Technology

Everybody was talking about Barack Obama's inauguration on Tuesday morning, and it showed. According to reports, a number of mobile phone networks faced overload circumstances that day until late afternoon, when the chat sessions finally began to ... dissipate. Having the most trouble that morning appears to have been T-Mobile, with PC World reporting that one customer complained they were unable to make or receive calls throughout the entire morning leading up to Obama's appearance. With cellphones an often necessary lifeline for personal and business purposes, the victim's disgust is certainly ... (view more)

Palm recently unveiled their response to the Apple iPhone: the Pre. Among its many features is a new operating system supporting the device (Palm WebOS) and an iPhone-like touch-screen. The Pre uses a sophisticated interface which self-charges on a ... special platform without the need to attach a cable. The device also boasts 8GB of storage, GPS navigation, WiFi networking and a sliding mini-keyboard. (Source: iht.com ) Despite always being regarded as a major contender in the smartphone industry, Palm has suffered many recent setbacks, including the 2007 cancellation of their much-anticipated ... (view more)

It seems the abnormally low number of exhibitors at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) has been paralleled by a startling slide in attendance by Joe Techie. With the recession on and consumer spending down, overall attendance is even lower than ... first expected. About a week ago, we reported that CES organizers expected the number of visitors for 2009 to be down slightly from last year's 141,000, perhaps between 130,000 and 135,000. That was evident the weekend prior to the event, when it was alarmingly easy to find a hotel room in Las Vegas, CES' annual host city. That's usually not the case ... (view more)

Hoping to turn their sagging fortunes around, Ford is set to debut a highly-anticipated technology allowing cars to parallel park themselves without driver assistance. Better yet, the entire self-parking experience is promised to be ... scratch-and-dent-free. The technology relies on ultrasonic sensors on the front and rear of the automobile, combined with electric power steering to angle and guide the vehicle into tight parking spaces. (Source: siliconvalley.com ) While the process sounds complicated, all a driver has to do is push one button and the system takes over from there. A visual or ... (view more)

Tired of reaching for that cellphone, only to find that your ensuing conversation is cut off because of a dying battery? Almost everyone knows the sinking feeling that accompanies a suddenly dead cellphone battery; in fact, consumers have been ... demanding a more efficient, longer-lasting device for ages. That might be on its way, thanks to the work of a doctoral student from Canada's national capital. PhD candidate Atif Shamim, an engineering student at Ottawa, Ontario's Carleton University, has reportedly built a technology capable of reducing the overall power consumption of mobile devices ... (view more)

Interested in taking advantage of your that expensive high definition TV by watching movies in the increasingly popular high-def Blu-ray movie format, but still not sure if it's worth buying a player that can't display your massive collection of ... standard DVD discs? An answer may be on the way from Infinity Storage Media, which has released the first hybrid Blu-ray/DVD disc in the Land of the Rising Sun. Although it limped out of the gates in its race against HD-DVD several years ago (primarily because its competitor's hardware offerings were much cheaper), by gobbling up the majority of major ... (view more)

Chip maker Intel wants to bring power to your mobile device. At a press event in San Francisco on December 5, Justin Rattner, the company's chief technical officer, unveiled Intel's vision for sensors that "scavenge" the environment for power ... sources. Called a Wireless Identification and Sensing Platform (WISP) the technology could continually scan the environment for possible energy sources. The WISP then takes in power through a variety of means, including solar and other light sources, body heat, radiation from cell phone towers, WiFi and television signals -- even the energy ... (view more)

How much do you love robots? Enough to max out three credit cards building one? Well, Le Trung has done just that in creating Aiko, a 'femme-bot' boasting a vocabulary comprised of 13,000 English and Japanese phrases and capable of distinguishing ... 300 faces per second. Trung, a native of Brampton, Ontario, has been building robots his whole life. He built his first for a science fair in grade four; it couldn't do much, just shoot fake bullets and move about a little bit. Teachers weren't pleased when one of those fake bullets hit another child, either. "You get disqualified if you make a ... (view more)

Have you ever forgot to make the necessary arrangements needed to record your favorite TV show? Sometimes we know to record the show well in advance, yet we keep putting it off -- and eventually forget altogether. While this might not be one of the ... most crucial topics in the world, having to miss one week of a preferred television program can really become a nuisance. What do you do if you miss a show? Ask a friend what happened? They always leave out best parts of the story. Do you search the Internet for a quick recap? It's never the same as the real thing. If only you had been home to set ... (view more)

Need $10,000? Who doesn't? A University of Calgary student might be in luck after making a once-in-a-lifetime find on the Canadian prairies. On November 20th, a meteor careened through the sky and crashed into a frozen pond not far from ... Lloydminster, Saskatchewan. At the time, property owner Ian Mitchell was helping his son get ready for a hockey game, and didn't hear about the event until other players began to show up, excitedly discussing the otherworldly event. Neither they nor Mitchell knew the rare lightshow had come to and end on the hockey Dad's ranch. (Source: edmontonsun.com ) ... (view more)