Foldable Screens, iPhone Vinyle DJ and Apple Oddities
Samsung have demonstrated a working foldable AMOLED screen, an iPhone has been used to use a real turnable in virtual DJing and Apple have further locked out users from new iMac hardware while also creating a keyboard that literally sucks. Read on…
Samsung are doing the whole scifi to reality thing by teasing us with their working foldable 4″ AMOLED screen. What’s better is that it doesn’t even suffer any noticeable ’creasing’ from a test of 100,000 openny-closey tests (technical term). I’m a little more interested in those crazy rollable screens that seem on the edge of reality so I can have me a stack of digital scrolls but a foldable screen makes an awful lot of sense when screen real-estate (to use a silly term) on mobile devices is becoming more of a premium while the devices are try to limit their physical size.
Next up Nicholas J. Bryan has cooked up a pretty nice use of the iPhone4′s gyro by mounting it to a record on a DJ turnable then, presumably, feeding the data back to a Virtual DJ type desktop application. It’s not a finished thing but the idea is very cool and probably a lot more accurate that using the crazy (but equally impressive) special vinyles that tell the Virtual DJ desk where the needle is and how fast and which direction it’s moving based on encoded sound. Seem, however, a little costly. For this to work you would need an iPhone4 (or, I suspect, a current gen iPod Touch) for each turntable. Love the idea of taking the iPhone’s motion sensing and using it in a totally new and unintended way but the reality of it seems probably shiny but impractical (but then it is using Apple products so…).
*takes a bite from tasty Pek chopped pork sandwich*
What else was there? Oh yes, Apple up to their shenanigans again. If you’re looking at the new line of iMacs but considering switching the hard drive at some point in the future then beware! Apple no longer use standard SATA cables for their drives but some newfangled proprietary 7 wire mutated beast. The extra wires seem to be related to, among other things, monitoring the drive temperature and feeding back to the internal fan controls. ElReg note that switching out a drive for a non-authenticated standard SATA one results in the system fan ramping up to permanent, noisy, full power along with the bonus of the replacement drive causing the iMac;s Apple Hardware Test to fail. The up side will be Apple ensuring their hardware works exactly as it should but it does also remove the ability for end users to easily conduct some repairs on out of warranty machines without costly visits to the Apple store.
In other Apple news they’re patented a keyboard that blows air at your fingers as a response to them bit hit. It seems Apple don’t trust their users to use the feeling of actually hitting a key as evidence enough that a keystroke has taken place. The keyboard also, like pidgins, sucks. Literally.