Samsung has decided that every pocket needs it’s own projector, and so the company is launching a nifty looking Beam Projector.

Rather than shoehorning a miniature projector into all of their phones, Samsung has decided that there is enough demand to warrant producing a handheld projector which can link up to your current gadgets and turn any wall in to a cinema screen.

While Samsung hopes you will be using the new Beam Projector with their Galaxy phones, tablets or players, they have been courteous enough to allow it to work with any device which supports MHL/HDMI.

So what about the specs? Well a 20 lumens bulb should generate enough light to project your Christmas movies on the living room wall while a 1650mAh battery should see at least a few hours of use.

Unfortunately (yes, there has to be an “Unfortunately”) the Samsung Beam Projector seems to be headed for the Korean market only, and no news of a worldwide launch has been announced at the time of writing.

[ source ]

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According to an article on Gizmodo, phone cases are unnatural. The phones that are painstakingly designed by different manufacturers should be allowed to “roam free, nude, as nature intended”, showing off the beautiful designs to everyone. And it’s not worth all the protection as people will end up upgrading to the latest device as soon as their two-year contract is up. The author has even said that a few scratches will also be a great memory, a reminder of who you used to be. And apparently the techies at the above said website are united on the matter as revealed by a quick survey.

But we are sticking to another formula, no phone case = broken phone. And every human being has the tendency to become clumsy at some point in their lifetime. And most families have at least one Bart Simpson type in their home to bring about a few scratches on their most beloved gadgets. So which way do you go?

We can take as example one of the most popular devices out there – the Apple iPhone. Both the faces of the iPhone are made up of glass and those faces have been placed at a raised position above the frame. And the bezel around the edge of the glass is very tiny as well. The conclusion: the device has not been designed to be used without a case.

And of course, it’s fun to show off our latest tech to everyone. But what if there is nothing left to show off? And most people find their device as precious things; they want to keep it with them as long as possible. There is no two year limit to their gadget love. And memories? Seriously, do you want to end up remembering the night you got so drunk that you used your phone as a foot rug?

And we are tempted to say something about that nature intended thing that they were talking about. Evolution did not design man at first with clothes on. Does that mean we should also set ourselves free?

The post Are We Ruining Our Phones With Phone Cases? appeared first on Mobile Magazine.

In 2006, beekeepers around the world reported that honey bee colonies were disappearing, and there didn’t seem to be a cause. The phenomenon was initially given the name colony collapse disorder, and researchers considered several different factors that could be responsible for CCD, including pathogens, parasites, environmental stress and cellphone signals.

Now there is new evidence that supports the theory that cellphones are to blame for the disappearance of bees. A study done in Lausanne, Switzerland suggests that the signal from cell phones confuses bees and leads to death.

Researchers placed cellphones close to or in hives, and the buzzing of the bees was recorded and analyzed. The results suggested that when a cellphone was in call-making mode, buzzing increased amongst worker bees, resulting in a “worker piping signal” that occurs before the takeoff of a swarm. The signal can cause unexpected swarming. The study further suggests that cellphone towers near beehives interfere with bee navigation, which could result in worker bees failing to return to the hive after the swarm. In this situation, the hive would remain with only queens, eggs and immature bees.

The bees were not affected by cellphones in standby mode. The researchers noted that while mobile phones are not placed close to the bees in real life, further studies are needed to determine the proximity cellphones can be placed to hives without affecting the bees.

The population of bees in the US and the UK has decreased by almost half in the last thirty years. There has been a notable rise in the amount of cellphones in the same time period. An estimated 5 billion people worldwide were using cellphones in 2010, according to the International Telecommunication Union. While it’s unclear if cellphones are the sole cause for the disappearance of bees, there is now support for the theory that honeybees experience sensitivity to pulsed electromagnetic fields generated by cellphones and could become confused, disoriented and die as a result.

Honey bees pollinate an estimated 30 per cent of the crops grown in the world, including cotton, strawberry, broccoli, cucumber, lemon, apple, avocado, almond, eggplant, raspberry and many others.

[Original Report]

Photo: Silvia Pikal

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Sprint hopes to keep phones from ending up in landfills. Project Connect will take your unwanted mobile phones, batteries, chords, earphones, accessories, data cards and even instruction manuals. It doesn’t matter what make, model, carrier the phone is, or what condition it’s in. Proceeds from equipment collected will fund free Internet safety resources for kids.

To recycle your phone or whatever else you have lying around, you can pick up a postage-paid envelope at a Sprint store. It doesn’t have to be a Sprint phone for you to participate, and you don’t even have to step into a Sprint store if you don’t want to, you can print off a pre-paid shipping label on Sprint’s website.

Sprint will refurbish whatever parts they can so the equipment can be used again. Whatever is non-recoverable is recycled for base materials. Sprint also has a buy-back program which can be used toward the purchase of a new Sprint phone. According to their website, they’ve recycled over 16 million phones. PR stint or not, it’s a great way to get rid of the spare chords and old phones you’ve got shoved into a drawer somewhere.

[Griffith.edu, GreenTechnolog via Sprint]

Photo: Technology Review

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At Mobile World Congress this week, the latest innovations from the labs of Samsung were being shown about. One of those innovations were the latest projector phone called the Samsung Beam, or I8520 Halo, running Android 2.1 with the companies highly-sought after Super AmOLED display.

The Beam uses a third-generation of Texas Instruments pico-projector chipset giving off 10 lumens of brightness and an 800×600 projection, as opposed to 6 lumens and 320 x 480 of its predecessor.

With an 800 Mhz processor, the BEAM is able to stream smooth images and video over the customized projector UI. The Super AMOLED is said to be a 3.7-inch WVGA display, Samsung has removed a layer of coating from the traditional AMOLED to decrease reflectivity by 80 percent making the screen appear brighter, more vivid, clear and super.

The Samsung Beam is expected to be launched in Europe the second quarter of this year with select locations worldwide, no details on a North American launch or pricing was announced.

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Faster gaming, more resource intensive applications, longer battery life, and hopefully a bit cheaper on your pocket. That is basically what you can expect when Rambus’ Mobile XDR memory architecture is implemented into the next-generation of mobile devices.

The Mobile Memory Initiative was introduced last year, and today Mobile XDR has been unveiled promising a future of devices that exceed power and performance targets dramatically.

“Future mobile applications demand far higher performance and longer battery life than today’s mobile products can achieve,” said Sharon Holt, senior vice president of Licensing and Marketing at Rambus. “Mobile XDR memory provides the ideal solution for designers to offer leading-edge mobile content in a dramatically lower power and cost-effective manner. Uniquely, the Mobile XDR architecture delivers these benefits in SoC and DRAM devices that can be built with current manufacturing infrastructure reducing both risk and time-to-market.”

The Mobile XDR memory architecture is expected to achieve throughputs of over 17GB/s of memory bandwidth from a single Mobile XDR DRAM device while extending battery life by over 30 minutes. This means device designers will be able to develop resource intensive multimedia applications using stereoscopic 3D HD video. Even 3D gaming will be made possible on future smartphones, tablets, netbooks and other multimedia devices.

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