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Singapore Post trials island-hopping delivery-by-drone program
You thought the USPS had it tough with all that rain, sleet, snow and hail they have to deal with? Try delivering mail throughout the Malay archipelago, the world's largest island chain. However, the Singapore Post thinks it may have a solution: Fly parcels between islands on the backs of UAVs. To that end, the mail service recently trialled the concept by successfully shipping two items from mainland Singapore to neighboring Pulau Ubin.
Fraunhofer develops extra-small 1Gbps infrared transceiver, recalls our PDA glory days
Our 1997-era selves would die with envy right about now. Fraunhofer has developed a new generation of infrared transceiver that can transfer data at 1Gbps, or well above anything that our vintage PDAs could manage. While the speed is nothing new by itself -- we saw such rates in 2010 Penn State experiments -- it's the size that makes the difference. The laser diode and processing are efficient enough to fit into a small module whose transceiver is as large as a "child's fingernail." In theory, the advancement makes infrared once more viable for mobile device syncing, with room to grow: even the current technology can scale to 3Gbps, lead researcher Frank Deicke says, and it might jump to 10Gbps with enough work. Along with the usual refinements, most of the challenge in getting production hardware rests in persuading the Infrared Data Association to adopt Deicke's work as a standard. If that ever comes to pass, we may just break out our PalmPilot's infrared adapter to try it for old time's sake.
Zepto's Znote 6625WD does DX10, HSDPA, and HD DVD
Considering that Zepto isn't exactly "the name" in full-blown gaming laptops, we certainly hope this one won't turn out like ones prior, but the Znote 6625WD purportedly packs a plethora of lavish innards if it proves legitimate. The 15.4-inch machine is based around Intel's Santa Rosa, er, Centrino Pro platform, and sports a WSXGA resolution, Core 2 Duo processor, 1GB of RAM, Bluetooth 2.0, NVIDIA's 512MB GeForce Go 8600 graphics card, DirectX 10 support, an optional HD DVD writer, 802.11a/b/g/n, HSDPA compatibility, and to top things off, an HDMI output. The company will supposedly be taking customized orders in May to satisfy your wildest dreams, and while the bottom-end of the bunch could land at around "$1,100 to $1,200," we imagine that some of the aforementioned luxuries will ratchet that right on up.[Via Laptopical]
