Tech Today w/ Ken May

I can’t say the market for Windows tablets is blowing up right now, what with the iPad-Android war heating up and the enticing Windows 8 on the horizon, but there is a market and Dell would want a part of it. Their Peju tablet was leaked before but in very little detail, so this new info is welcome. All your Peju-related news can be found at Dell Peju Insider, a rather finely-pointed website, but useful nevertheless. The specs are all there in the latest (and only) post, and haven’t been confirmed, though they don’t seem so far out. A Core i5, 4GB of RAM, a nice variety of ports, digitizer pen support, and a fat battery, coming in at just under two pounds. The spec that gets me going is the screen: 10.1 inches of Gorilla Glass at 1920×1080. That would be nice! Windows tablets right now are aimed at enterprise for the most part, but this would be a sweet home media tablet, especially with the little dock station there. They (whoever “they” are) peg the release at October-ish, and it’ll ship with Windows 7 but be Windows 8 compatible (naturally). Hopefully we’ll hear some more soon that corroborates this. [via Engadget ]

We’ve come to love the fantastic and sublime images of space taken from such satellites as the Hubble, but the truth is that the technology that created those images is incredibly out of date. And while you can’t argue with the results, it has gotten to the point where the sensitivity, angle of view, and data collection rate just need to be moved up to 21st-century standards. The European Space Agency (ESA) is happy to bring space into the gigapixel era, and they’re packing a monster camera array onto their Gaia astrometry platform. The mission of Gaia is accurate mapping of the entire Milky Way galaxy, and they plan to chart the positions of a billion stars about seventy times each over the next five years. The result will be (they hope) a more accurate and precise three-dimensional map of the galaxy. They’ll also pick up innumerable minor bodies (i.e. asteroid, planets, and so on) and will collect a ton of other useful miscellaneous space data. The camera itself is actually over a hundred individual sensors put into an array — which makes sense, as a single gigapixel sensor would likely be far too small and pixel-dense to be of any use in this situation. The 102 sensors are 4.7×6.0cm each, and arranged in a large 1.0×0.5m field, and four more are used for quality checks. The precision of the camera is pretty insane. It can resolve items of magnitude 15, which is 4000 times dimmer than what can be seen with the naked eye, down to 24 microarcseconds. To give you an idea of how powerful that is, if the Gaia array was on Earth, it could measure the thumbnails of a person standing on the moon. It will produce a huge amount of data, but its transmitter will be able to maintain a multi-megabit connection to its base station here on the ground even at a distance of 1.5 million kilometers. There’s a ton (or tonne, I suppose) more information at the ESA’s Gaia site , and some other links at Network World .

Those of you with Sonos equipment already filling your abode with the sweet tunes of your music library and an iPhone or iPod Touch should promptly hit up Apple’s App Store and download their free app now. It may or may not be available right this second, but it should make its way to the App Store sometime today. There are two other Sonos apps currently available but they want you to pay $15 for each. Having seen the app in person I can say that it’s very intuitive and easy to use. You will also be prompted to update your Sonos’ firmware to 2.7 today so that it is compatible with the software. So if you bought Sonos equipment in 2005 and you own an iPhone then you’re sittin’ pretty. A demo of the app in action and other screen shots are available after the jump. But that’s not the only announcement Sonos has for today. Sonos 2.7 unleashes 15,000 Internet radio stations from across the globe and free access to Last.fm and Pandora (everything syncs on the fly with both Last.fm and Pandora to your accounts online). Other new features of Sonos System Software 2.7 include: • Updated Rhapsody support with improved sound quality. Rhapsody now streams at 192 MP3 (versus 128 kbps WMA previously). • Support for RTSP streaming protocol which allows for expanded Internet Radio coverage. • Dutch and Swedish languages are now supported in the Sonos system software. Sonos already supports English, French, German, Italian, and Spanish. • For more information about the features of Sonos Software 2.7, please visit: http://www.sonos.com/support/software_update.aspx.

On June 22nd, 1996, id Software released Quake , the true successor to the Doom franchise and among the first games (certainly the most well-known) to be presented entirely in 3D. That is, with polygons. Those of us old enough to do so will remember the first set of levels (that is to say, the demo) with perfect clarity, and recall the classic grunts, moans, and clangs that accompanied that fantastic atmosphere and ambitious level design. It’s still a hell of a lot of fun. You can download a version compatible with modern Windows and OS X here, and there are tons of mods and level packs at Planet Quake . Graaaa!

There’s been a lot of speculation as of late over the next model iPhone . Will Jobs pull a 3GS on us and leave the form factor alone or will Apple go big and create some new hardware to go with that awesome new OS? Well, we may be inching closer to some answers today, as an app developer with connections to Nuance , the speech recognition firm, posted a few screen grabs of what appears to be a next-gen iPhone with an edge-to-edge screen. Read More

Just last week we posted a video of the new Nook (which we just reviewed ) running Angry Birds . Not exactly the best match for an e-paper display, but it does show that the underlying Android install is sound and functional. Further proof comes this weekend, with forum-dwelling hackers installing the ADW Launcher home screen and even the Kindle app on it. Sure, the animation is busted, but it could still be super useful. Oh, and by the way, it has Bluetooth . That wasn’t in the specs, but is probably part of the chipset they used. Was Barnes & Noble going to announce this? Doesn’t matter much, we know now! Looks like the “Nook Touch” is going to be about as popular a hacking platform as the Nook Color. I wonder if the similarly-specced Kobo will get a similar treatment?

Seeing solar energy progress is a good thing, but it still has one problem: at this point, it’s still inefficient when compared with other sources of energy. And now Japan and Europe have announced [PDF] that they will work together to develop the world’s most efficient photovoltaic cell over the next four years. The aim is to reach the world’s highest photoelectric conversion efficiency of at least 45%. Using it in practical applications, however, will not be possible until 2025, Japan’s New Energy and Industrial Technology Development Organization says. Commercializing the cell will take another 5 years. The project is expected to cost $15.5 million, with the Japanese side shouldering $8.1 of that sum. Participants from Japan include big names such as Toyota, Sharp, and the University of Tokyo. From Europe, organizations from five different countries (Germany, the UK, Italy, Spain, and France) will be contributing.