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taken from such satellites as the Hubble, but the truth is that the technology that created those images is incredibly out of date.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 kilometers. There’s a ton (or tonne, I suppose) more information at the ESA’s Gaia site , and some other links at Network World .

Do you want to wear sunglasses while being able to shoot videos in a discreet way at the same time? Tokyo-based crazy gadget maker Thanko seems to think there are people who need their HD Video Camera Sunglasses [JP]. The device’s 5MP CMOS camera lets you take AVIs in 1,280×720 resolution at 30fps – handsfree. Pictures (JPEGs) can be shot in 4,032×3,024 resolution. The material can be stored on microSD cards (32GB max., the sunglasses feature a slot) and later be transferred to a computer via USB 2.0. Thanko says about 1.4GB are enough to store about 10 minutes of HD video. The sunglasses are already on sale on Thanko’s Japanese website (price: $74). Ask online store Geek Stuff 4 U if they can get one shipped to you in case you live outside Japan.

Barnes & Noble just unveiled the latest and greatest Nook ereading device at a special NYC event . It’s a simple device, really. In fact B&N stated that this revamped Nook is the easiest to use ereading device on the market. The touchscreen enabled Nook, sorry Kobo , is said not to feature any page turning latency and a battery that last up to two months, which is double the current Kindle’s battery life. A 6-inch Pearl E Ink screen is front and center on the sleek device. It’s rather small at 7.5 ounces in a casing that’s just 5 x 6.5-inches. It’s tiny. Barnes & Noble is understandably proud of its latest creation and proudly stated on stage that the new Nook features 37 less buttons than the latest Kindle. (Not having a QWERTY keyboard would do that) The new Nook hits at a very Kindle-like $139 price. The unit ships June 10 with pre-orders starting later today.

This is sort of silly but still worthwhile. Of course prices of developing technologies drop over time, but the infograph from Wired is still fun if for nothing else than a bit of nostalgic reminiscing. I can recall the first two plasmas we got while I worked at Circuit City: a Panasonic for $10k and a Pioneer for $12k. Of course that was back in the wild and crazy times of 2002 when credit was available to anyone with a pulse and a social security number.

Concrete Canvas is just what it sounds like: canvas that’s, well, concrete. The material is essentially a water-activated concrete fabric that can be deployed for just about any task generally reserved for traditional concrete. Just add water, really. The novel part is that the company sells a self-contained pop-up tent that, with the help of a provided electric fan, deploys and becomes permanent relatively quick. All that’s need is to soak the tent and wait. It takes about 24 hours for the tent to harden, transforming into a permanent structure that can be sterilized and wired for electricity. The BCC just posted a video interview with the founders who explain how the material came to be and the company’s plans, but if nothing else, click through just to see this stuff in action. I want one for my backyard shed. Put together a standard Home Depot barn is for jerks.

Resistive random-access memory ( RRAM ) is something various electronics companies have been working on for years, but now Panasonic seems to be ready to be the first to start mass-producing the next-generation memory chips, according to a report in Japan’s biggest business daily The Nikkei. The new memory type can retain stored data over time even when it’s not powered, it’s much faster and more eco-friendly than flash memory chips, for example