Modu's Modular Cellphone Jacket System Coming In Q2

Last year, Modu teased us with their plans for a cellphone that could be inserted into other gadgets ("jackets") in order to change and personalize its function. Today those plans have been fully unveiled.


At the heart of the modu ecosystem is a tiny, modular and sleek mobile phone. In addition to complete mobile functionality, the modu phone is a music player and a mass storage device containing 2 GB of internal memory. The innovative modu phone presents a bold graphical user interface and a unique seven-key keypad to perform basic functions even without a modu jacket. For added functionality and style, users can easily slip the modu phone into a range of modu jackets. This modu ecosystem offers boundless – and affordable – possibilities.

The new modu jacket lineup includes:

• modu™ night jacket: inspired by the nightlife scene, this jacket includes futuristic styling with an edgy keypad, flashing lights, night mode imaging and a unique graphical user interface
• modu™ street-art jacket: capturing the expressive and vibrant street art scene, this jacket fea-tures stereo speakers and dedicated music keys for a powerful music experience
• modu™ classic jacket: designed to fit the everyday needs of a modern lifestyle, this jacket carries all essential mobile communication features with an air of elegance and fine taste
• modu™ express jacket: this jacket transforms the modu phone and user interface with a rain-bow of fun, playful flavors

"modu is turning the notion of a ‘one-size-fits-all' mobile phone experience on its ear," said Dov Moran, founder and chief executive officer of modu. "Consumers want a mobile phone that can keep up with their dynamic lifestyles. The combination of the eye-catching modu phone with the new modu jackets offers not only personalized style but affordable updates without the costly expense of buying a new phone."

At its heart, the Modu phone is a simple cellphone (the lightest on the planet according to Guinness), but adding these jackets can completely change the functionality and aesthetic of the device—allowing the user to customize the device to his/her tastes. Modu expects to have these jackets on the market by Q2 of 2009, with several other jackets to roll out by the end of the year. If the previous info holds up, the phone plus two jackets will be available for only $200, with additional jackets running from $20 to $60—an agressive low price that could be key to its success. What do you think? Does Modu have a chance? [Modu via TechCrunch]

Read more »

Formula 1 Cars Getting Electric Hyperspeed Jumps

Apart from being one of the most amazing 3D animations I've seen in a while, this Formula 1 2009 video shows how the new KERS works, a kinetic-to-electric-energy system that allows for speed jumps.
KERS is short for Kinetic Energy Recovery System, an ingenious mechanical device that recovers wasted kinetic energy generated while braking. It converts that energy into electric power, which gets stored in a battery in the car's front. And then the really cool part comes: Once every lap, the battery reaches its full capacity and the F1 car driver can click a button to obtain a 6.5 seconds turbo boost, adding an extra 82 horsepower to the nominal capacity of the engine. Turbo boost, KITT, turbo boost!
Next, Mario Kart-style power boosters floating on the road.

Read more »

Apple iLife 2009 review

Apple iLife 2009 review
Upgrade your iLife
Perhaps the biggest news of the last Macworld Expo was the unveiling of the two new updates for iLife and iWork. Both applications get around 90 major changes but the main show-stopper was iLife's iPhoto, with handy new features such as face recognition and the ability to plot your snaps on a Google map and send them directly to your Facebook pals. As it all sounds terribly exciting, does it really work? Read on...

iPhoto
iPhoto has become the champion application for iLife ’09, in acknowledgment of the fact that everyone and their dog now has a digital camera. It gets the biggest push this time with heaps of really quite impressive new tricks.

Faces joins Events as a new way of sorting your library, but it’s much cleverer. Using face detection technology, Faces automatically scans your photo collection to identify the same person throughout your library, so that you can label that person in one hit. When you label one person, Faces suggests other pictures of people that look similar.

It’s not perfect and sometimes you might find iPhoto asking you if this is your nephew, when it’s actually a slightly blurry picture of your nan, and sadly it doesn’t work at all with profiles of animals. You can of course label your pets manually. Now, when you make a new smart album, iPhoto can find and group your friends for you and suggest pictures you might have forgotten about.

Alongside Mobile Me, Facebook and Flickr buttons have been added to the iPhoto main screen. Anyone who's addicted to Facebook knows what a chore it is, tagging photos of all your chums - Faces makes the process a lot easier. Once you've tagged everyone on Faces, it will sync with your Facebook profile, so photos are not only uploaded straight to your photo album on the social networking site, but the tags will match Facebook tags. Also, when your Facebook friend labels someone you didn’t know, their profile name is added to your photo.

Places is powered by Google and shows you a world map. When you use your cursor to drop a pin in it, you’ll be shown a list of all the photos you have from that location. If your camera has geo-tagging, then iPhoto will do all of this for you, otherwise, you’ll need to label each photo first. A bit of a hassle but well worth it. Apple has enhanced the Google map to recognize actual addresses or landmarks too.

You can also add maps to your photo book too. When you label a photo, a small picture of the world map, showing that location will appear on the page if you so choose. And for the inside cover, you could plot lines on the Google map to show where all the photos were taken.

Another update is that red-eye removal is now automatic, like the face recognition feature, and the retouch function has inherited some features from Apple’s professional Apperture software. Now it is much more effective at airbrushing and brightening your blurrier snaps - we had great fun playing around with this on the slightly less favourable photos.

Once you’re done airbrushing you can export your slideshows in a resolution to suit your iPhone or iPod Nano or any other fruit flavoured companion you may own. To spice up the slide shows you can add Apple licensed slide shows and even movies.
iMovie
iMovie gets around 40 new tricks including an impressive stabilization feature that turns a shaky handheld camcorder clip into a steady movie-like shot. After you’ve imported your clip iMovie analyses the footage frame by frame first and then smoothes out the wobbles to a degree that you select yourself.

A brilliant Spielberg-esque feature is you can add an animation that presents, as a line on a globe, where your film was shot. Just think about the in-between bits in the Indian Jones films when Indy boards a plane that flies to the next scene.

Another cool animation starts your home made film as a camera zoom into the cover of a photo album which becomes the opening scene.
Editing photos with the Ken Burns effect to the beat of a tune is particularly satisfying. Just press edit on the beat while you listen to the music and then drag photos, or video clips, to each change.
GarageBand
The best new feature in GarageBand is a guitar lesson that shows you an instruction video along with a fret board graphic that shows you where to put your fingers. For $4.99, you can download a Sting tutorial, for example, from the iTunes store, or Nora Jones if it’s the Piano that you want to learn.

We're no guitarist, but after a lesson with Sting, we were feeling more confident about our guitar prowess, although we'd like to see some more well-known musicians featured in the Artist Lessons.

Read more »

Apple iWork 2009 review

Apple's answer to Microsoft Office gets a Winter revival


iWork has always had a reputation of being the 'dull' software, compared with Apple’s lighter side of software, iLife. The 2009 updates for iWork may not be as showy as its fun counterpart, but the changes to Keynote, Numbers and Pages are well worth the extra cash.


Keynote
Here's where the biggest changes for 2009's software update are. Previously watching a Keynote presentation would feel similar to watching beige paint dry, but now your slides can be animated rather than just plain dissolves.



Magic Move basically animates them from one slide to another. If the item on one slide is the same as the one before, but in a different position, Magic Move will recognize this and make it seemingly dance over to its new spot. Updates are done in real time, so the preview window is always up to date.



Another change is to the object transitions, it's now a more straight-forward zoom. With this you can apply a sparkle effect as the object, or word changes from one to another on the next slide. Alternatively you can animate the common letters in a sentence from one slide to the next with text transition. Again, the program knows which items are the same and moves them from one position to the next.



Bar Charts can now rotate as they grow from zero. You can fill them in with some new textures like concrete or etched metal and make them cylinders rather than blocks. Even end of financial year reports manage to look pretty.



Pie Charts meanwhile get subtly beveled edges and you can now animate the appearance of the slices. You can also add annotations that look like chalk lines on a blackboard. These appear in all of the iWork apps.



Shapes is a new animation tool that can make images move around the edge of whatever shape you drawer.



iPhone and iPod Touch owners have another real bonus. For 59p you can buy the Keynote ‘09 app from the iTunes store and use your mobile to control your presentation wirelessly - a fantastic app that has made us all the more proud of our iPhone.



Numbers
Numbers gets dozens of new features to make it much more flexible than Excel spreadsheets. Grouping data for example is as simple as dragging and dropping and pop-up windows help you calculate totals and currency conversions.



Another nifty feature that makes working out this month’s shopping budget much easier is the new calculations window. Click and choose the calculations function you would like to use, and the onboard Carol Voderman will get it done.



Pages
The word processing and page layout application now works in full screen with either one, or side-by-side page views. This makes it easy to blow up onto a display to show a group of people rather than printing out dozens of copies.



You can now save it as a Word or PDF doc for example, or choose to email your doc as soon as you’ve finished. The recipient, incidentally, gets to choose to download the Word, PDF or iWork formatted document. Apple seems to want to share the workload…





Buy one here: Apple PC World Amazon

Read more »