However, we have already heard rather a lot of rumours about this console, haven’t we? Let’s take a look and see what we know and what we think we know about it.

What’s Inside It?

Perhaps the most important part of the new console is the 64 bit, 8 core, 1.66 GHz AMD processor which it is said to house. It is also said to contain 8GB of DDR• RAM. We can expect an Ethernet port, UBS 3.0 ports, and an optical disc drive as part of the overall package as well.

What’s the Controller Like?

The main controller for the new Xbox is said to be similar to current one, if a little smaller. However, the most interesting aspect of the set up is the fact that every new Xbox will come with Kinect 2. This means that you can expect to be able to achieve a higher degree of control over the action. There are even rumours of eye tracking being included in the range of controls, which would be pretty exciting.

When Is The Release Date and What Will It Cost?

It seems as though this year’s Christmas present is sorted out for any gamers you know. All the signs are that this new device will be out in time for the end of 2013. As far as the price is concerned, it is hard to know exactly what the new model of the Xbox will cost. However, rumours suggest a $400 to $500 price tag, which would make it around the £300 mark. The confirmation of this and other details is due soon.

What do you want to see?

Update: The announcement has been made and the Telegraph has a good rundown of specs. In summary:

• It will be called the Xbox One
• Will have facial recognition
• Be voice activated
• Glossy black look
• Smaller footprint and controller
• 500GB Hard Drive
• Blu Ray player
• Skype and other apps enabled
• Release date: a vague later this year was mentioned. A more solid date will undoubtedly be unveiled at E3.

What Do We Know About the New Xbox? is a post from: Gadgets and gizmos

Actually, a pilot who was on board the Jetstream craft took off near Preston and landed in Inverness but for the 500 miles in between a pilot on the ground had control of the plane, taking instructions from the National Air Traffic Services.

There were no passengers flying in the 16 seat vessel but it travelled in airspace which was shared with other craft which did have passengers on board.

The aircraft is known as the Flying Testbed and is filled with on board equipment such as sensors and robotics to make sure that it identifies and then avoids hazards in the air.

A Huge Funding Investment

This isn’t the first test flight of the sort and the work is being done by Astraea, which stands for Autonomous Systems Technology Related Airborne Evaluation and Assessment. They have been given over £60 in funding grants from both the UK government and commercial airlines to find out how unmanned commercial aircrafts could be used.
One of the firms investing in Astraea is BAE Systems, and one of their spokespeople said that the test flights are needed to, among other things, “put a regulatory framework in place” concerning pilot-less flights in airspace which contains manned flights as well.

Where’s the Pilot Gone? Unmanned Flights Tested in the UK is a post from: Gadgets and gizmos

The idea they have had is that the app they have developed could use a mixture of data from the phone and the user’s own input.

The app is called EmotionSense and the people behind it believe that it is the first ever mobile phone app to combine these two factors to advise how happy the user is. There are other apps which do a similar sort of thing but they don’t take into account the same broad range of factors as this one does.

EmotionSense works by taking the information the user has reported about their mood together with data such as the number of text messages they send, the noisiness in the background and who they are talking to. The app forms part of an overall project which aims to help people enjoy better health and feel better using their mobile phones.

More Than Just Happy or Sad

 One of the people involved in the team is called Dr Jason Rentfrow and he is a senior lecturer in the field of psychology at Cambridge University. He said that many of the mood tracking apps around just now only look at the question of emotions as “feeling happy, sad, angry or neutral”.

However, he pointed out that part of the benefit of their approach is that it will show “how moods vary” from one person to another.  Overall, you can expect to take 8 week of using the app to unlock all of the sensor and get back meaningful results.  At the moment it is only going to be released for Android devices, with other to follow.

Let Your Phone Tell You If You Are Happy is a post from: Gadgets and gizmos

The Good News

Analysts IDC have reported that in the first quarter of this year the sale of tablets has boomed. The figures show a growth of more than 142% over the same 3 months last year. In fact, more tablets were  sold in the first quarter of 2013 than in the entire first half of 2012.

Of all the tablets sold so far this year almost 40% of them were from Apple. The total number of sales in this period was 49.2 million, and 19.5 million of them were from Apple. Despite having sold more tablets like the iPad Mini than ever before Apple has seen its market dominance slip from 58% recently.

The Bad News

Heins says tablets will be obsolete in 5 years.

Meanwhile, Thorsten Heins thinks that we won’t be using tablets after 2018. He is the head of Blackberry and during an interview with Bloomberg has said that by this time he doesn’t believe that there will “a reason” to own one of these devices. He went on to say that maybe we will want a big screen for work but that tablets are “not a good business model.” Of course, Blackberry’s Playbook tablet didn’t exactly set the heather on fire when it was finally released in 2011.

A final piece of bad news for electronics firms but good news for consumers is that many tablets have been reported to be selling almost at cost price this year.

What do you think, will tablets be obsolete in 5 years?

Tablets: Doomed but Getting More Popular? is a post from: Gadgets and gizmos

It seems that researchers from North Dakota State University in the US have worked out how to slip a radio frequency identification chip into a sheet of paper in a way which is going to open up a lot new uses for it.

For example, the use of these chips could help cut down on fraud if they are used in bank notes or legal documents. Other possibilities could include the use of these chips on travel documents and smart labels.

A Giant LEAP for Paper

The work which has been carried out to date is to be presented to the audience of the upcoming conference at the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers and the paper in question has been labelled Laser Enabled Advanced Packaging (LEAP).

The current smart paper (known as RFID enabled) uses chips which are much thicker than these ones, which means that it becomes very bulky and in some cases unprintable.

With the LEAP process a laser is used to embed the chips and antenna as precisely as possible, but even so the process is said to be twice as quick as the methods which are currently used, while it is also said to be a good deal cheaper, according to Professor Val Marinov, who just happens to be the head of the project.

It has been more or less a decade since the likes of the European bank and Bank of Japan said that they wanted to go do this avenue and this latest research appears to be a huge step forward.

Even Paper Will be Smarter Than Us Soon is a post from: Gadgets and gizmos

The report was put together with the help of The Future Foundation and it suggests the following:

1. By 2030 we can expect to have 51 gadgets in our home, compared to 35 just now.
2. By this year the appliances we use at home will use up 40% less energy.
3. The use of remote control on our home technology could help cut down on the amount of energy we waste by 19%. This would include systems which allow us to turn off lights, heating and security devices from a smartphone.
4. We can also expect to use bio-metric sensors to control the temperature at home and split screen TVs which combine social networks with our favourite shows by the time 2030 arrives. Other new gadgets could be robotic lawnmowers, remote alarm systems and iris scanners for controlled entry to the property.

You Can Already Control Your Heating Remotely

A product which we don’t have to wait until 2030 for is called Remote Control Heating. This is from British Gas and allows you to regulate your property’s temperature remotely from an app on your smartphone or tablet.

The fact that technology like this is expected to become far more commonplace over the next few years means that we can waste les energy in heating and lighting homes which are lying empty for hours on end. In fact, the study revealed that across the UK there are 2.5 million properties left empty but with their lights on, while 2.2 million of us leave on the television when we go out.

What are your feelings on smart meters, will you be making the upgrade?

British Gas Study Reveals the Gadgets We Will Be Using by 2030 is a post from: Gadgets and gizmos

Investigators in the US have working on a robot which is built like a snake and which could come in very useful in future search and rescue missions.

Dogs and Snakes Working in Harmony

The most recent trial they have carried out was done with the help of rescue dogs. The canine workers carried the snake robot into a mock up of a collapsed building on a special harness. They then released the snake and it went about its business.

The idea is that a robot like this can wriggle into little spaces where dogs and people simply can’t enter. At the moment the researchers at the biorobotics lab in Carnegie Mellon University are working to find a way to get their creation to get over rubble and debris faster than it does just now.

The creatures are described as modular snake robots and they move by changing the position of the links that join their body together. Scientists have been working on these models for a decade and the phrase used for their type of movement is “lateral undulation”, which is how real life snakes get around.

The entire search and rescue process using dogs and snakes is pretty interesting. The dogs are taught to bark once they find something which needs investigating. At this point the robot snakes are released and they start to send back live video images to the people operating it.

The New Breed of Rescue Snake Robots is a post from: Gadgets and gizmos

If the drinking of hops and barley based beverages is something you enjoy them this up and coming new app could help you do it in even more style than before.

The man behind Beer Mapper is called Kevin Jamieson. He is an engineering student and promises that the app will let you find the best pints near you which most suit your taste. This fancy new app has a clever feature which will let you tell your phone which beers you like and which you don’t fancy so much. By choosing one of two listed beers as your favourite, in a series of multiple choice questions you will let the app work out your preferences.

A Heat Map of Your Tastes

This means that after a while the app will work out which other ones are most likely to be to your taste and will be able to produce a heat map which shows your preferences, showing the brands and tastes which are most similar to your taste. The designer of the software has worked out a beer database which pulls together all of the similar drinks and notes the crucial differences as well. Once your opinion has been added the map can be worked out for you to look at and enjoy.

The idea is that you will never again try a new beer and be left disappointed, which sounds like a great idea. The Beer Mapper app hasn’t yet been released but it is apparently 97% completed.

Do you need an app to find a good pint of beer? We’ll let you be the judge.

Beer Mapper App Promises to Let You Enjoy Your Beer More is a post from: Gadgets and gizmos

The researchers are working on a new sort of street lighting design which could stop so much light being wasted.

If you live in a big city you are probably used to not being able to see the stars and having to screw up your eyes at time due to strong lights. These factors are, in part, due to conventional street lighting, which can also waste a lot of energy by allowing light to “leak” out in different directions rather than being as focused as it should be.

The Best Lights Ever?

The new creation is LED powered and it has been described as the best street lighting ever. Is there a but? Yes, there is. Their theory hasn’t yet been turned in a working light.

The statistics uncovered by the research team suggests that normal street lighting loses about a fifth of its light through the beams going, well, everywhere but where they are meant to go. LEDs are easier to control, so there is far less wastage.

This means that accurate lenses can be used instead of the old fashioned approach of polished aluminium reflectors. This in turn means that wasted light could be reduced to just 2% of the total amount produced, which could provide an energy saving of up to 50% when lighting a stretch of road. A prototype should be available for testing by the end of the year.

Will You See More Stars Thanks to Better Street Lights? is a post from: Gadgets and gizmos

The people behind it are from Samsung, and they expect their mind-controlled tablet to revolutionise the way we interact with our digital devices. So how does it work?

Well, first of all you need to put on a rather stylish cap which is covered in EEG monitoring electrodes. They then need to concentrate on a blinking icon to make things happen. Insoo Kim is a lead researcher at Samsung and he said that this type of control process was a “natural transition”.

The Trend of Recent Changes

Kim pointed out how we have moved in recent years from a small physical keypad to the likes of touch, gesture and eye movement control of our mobile devices. He said that by increasing the number of “input modalities” will give us “more convenient and richer ways” of controlling our gadgets. It is also expected to be a huge boost for people with mobility problems.

Of course, you can already use your eyes to control the Samsung Galaxy S4 phone. With this device you can do things like pause videos and scroll through the screen using only your eyes.

The demonstration Samsung gave of the mind control feature involved someone picking a music track and then playing and pausing entirely through the power of their mind. The accuracy is currently said to be between 80% and 95% and the firm is working on making the cumbersome EEG caps a bit more suitable for everyday use.

A Tablet You Can Control Using Your Mind is a post from: Gadgets and gizmos