You and I know what a piano is, but an Airpiano? Come on now, from its name alone, how do you think the musical instrument is able to function? Does it mean you will need to blow into some sort of tube before pressing a single key on the piano will emanate sound?
Or fast forward to the 22nd century, will this piano float on air thanks to a built-in hovering mechanism? Well, it is neither of the above, although seeing the Airpiano being played in the hands of the master is truly a sight to behold as it gives you the feeling as though you were watching a graceful martial artist, musical conductor or mysterious magician at work here. Why is it called the Airpiano? The answer is simple, really, as it features an innovative interface that is activated and controlled by moving a hand in mid-air above the flat display surface — as long as you remain within range of a sensor array matrix. This is only made possible thanks to custom software, enabling one to have a huge library of tones and sounds at a one’s disposal.
There is a total of eight Infrared proximity sensors together, all of them spread horizontally across the surface of the Airpiano in order to let you play three notes depending on your vertical hand position. These sensors have the option to be specially programmed to provide up to eight control faders for altering volume, pitch, and filters among others. Custom software paves the way for MIDI mapping while Open Sound Control message assignment ensures you will be able to project a vast soundscape at your spatial command. Should there arise the need for confirmation of user action, LED lights located at the surface of the instrument comes in handy.
While it might resemble the Theremin, the Airpiano’s inventor has this to say about his pet project. «What makes it so different from a Theremin, besides the technology, is the concept of interaction. Playing a Theremin is hard to learn since every slight movement of the hand changes the pitch/volume of the generated sound. It also lacks visual feedback. The idea of the Airpiano is to keep things as simple as possible in order to achieve full control over the instrument.”
Expect a limited run of production devices to hit the market sometime in September or October for a yet undisclosed price.
07/2/2010
— Filed under: Audio/Video, Gadgets
Tags: Airpiano, musical instrument
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All of us, at one point or the other have been hit by an emotion called loneliness. It is very natural to look for like minded friends. But did you ever count on dogs? Why not. After all dogs are known to be man’s best friend. Well, here I’m not talking about a real dog, but a dog which can lead you from darkness to light. And most importantly, be your companion in those lonely nights.
05/29/2010
— Filed under: Gadgets
Tags: Doggie Lamp, friend
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The idea of personal space for working named cabinet is sure helpful if you boss wants you to be productive. But what if you want your leisure to be productive? And, oh yeah, coincidently, you happen to be a computer racing simulator fan. Then you almost certainly you have caught yourself thinking that you must have a gaming simulator at some point.
05/25/2010
— Filed under: Gadgets
Tags: "D. Y. I. R-CADE", console
Being separated from the one you love can be a sad and lonely time, especially if you’ve grown used to sleeping next to each other and find it hard to sleep alone. This beautiful project from Interaction Design student Joanna Montgomery helps to connect lovers separated by any amount of distance who want to feel as though they’re still right where they should be: together.
05/3/2010
— Filed under: Gadgets
Tags: lovers, pillow
Novero has launched a range of Bluetooth headsets for you mobile phone or smartphone that are designed to look like jewelery, as you can see in the photo below the one pictured looks like a necklace.
04/24/2010
— Filed under: Gadgets
Tags: Bluetooth, Novero
A couple of guys in their early-20s came up with a product intended for arthritis sufferers, but instead have managed to excite a lot more people in the process. Yes, tea-drinkers can get excited too, especially by a mug/kettle mash-up.
04/17/2010
— Filed under: Gadgets
Tags: kettle, mug
Carnegie Mellon University researchers say that the same optical sensors found in computer mice can be used to give mouse-like capabilities to gadgets such as mobile phones and MP3 players — but there’s a twist.
04/10/2010
— Filed under: Gadgets
Tags: computer mice, NSF
The winter season is long gone and we are about to welcome the sunny summers, but if you just roll back a few months from now you would remember the cold wintry nights that seemed just perfect to grab a warm rug and go to bed, also needless to mention the warm bonfires or the campfires we used to light just to keep ourselves warm. One thing that bugged me the most were cold hands and the new Zippo is here to kill the very same problem.
03/20/2010
— Filed under: Gadgets
Tags: hands, warm, Zippo
We realize that the e-reader market is about as crowded (not to mention overwhelming) as a Walmart on Black Friday, but ever since the dual-screen Spring Design Alex surfaced and we mistook it as the Barnes & Noble Nook, we’ve been incredibly intrigued by it.
Though its 6-inch E-Ink display and 3,5-inch Android LCD form factor may seem like a riff on the Nook, the Alex has quite a few more tricks up its sleeve, including a full Android browser and the ability to extend what appears on the LCD to the E-Ink screen. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to all the unorthodox extras baked into the $399 Alex. Still, games and gimmicks only get you so far, and you’re probably wondering if it has what it takes to pull up next to the the majors like the Kindle or Nook and knock them from the top. We’ve got that answer and lots more details on what it’s like to use two screens rather than one just after the break in our full review. Join us, won’t you?
Spring Design Alex review
Look and feel
Flat out, the Alex looks and feels like an e-reader, but there are some subtle design differences that distinguish it from the others currently on the hunt for your dollars. Measuring 8,9- x 4,7-inches, it’s about the size of a standard paperback, but more rectangular in shape than both the Kindle and Nook. At a glance, its longer and narrower shape looks a bit awkward, but ergonomically it’s far from it — those dimensions actually make it easier to wrap a hand around, and we found holding it up to be exceedingly comfortable. The half-an-inch thick device is a tad thicker than the Kindle 2, but at 11 ounces, it’s far from falling into the bulky or heavy category.
At first blush, there’s nothing too striking about the Alex’s mostly-plastic industrial design, yet — for one reason or another — we think it’s duly attractive in both available hues (black and white). Beyond the E-Ink display and the 3,5-inch capacitive touchscreen below it, the Alex has five buttons, which can frankly get quite confusing at times. The small button between the two screens with Spring Design’s squiggly logo syncs the LCD to the E-Ink screen; to the left of the LCD screen is a page back button, and a back button for the Android OS. Conversely, to the right are page forward and power buttons.
On top of the reader you’ll find a 3,5mm headphone jack and microUSB port. An easy access microSD slot and dual speakers are around back, while a tiny microphone lives on the front right edge of the device.
As with the Kindle 2 and Nook, the Alex has a 600 x 800 pixel, 6-inch E-Ink display. The contrast and clarity of the grayscale (eight shades) screen is pretty much the same as the others, which comes as no shock since it’s made by the same company. Reading Jane Eyre on a sunny day was pretty much the typical e-reading experience: the black text looked crisp, and there was the expected second-long refresh when we turned pages. In a side-by-side comparison with the Nook, the Alex took the same amount of time to flip a page — the Kindle 2 was a hair faster than both.
Other than the physical page forward and back buttons, all the controls for the reader are contained to the Library application on the LCD. The interface isn’t flashy, but it is intuitive and packed with features — it’s easy to look through titles, flip to different chapters, jump to a specific page and add a bookmark. And for some reason, we could amuse ourselves for quite awhile by sliding a finger over the the rocker to jump to a different page. When it comes to changing the font size there are five size options, but unlike the Kindle and Nook you cannot change the font style itself. As for those that want to do more and annotate a book, you can highlight select words, add a note by typing on the Android virtual keyboard, or record a short audio clip.
All those features work quite well in practice, but it was harder than anticipated to accomplish those tasks on the smaller screen — we prefer the experience on the Entourage Edge where you can just reach out and touch the E-Ink screen.
There’s no doubt that the Alex is chock-full of reading features, but we just can’t say the same about its book selection… at least at this point in time. While there’s access to over a million Google Books that can be downloaded over WiFi directly on the device (no 3G version until the summer) there’s only so many times we can read older classics like Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment and H. G. Wells’ The Time Machine before we find ourselves longing for the latest and greatest from Danielle Steel. We’ll blame the whole ‘being on the cutting edge of technology’ thing for wanting some more modern titles, but in all seriousness, this may be a deal-breaking for those who prefer newer cuts. Spring Design has struck a deal with Borders and plans to roll out access to the e-book store in June, but for now you’re stuck searching for modern day ePub, TXT, HTML and PDF-based books through sites like eBooks.com or EPubbooks.com and sideloading them to the device.
Yes, it can be done, but believe us — it’s a unwanted hassle. We wish there were more onboard storage space for those books too — there’s only 256MB of DRAM internally, though it comes with a 2GB microSD card. The Nook and Kindle 2 have 2GB of internal storage each and allow for adding more via an external card.
Browsing and other features
Usually it’d be at this point in the review that we’d conclude that a $399 e-reader lacking 3G and a well-stocked e-book store would — at best — make a good doorstop, but luckily the Alex’s Android 1,5 browser and 480 x 320-resolution, 3,5-inch glossy touchscreen keep it from being doomed to such a fate. Before we get into the browsing experience we should mention that the capacitive nature of the panel makes all the difference — it’s stupendously responsive and doesn’t require too firm of a press to make selections.
The stock WebKit Android browser won’t come as anything new to most, but the ability to clone what’s on the LCD on the E-Ink display sure will. You can navigate to any webpage and hit the button in between the two screens to make it appear on the above E-Ink display. It’s a pretty neat trick, and the ability to save the page as a PDF so you can read it later is even more impressive. However, after a bit of use we discovered that the sync mode only makes sense when you’re actually going to read something on the E-Ink display — when surfing or scrolling the E-Ink panel keeps auto-refreshing to keep up with what’s on the LCD and looks like its having a perpetual seizure.
Our biggest complaint about the Android experience is the lack of a menu button — in order to bring up the menu bar in the browser you have to hold down both the page back and forward buttons. It’s frustrating to say the least, and it’s not the slightest bit convenient to do every time you want to enter a new URL.
Spring Design plans to roll out an Android 2,0 upgrade sometime this summer, but for now it doesn’t really make much of a difference considering the limited number of preloaded apps and lack of access to the Android Marketplace. Desperate for our favorite Android apps, we were able to download a few APKs (including those for Twitdroid and Facebook) and install them on our own. And to no one’s surprise, the outfit also plans to launch its very own app store this summer. Starting to sense a trend? Yes, ironically, the summer is going to be a big time for Spring Design updates.
Other than the browser, the standard Email, Photo Gallery, Music and Calculator apps are preloaded. We certainly enjoyed listening to Kings of Leon on the surprisingly-loud speakers while reading, but watching a short video on the screen was sluggish and less-than-thrilling. We could see using the panel to watch a short YouTube vid, but we couldn’t get the app to work and the browser doesn’t support Flash Lite. Bummer.
Performance and battery life
In our few days with the 600MHz Marvell Monahan PX30x-powered Alex we found it to be an adequate performer and definitely not as sluggish as the Entourage Edge or the Barnes & Noble Nook. That doesn’t mean it’s blazing fast, it just means we weren’t waiting endlessly for books to open or to get back to a previous web pages / menus. When it came to multitasking, the Alex was just fine for reading a book and listening to some music, but when we threw in web browsing things began to slow to a crawl. When we went to type in a URL or search term, it was a few seconds behind our typing. Similarly, running Twitdroid in the background caused the device to be incredibly laggy.
Unlike the Entourage Edge, it’s very easy to turn off the LCD by hitting the power button to save some juice. With both screens and WiFi turned on, the Alex lasted about six hours on a charge. That’s disappointing, but with the LCD off it stayed powered on for 24 hours. Oddly, there doesn’t seem to be a standby or sleep mode setting, but at least the power adapter is small enough to fit into your briefcase.
Wrap-up
We’re not saying that Spring Design’s Alex doesn’t have a ton of potential, it just doesn’t have enough books or connectivity options to justify its $399 price point today. Here’s where we remind you that the Nook and the Kindle both go for $259, and both are equipped with 3G access right out of the box. We definitely dig the form factor and the ability to (semi)-legitimately browse the web on an e-reader, but at the end of the day this device is for reading books — popular books that have been published in the last decade and can conveniently be found. We’ll wait for the summer updates and the 3G version to arrive, but let’s not kid ourselves, by then we’ll probably be looking at an entirely different e-reader / tablet ecosystem. Right, Apple and Microsoft?
03/13/2010
— Filed under: Gadgets
Tags: Alex, design, e-book
