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EXCLUSIVE: 10 things I’ve learnt about technology – by Ricky Gervais
iPad voice calls, Cello 3D TV, Nokia N8 video skills: US Update
Angry Mario: Play the Nintendo Rovio mashup that was never meant to be
Nokia N8 update adds continuous auto-focus, now rivals HDSLR
Rubber duckies, laser pens and bubble machines: How Sony trains camera crews to shoot in 3D
HP TouchPad video extravaganza: see it in action before the July launch
Huawei enters the Honeycomb tablet game with dual-core 1.5 GHz slate
Cello 3D TV slashes the price of the next dimension in your living room
Duke Nukem Forever tops the sales charts; all hail the king
Turn your iPad 3G into a giant iPhone with PhoneIt-iPad app

EXCLUSIVE: 10 things I’ve learnt about technology – by Ricky Gervais

Posted: 13 Jun 2011 04:48 PM PDT

Ricky Gervais spoke to Electricpig about his graveyard of Macs, why Twitter is the modern equivalent of graffiti on the toilet wall – and why it’s safer to get an assistant to switch the telly on…

Hit the Read More button below to view the full article now.

1. 80% of people use 20% of a gadget's true potential

I'm in awe of technology, albeit not great with it. In one respect I have to call an assistant to turn the telly on, but in another I'm a gadget guru. I just love them, and I fit into the 80/20 thing, namely that I'm one of the 80% who uses only 20% of what an iPod, iMac, iPad, iPhone is for.

2. It's probably a good idea to read the instruction manual. (Not that I do…)

I know I should get more out of my gadgets and it's something I've tried to do over the past few years. But I never read instruction manuals. Take the Sky box. If something goes wrong with it, my partner Jane is going 'Not that remote, no, that's the TV, no, okay, you've just put the shutters down…'

3. You can't blame technology when someone posts a racist comment on YouTube…

The internet is the biggest resource the world has ever known. But there's a lot of misinformation as well. For all its freedom, there are downsides. People can say anything on there. You only have to look at some things on YouTube and it's the most horrible, racist stuff. It's carte blanche – and virtually anonymous. Technology isn't to blame, whatever is vented isn't to blame – people are thinking this stuff anyway.

4. A gadget made six months ago will look like it’s from the 1950s

I love anything with 'i' at the start of it – the iPod, the iMac, the iPad. And when you get to the iPhone – that's just an incredible work of art. Technology these days isn't just technology, it's art, it's objet d'art and has to be aesthetically pleasing. Because the technology is so innovative and fast-moving, a six-month old gadget runs the risk of looking really old. You go, 'What's that, like 1950s?' 'No, 2009!'

5. I don’t know how we lived before the mobile phone

Farmers voted the mobile phone the invention of the century. I suppose if you're in a 1,000-acre farm, that saves you daylight hours. I don't know how we lived before the mobile phone. I'll call a mate on the way to him and go 'Where are ya?', and he'd go, 'I'm here'. And I'd look ahead and say 'Ah yes, there you are!' I mean, what happened before? I remember leaving notes on pub doors saying 'We've moved to The Horn'. How did we ever plan anything?

6. It won't be long before someone shoots a movie on an iPhone

I don't think it will be long before someone makes the first movie shot on an iPhone. Everything is broadcast quality now – even those HD Flip cameras. It's only the lenses that are different. It’s remarkable – people are making their own movies or their own animation. Bedroom science.

7. Technology has moved civilization forward exponentially. (I know this by looking at my computer graveyard…)

In my room, I have a pile of iMacs that resembles a computer graveyard. I mean, it's crazy what they can do when you consider that the computer that put man on the moon was the size of a room and had the power of a calculator! There's nothing that has moved technology forward so exponentially as the computer. In a very short time – 50 years maybe – the world, civilization, has changed. And when you consider that only 1% of people in Africa have got a computer, we've not reached the ceiling by any means.

8. Technology has made 'the idea' more valuable than ever. (How else could three men with mics clock up 216million downloads?)

Take the Ricky Gervais podcast – 216million downloads, three blokes in a room with three old mics and a bit of foam. It's amazing – you can speak to the world. And the thing with audio is that it stands up against any audio. You make a film, it's not going to look like Avatar, but you record a podcast and it's there, crystal clear. It makes you realize just how accessible the rest of the world is. I used to tell Karl who listens to the podcast – David Bowie, The Simpsons, etc. Then we found out that there was an Inuit listening to the podcast and Karl couldn't come to terms with it. Quite mind-blowing, isn't it.

9. Don't fear progress

Technology is great for many reasons – progress should be embraced. It unifies the world. Plus, thanks to texting, you don't even have to talk to people when you want to do an awkward blow-out…

10. Twitter is the modern equivalent of graffiti on a toilet wall…

[Twitter] is 'out there'. It's not like dealing with the press – you know who they are; they're not anonymous. Nowadays with forums and Twitter, it's like graffiti – it’s like walking round finding your name on every toilet wall. It seems weird.

Read Ricky’s blog at www.rickygervais.com

Life’s Too Short, starring (in ascending height order) Warwick Davis, Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant, is coming soon to BBC Two.

Meanwhile, Karl Pilkington will be back on Sky One with An Idiot Abroad: The Bucket List. Here’s a trailer…

iPad voice calls, Cello 3D TV, Nokia N8 video skills: US Update

Posted: 13 Jun 2011 09:45 AM PDT

It's that time for your evening tech jolt, better known as the US Update. Headlining today's news is a new app which promises to turn your iPad 3G into a 9.7-inch iPhone. We've got the scoop on the ultra-affordable Cello 3D TVs arriving later this month and huge news for N8 owners hoping to take their video skills to the next level.

iPhoneIslam, the team behind FaceTime 3G, has released a video showing an iPad 3G making voice calls and sending text messages (SMS). You'll need to jailbreak your iPad 3G and purchase the £12.29 app, but that's a small price to pay for a 10-inch iPhone.

Surprise, surprise. Duke Nukem Forever has topped the UK video game sales charts this week — all hail the king. Taking the top seed from L.A. Noire, the rock em' sock em' FPS is a hit for Xbox 360, taking home 56 percent of the opening week sales.

The UK's most affordable 3D TVs have been announced this afternoon. Cello has made its new line of 42" and 47" sets official, priced at £499 and £699 respectively. The sets use LG passive 3D LCD panels and deliver full HD 1080p goodness. The icing on the cake is that both sets include four pairs of 3D glasses — talk about a deal.

Huawei has released a video showcasing its upcoming Android Honeycomb tablet. The dual-core 1.5 GHz slate will feature a 7-inch display running at 1280 x 800 pixel resolution, WiFi, Bluetooth and 3G. Stay tuned as we bring you the latest and this bite-sized powerhouse.

HP is kicking off this week's TouchPad pre-orders with a webOS video showcase on YouTube. The company has released eight videos, each showing a different aspect of the slate. If you're planning to pre-order Sunday these video are a must-see.

Last in this morning is news of an update headed to the N8. The update requires Symbian Anna, but with it comes 30fps video recording and continuous auto-focus. With these types of improvements, the best smartphone camera just became a HDSLR competitor. That wraps up the latest and greatest in the fine world of tech news. As always I'm Nick Marshall and I'll see you again tomorrow.

Angry Mario: Play the Nintendo Rovio mashup that was never meant to be

Posted: 13 Jun 2011 09:33 AM PDT

Plenty of people have been tipping Rovio, developer of Angry Birds, as the next Nintendo, thanks to it knack for nailing gameplay and cute design. But not so many people have been tipping an Angry Birds and Super Mario mashup, least of all the two gaming legends. But Angry Mario is just that. Play it before it gets pulled!

Head over to Funny-Games.biz and you’ll find a free, rather crude Flash game, the involves firing Mario out of a cannon at structures stuffed with goombas and bob-ombs, and knocking them down. As with Angry Birds, you can vary the angle of elevation and the speed to hit your target.

Of course, inter-spliced with all the catapult action are plenty of animated GIFs, backgrounds and Mario sound effects to “enhance” the experience, all of which do not appear to be licensed by Ninteno.

Sound familiar? See the IP infringing Mario spoof that sneaked onto the iPhone App Store a few months ago, and was quickly pulled:

Nokia N8 update adds continuous auto-focus, now rivals HDSLR

Posted: 13 Jun 2011 08:45 AM PDT

The Nokia N8 touts one of the best, if not the best, cameras we've seen on a smartphone. Thanks to a 12-megapixel sensor and Carl Zeiss optics, taking professional-grade photos on the go is easier than ever before.

An update to the N8 is rumored to be coming soon. With it brings 30fps video recording, up from 25fps, and continuous auto-focus. The latter is one of the most highly coveted features for DSLR users hoping to replace a HD video camera.

According to Nokia mobile camera guru Damien Dinning, the Nokia N8 will be landing the aforementioned update very soon. The addition of 30fps video recording and continuous auto-focus has one important prerequisite: Symbian Anna. “There will be an N8 specific update coming which will. You need the code from Anna though” says Damien.

via PocketNow

Rubber duckies, laser pens and bubble machines: How Sony trains camera crews to shoot in 3D

Posted: 13 Jun 2011 08:28 AM PDT

Like it or loathe it, 3D is a big deal today, with more Hollywood blockbusters being shot in stereoscope than ever before, and for the first time, telly shows filmed in three dimensions as well.

But it’s not just a case of plonking another camera next to the existing one: there’s a whole science to it, one that camera crews have to learn all over again. We took a trip to Sony’s HQ to find out just how it trains the industry to grasp the new medium.

It’s a cold, grey day in late May when we head out to Sony’s headquarters in Basingstoke, Hampshire. The hulking complex has been home to Sony’s Broadcast and Professional division in Europe since 1978, and is one of four locations in the world where the gadget giant’s Professional Education And Knowledge team (SPEAK) trains movie and TV crew staff to shoot in 3D. The others are situated in Culver City (Los Angeles), Mumbai and Hong Kong, while another is expected to open in Moscow in the coming months.

The Basingstoke centre focuses on training professionals in the art of 3D for live broadcast

The Basingstoke centre focuses on 3D for live TV, and offers everything from morning to three day courses, not just on how to shoot in 3D, but on the science behind it. As we discover listening to SPEAK’s Paul Cameron, there are plenty of pitfalls and considerations you have to make, especially when broadcasting live 3D TV, as Sky and even the BBC are now wont to do.

“The best way of eating chocolate is to eat one, wait, a bit, and have another. 3D is exactly the same.”

For instance, there are various “depth cues” that we automatically use to perceive distance in both life, and when plonked on the sofa watching the box. Most of these are true of both 2D and 3D imaging – perspective and extrapolated vanishing points, overlap or occlusion of objects, lighting and shading – but two cues give 3D footage that extra D: vergence and stereopsis, the impression of distance created by your left and right eyes seeing slightly different images.

There's only so far forward or back you can go with 3D

The trick comes from keeping as many of these cues in line with each other as possible, and that’s tough when filming in 3D allows you to fiddle with the depth (Sort of the whole point of 3D).

In fact, Cameron reveals, the art of good – and some would say bearable – 3D is to be subtle. “The skill in shooting good 3D is you don’t go beyond certain limits,” he says.

Sky for instance keeps its depth budget (how far forward and back objects in the screen can appear to a viewer) “fairly conservative”, so that rapid cutting in 3D football matches doesn’t disorientate hordes of fans, or worse, a player runs so close to the camera that he appears in front of the on-screen scoreline, which can cause a jarring sensation akin to realising that an MC Escher painting actually makes no sense at all.

“The best way of eating chocolate is to eat one, wait, a bit, and have another. 3D is exactly the same,” he says. Cameron should know. As well as mapping an enormous timeline of every 3D feature film in history, he’s been working as a technical trainer at Sony for twenty years, and is surprisingly frank about Sony’s failings in the past when it comes to 3D.

Cameron demonstrate how lighting in 3D can create unexpected illusions

“Sony and other manufacturers have made mistakes in the past, not thinking about how the technology will work in the home,” he tells us. “3D is not going to take off if we make the same mistakes as we did back in the 1980s.”

Digital projection, allowing the images to be kept perfectly in sync, solves a lot of these issues. Previous 3D booms in the twentieth century went bust simply because two projectors couldn’t be kept precisely in sync, inducing terrible headaches in viewers.

But understanding how 3D filming works is just as important. To that end, Cameron walks us through some of the scenarios he uses to train camera crews, and they’re, well, unique, to put it politely.

"I'm here to fix the sink..."

One example Sony uses to deal with depth and convergence is a door opening, to reveal hidden depth behind it. This needs rapid adjustment of the interaxial controller on a 3D camera, and to illustrate this, Cameron would normally have a participant dress up as a pizza delivery guy and rap on a prop door, while another opens it.

Bear with us. This totally makes sense.

But time is short, so instead, Cameron, a man clearly in love with his job, jumps behind a curtain, pops on a pair of silly specs, holds up a rubber duck and asks a journalist to wave a stick in front of his face.

There’s method to his madness though: he shows us just what happens if objects break a certain depth budget. On a passive 3D screen nearby, Cameron’s toy duck appears to be coming out of the screen (Negative parallax), but as soon as the stick overlaps it, the whole illusion comes crashing down. How can the duck be in front of the stick, and behind it at the same time? It can’t.

Cameron recreates a Foo Fighters stadium concert with a laser pen and a bubble machine

Cameron also shows us just how he trains technicians to film outdoor and atmospheric events (live concerts, say) – with a bubble machine, a smoke machine and a laser pen. As he blasts all three onto a small set, we see how it’s possible to recreate the sense of depth, even with strobes of light and vapours. As for the bubbles? No, we’re not sure what gigs he’s been to either, but we’d like to know.

To conclude the morning, we’re shown a reel of some 3D footage recently shot by Sony teams – including the beatification of Pope John Paul II, no less. Of course, plenty of goals from last year’s World Cup in South Africa make the showreel, but one sport we’d never expected leaves us actually longing to watch more: greyhound racing, in 3D. Suddenly, the sandy track is no longer a vertical, uniform wall of yellow, but a track stretching out into the distance – and one on which you can see where every pooch is placing.

Colour television brought snooker to the small screen: perhaps 3D could do the same for the dogs.

Want to know more? There’s a host of videos presented by Cameron on the subject here.

A stereoscope picture viewer from the early 1900s, on show in Sony's 3D Experience room

Another cabinet, full to the brim with ViewMasters and more recent 3D toys

A pair of the first ever polarised 3D glasses, from the 1939 New York World's Fair

HP TouchPad video extravaganza: see it in action before the July launch

Posted: 13 Jun 2011 08:15 AM PDT

This Sunday pre-orders for the HP TouchPad kick off in the UK with a July release to follow. While you sit back and fantasize about the latest build of webOS gracing a 9.7-inch display, HP has released a series of eight videos to hold you over.

The video series covers everything from multitasking to charging. When the TouchPad goes on sale next month, the 16GB model will be £399 and the 32GB £479. The combination of a 1.2 GHz Snapdragon dual-core processor and 512MB of RAM look to outclass both its iOS and Android competitors.

Video 1: Multitasking

Video 2: Wireless Charging

Video 3: Notifications

There's five additional videos, all listed on HP's official YouTube channel here. If you've been considering webOS as your tablet OS, we highly recommend you peruse the showcase. Who's going all in with webOS next month?

July 2011 | HP | £399 16GB, £479 32GB

Huawei enters the Honeycomb tablet game with dual-core 1.5 GHz slate

Posted: 13 Jun 2011 07:30 AM PDT

Typically known for entry to mid-level smartphones, Huawei is quietly working on its first Android Honeycomb tablet. The unnamed slate will reportedly feature either a 1.5 GHz dual-core Snapdragon or a Nvidia Tegra 2 chip processor. Here's what we know so far.

Beyond the lighting quick chip, the Huawei tablet will run Android Honeycomb (3.x) and feature a 7-inch display running at a resolution of 1280 x 800 . Normally a 7-inch display would not receive much fanfare, but considering the resolution matches 10-inch competitors, this is no small feat.

For comparison, the 7-inch HTC Flyer features a 1.5 GHz single core Snapdragon processor and 7-inch 1024 x 600 resolution display. Meanwhile the LG Optimus Pad has a 1 GHz dual-core processor and 8.9-inch display running at 1280 x 768. The power of the Huawei tablet and its screen resolution are unmatched.

For now the slate remains nameless, but we have confirmed WiFi, 3G, Bluetooth and a web cam come standard. Stay tuned for an official announcement.

via Akihabaranews

Cello 3D TV slashes the price of the next dimension in your living room

Posted: 13 Jun 2011 07:03 AM PDT

The UK's most affordable 3D TVs are headed to your living room in two varieties: 42" and 47" models. Both new sets announced by Cello this afternoon deliver full HD 1080p and stunning 3D compliments of a LG passive 3D LCD panel.

Unlike the competition, the Cello 3D TVs come bundled with four pairs of 3D glasses, enough for the whole family. For larger families or big parties, Cello is selling the glasses for £19.99 a set. To put this deal into perspective, Sony active shutter 3D glasses retail for £79.99 each.

Other highlights to the Cello 3D TVs include two HDMI inputs, EPG, a USB socket for recording content and an easy-to-use remote. With Sky entering the 3D programming game with its free 3D channel for full package subscribers, it's only a matter of time before the content rolls in. In the meantime a 42" or 47" Cello 3D TV will make the perfect pairing for your PlayStation 3 to play countless Blu-ray 3D movies and games.

Late June | Cello | 42" £499, 47" £699

Duke Nukem Forever tops the sales charts; all hail the king

Posted: 13 Jun 2011 06:30 AM PDT

Mediocre reviews can't stop Duke Nukem Forever sales. After fifteen years of development the FPS quickly climbed the sales ladder landing the number one position in UK. The debut sent L.A. Noire to the two spot for first time since its release.

Leading the way with Duke Nukem Forever sales was the Xbox 360 which accounted for 56 percent. Six percent of the copies sold were the £64.99 special edition version; the other 94 percent were standard. Duke was not the only winner this week, Infamous 2 and Red Faction Armageddon also saw solid debuts.

Infamous 2 broke in the top 10 in the number four position while Red Faction Armageddon was number eight. The top five positions were as follows: Duke Nukem Forever, L.A. Noire, Zumba Fitness, Infamous 2, LEGO Pirates of the Carribbean.

Out Now | Duke Nukem Forever | £34.97

Turn your iPad 3G into a giant iPhone with PhoneIt-iPad app

Posted: 13 Jun 2011 05:46 AM PDT

Jailbroken iPad 3G users have a new treat this afternoon. After enabling FaceTime video calling on the iPhone 3GS, iPhoneIslam has taken its talents to the iPad. Available for $20 (£12.29) via Cydia, the team's new app PhoneIt-iPad transforms your jailbroken iPad 3G into a giant iPhone, enabling cellular calling and texting (SMS).

The latter of the two improvements will be partially addressed in iOS 5 with the advent of iMessage. However, iMessage is limited to the iOS ecosystem whereas this app unlocks full-fledged text messaging, allowing messages to be sent to any phone on any carrier.

The app is not live in Cydia, but once available the $20 (£12.29) price tag should see a warm reception. With a Bluetooth headset and the SIM card from your iPhone this is the unofficial iOS counter to RIM's BlackBerry Bridge.

via Engadget