Monday, May 30, 2011

MobileCrunch

MobileCrunch

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Video: Smartphone Simulates Sensation Of Buttons On A Touchscreen

Posted: 30 May 2011 05:08 AM PDT

Do you miss the feeling of pressing physical buttons when you touch icons or letters on a smartphone touchscreen? Japan’s second largest mobile carrier KDDI is working on a display that recreates exactly that “clicking sensation” by combining vibration with a pressure sensor.

The haptic display, which is manufactured by Kyocera, is still in prototype mode. Apparently, KDDI currently aims at developing a thinner multi-touch version before offering the screen to manufacturers of cell phones.

What’s interesting is that the company says there are three different sensations the display can recreate, two for clicking on numbers or letters and one for pushing icons (for example, the screen can recreate the sensation of pushing soft buttons if the user prefers it that way).

This video (in English, shot by Diginfonews in Tokyo) provides more insight:

Padfone: Asus Officially Announces Its Android Tablet/Phone Combo (Videos)

Posted: 30 May 2011 04:06 AM PDT

Today, on the first day of the yearly Computex Taipei exhibition in Taiwan, Asus took the wraps off the Android tablet/phone combo it teased last week. Dubbed Padfone, Asus is relatively mum on details (specs, pricing, availability) at this point. Read the rest on CrunchGear.


Video: NTT Docomo’s Mobile, Simultaneous Translation System

Posted: 30 May 2011 01:10 AM PDT


The idea of translating spoken language from cell phone to cell phone isn’t exactly new, but the mobile simultaneous translation system NTT Docomo is currently working on looks really impressive. Japan’s biggest mobile carrier says it uses the “best technologies” for voice recognition, machine translation, and voice synthesis out there for its solution.

As you can see in the video embedded below, Docomo’s system goes beyond simple tourist talk like “Hello” or “How much is this?”. For the demo, a Docomo employee at a remote location reads a rather complex newspaper article in Japanese which is then translated into English and sent to the receiver in near real-time (English -> Japanese is possible, too).

Accuracy and speed still need some work, but it looks like Docomo could get there soon.

Here’s the video (provided by Diginfonews in Tokyo):
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