Web Designer & Front-end Developer
Posts tagged touchpad
News Republic for WebOS
It turns out that WebOS app beggars can be choosers, when selecting the right news app. I have officially replaced USA Today with a new goto news app for my Touchpad, News Republic. I like it so much that I even put it along the static app area on the bottom of the screen. USA Today wasn’t a bad app to use. It’s just that News Republic offers more categories, more stories, longer stories with more pictures, more up to date news and an overall slicker interface. That is saying a lot considering the USA Today app has been around for as long as the Touchpad and I want to say that it even came pre-installed on my Touchpad. It always left more to be desired though. The USA Today app always felt like a limited version of the popular newspaper I’d find waiting for me at my hotel room door while News Republic feels like an incoming feed of news that gets updated as soon as the story is released to the public and deemed appropriate for this app. Preferences are currently limited and they will probably stay that way but that doesn’t worry me.
Flight Control Soars Into Your Touchpad
The great news is that the Touchpad now has Flight Control available to download. And I was right, this is a game that’s much easier and better to play on a tablet vs on a phone due to the amount of action on the screen all at once. Flight Control is a game where you control the flight paths of aircrafts and helicopters. Different size planes need to land on different runways in some levels. The game was developed by Namco and Firemint and was first available back in March of 2009 and has sold over two million units worldwide. Best of all it’s only 99 cents in the Touchpad app store.
Zinio: A Magazine Reader For Touchpad
After everyone bought an HP Touchpad during the firesale a couple months ago, they slowly began to realize that support is not so great in the land of WebOS. Lately though, developers have been releasing some killer apps that save the Touchpad from being JATWAA (Just Another Tablet Without Any Apps). Zinio has earlier this month released their popular app for the Touchpad. Zinio is the world’s largest digital newsstand offering over 4,000 magazines. There are even some free full magazine and magazine excerpts to download. If you decide to buy one, the average price of a magazine in Zinio is about $5, about what you’d expect to find it for at the store. A good thing is that because the magazines are downloaded to your Touchpad, you can read them away from wifi hotspots. And not surprisingly, the experience of reading a magazine with this app is really quite nice.
More @ Zinio.
HP Touchpad Offline RSS Feed Reader
Ever since I got my $99 HP Touchpad I’ve been looking for a way to view RSS feeds offline. Because the Touchpad doesn’t have built in 3G, an offline RSS feed viewer is a great solution for reading news while commuting to work, hanging out in the park, or being somewhere else without a wifi connection. I was hoping Pulse or similar software would eventually port versions of their apps over to WebOS but with WebOS support in question, I doubt that there will be too many new apps being released.
Today I finally found the right app for the job and best of all, it’s free! The app is simply called RSS Basic Free. There is also a paid version for 99 cents but I’m not sure of the difference between the free and the paid version other than supporting the developer. RSS Basic Free may not be as fancy as some of the other apps but it does do the job and it’s actually somewhat refreshing how simple the interface is. After you download it, you will notice that you have to manually add feed URL’s from your favorite blogs. This may take a little time but after you start inserting the feed URLs you will notice the program start to fill up with stories. Turn your wifi off an BAM! offline RSS feeds on your Touchpad.
Here are a few of RSS feed URLs to my favorite blogs to get you started:
- Boing Boing: http://feeds.boingboing.net/boingboing/iBag
- Engaget: http://www.engadget.com/rss.xml
- Kotaku: http://feeds.gawker.com/kotaku/full
- The Official Google Blog: http://feeds.feedburner.com/blogspot/MKuf
- Playstation Blog: http://feeds.feedburner.com/psblog
- Wired Top Stories: http://feeds.wired.com/wired/index
HP WebOS Touchpad $99 Firesale
August 22, 2011
Late last week HP announced that they’re discontinuing their tablet WebOS Touchpads as they are focusing on other aspects of their brand. Because of this, HP felt it was necessary to drop the price of their Touchpads from $499 to $99 on the 16GB version and $599 to $150 on the 32GB version. This being the cheapest price for a tablet computer ever, the internet has been a buzz on the Touchpad. HP’s inventory on their website sold out within hours and when other stores including Amazon, MacMall and sellers on ebay priced the Touchpad at the new lower price, they also instantly sold out.
Here are some of the technical details on the $99 HP Touchpad:
- 16GB internal storage
- 1.2GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon dual-core APQ8060 processor
- 9.7″ diagonal LED backlit touch display with high-gloss finish, scratch-resistant coating
- Front-facing 1.3MP camera and digital microphone for video chat
- Wi-Fi and Bluetooth wireless
- Beats audio
Sony Announces New PlayStation Portable, NGP
January 27, 2011
by Matt
in PlayStation
| 1256 Views
Roughly six years ago Sony released the PSP and set the portable gaming world a blaze with the new handheld. The screen was brighter, bigger and had some of the best graphics seen on a portable to date. Today the PSP isn’t anything that’s going to knock your socks off and there were many rumors as of late about the next iteration of the PSP floating around CES this year. Those rumors have proved to become true because Sony has just officially announced the PSP2 at an event in Tokyo. For now however, Sony is calling the portable device by its code name ‘Next Generation Portable’ or NGP for short.
Fans of the PSP have been dreaming of dual analog sticks for years and they finally get them in the NGP. It will also feature a high-resolution, touch-sensitive OLED screen that’s larger than the original PSP screen, tilt-sensitive SIXAXIS controls, dual analog sticks, front and back-facing cameras, and a touch sensitive back panel. This new touchpad back panel will make most of the device interactive unlike anything seen before. Sony claims that the new NGP will be as powerful as the PlayStation 3.
There will be no more UMD with the NGP. Sony in introducing a new game medium that’s a small flash memory based card. The cards will be able to hold full software titles plus add-on game content and game save data. Sony also announced ‘PlayStation Suite’ which will allow the games to be played on other Android based devices such as mobile phones, smart-phones, and tablet PCs.
In addition, Sony is introducing a new service called LiveArea that will let your NGP be able to detect others in the area and let you see what they’re playing, chat, see game rankings, etc. It sounds like something similar to what the Nintendo DS has with PictoChat but hopefully this is on a much larger scale. The NGP is expected to be out later this year in Japan. No timeframe given to the U.S. release date yet.
The Full Specs
- CPU: ARM® Cortex™-A9 core (4 core)
- GPU: SGX543MP4+
- External Dimensions: Approx. 182.0 x 18.6 x 83.5mm (width x height x depth) (tentative, excludes largest projection)
- Rear touch pad: Multi touch pad (capacitive type)
- Cameras: Front camera, Rear camera
- Sound: Built-in stereo speakers, Built-in microphone
- Sensors: Six-axis motion sensing system (three-axis gyroscope, three-axis accelerometer), Three-axis electronic compass
- Location: Built-in GPS, Wi-Fi location service support
- Keys / Switches: PS button, Power button, Directional buttons (Up/Down/Right/Left), Action buttons (Triangle, Circle, Cross, Square), Shoulder buttons (Right/Left), Right stick, Left stick, START button, SELECT button, Volume buttons
- Wireless communications: Mobile network connectivity (3G), IEEE 802.11b/g/n (n = 1×1)(Wi-Fi) (Infrastructure mode/Ad-hoc mode), Bluetooth® 2.1+EDR （A2DP/AVRCP/HSP）
The Announced Games
- Uncharted
- Killzone
- WipeOut
- Resistance
- LittleBigPlanet
- Hustle Kings
- Hot Shots Golf
More at PlayStation Blog.