News

Arriving early 2017.

The Surface Studio is designed for the creative process. The 28” PixelSense™ Display gives you a huge canvas for all kinds of work. Use it upright, or draw on it like a drafting table.

Surface Studio, with its strikingly large and incredibly thin 28” PixelSense™ touch screen Display with a 4500 x 3000 resolution, lets you visualise ideas as you paint, edit, and design. Then watch those ideas leap off the screen with 13.5 million pixels of true-to-life colour and clarity.

This stunning desktop computer is available in either i5 or i7 CPU options, 1 or 2TB hard drive versions and can take up to 32GB of memory.

Check out the video of it in action here.

See the friendly sales team for more info.

Lost your car and can’t remember where you parked? It happens to the best of us: wandering aimlessly through parking lots, clicking the panic button on your key chain to get your headlights to illuminate. Now there is a cheap solution to one of life’s most annoying problems. 
You don’t need some high-end radio transponder to keep tabs on your car because now there is an easier, much cheaper solution.
Standalone GPS and radio triangulation units can cost hundreds. And that’s not counting the installation and (frequently hefty) activation and monthly fees associated with whatever service you do choose. For most of us, it’s overkill. The good news is that some of life’s biggest problems seem to be disappearing because of new technology. If you frequently forget where you parked your car, there is a tiny gadget and app that could be what you’re looking for. 
Trackr is a small and discreet device the size of a coin that is revolutionizing the way people track their vehicles using their smartphones.

Visit their website here.

One of our team attended the preview last week of the new HP Elite X3 Windows 10 Phone.  This is HP’s latest venture in to the phone space, but they see this more as a tiny computer with phone capabilities.
The Elite X3, once back in the office, can be slotted into a small dock which has a monitor, keyboard and mouse connected.  The phone then becomes a desktop PC allowing the user to run the phones applications on the big screen.

There is also a “laptop” option which is basically just a screen, keyboard and battery which once the phone is connected behaves like a laptop.  This laptop device can be left in the glove-box of a car without concerns of losing data as the applications and data are held on the phone.

This is a powerful and small device which will be ideal for users who need mobility and want to cut down on the number of devices they use.

Hydropower was used by farmers in ancient Greece to grind grain and today is used in iconic locations like Nevada with the Hoover Dam. But a start up in South Korea have revealed a hydropower device called the eStream, which converts running water into electricity, so you can charge your phone and other USB devices. The eStream is about the size of a water bottle with a turbine that rotates underwater and generates electricity that gets stored in a built in battery. This takes about 4.5 hours to charge fully. A full battery can charge up to 3 smart phones, cameras or other USB devices. Click here to see the eStream in action.

Ever since the first practical computers came on the market in the 1950's, scientists and engineers have been seeking ever more compact data storage technologies, which have gone from giant drums to tiny chips. Now scientists at the Kavli Institute of Nanoscience at the Delft University of Technology (TUDelft) have developed a memory technology that achieves the ultimate physical limit by using individual atoms to represent a single bit of data.

See more here.

Waverly Labs have created a simple wearable earpiece called Pilot, which claims to make translation effortless and instantaneous. After a slight pause, the earpiece allows the wearer to hear a basic translation of multiple languages into their native tongue. It is designed for the international traveller and Waverly Labs looks to make it function completely offline. A companion mobile app is used to download language packs and toggle the language within the earpiece, but translation doesn't require an internet connection to work. The Pilot is running a pre-order campaign, but unfortunately won't ship until mid-2017.

When it comes to working in a lab, accidents aren't usually a good thing. But due to an unexpected result, which led chemists to a system that could make batteries last up to 400 times longer than the best performing batteries. The accident part is that the researchers still aren't sure how the system works. Instead of lithium, the new batteries store electricity in gold nanowires that are thinner than a human hair. But an addition of an electrolyte gel to the nanowires as well as coating it with manganese oxide made the big difference. The testing cycle showed the new system could withstand 200,000 charge cycles over 3 months and only lose 5 percent of its capacity.
Unfortunately, this system is not a battery yet and there is no guarantee the efficiency will be maintained when it's scaled up to a device.

What is Neighbourly?
Neighbourly allows you to stay connected with your neighbours and community using a private neighbourhood website. It's a free service that is designed to make your neighbourhood a safer and better place to live.
Members of Neighbourly use the website to interact on topics such as local events, after school activities, crime and safety, council issues, local services or even lost pets.
Neighbourly also offers a crime prevention service for members within its communities. Members are kept informed of any suspicious activity and can also inform each other instantly of any urgent crime or safety updates via SMS text message.
Once you have signed up as a member with Neighbourly you can do things like:

Fontus have created a self-filling water bottle that lets you go on an adventure without worrying about finding a water supply or carrying heavy loads of water. There are 2 models, one that straps on your bike and relies on air to pass through a dual-chambered solar powered Peltier element that condenses air into water. And the other is a standalone bottle that uses a solar panel to power a fan that pulls humid air through a filter into a condensation chamber. With an IP54 rating it means the filters protect against dust and low pressure jets of water.

Queen’s University have developed a prototype of a bendable smartphone named ReFlex. LG have already created a flexible screen in the past, but they have yet to use it on a device. ReFlex was made to revolutionise the way we communicate with a smartphone. Bending the ReFlex will make the pages flip in an eBook, making you feel like your reading an actual book. The bending also works on games & apps.