Ever found yourself without a signal and wished you could just spray one on like magic? Well, maybe soon, you’ll be able to do just that. Chamtech Enterprises has developed a spray-on antenna it says is more lightweight and energy-efficient than current technology. Revealed at Google’s inaugural Solve for X shindig, the antenna can be “painted” onto almost anything, including trees, walls and fabrics. Chamtech’s already talking with government-based customers, and as such can’t spill too much detail on how it works, but said it uses organic elements to tinker with magnetic and radio-frequency fields. The start-up’s CTO, Rhett Spencer, claims the antenna could increase mobile energy efficiency by 10 percent. It was also found to work particularly well under water, and being organic, we presume, would make it ideal for sub-aquatic telecom infrastructure, and of course, rainy days.

Continue reading Spray-on antenna revealed: best thing to come in a can since Easy Cheese (video)

Spray-on antenna revealed: best thing to come in a can since Easy Cheese (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 11 Feb 2012 07:04:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Hot hardware

The Transformer Prime with 32 GB of storage is the second iteration of Asus’ popular 10.1-inch tablet which debuted last year. And the reason for the “Transformer” name is due to the optional 0 keyboard dock, but more on that in a minute. The slate itself uses a high-quality IPS display at 1280 x 800 resolution. It’s clear and bright from all angles. There’s also a handy option to bump up the brightness for outdoor use: The screen jumps to 600 nits vs. the iPad 2′s 380 to 400 nits, so it’s nearly 50 percent brighter with this setting.

At 8.6 millimeters thick and 586 grams, the Prime is easy to tote and hold, especially with the large bezel around the display; roughly one inch.There’s a 1.2 megapixel front camera which worked fine in my video chat tests. However, the camera is offset, so I had to tilt the tablet to appear centered in my calls. The rear camera is 8 megapixels (with LED flash) and takes adequate, but not stellar images. Video capture is supported up to 1080p and video looks soft around the edges but still good.

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Other ports and buttons include a 3.5 millimeter headphone jack, a single speaker, two microphone ports, up and down volume rocker, microSD card slot and micro HDMI port to connect the device to an HDTV or digital monitor. This last port works well and the tablet is more than capable for displaying high resolution videos or games on a second screen. The power button is very small and can be hard to find; a problem when waking the Prime up from sleep mode. GPS, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth are all standard; there is no version available with mobile broadband.

About that dock: With it, the thin slate connects to a full keyboard and trackpad, morphing the device into an Android-powered notebook of sorts. In addition to the easier input method, the dock adds a full-sized USB port and SD memory card slot. There’s also dedicated Home and Back buttons that support Android. Plus the dock has its own battery, which adds another 6 or so hours of runtime to the Transformer Prime. On its own, the Prime can easily power through a day. I’ve been able to use it as a primary device for a solid 11 hours with juice to spare. So with the dock, this becomes an 18 hour configuration.

On the downside, the dock weighs less than the slate, so the Prime can tip over if not careful. The keyboard isn’t backlit and the trackpad needs improving as well. It often became frustrating to use when not responding the way I had swiped. You can use two fingers to swipe up or down for browsing or navigating home screens, which is handy.

Much improved software

Google’s new Android 4.0 software, or Ice Cream Sandwich, is similar to the prior iteration, but much improved. The user interface is cleaner more consistent than before, but not radically changed in terms of general navigation.

Android widgets are more interactive and Asus even added some of its own to help with battery monitoring, email and task management. Also customized by Asus is the one-touch Settings display, making it easy to enable or turn off radios or use one of three tablet modes: Power Saving, Balanced and Performance mode; each of which throttle the CPU up or down for optimal use.

As mentioned, the CPU is Nvidia’s 1.3 GHz quad-core Tegra 3, which also has a fifth, low-power computing core as well as 12 graphics cores. Overall performance shines with Tegra 3, especially when playing games optimized for the Tegra 3. Here’s a video look at how the Prime handles console quality games along with an Xbox 360 controller, which is supported by the dock’s USB port.

For nearly every task the Prime keeps Android apps moving quickly. But don’t set your expectations too high simply because of the multiple processing cores. The tablet is fast, but not all apps are optimized to tap the full power of a quad-core chip. Given that developers haven’t yet optimized many of their apps for Android tablets in the past year, this could take time. Still, even with today’s apps, the Prime offers the best software experience available today on a Google-powered tablet.

In addition to the core Android 4.0 apps and those in the Android Market, Asus has added some of its own. SuperNote is a simple simple way to capture and ink notes with a finger. MyCloud offers access to cloud storage for media or documents or can be used to remotely connect to a PC or Mac. And Asus partnered with Infraware to include Polaris Office; a productivity suite that really shines with the keyboard dock.

Verdict: A winning combo

If you’re in the market for a large Android tablet, the Transformer Prime is a must-see. At this price, it clearly competes with Apple’s iPad 2, but offers 32 GB of internal storage plus the ability to expand. While the trackpad is lacking on the optional dock, it’s worth the extra cost for both the extra battery life, keyboard input and USB port if you need these features. Essentially, you end up with a netbook-style form factor that runs all day on a charge and can be used as a standalone tablet.

But even on its own, the Transformer Prime is a powerhouse with an experience exceeding its peers thanks to Android 4.0 and the Tegra 3 processor. If I were in the market for a large Android tablet, this device would be atop my list.

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Will devices be the next victim in the net neutrality debate?

Remember that whole network neutrality fight in the U.S. from 2009 and 2010? Well back then the issue was over applications hogging precious bandwidth, and ISPs hoping to charge the likes of Google, Netflix and others for the increasing traffic running across wireline and wireless pipes. Korea Telecom in South Korea has taken an interesting twist on the idea, and decided to block Samsung’s Smart TVs from accessing the Internet, according to this article from the Maeil Business Newspaper, a large S. Korean daily. That’s right, net neutrality isn’t just for applications anymore.

According to the story, KT cut off Samsung’s Smart TVs Friday morning after a dispute over how much data those TVs consume. From the story:

The dispute has been festering for a while as KT insists smart TVs share the costs of quality maintenance of the internet as they tend to hog the networks, while TV makers argue they have no obligation to do so.

The argument is familiar. Remember this quote from Ed Whitacre when he was the CEO of AT&T?

“How do you think they’re going to get to customers? Through a broadband pipe. Cable companies have them. We have them. Now what they would like to do is use my pipes free, but I ain’t going to let them do that because we have spent this capital and we have to have a return on it. So there’s going to have to be some mechanism for these people who use these pipes to pay for the portion they’re using. Why should they be allowed to use my pipes?”

Or what about this quote from John Petter, managing director of BT Retail’s consumer business?

“We can’t give the content providers a completely free ride and continue to give customers the [service] they want at the price they expect.”

But this angle of attacking a device seems new and troublesome. It’s unclear if this is a problem in Korea because Samsung is based there and KT feels like it might have less success going after a content provider like Netflix or Google. However, if other ISPs follow suit, would Roku, Boxee or even Smart TV makers such as LG or Vizio be next in line for some form of blocking?

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Path and Pinterest are probably two of the hottest social services right now, racking up millions of users and generating an ocean of favorable coverage. But both have gotten tripped up by the same thing that has made the social web a minefield for both Facebook and Google: namely, decisions that put their interests ahead of their users, and a lack of disclosure about what was going on behind the scenes or under the hood of their services. Will these missteps spell doom for either company? Probably not. But the backlash is a welcome reminder that for social apps, the trust of users is not something to be toyed with.

Path, a mobile photo-sharing app that expanded to become a full-fledged mobile social app when it relaunched a couple of months ago, was co-founded and is run by Dave Morin, an early Facebook staffer. You might think that the privacy blowups the giant social network has experienced over the past couple of years would make Path pretty sensitive to handling user data properly, but that doesn’t seem to be the case: earlier this week, controversy erupted when it was revealed that Path was uploading all of its users’ contacts to the company’s servers, something that many users have taken as a breach of their privacy.

It may not seem like a big deal, but you should still disclose it

In public comments on the blog post that first brought this to light, Morin apologized and said that Path will fix the problem in an upcoming version, by requiring users to explicitly opt-in — and he also tried to defend the company’s behavior by saying that it is the “industry best practice.” As a commenter on the Hacker News thread about the issue put it, however, a better phrase might be “industry lowest common denominator.”

It’s true that other apps and services also do this, including WhatsApp, Beluga, Hipster and others, and the ability to do so has been a part of Apple’s iOS since 2008. Others have also noted in Path’s defence that Apple allows apps to upload contacts without explicitly asking users for permission — something that it doesn’t do for other data such as a user’s location. And it’s also true that importing a user’s address book makes it a lot easier to scan for friends who are already on Path, and that this can be a benefit for users in the long run.

That said, however, the anger and shock that Path’s move seems to have triggered among many users — some of whom say they have deleted the app and will never return — makes it pretty clear that even if this behavior has benefits for users, the lack of disclosure about what Path was planning to do is a deal-breaker for many.

Pinterest, meanwhile, did something completely different to upset some of its users, but the underlying lesson is the same: the company — which says it has built up a massive user base of more than 10 million in just two months — is a content-sharing service where fans of different products and websites can post (or “pin”) their favorites. Since popular posts can drive a lot of traffic to websites that sell these products, Pinterest has been adding affiliate links that generate revenue for the site when users click on them.

Lesson: Never take your users for granted

As many of the company’s defenders have pointed out, this behavior makes a huge amount of sense for Pinterest, since it is providing a free service and needs to generate revenue somehow. But as with Path’s move — which also makes a lot of sense from a purely utilitarian point of view — Pinterest failed to disclose what it was doing to users, or at least failed to make it obvious. Perhaps the company thought (as Path likely did) that users wouldn’t mind. But it turns out that plenty of them do mind.

Path’s decision seems the more surprising of the two, if only because there are so many examples of similar undisclosed or opt-in-by-default moves that have triggered a huge amount of backlash, and not just for Facebook but for Google as well. The search giant’s engineers also clearly thought that merging people’s email contact lists with their new Buzz service was a great idea — after all, it was the most efficient way to populate a user’s follow list. But many users disagreed, and so did the federal government, and the resulting backlash arguably helped kill Google’s first attempt at a real social service.

The lesson here is that for social apps, the trust of users is paramount, and the best way to maintain that trust is to be as open as possible about everything that is occurring, particularly if it involves a user’s personal data. Whatever you’re doing with it may not seem like a big deal to you, but better to be open about it than have it revealed by someone else — at which point you look sneaky. As Craigslist founder Craig Newmark has put it, “trust is the new black,” and it never goes out of style.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr users Lars Plougmann and Christian Ditatompel

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Wired Top Stories

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Greenpeace gave Google the top overall score (53 out of 100), while Cisco (49 out of 100), Ericsson (48 out of 100) and Fujitsu (48 out of 100) followed shortly behind. On the flipside of the top companies, were the stragglers, which included Oracle (10 out of 100) at the very bottom, and TCS (11 out of 100) and Telefonica (11 out of 100) at the second and third to last spots.

Greenpeace gives the most weight in its scores to companies for using their own technology to reduce the world’s green house emissions. For example, a networking company like Cisco develops smart grid technology which can save energy and reduce emissions. The second largest part of the Greenpeace score is made up by how well the company advocates publicly and politically for reducing emissions. Lastly, Greenpeace gives companies points for monitoring and managing their own company emissions footprint.

Google rose in the rankings from six overall in 2010 to number one this week. Last year Google invested close to a billion dollars into clean energy projects. Cisco lost its top spot in 2010 to Google this year.

IBM, which was 3rd in 2010, dropped to 9th overall this week. Greenpeace says that IBM fell across all three categories and obtained four penalty points in political advocacy for being a member of a trade association that is trying to block the EU’s greenhouse gas emissions reduction goals.

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There are Samsung phones, there are Motorola phones. There are BlackBerry Phones, there are Nokia phones. But you know what really gets us excited? KDDI phones with ten keys and heart of Japanese Gold. It’s the Engadget Mobile Podcast.

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Engadget Mobile Podcast 124 – 02.05.2012 originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 05 Feb 2012 09:10:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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