Interestingly, the “take a seat” chair is an amazing robotic chair that trails you around. All you need to have is a card embedded with an RFID chip, which allows the chair to find and follow the target. Following by touching your RFID card on the design spot of the chair and magic pops out, the chair will follow you to wherever you go. This brilliant concept is designed by Dutch designer Jelte van Geest for the Openbare Bibliotheek Endhoven Library Design project. He says. “Robots are often seen as mean machines. However, they do have a more friendly side, which should have a more prominent place in our society.” Bravo. The video speaks for this. Enjoy!

[via Technabob]

Japanese Sumitomo Electric has developed the world’s first superconducting engine inside a Toyota Crown Comfort, which boosts the car performance through the use of liquid nitrogen-cooled super-conduction. With under 200° C, the superconducting engine is claimed to operate more efficient and produce greater torque that could make this prototype travels 10% further than regular electric vehicles. Apparently, this new technology is replacing the old copper wires modus with the superconducting wires and it could be a real selling point for an all-electric vehicle in future though it costs a little more.

[via The Pink Tentacle]

Pal Technology, an Abu Dhabi-based company recently unveiled the REEM-B, a humanoid service robot in Abu Dhahi. The creation of this humanoid robot is mainly to assist humans in the future with sophisticated tasks but not replace them especially elderly and disabled. The 132lbs weight and 1.47m tall can learn and then recognise faces, having a grasping ability that uses infrared and touch sensors. Also, it can operate up to 2 hours on a single full battery charge. Sadly, this will be the last prototype to be formed, as the company planning commercial venture for humanoid legged robots in the near future. I think the ASIMO is still the coolest. Check out the video to see the REEM-B in action.

[via Engadget]

[via WIRED]

Apple’s MacBook Air is no longer the thinnest lappie now but its edge is still the best for cake cutting. HP has unveiled its ultra-thin and mighty Voodoo Envy 133 to rival the MacBook Air. The Voodoo Envy 133 is 0.7-inch thick and less than 3.4-pound weight, featuring a custom Intel Core 2 Duo 1.8/1.6GHz with 4MB L2 Cache and 800FSB processor, Intel integrated X3100 graphics chip, and you neither can enjoy a pop of 80 GB 4200 RPM hard drive or a 64 GB solid-state disk inside the glossy carbon-fiber chassis. While outta chassis, you enjoy a 13.3-inch LED Backlit display with 1280 by 800 pixels resolution, LED backlit Keyboard, an HDMI port, two USB ports and sorry no optical drive included like the Air. Notably it packs an “instant-on” Linux variant and a power brick that could double as a Wi-Fi router. No word on pricing right now.

Voodoo
Voodoo Video

Yup. It’s here! Steve unveiled the long-waited promising iPhone 3G at the WWCC ‘08 today. It has thinner edges, slightly lighter weight, full plastic back cover and of course the iPhone 2.0 firmware. For sure, the 3G is the foreground of this little and Apple claimed the its 3G trounces the N95 and Treo 750 with 36% faster pageloads. A little disappointed, no front-cam on the phone which makes the 3G a little tough. Other that this, everything looks good with a built-in A-GPS (supplements regular satellite GPS data with info from cellular towers for faster location), Wi-Fi (802.11b/g, sorry no n this time), UMTS / HSDPA (850, 1900, 2100MHz), GSM / EDGE (850, 900, 1800, 1900MHz), Bluetooth 2.0, support for enterprise features like Microsoft Exchange, and the new App Store. It’s battery can bear for 300 hours of standby, 8-10 hours of 2G talk, 5 hours of 3G talk, 7 hours of video and 24 hours of audio, which not too bad. Two flavors, 8GB ($199) and 16GB ($299) hitting the shelves of 22 countries on July 11th but don’t be too happy. Apple said iPhone 3G purchase and activation will be in-store only. Sad huh?

The 22 happy countries with iPhone 3G go live on July 11th:
Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, UK and the US

iPhone 3G Product page

HTC Touch Pro was officially unveiled on June 4th. This sexy glossy black Touch Pro comes with a five-row QWERTY slider for quick and easy text messaging and it features a 2.8-inch touchscreen display, Windows Mobile 6.1 with HTC’s TouchFLO 3D interface, a 3.2 megapixel auto-focus camera with flash light, 512MB of ROM while 288MB of RAM, WiFi, HSPA with a solid 7.2Mbps on the downstream, and Bluetooth as well as Integrated GPS can be used with maps software. HTC is shipping this promising new gadget to Europe sometime in late summer for the 900/2100MHz 3G, quadband GSM and EDGE version while North and Latin American will be later this year. No words on price but it won’t be cheap!

Product page

A new transportation bill signed by President Bush to allocate $45 million for initialing the U.S.’s first maglev train. This train is projected to fetch people from Disneyland in Anaheim to Las Vegas in under two hours at up to 300 mph speed. As we know the Maglev train is expensive, The 5.5 miles long Japan’s Linimo maglev train asked for $380 million while the China’s Shanghai Maglev Train cost $1.3 billion for 19 miles, and so the $45 million is just enough to get things rolling at the beginning. No words on actual construction date yet but we shall see things moving on soon.

[via Slashdot]

AMD rolled out a series of its new technology at the Computex. First, the Puma platform is officially introduced along with the AMD Turion X2 Ultra Dual-Core processors as the “Puma” stickers anywhere at Computex. Second, AMD presented their ATI Mobility Radeon HD 3800, which is believed to be top of the line graphic chipset for the lappies. Interestingly, this new chipset enables the CrossFireX technology for the first time in the lappies to cheer the gamers up. Following by the PowerXpress technology, which allows users to double or triple the performance of the integrated graphics processor when connected to wall socket or extend the battery life by over an hour while on the go. Essentially, it’s a Hybrid graphic technology for laptops. We shall be expecting AMD’s top tier partners like Dell, HP, Asus, Acer and others shipping out their lappies with these new technology shortly.

Press release

Acer is joining the Atom-party to share the cake and their Aspire One is finally official at the Computex. Just like others, it’s Atom-based processor and it packs a 8.9-inch 1024 x 600 LED-backlit display, 512MB DDR2 SDRAM (expandable up to 1GB), 1.3MP built-in camera, SDHC and multi-format media slot, 802.11b/g WiFi and 3 USB port. You can have the choices of 80GB hard drive with XP flavor or 8GB solid-state drive with Ubuntu. Also, choices of 3-cell or 6-cell batteries. They are available overseas this month and supposedly hitting the US market later this year for around $400 for the Linux version and $600 for the Windows version.

Product page