prototype

Microsoft’s Windows Phone Developer Tools package goes to beta

Early versions of the tools Windows Phone 7 developers will use to craft their wares have been floating around since Microsoft’s MIX event in March, but it looks like things have finally gotten robust and feature-complete enough this week to bless the kit with a beta label. In fact, Microsoft is coming out and saying that this release “represents the near final version,” which we take to mean you can develop with some confidence that your world won’t be turned upside down when the time comes to prep your apps for shipping devices and firmwares.


NVIDIA GeForce GTX 460 becomes everyone’s favorite midrange graphics card

It’s rare to come across a universally lauded product nowadays, but NVIDIA’s fresh new GTX 460 is just that sort of exceptional creation.


Kompott ‘robotic agent’ helps the elderly stay connected, enjoys a nap

Full-fledged humanoid robots helping the elderly are certainly well and good, but what about somebody that just needs a little help staying in touch with their family?


Marines field autonomous support vehicles based on winning robot design (video)

Since their third-place finish in the 2007 DARPA Urban Challenge , TORC Technology’s had quite a climb — the company founded by Virginia Tech graduates has since provided IED-scouting Humvee kits to the US Military, and a vehicle for the blind uses the drive-by-wire platform that they designed. Now, the Marines are testing a TORC kit called the Ground Unmanned Support Surrogate (GUSS), which autonomously navigate off-road terrain.


Tesla planting electric engines into two Toyota prototype bodies

Word on the street had it that Tesla’s $50 million deal with Toyota wasn’t formal back in late May, but evidently things have made positive progress since. According to a new (though admittedly brief) report over at CNN , Toyota is currently working with the electric automaker on a pair of prototype vehicles


Google’s Larry Page: Steve Jobs is ‘rewriting history’ by saying Android came after the iPhone

Steve Jobs might have thought he was lightly playing down reports that the Apple / Google rivalry had dramatically changed when he said ” they decided to compete with us — we didn’t go into the search business” at D8 , but it appears that his phrasing didn’t sit so well with Larry Page, who told Reuters yesterday that Jobs was doing a “little bit of rewriting history,” and that the “characterization of us entering [the phone market] after is not really reasonable.” Page, who was being interviewed alongside Eric Schmidt, also said that Google had been working on Android for “a very long time” and that the goal was always to develop phones with solid browsers to fill a market void. That’s true, of course — Google purchased Andy Rubin’s Android, Inc