For many office workers, landlines are a redundant nuisance: one more voicemail account to check, one more thing to ring during a clandestine nap. But most office buildings wreak havoc on cell reception. New intra-office phone antennas, working as a cloud to smartly route traffic, might finally solve the problem, rendering landlines at long last unnecessary.
Glamour shots of this concept cell-phone wristwatch have been bouncing between design blogs, and Samsung announced recently that it would release a real-life analog in Europe by the fourth quarter of this year. But the wrist-mounted communications device has real roots--and I'm not talking about Dick Tracy.
Clever, mischief-minded researchers in Japan have developed an interior paint that blocks wireless signals. Made with aluminum-iron oxide, the paint resonates at the same frequency as many household devices like routers and cell phones, absorbing and deflecting waves of data.
Creative has been teasing a strange "stem cell" chip for a few weeks as part of its Ziilabs offshoot. Now we know that it's a crazy-powerful media-centred system on a chip, designed to be daisy-chained together into a "nano-sized" super computer.
