The week’s just begun, the sun is out, and it’s time for a sandwich. But before you break out the Hovis, make sure you chow down on the tastiest tech morsels, with Russell Brand promoting HP’s Touchpad, Apple being hacked, BBC banning Twitter, and PS4 news.
July, 2011
Russell Brand and HP? Considering it’s targeting business customers for its Touchpad, you might think Brand is a pretty odd choice of frontman for its adverts. And you’d be right.
But it’s far from the strangest pairing, as our rundown of the 10 oddest tech adverts ever shows. Click through to see what brings together Mr. T, John Cleese, Andy Warhol, Chuck Norris, Quentin Tarantino and Nicolas Cage.
While Sony has long said that the PS3 will have a 10-year lifespan – which would take us through to 2016 – chatter around the arrival of the PS4 has been picking up recently. Back in May, Sony CFO, Masaru Kato, confirmed that a big chunk of the company’s R&D budget is focused on building the next console.
Now DigiTimes has gone all out with claims that the PS4 will hit production at the end of 2011 in time for a 2012 launch. That would set Sony up for a head-to-head battle with the Nintendo Wii U. And that’s before we even consider the claim that it’ll come with motion control built in…
Sure we’ve shown you plenty of Kinect hacks in the past but this lets you create your very own version of that nifty blue hologram Princess Leia used to cry: “Help me Obi Wan!” Yes, we know that wasn’t actually real but this is thanks to a clever combination of Kinect, an iPad and an augmented reality SDK.
The iPhone app creators at LAAN Labs (we reviewed their Tap DJ app way back when) also turn their hand to hacking hardware and put together this Kinect iPad hack. They used the String SDK to turn 3D data grabbed by Kinect into a AR image on the iPad. You can see it in action after the jump…
The BBC is considering a Twitter ban to prevent actors, writers and crew from spoiling details of new shows. It follows a series of careless tweets that revealed secrets before the BBC press machine was ready to crank into action.
The campaign, allegedly being pushed by senior BBC executives, follows a rash of Twitter revelations from stars including Thick Of It creator Armando Iannucci and self-proclaimed iPod inspiration Sophie Ellis Bextor…
The Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 is due on these shores this time next month and it looks like it’ll arrive with a new update in tow. Samsung has announced that a new Android Honeycomb version of its Touchwiz skin is in the works.
That’s likely to irk Android tablet fans hoping to get their hands on the Galaxy Tab 10.1 with the unsullied version of Android Honeycomb onboard. Hopefully some of the new features detailed after the break will ease their pain…
Not sure about the HP TouchPad? Well, HP thinks the man to persuade you is Russell Brand. It’s wrangled the big-haired comic into filming a series of clips to promote the tablet and they’re fairly bizarre.
Perched precariously on a spectacularly ugly sofa, Brand dubs the HP TouchPad his “little robot butler” and compares the flicks and swipes of multitasking to dealing with boogers. Frankly, it’s quite difficult to get your head around the comedian seriously saying terms like “HTML5″ in his usual whimsically faux-Victorian manner.
Click through to watch the clips for yourself. Has HP got it right with Russell or are we right in thinking these ads are just too odd?
AnonymousIRC, a twitter account used by former members of Lulzsec (the group behind the PlayStation Network hack) and Scientology-baiting folk from Anonymous, claims an Apple server has been compromised as part of the ongoing AntiSec hacking campaign.
Don’t start staring fearfully at your Macbook or clasping your iPhone to your bosom just yet. It seems the security breach, if it’s legit, is limited to a server used to conduct a survey by Apple’s Business Intelligence group. Still, the group says Apple could be a full on target of its attentions in the future…