Remember the Nokia 808 PureView? Announced at MWC, the Symbian device has a 41MP camera that is more than a marketing gimmick. Now, with its launch coming up in the next couple of months, Nokia has released a promotional video on YouTube – shot entirely on the phone itself. We’ve already seen how phenomenal the shots can be, and we can’t wait to go hands-on. Watch the video below, and marvel at the camera over on the galleries at My Nokia Blog.
Have you ever dreamt of having x-ray vision? If so, new research from the University of Texas that could lead to x-ray cameras built into smartphones should be right up your street. The range of vision would be restricted to 4 inches for privacy reasons, and such cameras are years away from commercial availability, but these developments are exciting nevertheless.
While the smartphone of today has become a pretty amazing sensor for discovering the real world, the smartphone of tomorrow may just give you the ability to have X-ray vision. That’s the potential implication of a breakthrough at the University of Texas, Dallas, where researchers say they have taken a big step closer to enabling a phone to see a short distance through wood, walls, plastics and other objects.
It comes down to the ability to bridge what’s called the terahertz gap in the infrared band. The terahertz band is largely unused because the band is too high for electronics and too low for light-based systems. But an engineering team at the University of Texas at Dallas has found a way to create images with signals in the terahertz band without having to use multiple lenses inside a device. Basically, they’re able to focus light without using a lot of big lenses and…
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In a post on Facebook, CEO Mark Zuckerberg confirmed that his company has purchased Instagram for $1 billion. Read his post below.
I’m excited to share the news that we’ve agreed to acquire Instagram and that their talented team will be joining Facebook.
For years, we’ve focused on building the best experience for sharing photos with your friends and family. Now, we’ll be able to work even more closely with the Instagram team to also offer the best experiences for sharing beautiful mobile photos with people based on your interests.
We believe these are different experiences that complement each other. But in order to do this well, we need to be mindful about keeping and building on Instagram’s strengths and features rather than just trying to integrate everything into Facebook.
That’s why we’re committed to building and growing Instagram independently. Millions of people around the world love the Instagram app and the brand associated with it, and our goal is to help spread this app and brand to even more people.
We think the fact that Instagram is connected to other services beyond Facebook is an important part of the experience. We plan on keeping features like the ability to post to other social networks, the ability to not share your Instagrams on Facebook if you want, and the ability to have followers and follow people separately from your friends on Facebook.
These and many other features are important parts of the Instagram experience and we understand that. We will try to learn from Instagram’s experience to build similar features into our other products. At the same time, we will try to help Instagram continue to grow by using Facebook’s strong engineering team and infrastructure.
This is an important milestone for Facebook because it’s the first time we’ve ever acquired a product and company with so many users. We don’t plan on doing many more of these, if any at all. But providing the best photo sharing experience is one reason why so many people love Facebook and we knew it would be worth bringing these two companies together.
We’re looking forward to working with the Instagram team and to all of the great new experiences we’re going to be able to build together.
Instagram, the popular photo-sharing app cum social network, finally launched on Android today. The app, which lets users apply filters to their pictures and share them across a variety of social networks, including within its own community, has proved wildly popular since its launch on iOS, with over 30 million registered users (from myself to Justin Bieber) and Apple naming it as the best iPhone app of 2011. If you have a phone running Android 2.2 or later and you want to see what all the fuss is about, head over to Google Play for the free download (unless you have the new HTC One X), but don’t blame me if you become addicted. I hear it can have that effect on people.
Instagram, Android & iOS, Free
Download from the App Store or Google Play or visit the website
TechCrunch explains a bit about the Nokia 808 PureView and why its insane megapixel count is more than a gimmick.
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