Technical Devices

Pentax pushed rugged photography into new terrains this week, launching a pair of 16Mp compact cameras that promise to perform under the most demanding of outdoor conditions.

The Pentax Optio WG-2 and WG-2 GPS may look like Optimus Prime’s caboose, but they’re built to pull through even the harshest of Decepticon onslaughts.

Along with surviving dives of up to 12 metres, the WG-2s can be dropped from 1.5m, frozen to temperatures as low as -10 degrees C and crushed with a force of up to 100kg.

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The Patras program, used by the German Federal Police for surveillance and tracking of suspects and their vehicles via GPS, has recently been suspended for a while and its servers taken offline due to a breach that was made possible by a most bizarre chain of events.

According to The Local, it all started with a senior official of the Federal Police in Frankfurt am Main wishing to find out what his daughter was doing online. In order to do that, he installed a Trojan on her computer.

But the Trojan was discovered by a hacker friend of hers, and in order to exact revenge on the spying father, he managed to break into his home computer. Full Article…

Has the bottom fallen out of the 3D smartphone boom? Supermarket Asda certainly thinks so as it is offering one of last year’s superphones, the HTC Evo 3D, for under 250.

“It’s a blockbuster phone at an amazingly low price,” said James McMurrough, Asda’s mobile phone expert. “We’re constantly amazed at the features that are being built into the latest phones – and it’s incredible to think that one of the latest Hollywood techniques is now available at such a low price.”

We think that’s a nice way of saying: “We don’t think anyone really cares if their smartphone has 3D capabilities so we’re going to have to smash the price if we’re to shift all the units we’ve got out the back”. Althoug

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The year may be winding down, but the Mark Hurd/Jodie Fisher train keeps chugging along.  Hurd has just asked to become a party in a lawsuit by a Delaware shareholder, Ernesto Espinoza, who has sued HP to inspect its books.  The letter, which Hurd thinks should be confidential, was sent to him on behalf of Fisher by her lawyer, Gloria Allred, and Fisher later claimed it contained “many inaccuracies.”  If the letter becomes public, it means we might finally get a glimpse of what the actual allegations from Fisher were, but something tells us there’s a few lengthy rounds of litigation still to go before we ought to get our hopes up.

Ultrabooks are set to make a big splash in 2012, the thin but powerful form factor clearly a huge advantage for those who need to remain portable. The one snag is the expense, however it has been suggested that AMD is looking to produce a powerful and light cheaper alternative that will launch this year in direct competition to Intel’s Ultrabook.

According to a Digitimes report, the new super-light laptop from AMD will carry its new Trinity APU, as opposed to Ultrabooks which carry Intel’s hardware.

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