Technology in your hands.

AMD showed off a new platform at CES called Yukon that featured a new single-core Athlon Neo processor. The HP machine featuring the platform was very thin (think MacBook Air) and looked fantastic. HP is set to begin shipping the notebook in 2009.

EWeek reports that AMD will also be fielding a dual-core version of its Neo processor that will be part of the Congo platform. Congo and the dual-core Neo are reportedly set to launch later in 2009. Congo will be a platform for new types of ultraportable laptops. AMD was very clear in meetings at CES that the Neo was not for the netbook market…

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A British scientist is calling for immediate introduction of robot ethics guidelines amid surging use of the machines and concern about their lack of human responsibility while caring for children or the elderly.

In an article published Thursday in the US journal Science, Noel Sharkey, a professor of artificial intelligence and robotics at the University of Sheffield, argues that the steady increase in the use of robots in day-to-day life poses unanticipated risks and ethical problems.

Outside of military applications, Sharkey worries how robots – and particularly the people who control them – will be held accountable when the machines work with “the vulnerable,” namely children and the elderly, stressing that there are already robotic machines in wide use such as the Japanese meal assistance robot “My Spoon.”…

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It is often assumed that touch-screen device can be made smaller, because they do away with the need for buttons. But paradoxically, they are often larger than the push button gadgets they replace, according to Patrick Baudisch at the Hasso Plattner Institute in Potsdam, Germany, and Microsoft Research in Redmond, Washington.

It’s the “fat finger” problem that is to blame. It is hard to hit small touch targets on a screen because your finger hides what you are aiming for.

Last year, Baudisch and Daniel Wigdor of Mitsubishi Electric Research Labs (MERL) in Cambridge, Massachusetts, led a team that developed a fix to that. Their “transparent” LucidTouch device let users interact with a screen from the reverse sideMovie Camera.

A new, smaller prototype created by Baudisch and his student Gerry Chu at the University of Toronto takes the idea further. Called NanoTouch, it has a 6-centimetre (2.4 inch) screen and a touch pad of the same size on the back . It can detect the touch or press of a finger, allowing the user to move a tiny cursor around and click and drag with it…

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Advanced Micro Devices Inc. will today release its next-generation Opteron quad-core chip, code-named Shanghai, ahead of schedule as it moves to shift attention from its ill-fated Barcelona chip to this smaller and faster device.

The new 45nm Opteron chip’s release is getting a quick endorsement from IBM, which said today that it is producing four servers with AMD’s chip for use in high-performance applications, virtualization and collaboration environments, and big databases…

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Nintendo, riding high on the success of the Wii, said on Thursday that it will launch a new version of its popular DS handheld console next month with a built-in camera and enhanced audio capabilities.

The dual-screen DSi will go on sale in Japan from November 1 with a price tag of 18,900 yen ($US178), the Japanese video game giant said. It will be launched in overseas markets some time next year…

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The first phone that harnesses Google Inc.’s ambition to make the Internet easy to use on the go was revealed Tuesday, and it looks a lot like an iPhone.

T-Mobile USA showed off the G1, a phone that, like Apple Inc.’s iPhone, has a large touch screen. But it also packs a trackball, a slide-out keyboard and easy access to Google’s e-mail and mapping programs.

T-Mobile said it will begin selling the G1 for $179 with a two-year contract. The device hits U.S. stores Oct. 22 and heads to Britain in November and other European countries early next year.

The phone will be sold in T-Mobile stores only in the U.S. cities where the company has rolled out its faster, third-generation wireless data network. By launch, that will be 21 cities, including New York, Los Angeles, Houston and Miami…

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With customized physics effects, developers can design trees that bend in the wind, water that ebbs and flows naturally, and include objects in the environment that dramatically impact the gaming experience. To deliver this level of interactivity, developers are rapidly taking advantage of NVIDIA® PhysX™ technology, interactive entertainment’s most pervasive physics engine, already used in more than 140 shipping titles for Sony Playstation 3, Microsoft Xbox 360, and Nintendo Wii. With today’s release of the GeForce Power Pack, a compilation of games, demos, and mod packs for the PC platform that is available for free at www.nvidia.com/theforcewithin, NVIDIA is now bringing this new depth of gameplay to PC gamers everywhere…

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AMD on Tuesday announced dual-GPU versions of the HD Radeon 4850 and 4870, pushing graphics performance – and prices – into the upper high end of the market.

The ATI Radeon HD 4850 X2 is currently shipping for $399, while the 4870 X2 is available for a whopping $599, more than the price of some low-end PCs.

But according to Neal Robison, director of global ISV relations for AMD, both chips will capture the “super high end” of the market, where price is much less important than performance. AMD claims the HD 4870 X2 is roughly 80 percent of the performance of the single HD 4870, allowing for some overhead lost in duplicating the effort of a single chip.

For now, AMD claims the HD 4870 X2 is the fastest graphics card in the world, recording a score of 17743 in 3DMark06, the highest ever…

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It’s nearly 40 years old but one leading research company says the days of the computer mouse are numbered. A Gartner analyst predicts the demise of the computer mouse in the next three to five years.

Taking over will be so called gestural computer mechanisms like touch screens and facial recognition devices.

“The mouse works fine in the desktop environment but for home entertainment or working on a notebook it’s over,” declared analyst Steve Prentice. He told BBC News that his prediction is driven by the efforts of consumer electronics firm which are making products with new interactive interfaces inspired by the world of gaming…

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