Sprint’s Motorola Photon Q LTE World Phone is coming ‘very soon’
During Sprint’s earnings call, CEO Dan Hesse revealed that Motorola’s Photon Q, the company’s latest LTE World Phone is coming “very soon.” The Photon Q is believed to be the Android 4.0-running QWERTY-slider you can see in the image above, but now that the company’s head has let the cat out of the bag, we expect more details to roll around very shortly.
Filed under: Cellphones
Sprint’s Motorola Photon Q LTE World Phone is coming ‘very soon’ originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 26 Jul 2012 08:21:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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This is the Modem World: So what’s with the tech backlash thing?
Each week Joshua Fruhlinger contributes This is the Modem World, a column dedicated to exploring the culture of consumer technology.
Just over a month ago, Apple launched its svelte new MacBook Pro with Retina display. Powerful and beautiful, we all fell in love with the new device, jammed up Apple’s ordering process, and prepared to queue up for a hot new Mac all over again.
Then we woke a day later to a slew of realizations: the unit is hard to upgrade, software isn’t optimized for the new display, and repairs will be expensive, if not impossible. Then we heard that some Retina screens were having color issues. So we rioted. We hated it for being limited, for not being the sexy woman she promised she was the night before.
It happens every time: Some great new thing is announced, we all gush with excitement and throw our wallets at our monitors. Then we wake up the next morning hung over and hating the very product we lusted after only 24 hours earlier.
“I took THAT home last night?”
Remember how excited we were over Facebook finally going public? Now we ridicule the social network and some pundits are even glad its stock is eroding. We find joy in ridiculing the giant social network for being a wasteland of baby pictures and farming games.
“That’ll teach Zuckerberg,” we say.
Teach him what?
Or how about how we are all slowly dismembering Microsoft after imbibing their products like holy tech mana for years? It’s now fashionable to mock their products. Even Ashton Kutcher got laughs when he bashed the Zune in his very first appearance on “Two and a Half Men” (probably his one funny line so far, unfortunately).
And then there was the Nintendo Wii. Oh, the Wii. They told us we’d never play games the same way again. We thought they were crazy, but we were ready to give it a try, because we loved Nintendo. Then we all went nuts for Wii Sports and no one could find the console on store shelves for over a year. Almost as quickly as we drank the Wii Kool Aid, though, we shared videos of TVs being shattered by flying Wiimotes, doctors diagnosed us all with Wii-itis and we all begged Nintendo to drop the whole thing and just give us Zelda in HD with a Nintendo 64 controller.
And when that comes, will we turn on it?
Perhaps this is just the way we operate: We lump praise, go nuts and then correct ourselves when we realize we were being silly all along. This is human nature. We love, take things for granted, lose and regret. Then, we get all nostalgic.
But when we act this way about consumer electronics, it sends product developers and marketers into tizzies. They’re not sure what we like at the end of the day, and they end up putting things out that miss the mark, which, of course, we love, because we find more pleasure in mocking a product than showering it with praise.
We’re silly.
Joshua Fruhlinger is the former Editorial Director for Engadget and current contributor to both Engadget and the Wall Street Journal. You can find him on Twitter at @fruhlinger.
This is the Modem World: So what’s with the tech backlash thing? originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 25 Jul 2012 18:00:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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It’s a Man’s World
Sam’s Natural, an Etsy Store specializing in men’s hygiene products, launched these 2012 Happy Father’s Day Kits.
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Microsoft details Windows 8′s pre-boot world, helps you skip the F8 F8 F8 routine
Microsoft has been going into very exacting detail as to how Windows 8 works, but one area it hasn’t explored much is what happens before you even see the Start screen. As user experience manager Chris Clark notes, the days of mashing F8 repeatedly to reach a pre-boot configuration are (mostly) over: you can invoke it either through an “advanced startup” in settings, through Start menu shortcuts or, if your PC is truly sick, let it show automatically. At least on systems blessed with UEFI instead of an aging BIOS, you’ll get a lot more to tinker with as well, including going straight to the command prompt, recovering from a system image or booting from external storage. The emphasis on choosing your environment before you hit the power button is virtually necessary. A Windows 8 PC with a solid-state drive leaves just a 200-millisecond slice of time for any user input, and Microsoft would rather not have users caught in an infinite loop of restarting their systems as they unsuccessfully try to boot from USB drives. You’ll likely discover the pre-boot space first-hand when the OS ships later this year, but for now you can check the source for more.
Microsoft details Windows 8′s pre-boot world, helps you skip the F8 F8 F8 routine originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 22 May 2012 23:09:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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First solar-powered boat to circle the world pulls into home port, contemplates next move
It’s been two years since we last heard of the 98-foot-long solar-powered boat, which at the time was gearing up for its big journey around the world. Well, some 19 months and 37,286 miles after setting sail from Monaco, the MS Turanor PlanetSolar has finally made it home. The PlanetSolar broke four Guinness world records along the way, including the all-important “first circumnavigation by solar-powered boat,” and it made stops on six continents to promote solar energy. Oh, and the team fended off Somalian pirates in the process, too. Now that it has a moment to catch its breath and soak up some rays at leisure, the MS Turanor could become any number of things — from the world’s largest solar battery to a “green luxury yacht.” The latter option would certainly befit its chichi home port.
First solar-powered boat to circle the world pulls into home port, contemplates next move originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 04 May 2012 20:54:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Leave a commentOne World Trade Center’s Tip
Set to open in 2013, One World Trade Center (also known as 1WTC and previously Freedom Tower) is the flagship building of the thoroughly chronicled, scrutinized, and troubled development of the new World Trade Center complex, that includes four other skyscrapers, the National September 11 Memorial & Museum, 550,000 square feet of retail space, and a Performing Arts Center. One World Trade Center is the design of David M. Childs of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, rising a symbolic 1,776 — the year of the United States independence — feet and boasting 2.6 million square feet of space to be filled by the likes of Condé Nast, one of the first big name tenants to sign a major lease. One World Trade Center is developed by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey and developer The Durst Organization. Yesterday, the logo for the building was introduced, designed by London-based Wordsearch, a design firm specializing in branding and communications for real estate and architecture across the world.
One World Trade Center height among other New York skyscrapers. Diagram from Skyscraper Page.
The mark suggests the summit and spire reaching into the sky above Lower Manhattan. By focusing on the very top of the building we reach out to the commonest experience of the building, as it will be seen from all around the city. As the tallest building in the Western hemisphere the building’s ultimate height of 1,776 ft is a source of pride and inspiration, and is celebrated in the mark.
So, the logo achieves a number of goals. It is sufficiently visionary and ambitious to acknowledge the broader context and wider significance of this building, while remaining appropriately bold, confi dent and business-like to reflect One World Trade Center’s true, central purpose as the world’s latest, greatest piece of commercial real estate.
— Provided Press Materials
Tagline.
I don’t envy the job of Wordsearch, mostly because designing logos for landmark buildings invariably leads to some kind of graphic abstraction of the whole building or a detail of it and they rarely look as good on paper as they sound when pitching it or explaining it. This is no different. The idea is great and heroic: showcasing the pinnacle of the tallest building in the Western Hemisphere! And while the pinnacle looks to be stunning in the renderings amidst the skyline of New York and against lusciously photographed skies the effect is completely lost when placed inside a circle. The sharpness of the spire itself is lost when translated to a logo as it needs to be bulked up to not get lost at small sizes and avoid getting it filled in with the color and gradients around it. The choice of Gotham is painfully obvious and in choosing a typeface that is meant to evoke the “street-level” business aura of a bygone New York the effect cheapens what is otherwise an expensive and sophisticated address to lease office space from. In less words, I think this logo misses the mark, I feel there is a big disconnect between the building itself and the tenants it hopes to attract.
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It’s a Gradient-Covered World After All
Founded in 1953, Rede Record is, in terms of reach and coverage, the second largest television network in Brazil with varied programming that covers everything from soaps to sitcoms to reality TV to variety shows to news and this year they are the official network for the 2012 Summer Olympic Games. This past February, they introduced an evolution to their logo, which has featured a globe surrounded by metal-like plates since 1994.
[The ADC Young Guns X imposing "X" will be on the site for 24 hours only. We are happy to be their media partners.]
Logo launch segment during Domingo Espetacular. Don’t miss the 3:09 mark when the host tries to point to the new bug logo on the screen.
Logo animation and sound mnemonic.
If you have been feeling minimalist this week on Brand New with all the flat, black-and-white identities reviewed this should get your gradient neurons firing. When you look at the logo history at the top it’s easy to see how they ended up where they are. What started in 1990 as a harmless, if downright ugly, globe logo surrounded by a tsunami icon has, in 20 years, “evolved” into a highly polished globe with super detailed renderings at times abstract and at others realistic — either way, never quite sophisticated. This latest rendition is probably the best one, relatively speaking. It’s simpler, with nicer rendering details, like the reflection of the color plates in the silver globe. The typography is also an improvement, away from the futuristic versions it had used previously into a 1970s Avenir-esque choice deep-fried in a metal gradient. What’s kind of scary is that this visual language is the norm in major Brazilian TV networks, including Rede Globo, reviewed here in 2008. So in context — I repeat, in context — it succeeds. The news logo also got a makeover, which looks like an evil, robotic, cyclops overlord.
Record News logo animation and sound mnemonic.
Thanks to Thiago Felizzola for the tip.
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Join us for Huawei’s Mobile World Congress 2012 liveblog at 9:30am EST
Join us for Huawei’s Mobile World Congress 2012 liveblog at 9:30am EST originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 26 Feb 2012 07:01:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Dulux Colors the World
Dulux, owned by Dutch multinational conglomerate AkzoNobel is an international brand of paint with a history dating back to 1931 which, during its lifetime, has been sold by Dupont and former British chemical company ICI. Initially aimed at wholesalers and decorators the brand moved into the retail market during the 1950s and delivered a significant (and memorable) advertising impact with the introduction of the “Dulux dog” as part of a 1960s advertising campaign which continues to be used today. Following a decision to resolve the international variations of Dulux into one premium paint brand, October 2010 saw the initial launch of a new global visual identity system created by London-based Design Bridge across Canada, China, India, South East Asia, the Pacific and the Netherlands with other regions to follow.
[…] This harmonising identity would need to work across 14 existing brand names in 50 local markets, in every format and application, from simple business cards to point of sale, livery and major advertising campaigns.
International creative collaboration between our studios produced a new identity symbolised by the iconic, energising Flourish logo and motivational strapline: “Let’s Colour”. This universally understood shorthand liberates creativity by opening consumers’ eyes to the transformative power of colour.
— Design Bridge Case Study
The previous logo was a straightforward but competent typographical construction with a distinctive “U” character that neatly paired with the “l” and “x”. The use of bold italics delivered a fairly conventional sense of motion but appropriately resolved the product’s swift application and durability. Reliable but certainly not inspiring. In contrast Dulux’s new global identity is bursting with bright colours and rhythm that feels positive, creative and inclusive. It understands today’s home decor/DIY market as one of frequent change and self-expression and as such delivers a positive “can do” message through the dynamic posture of a hero-like character and billowing flag aesthetic that implores consumers to go forth and colour.
The wordmark, developed by freelance designer Rob Clark (and created as a complete and proprietary typeface), resolves the same visual messages of the previous identity but in a far more understanding and accessible manner through its smooth curves and windswept terminals. The lock-up has a smart balance of positive and negative space, the “hero” is well placed and carries the direction of the “x” well and together with the wind swept banner deliver a strong forward momentum.
I’m really impressed by the bold duality of this identity in its smart contrast of geometric, organic, and anthropomorphic visual styles. For me it neatly balances the world of functionality with that of the cosmetic with a simple modular build that neatly resolves all the international variations. I see the identity as a smart representation of personal expression, practicality, and global inclusivity (and perhaps diversity) that ties in neatly with the “Let’s Colour” campaign.
4-minute summary of the “Let’s Colour” initiative.
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