Samsung Reinvents Windows (Not the OS) With Touchscreen Display 227
An anonymous reader writes "If you want a large, interactive display on your wall, typically you have to make space for it by moving any pictures out of the way, and finding room next to any shelves or lighting you have installed. Samsung's idea is to remove that problem by creating a transparent display that replaces an actual window, or at least sit over the top of one. The display uses ambient light during the day and then can switch over to a more traditional black background as a night time mode. If you want to shut the daylight out it has virtual blinds you can draw to help darken a room. And from the outside you just like you are tapping your window as none of the graphics can be seen. Yes, your neighbors will talk."
Re:Weather app is a rip-off of OS X weather widget (Score:4, Informative)
Contrary to what you may believe, fanboy, Apple are not the epitome of innovation. They'd have gone nowhere if they didn't steal ideas from Xerox (just like Microsoft did). Steve Jobs admitted it himself [youtube.com].
Re:Weather app is a rip-off of OS X weather widget (Score:5, Informative)
The window itself is seriously awesome. But the weather app [imgur.com] is a direct rip-off of OS X's weather widget [imgur.com]. There's seriously no other way to design a weather app but how Apple did in 2005?
Never change, Samsung.
The Apple Weather app looks like the weather presentation has looked when PRINTED in different Swedish NEWSPAPERS from cirka 1980 (ever since Swedish newspapers started to be printed in colour). Similar weather presentations was used by Swedish Television when it was still broadcasted in monochrome; Sweden switched to colour TV broadcasts in 1970. I'm not claiming it is a Swedish invention, this kind of weather display may have been used and invented in some other country/-ies decades before it become common in Swedish media. I'm just pointing out that there is a much larger and diverse world outside the boarders of the country you live in.
Just because some "innovation" is brought to the publics attention by some company in USA, that doesn't mean that company invited it. Most (all?) US companies are copycats by nature (and Apple in particular is a pure copyist), usually decades behind how stuff is done in other countries (and usually the US consumer has less to choose from when it comes to different gadgets doing the same thing, differently, US companies like to standardise on one way for a consumer product to work, to avoid that their consumer will get confused (like early automobiles steered by reins), while most companies operatinh outside USA take for granted that their consumers are intelligent enough to understand that different products might achieve the same end result, even if they need to be handled/interpreted differently). Unlike companies in other countries, US companies like to imply that they invented the things they market, even when they didn't. Because the US population like to live in isolation from the (scary/insignificant/...) world outside USA (when was the last time you visited a foreign website? one that was not in English?), US companies can get away with this kind of shenanigans without getting caught.
Re:Wow! (Score:4, Informative)
OMG I had to scroll down 200 "the widget is copied from apple" comments to find a poster actually focusing on the subject! Event if it is an ill fated attempt at being funny.
Anyway. what I can't get my head around is that:
If it's working as they say why are they only showing one side of the screen and at that have the screen pointed into a light box with a printed 3D environment wallpaper.
Re:Vertical touch interface ??? (Score:5, Informative)
Sure, great ideas. My point is not that this is unusable, but that it's gonna be way too expensive for 99.9% of consumers to consider buying one. Especially since the use cases you mention are "this would be cool, kinda".
Now, to get a very optimistic (as in, low price) estimate of what this will cost: We add up 1 LCD screen of about 40 inches, 16 replacement Ipad digitizers from ebay, and an Atom-powered net-top to run the software and control everything. You end up with $500 for the screen + $800 for the digitizers + $200 for the net-top, or a total cost of $1500.
Note that this very optimistic estimate, assuming that everything scales linearly and that they are able to sell millions of these and get the same economics of scale as with LCD TVs, gives us an unbelievably expensive way to quickly check your email and watch TV while cooking. Particularly when you take into account that 99.9% of all consumers already own several devices that can do exactly these things. The question becomes "would you rather buy this, or would you buy three Ipads instead"? That is why this technology, while cool, will suffer the same fate as the Microsoft Surface.
Enlightenment WM (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Weather app is a rip-off of OS X weather widget (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Weather app is a rip-off of OS X weather widget (Score:5, Informative)