Those of you stateside Windows Phone hopefuls just dying to get on the Lumia bandwagon will have a new handset to jump on beginning early next month. AT&T has confirmed to CNET that the Lumia 900 will be hitting U.S. retailers on April 8th, for $99.99 on a two-year contract -- an aggressive price for the flagship smartphone. The LTE-equipped device includes a 4.3-inch ClearBlack display, 1.4GHz single-core CPU, 512MB of RAM and an 8-megapixel rear-facing cam with an f/2.2 Carl Zeiss lens and LED flash. There's also a non-removable 1,830mAh battery, which should keep the 4G slab powered for a fair amount of time. Want to take a closer look at this new Microsoft-friendly flagship? Jump past the break for our hands-on video, direct from CES 2012.
In its opening weekend (give or take a day or two) Rovio's space-based reinvention has picked up more than 10 million downloads. Presumably assisted by its freebie status on Android devices, Rovio's self-congratulatory tweet didn't give a breakdown across platforms. While we're now assured that a Windows Phone version will join the intergalactic fight, Rovio doesn't appear to need the help.
A future threatened by wild robotic rottweilers with no humanoid dog-walkers to keep them in check? That must not happen. Fortunately, we'll have a fleet-footed droid named "Hume" to keep us safe: he's the work of engineers at Meka Robotics and the University of Texas at Austin, who want to be the first to build a bipedal robot with Parkour skills, aka rough terrain free-running or "Human-Centered Hyper-Agility". Sure, they still have some way to go, but watch the video after the break, then imagine it without the wobbly coat stand, and then re-imagine it from the POV of an angry pup.
A touchscreen's fatal flaw is its lack of feedback: imagine the satisfaction if you could feel those Angry Birds as they flew across the screen. NEC and the Tokyo Institute of Technology wanted a simpler solution to tactile displays than Senseg's electrostatic-field based tech. Instead, this device uses a wire (yup) anchored on each corner of the display -- when force is shown on screen, it jerks the screen in the corresponding direction. You can see it in action after the break, accompanied by the restful tones of Diginfo's narrator. If there's a better way to start a week, we don't wanna know about it.
