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The Year in Hardware
The Past 12 Months Have Featured Touch Screens, Context-Aware Gadgets, Autonomous Vehicles and Brain-Computer Interfaces
Kate Greene, ABC News, December 26, 2007
Excerpts from the article:
Context-Aware Gadgets
People are getting more and more accustomed to having their cell phones or laptops with them at all times. Useful as these gadgets are, they can be even more helpful if they can automatically suggest things to do or give directions to a restaurant nearby. This year, a number of products and research projects tried to make phones and other gadgets even smarter. Nokia, for instance, introduced a powerful tablet PC with a Global Positioning System (GPS) chip. But not all gadgets have GPS capabilities. Google recently announced a technology that sidesteps the GPS issue and helps a person place himself on a map, within about 1,000 meters, using information from a cell-phone tower. Similarly, the German startup Plazes offers a service that lets a person use a Wi-Fi signal to locate herself, among other services. And what to do with all this location information? Researchers at the Palo Alto Research Center have developed an application for a phone that suggests things that the user might want to do, places to eat and shop, and things to see, based on location, time of day, past preferences, and even text-message conversations.
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