A Flexible Keyboard with Buttons That Feel Clickable

A very thin keyboard that uses shape-changing polymers to replicate the feel and sound of chunky, clicking buttons could be in laptops and ultrabooks next year. Strategic Polymers Sciences, the San Francisco-based company that developed the keyboard, is working on transparent coatings that would enable this feature in touch screens.

Today’s portable electronics provide rudimentary tactile feedback—many cell phones can vibrate to confirm that the user has pressed a button on a touch screen, for example. These vibrations are produced by a small motor, meaning the entire phone will move rather than just the appropriate spot on the screen where the button is, and there can be a lag in response time.

Strategic Polymers’ technology is a polymer that dramatically and rapidly changes its shape under an applied electric field. The letters on the company’s haptic keyboard vibrate to confirm that they’ve been pressed; that vibration can also be used to create sound waves, so the keys can click, or even play music. The advantage of the haptic keyboard over one with physical buttons, says Ramstein, is that it’s just 1.5 millimeters thick, and it’s flexible. Ramstein says the company, which has manufacturing facilities in State College, Pennsylvania, plans to ship the keyboards to equipment manufacturers in 2014.

There are other materials that provide this kind of response to electric fields, but they don’t have the ideal balance of properties, says Qiming Zhang, cofounder of the company and a professor of electrical engineering at Penn State University. On the one side, there are very hard ceramic materials called piezoelectrics that can respond rapidly to voltage, but don’t provide much shape change. On the other are other electrically responsive polymers that can dramatically change shape but work slowly. The new polymers respond in milliseconds, change their shape by as much as 10 percent, and respond to small voltages, says Zhang.

Indeed, Ramstein says the company’s future products will take advantage of the polymers’ transparency and flexibility. One prototype is a cell phone with pads on the back that vibrate to indicate right and left turns or notable sights during navigation. The company is also working on a fully transparent keyboard with buttons that would physically pop up from the surface of a touch screen when activated, and then return to a smooth state. 

45 RAS Transfer Order Dated 29-9-2013

Department of Personnel Government of Rajasthan, Jaipur has publish Transfer Orders to 45 RAS Officers Dated 29/09/2013 

                                                               
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4 Portable Printers

                       Whether you're on a working vacation or just working on the road, you might need a record of your business dealings along the way. If you're nowhere near another office (or even a power source) to plug in a printer, these little machines can roll out on-the-spot documents to record your appointments, contracts and sales.

The Canon Pixma iP90 and HP Deskjet 450wbt inkjets, each weighing about four pounds, print text pages as well as photos up to letter size. The Canon iP90 sells for $250, but you'll pay $100 more if you need a battery, and another $80 for the Bluetooth adapter. With the battery and Bluetooth wireless printing included, the $350 HP 450wbt costs less than its rival.

You can also downgrade to the non-Bluetooth 450cbi for $300, or to the 450 base model without a battery for $250, which makes it comparable to the Canon. Due to ink and paper costs, a photo print can cost up to $1. Check out these snapshot printers if you're looking for all play and no work.

Samsung GALAXY Note 10.1 (2014 Edition)

The 2014 Edition of the Galaxy Note 10.1 is arriving on US shores soon, folks, as Samsung just issued a presser that its release date this side of the pond will be October 10.

The Note 10.1 sports the highest screen resolution of all slates in the category this year, with the Super Clear LCD sporting 2560 x 1600 pixels - that is over four million dots present on the panel, for a record 300ppi tablet pixel density. 

It is also the ARM-based slate with most RAM onboard, as the 3 GB will come in handy when you miltitask with the included S Pen stylus, and the suite of apps for it. The processor that powers it all is no slouch, either, as a powerful Exynos 5420 will breeze through everything you throw at it.

Above all, Samsung has priced the tablet rather competitively, and you can get the 16 GB version for $549.99, while $50 more will net you the 32 GB Galaxy Note 10.1 - a pretty good deal for what can be considered the best Android slate currently on the market, plus you get expandable storage via a microSD slot.