Widgets Customize This Touchscreen

From Samsung Electronics comes the TouchWiz F480, a full touchscreen mobile with a user interface that has specially designed widgets to customize and personalize the slim handset. The widgets display functions such as clock, radio player, music player and more personal elements including photos and birthday reminders, which users can “drag and drop” onto their home screens to suit their personal needs. Samsung’s differentiated tactile technology also gives users a tangible, pleasing feedback sensation when items are selected.

Despite its slim 11.6 mm body, the F480 also boasts advanced multimedia functions including 240 MB of internal music memory, a memory card with up to 8GB storage, an integrated FM radio, a 5 megapixel camera, a CMOS video lens, HSDPA and USB 2.0 connectivity. The high-end camera in the phone offers auto focus, automatic face detection technology and an image stabilizer.

Do You Know Leetspeak?

Leet, or 1337 to the better informed, is used primarily on the Internet, with various combinations of ASCII character replacing Latinate letters. It is a specialized form of symbolic writing, which initially was used mostly for encrypted communication and now is commonly found on community websites and in gaming communities.

Newbies to Leetspeak can now learn the language through a “Leet Word of the Day Service” at www.transparent.com/wotd/today/leetspeak-words.htm. Leet Word of the Day offers a new 1337 slice of Internet culture each day, teaches proper usage with example sentences, and provides native speaker sound for learning proper pronunciation. Leet language learners may subscribe to a daily e-mail or RSS feed, or add a Word of the Day gadget to their iGoogle or MySpace pages.

See What’s New at OpenOffice

The OpenOffice.org community invites the public to explore the more than 100 extensions in the OpenOffice.org Extension Repository. Extensions are additional components downloaded on top of an existing OpenOffice.org installation to add extra features, templates, languages and dictionaries to the free software.

Created through worldwide community collaboration, the OpenOffice.org Extension Repository includes template packs, a report designer, tools for professional writers, translation, presentation compression functionality and more. Two new OpenOffice.org 3.0 features to be available in weeks are the Sun Presenter Console and the Sun PDF Import Extension. The Sun Presenter Console extension allows users to view their speaker notes, the next slide and the time on their laptop screens while presenting via a connected projector. The Sun PDF Import Extension allows users to edit PDF files.

Digital Printers to Compete With Offset

Xerox has previewed a cured gel ink technology that prints on materials like plastic and foil, enabling digital printers to compete in areas like packaging to capture even more of the traditional offset print jobs making up an estimated $400 billion market. Xerox claims that cured gel ink systems combine the speed, low-cost and ability to print on varied materials just like offset, with the personalization of digital.

The gel ink has the consistency of peanut butter after it is jetted through the print heads and then turns rock hard when exposed to a pulse of ultraviolet light. The result is a crisp, vivid, long lasting image. Unlike current water or solvent-based inkjet systems, the gel ink won’t bleed-through or require dryers and vapor recovery systems, thereby increasing print speeds and making the system more environmentally friendly.