Video: Hack a Common Slingshot into a USB Peripheral for 'Angry Birds'

Launching Angry Birds from a slingshot on your iPhone screen is fun, but actually launching Angry Birds from a slingshot sounds difficult, and borderline dangerous (well, definitely dangerous to the bird, variably dangerous to you depending on size of bird and degree of anger). A clever hack over on mbed shows you how to have the best of both worlds--real slingshot, digital birds--by turning a slingshot into a USB peripheral for playing Angry Birds.

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Polycom's RealPresence Video Conference App Comes to iPhone 4S

Polycom’s video conferencing and collaboration app for the iPad and Android tablets is now heading to your phone. The RealPresence app is a secure, high-quality HD video collaboration app that lets you meet with your coworkers no matter where you are. The app is now available for the iPhone 4S with other Android Ice Cream Sandwich phones to follow.

The RealPresence app works with any laptop or desktop computer and can connect over Wi-Fi, 3G or 4G LTE networks. The app features multiparty calling but you can do some other neat collaborative actions as well. For example, you can share presentations by swapping the view between the content and the people in the conference.

Polycom also added some features to the RealPresence app for the iPad 2. Now, you can share PDF files from the tablet to other conference members.

I haven’t demoed the iPhone app yet, but I have used both the Android Honeycomb and iPad tablet apps. The video quality is quite good and the audio is excellent. Some video conferencing apps make meeting remotely a pain because of poor audio quality. Polycom’s tradition in voice communications really shines with the audio.

Toshiba’s Ultra-Thin Excite Tablet

Toshiba’s super-slim 10-inch Excite, one of the hottest Android tablets this year, will debut in the U.S. on March 6. The tablet got the Best Tablet title at CES from PCWorld in January, and the name has slightly changed since then, from Excite X10 to Excite 10 LE.

The Wi-Fi-only Excite 10 LE will cost $530 for the 16GB model and $600 for the 32GB model. This is slightly more than an equivalent iPad 2 (and probably iPad 3 come March 7), so why choose the Excite 10 LE over Apple’s tablet? Well, instead of competing on price, Toshiba is trying to place the Excite as a super-slim luxury tablet.

Toshiba claims its device is the world’s thinnest and lightest 10-inch tablet, measuring 0.3 inches (7.7 mm) thick and weighing 1.18 pounds (535 g). For comparison, the iPad 2 is 0.34 inches (8.8 mm) thick and weighs 1.33 pounds (601 g). Toshiba also used premium materials for the Excite 10 LE, including magnesium alloy surface and scratch-resistant Gorilla Glass display.

The screen is 10.1 inches, has a 1280 x 800 resolution and a 16:10 aspect ratio. InPCWorld’s hands-on at CES with the tablet, the display looked good, with a minimal air-gap and a wide viewing angle; but text and graphics weren't as sharp as on the Acer Iconia Tab A700, which has higher resolution.

The processor inside is a dual-core 1.2 GHz Texas Instruments OMAP 4430 with 1GB of RAM, which makes the Excite the first tablet from Toshiba with an OMAP processor. There are also dual cameras on board: a 5-megapixel on the back, capable of 1080p HD video recording and with a LED flash, and a 2-megapixel front-facing camera for video chat.

For its thinness, the Excite LE has plenty of ports neatly aligned along the edge: the headphone jack, micro-USB, micro-HDMI, and microSDHC. The tablet has the usual connectivity options (Bluetooth and Wi-Fi), but lacks 3G or 4G cellular connectivity.

Toshiba is missing a trick with the Excite 10 LE tablet though, which comes with stock Android 3.2 Honeycomb initially, and not with Android 4.0. The company said the tablet would be upgradeable to Ice Cream Sandwich later in the year.