Starting this summer, Vodafone will be adding hand scanners to its VIP Recharge Truck, a phone-charging station for UK festival-goers. Capable of housing 2,000 phones, the truck will utilize palm vein readers to properly identify a device’s owner, a technology that we’ve also seen with laptops and ATMs in Japan. Previously, the Recharge Truck and its staff used photos and wristbands to match a phone to its master, but dealing with lost wristbands and unidentifiable individuals created an inconsistent experience. With the palm vein readers, a music fan can have their hand scanned when they drop their phone off with the Recharge Truck staff, and then rescanned at the time of retrieval to verify ownership. The reader works by tracking and…

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Ogaki Kyoritsu Bank in Japan is introducing ATMs to the market that authenticate a user with a hand-scan, birth date and PIN instead of a card. That way you can’t use the excuse, “I forgot my bank card” when you don’t have cash for dinner. Me? I always sneak out through the kitchen and pocket some dinner rolls on the way.

On top of being convenient, the machines are also a necessary response to the large number of ATM cards and personal IDs lost in last year’s devastating earthquake.

No word how much Japanese police expect severed limb related crimes to increase, but my guess is significantly considering the country’s abundance of ninja swords.

Palm-Scanning ATMs of the Day [geeks.thedailywh.at]

Thanks to Mark, who doesn’t have a bank account, just a shit-ton of buried jars and a really crappy map.

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First coins were too heavy so we moved to notes. Then notes were too numerous and we streamlined to credit cards. Now, your wealth can be literally contained within the palm of your hand. Japanese bank Ogaki Kyoritsu will soon start accepting palm authentication, allied to a PIN and date of birth verification, as enough proof of identity before releasing cash from ATMs.

Biometric identification methods are already commonplace in Japanese banks, but the novelty here is that Ogaki Kyoritsu will dispense with the need for a related credit card or bank book. Based in Gifu Prefecture, this is only a small regional bank, so we can consider its rollout of the new ATM system very much a pilot scheme. The plan is to install the new ATMs at 10…

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When we reviewed Dell’s XPS 13 ultrabook last week, only three things held it back: an iffy display, a lightweight battery and a sluggish, buggy trackpad. Well, the last of those problems may soon be no more, as Dell’s got a fix on the way, and we can personally vouch that the new drivers are far more satisfactory. Presently, the XPS 13′s Cypress touchpad drivers are at v2.3.6.25, and that’s what you’ll find on Dell’s site, but we found v2.3.6.33 far faster to respond to user input and (after a quick run of a Dell-provided calibration tool) also a bit more precise. Perhaps most importantly, though, v2.3.6.33 automatically disables the trackpad after you begin typing, which keeps your palms from making the cursor jump when they brush the…

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Hindsight, as they say, is 20/20 and Brian X Chen has a great tick-tock detailing the initial fall – and continuing fall – of webOS. The interviews are quite telling, including a quote from Paul Mercer:

The most important line there is “the technology wasn’t there yet.” Considering a number of other OSes, including, most notably, WinPho 7, are able to do what webOS was supposed to do including social network contact control, status updates, and web-technologies-based UIs, I find this as a bit of a cop out.

The Pre came out in 2009 to much fanfare and was in a face-off against iOS and Android for most of its life cycle. The primary problems outlined in the article – lack of developer support, a speedy, nine-month build time, and general failures to secure key talent – sound like good excuses in retrospect but I think the lesson learned here is that Palm tried to play by start-up rules in an established game. Nine month programming jags to produce shipping code is fine when you’re doing a social network for goat lovers. It’s not so fine when you’re selling phones to a mass market.

I don’t miss webOS. Palm overshot and failed to convince a jaded public that it was worth switching. Palm died because the core audience – the “anything but iPhone crowd” – never received a clear, compelling reason to switch. Then HP bought it and, well, we all know what happened there.

In the end, Palm couldn’t build momentum or a product that worked. There are, oddly enough, still Pre fanboys out there who point to a great webOS open source renaissance but that’s about as likely as the average user caring enough about their Android phone to install Cyanogenmod: there is some impetus there, to be sure, but most people just want to check email, make calls, and buy a phone that will work for, at minimum, two years until the next big thing comes along.

[Image: jocic/Shutterstock]

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I’ve gotten to review a few pico projectors, but haven’t had the opportunity to test one from AAXA. This new one, the P4, looks like it could stand up to my favorite so far, the 3M MP160. As 3M did with that device, AAXA sacrifices smallness for brightness, and ends up beating the competition by some margin.

At 80 lumens, the P4 is more than twice as bright as the MP160. That’s still nothing compared to normal stationary projectors, which can produce thousands of lumens, but 80 is more than enough for a nice big screen in a reasonably dim room.

Battery life is a reasonable 75 minutes, which is enough for a presentation or a TV show or two, but no good if you want to watch a movie with your sweetheart out in the woods (or something, I don’t know). The resolution is 1280×800, though, which is better than any other pico projector I know of, and the 750MHz processor should chew through most SD video files, though I doubt it can handle highly compressed 720p; you should probably use an external source for that.

Interestingly, it runs Windows CE apps, not that those are especially common, but it may make a laptop unnecessary if you’re just showing a few graphs or slides.

Hopefully we’ll get our hands on one of these to review. At $ 399 (on sale for $ 339 at the moment) it’s not quite an impulse buy, but it is probably the best one of these devices, spec-wise, on the market right now.

[via SlashGear]

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The Kindle Fire announcement set the interwebs ablaze as Amazon burst into the tablet scene. But the retailer-turned-CE player might be looking to go a different way in the future. Amazon has been named as Palm’s current top suitor among “a handful of contenders” as HP looks to rid itself from the TouchPad/webOS disaster.

It’s unclear from VentureBeat’s leaks why Amazon is interested in Palm. Ditching Android for webOS after building an ecosystem around Android seems foolish and shortsighted. This move, if it’s really happening, could be more about hardware development and patents than reviving a dead operating system. Sorry, fanboys.

Amazon launched the Kindle Fire earlier this week, which brings nearly all of Amazon’s cloud services into one device. Even Amazon’s massive cloud servers, Amazon EC2, are used in the clever Silk browser and the Amazon Appstore finally has flagship device in the Fire. Amazon rebuilt its Kindle syncing platform, Whispersync, to enable resuming of TV shows and movies purchased or streamed using its Prime Instant Vidoes Android app. The Fire is the compilation of a lot of Amazon’s work — and it’s all built around Android.

Adding a second tablet to Amazon’s offering seems to go against the Kindle brand’s mantra of keeping it simple. The Fire isn’t about Android or specs. It’s a tablet built around the same principles as the iPad. By bringing webOS into the fold, Amazon turns the attention to the platform, capabilities and differences rather than the form and function. A webOS Kindle doesn’t make sense.

Instead, if Amazon is indeed looking to acquire Palm from HP, the company could be looking to acquire a proper hardware design team. Amazon reportedly outsourced the Fire’s development to Quanta, who, as Ryan Block puts it, “helped them shortcut the development process by using the PlayBook as their hardware template.” Amazon is clearly going all-in on tablets and will need the right principles in place for future products. However, Palm, and even HP, have never been known to make killer hardware so even this motive is a bit questionable.

The notion of Amazon buying Palm seems a bit untimely at this point. Amazon is fully vested in the Android ecosystem with a host of apps and services. Plus, the Android-powered Fire is seemingly a hit. The install base of webOS, even after the $ 99 TouchPad fire sale, isn’t large enough to compensate the upfront cost and effort resurrecting a dead platform. Palm off-loaded most pre-webOS patents before HP acquired the company in 2010 so Amazon would only be purchasing whatever patents were left over or granted within the last few years.

Steve Ballmer proudly proclaimed that Android isn’t free and his company is constantly signing new Android licensing agreements. In fact Microsoft reportedly makes more money from Android than its own Windows Phone 7. Amazon’s only play, and this is a stretch given the company’s Android investment, would be to buy webOS upfront to avoid any potential deals with Microsoft down the road. Some companies are fighting Microsoft’s patents but others, including Samsung, HTC and Acer, have already signed on the dotted line.

From this vantage point outside of Amazon’s boardrooms, it doesn’t seem like Amazon needs Palm or webOS. The company did a fine job retooling Android into a consumer-friendly offering and is the only company outside of Apple to supplement hardware with a rich set of services and media, properly setting up the Fire for success. But if the price is right and Amazon foresees a legal battle with Microsoft, it’s completely plausible Amazon will be the next owner of the company that first innovated and advanced touchscreen tablets.

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