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iRobot has been branching out from its traditional household and military robots for quite a while, and it looks like it's now officially embracing those activities as a core part of its business. The company announced a reorganization (or "strategic realignment") today that will see it comprised of three different business units: Home Robots, Military Robots and Emerging Technologies. That last group includes things like the Ava mobile robotics platform, which iRobot hopes will eventually be used in everything from healthcare to retail to security applications. Alongside that news, the company also announced a bit of an exec shakeup, with Home Robots President Jeffrey Beck being named Chief Operating Officer, and former COO Joseph Dyer switching roles to become Chief Strategy Officer. The company's official announcement can be found after the break.

Continue reading iRobot reorganizes, forms new unit focused on Ava and other emerging technologies

iRobot reorganizes, forms new unit focused on Ava and other emerging technologies originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 29 Feb 2012 19:19:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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If you were only allowed to read one piece of tech news today, I’d bet you’d read up on the Windows 8 Consumer Preview. The beta became available today, though we were lucky enough to go hands-on with the OS for the past week or so, and people can’t stop talking about it.

Windows 8 is a merging of old with new. A Metro UI offers up live tiles much like Windows Phone, but there are still some apps that require the old-school XP interface, sending you directly into the past when you least expect it.

For John and I, that’s our biggest concern. Metro looks wonderful, Bing’s HTML5 apps are crisp, smooth, and engaging, and the combination of bezel gestures and contracts (which is, essentially, a system that lets one app’s API communicate with another) makes the whole system intuitively navigable.

Getting thrown into XP, then, becomes even more awful. John brought up the important point, though, that Microsoft needs to maintain its relationships with big enterprise app developers and programs that expect their products to work the same way they did last year. Remember, we’re introducing an entirely new set of tools to Windows devs with this release, and the ones who’ve been around for forever will need time to transition.

And to an extent, so will the consumer. Change can be hard, right? But as I said, we’re hoping that this is just a step in the right direction rather than a vision realized.

Those of you that scurried to get an early spot in the pre-order cue for Lytro's upcoming camera, ought to carefully skim your inboxes for an email confirming shipment of your infinite focusing shooter. Per a ton of tips from you, in addition to a post from the company's official blog, early orders of the unconventionally shaped camera that allows you to refocus after the fact are now en route to abodes stateside. When we played with it at its launch event, we came away impressed, yet ultimately longed for the underlying technology to be licensed to others -- something the company maintains it's actively exploring. No matter, with a unit in hand, look for our full review in the coming days.

[Thanks to everyone who sent this in]

Continue reading Lytro pre-orders start shipping, infinite focusing now within reach

Lytro pre-orders start shipping, infinite focusing now within reach originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 29 Feb 2012 18:08:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Continue reading Mini quadrotors play Bond, James Bond (video)

Mini quadrotors play Bond, James Bond (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 29 Feb 2012 18:01:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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A bit of news that squeaked out during the Win8 festivities was the launch of the Microsoft app store. In the version of the software I was using, the app has always been there but it wasn’t available until today. To be clear, the app store here is still in its absolute infancy and is, at best, a hall of demos for various app providers.

The real test of Windows 8 will be the adoption of the OS’s new design paradigms. While everyone will eventually have to fix their apps to reflect Win8′s major architecture changes, there is going to be a lot of hand-holding until the Win9 (potentially) destroys all vestigial Windows cruft. For example, Windows 8 still uses a legacy version of the registry inside Windows 8, a necessary evil required by many applications. Many apps won’t be able to update to Win8 UI standards and many more apps won’t trickle over to the Microsoft app store. It’s this disconnect that will challenge Windows 8 in the first few years of life.

Microsoft knows this yet the Windows business model won’t allow for anything different. The biggest complaint non-die-hards will have with Win8 is the dependence on the old Windows XP desktop. When I asked the Microsoft spokesfolks about this, they explained that the desktop experience was still the best way to interact with files on a general purpose computer, a concept that Microsoft is surely hoping will go away over the next few years.

The real problem, then, will be app store adoption and, more important, the desire by devs to program for Metro as opposed to “Windows” as we once knew it. Metro will require a new set of tools as well as a new aesthetic and the vector-based graphics do not lend themselves to the usual Windows monstrosities in-house programming teams have been rolling out over the past decade. User experience, once a second or third tier concern, is now at the forefront and the crutch of XP mode will reduce the impetus of the average programmer to really ramp up these dormant skills.

All is not lost. Microsoft has a lot of money and they’ve been evangelizing their new platform to programmers, both desktop and mobile, by offering test hardware and cash incentives. The Metro UI also lends itself to “mini-apps” (Twitter clients, email apps, etc.) that, for the time being, are being built in Adobe Air, and games like Cut the Rope. The hardest thing will be to recreating the experience of dragging and dropping lots of files from place to place and editing major documents in Windows 8, another reason the XP mode is important.

In the end, Microsoft is facing a hard, long road. They have an entrenched user base and an entrenched system for the distribution of apps. Unlike their mobile offerings, people have been installing the same apps the same way since time immemorial. To change the way Windows works so drastically – from the way programmers program to the way users interact with applications to the way those applications are sold – is a bold endeavor and one fraught with peril. It will take quite a while, but rest assured Microsoft will force everyone to move over to their new way of thinking. The question is how long will it take for these changes to become generally accepted and how often will people throw their hands up in exasperation when things aren’t working like they “used to?”

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