Following complaints of bag lifting and missing properties from commuters, Inspector General and Commissioner of Police P. Kannappan had formed special teams to monitor movements of suspicious persons in public places including bus stand and railway station.

Addressing a press conference, DCP (crime) Rajendran told reporters at the Anna Nagar police station after inspecting the recovered properties, that following complaints of property missing crimes at the Maatuthavani bus stand from many passengers, special teams were formed to nab the robbers.

It was found that bag lifters watched the movement of passengers, who after boarding the bus alighted to have a cup of tea or purchased snacks and magazines.

It was then that the robbers decamped with the bag, which contained anything from clothes to gadgets such as laptops and gold jewelleries.

On one such occasion, a special team (in plain clothes) caught a person alighting with a bag. Interrogations revealed that he was not the owner of the suitcase.

Discreet probe led to unravelling of the crimes reported in the bus stand, Mr. Rajendran said and appealed to the passengers to beware of bag lifters, who moved in the area, just like any other commuter and committed the crime.

The special team comprising Inspector Murugadasson and others were appreciated for the commendable work. The names of the accused were given as Balamurugan (36) and Pitchai (34) of Amandurpatti, near here. Anna Nagar police registered cases and produced the duo before a court. Further investigation is on.

Article source: http://www.thehindu.com/news/cities/Madurai/article2860277.ece

If you’ve watched our extensive laptop coverage from CES 2012, only to look down at your own busted-up old clunker of a machine, then 2012 might be the year you buy a new laptop.

And with so many high-end, high-design systems hitting store shelves this year, there are more worthy candidates than ever to choose from, and many of them fall into the still-new ultrabook category.

If you need a refresher on what “ultrabook” means, it’s an Intel marketing term (much like Centrino was), encompassing a growing category of Windows laptops that are thin and reasonably powerful (typically under 188 millimeters thick with the latest Core i-series processors), with good battery life and at least some solid-state-drive (SSD) storage.

With all the ultrabooks already confirmed for 2012, it’s a fairly safe bet that your next laptop will be a very thin one.

Running from just under $1,000 to $1,500 or more, the 2012 laptops that seem the most exciting aren’t exactly the least expensive we’ve ever seen, especially after several years of falling prices, but at least they all look good.

Our question for you is: based on design, price, components, and features, which of these highly anticipated 2012 laptops are you hoping to buy this year?

Below you’ll find a brief executive summary of each one, linked to more in-depth coverage, with our take on why it’s a lustworthy machine. Check out the contenders, then vote in our poll. Or, if you have a different choice, let us know in the comments section below.

(Credit:
CNET)

HP Envy 14 Spectre
Estimated price: $1,499, Q1 2012

The winner of our Computers and Hardware Best of
CES category, this glass-covered beast is certainly unique. We’re still not convinced a glass-lid laptop can survive in the wild, but the NFC support and great audio controls are big pluses.

(Credit:
CNET)

Dell XPS 13


Estimated price: $999, Q1 2012

The look and feel remind us of Dell’s corporate Latitude line spliced with a MacBook Air, rather than previous XPS laptops, and inside it has edge-to-edge Gorilla Glass over the screen and a large clickpad.

(Credit:
Acer)

Acer Aspire S5

Estimated price: $999, Q2/3 2012

The S5 is 15mm thick–2mm thinner than last year’s Aspire S3–weighs less than 3 pounds, and has a sleek Onyx Black magnesium alloy chassis. More importantly, the ports–HDMI, USB 3.0, and Thunderbolt–are tucked away via a motorized rear port door.

(Credit:
CNET)

Samsung Series 9

Estimated price: $1,399, Q1 2012

Last year’s big design winner was the ultraslim Samsung Series 9, which hit before anyone had ever heard of an ultrabook. This year’s version is even slicker, but still on the expensive side for what you get.

(Credit:
Lenovo)

Lenovo IdeaPad Yoga

Estimated price: $1,199, Q2/3 2012

Another laptop we’ll have to wait for Windows 8 to get our hands on, the Yoga works perfectly fine as a standard clamshell laptop, but its lid flips all the way back to form a touch-screen
tablet, providing extra flexibility (no pun intended) in how you use it.

Not a 15-inch MacBook Air.

(Credit:
CNET)

15-inch Apple MacBook Air
Estimated price: $1,699 or more, sometime in 2012

A shot in the dark here, but there have been enough rumors and online chatter about a larger version of Apple’s MacBook Air that it must be on at least some people’s list of most-lusted-after laptops of 2012. If there is indeed a 15-inch Air, it could very well hit sometime around midyear, when the next generation of Intel CPUs is expected, and would most likely involve a decent premium over the existing 11- and 13-inch versions.

Article source: http://news.cnet.com/8301-17938_105-57370522-1/the-most-anticipated-laptops-of-2012/?part=rss&subj=crave&tag=title

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Research of more 1,900 web users by the comparison site revealed UK web users believe portable computers will be replaced with tablet PCs. More than two thirds (69 percent) of those surveyed own a laptop, while 47 percent of those also said they have a tablet PC.

More than a third (36 percent) said they use their laptop every day compared to 62 percent of tablet PC owners who use their device every day.

Of those that believe laptops will become obsolete, 44 percent said it will be within five years, while just over one in five (21 percent) said laptops would disappear within the next ten years and 16 percent believe it’ll take 20 years.

“It’s actually amazing to think how far technology has come in the last ten years. If you had suggested then that people though laptops would become obsolete, no-one would have believed you! The rise of the iPad and other tablets does make it hard for laptops to compete in the same market,” said Mark Pearson, Chairman of MyVoucherCodes.co.uk

“I’m not all that surprised to find out that people think laptops will become obsolete, however I doubt it will be as soon as within the next five years. While tablet computers are great for doing the majority of things, I think a lot of people prefer to work on laptops and desktop computers.”

Pearson also said the memory on a tablet was also an issue.

“whether they would ever be able to hold as much as a normal computer, although likely in the future, is anyone’s guess right now.”

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A handful of prototype laptops spotted at
CES with Microsoft’s Kinect hardware built in are currently generating some serious buzz.

Originally a hardware add-on for the
Xbox 360 game console, the Kinect has the potential to be built into a lot of devices, at least those that run Windows. Enterprising hobbyists have already hacked it to work on PCs, and the next step is to take the bulky oversize Webcam hardware and shrink it down so it fits inside a laptop, with no external hardware required.

The Daily originally pointed out these prototypes, and described them as follows: “The devices, which at first glance appear to be Asus Netbooks running Windows 8, feature an array of small sensors stretching over the top of the screen where the Webcam would normally be. At the bottom of the display is a set of what appear to be LEDs.”

My colleague Scott Stein was aptly dubious: “The real question here is, who’s going to use this?” he wrote recently, adding, “Based on my experiences with Kinect, accuracy could be an issue for fine movement controls such as video editing (or, any sort of virtual touch-pad analog).”

I’ll take it one step further. This is not the first time we’ve seen an attempt to incorporate serious motion control into a laptop. The last big push in a consumer product that was available on store shelves was the Toshiba Qosmio G55, a desktop replacement laptop we reviewed in 2008.

I recall seeing the G55 demoed behind closed doors by Toshiba at CES earlier that year. The motion control software, which used the system’s built-in Webcam and a list of hand gestures to act as media controls, seemed to have potential, but clearly wasn’t quite fully cooked–a fact lost to no one in the room at the time.

When the final system was released later that year, the motion controls were disappointingly no better. In my review of the Toshiba Qosmio G55, I said:

The gesture controls work by using the built-in Webcam to detect hand movements. The controls work specifically in a handful of media programs, including Windows Media Center and Toshiba’s proprietary media player. You have to sit 3 to 10 feet away from the laptop and hold up your hand (there’s a menu setting for left- or right-hand preference). At its most basic level, holding a hand up, palm facing the screen, will start and stop playback. That works about 70 percent of the time, just shy of being actually useful. By holding up a closed fist, one can move a cursor around like a mouse pointer, raising and lowering the thumb to left-click on any icon or window. That part of the gesture control system is much trickier, and at least in this initial version, will be more frustrating than helpful.

In hindsight, my description was overly generous, if anything. You can see some of the gestures demonstrated in the First Look video for the review (jump to 1:10 in to see some gesturing).

Needless to say, this was the first and last laptop we saw with this gesture control system built in. Aside from facial recognition software, now common in many laptops (but still a bit unreliable), there have been few, if any, attempts to work new and more-useful camera controls into laptops.

Would a Kinect camera in a laptop work better? Undoubtedly, but that’s setting the bar very low. Kinect for Xbox works well, but is easily hamstrung by small apartments, poor lighting, or much more often, badly designed games that have terrible gesture recognition.

If some company actually puts out a Kinect-powered laptop, I’ll be the first in line to review it–but with some serious skepticism about how the two elements will work together.

Article source: http://news.cnet.com/8301-17938_105-57369732-1/sorry-kinect-weve-already-tried-motion-control-in-laptops-and-it-flopped/?part=rss&subj=crave&tag=title

On the one hand, the news is not entirely a surprise, given Microsoft’s CES announcement that it would integrate Kinect tech into desktop PCs soon. Steve Ballmer said that those devices might go on sale as early as February 1^st. (A collective squeal from hardcore desktop gamers surely ensued–followed by a rush to Amazon to pre-order the thing, which costs $250.) And for Microsoft to do everything it can to feed its burgeoning beast–the Kinect was the fastest-selling consumer electronics device of all time, per Guiness–makes perfect sense. Indeed, it recently announced a “Kinect accelerator” to bring some of the most creative Kinect hackers into the fold, and released this nifty bit of YouTube promotion:

On the other hand, though, a Kinect-enabled laptop–The Daily says the prototypes it got its hands on “appear to be Asus netbooks running Windows 8”–raises a kind of cognitive dissonance. The image of the Kinect is one of sweeping, expansive movement–the wide gesture, the swing, the jumping jack. The image of a laptop–I should know–is of someone hunched over a screen that’s a little too small for comfort. The Kinect is about openness, expansiveness; the laptop is about contraction. What defines portability, after all, is size.

Perhaps it’s unlikely that people will use the Kinect for gaming on a laptop, then. But there are a host of other applications where a simple flick of the hand would do. A site called Electricpig has envisioned a few weird ones: augmented-reality shopping, for one; faster browsing enabled by eye-tracking, for another. As soon as your laptop can read you as well as you can read it, all sorts of applications we can’t even imagine yet may become possible.

One thing’s for sure: what Microsoft dubs the “Kinect effect” shows no signs of abating, and it seems that Redmond would prefer for consumers to see the Kinect as something that belongs with every screen, a technology as indispensable to your daily habits as your smartphone. I’ve written before that the Kinect belongs to the world; pretty soon, the world may belong to the Kinect.

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Article source: http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/helloworld/27539/?ref=rss

(Credit:
Microsoft)
(CBS) – Kinect for the Xbox 360 is making leap to desktop computers in February, but according to sources, it may be a built in to laptops soon.

The Daily reported seeing prototypes of Asus Windows 8 netbooks with built-in Kinect sensors. According to the site, “A source at Microsoft has confirmed that the devices are indeed official prototypes of laptops featuring a Kinect sensor.”

Full coverage of Microsoft at Tech Talk

Why should you care? While it may seem awkward at first, think about being able to sit back and control your computer with the wave of a hand.

Porting the device to laptops will open an avenue for developers to create a wider variety of apps using the motion-sensing device. Forget about a touchscreen. How about no screen, mouse or remote control to deal with? We could change a song on a playlist with voice commands or gestures from across the room.

Naysayers think it will look a bit silly, but have you ever tried accepting a video chat while preparing dinner? It’s a mess! I would love to be able to switch programs or open and close windows without touching my computer.

Aside from practical applications, the potential for Kinect is endless. Microsoft’s use-cases include therapy for Autistic children or stroke rehabilitation. In a video produced by Microsoft called “Kinect Effect,” some examples of how Kinect could be used include defusing bombs, controlling projectors and creating games for physical therapy patients. In South Korea, “Live Park” is an interactive theme-park, built using Kinect technology.

Kinect uses facial and voice recognition, as well as a sensor to track your body’s motion. Developers can already take a crack at Kinect for desktop Windows 7 and 8 via a software development kit released by Microsoft. A Windows version of the sensor goes on sale Feb. 1.

The Daily speculates that Microsoft probably won’t release its own portable computers; instead it would license Kinect technology to computer makers. If it catches on – and Microsoft gives the right support to developers – the potential for Kinect to modify our behavior could be on par with Apple’s touchscreen.

Article source: http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-501465_162-57368427-501465/kinect-built-into-asus-laptops-why-you-should-care/

Intel showing off a Kinect-like laptop concept at CES 2012.

(Credit:
CNET)

Hey, look at this: Kinect on a laptop. OK, so there we go. According to The Daily, companies are well on their way to making laptops–or, at least, laptop prototypes–running Windows 8 and equipped with Kinect motion camera hardware instead of standard webcams.

The Daily got to see some of this technology first hand on what it thinks were Asus laptops. Intel’s CES 2012 press conference featured a stage re-enactment of a similar Kinect-like idea on a laptop, shooting a virtual catapult in a game.

The real question here is, who’s going to use this?

For those not able to easily type, a motion-control camera could be useful. Maybe motions combined with keyboard controls could add touch-like gesture vocabulary to a hinged device like a laptop in a more logical/ergonomic way than, say, a touch screen. Gaming, media- and application-switching controls, and universal access for disabled individuals are the three uses that The Daily’s Matt Hickey discusses. I agree with the latter the most, but I’m skeptical as to how much I’d use motion otherwise.

My biggest concern would be with the sensitivity radius. The Kinect camera on the
Xbox 360 needs several feet of space in order to register movement, although third-party peripherals can trick out the sensitivity to be a bit closer. Does this modified version of the Kinect technology improve on its range and accuracy? Kinects can also be finicky with light sensitivity, which makes me wonder if this would be a problem outdoors. Maybe I’d reach and grab videos and other objects in a virtual manner like “Minority Report.” Still, based on my experiences with Kinect, accuracy could be an issue for fine movement controls such as video editing (or, any sort of virtual touch-pad analog). A touch-oriented interface like Metro on Windows 8 is extremely similar to the Xbox 360′s new dashboard, suggesting an easy Kinect transition (large icons laid out in a grid), but I’d find using gesture-based Metro in addition to my regular Windows 8 computing to be a weird chore.

What would you use Kinect on a laptop for, other than possibly games? File your suggestions below. I’m a future-minded person, but I’m having a hard time thinking of anything.

(Via The Daily)

Article source: http://news.cnet.com/8301-17938_105-57367688-1/kinect-coming-to-laptops-why/?part=rss&subj=latest-news&tag=title

Article source: http://news.yahoo.com/kinect-technology-heading-laptops-180301817.html

Microsoft is working on implanting its Kinect technology into laptops, so you may soon be able to control programs with the wave of your hand.

The Daily got a look at some prototype laptops with integrated Kinect sensors and described the devices as Asus netbook lookalikes running Windows 8, with an array of small sensors at the top of the screen where the webcam is normally placed.

If you’re familiar with Microsoft Kinect’s voice and motion controls on the Xbox 360, you know its potential for gaming on the laptop. Other applications come to mind, however: Imagine swiping your finger in the air to switch between windows or applications or using other motions to control your song playlist without having to be right at the keyboard. These laptops would also offer additional control for disabled users.

A Kinect-enable laptop won’t be built in-house by Microsoft (no surprise there), but instead licensed to manufacturers, according to the speculation. While these devices are probably not coming anytime soon, get ready for potential new ways to interact with your laptop.

Follow Melanie Pinola (@melaniepinola) and Today@PCWorld on Twitter

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Article source: http://www.pcworld.com/article/248869/microsoft_kinect_motionsensing_technology_coming_to_laptops_sources_say.html

Hewlett-Packard has agreed to pay out $425,000 to settle claims regarding hazardous laptop incidents after the US Consumer Product Safety Commission charged the company for not issuing a recall quickly enough for knowingly selling laptops with batteries that could catch fire or overheat.

HP and the commission recalled about 32,000 lithium-ion battery packs, which means if you registered your laptop via snail mail or online you might have received a notice.

If not, here’s HP’s quick list of affected laptops:

and HP Notebook PC Battery Pack Replacement Program:

Check the serial number of your battery to make sure your battery is safe, and if not, contact HP.

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Article source: http://www.pcworld.com/article/248713/hp_recallls_laptops_over_faulty_batteries.html