Japanese clothing giant Uniqlo launches online store for US consumers

Are you the kind of person that's fine buying an item of clothing without first trying it on and checking yourself in a mirror for an inordinate amount to check it's really 'you' before deciding whether to buy it? If so, you may be interested to know that Japanese clothing giant Uniqlo this week launched an online store for shoppers just like you.

If you live in the US, chances are it’s a bit of a drive to your nearest Uniqlo store. Like around a thousand miles.

But from this week there’s another way to check out the wares of the Japanese clothing giant – the Web.

The company – which occupies a similar space to Gap, H&M and Zara, offering stylish clothes at reasonable prices – launched an online store for US customers this week as part of a long-term strategy to expand its business in the country.

Uniqlo currently only has five stores in the US – in San Francisco, New York and New Jersey – but is hoping to increase its bricks-and-mortar presence in a big way, with plans to open up to 60 new stores over the next two years and earn $10 billion in sales by 2020, Reuters reports.

Rival clothing firm Gap has had an e-commerce site up and running since 1997, while Zara launched its own online service just over a year ago. H&M says it’ll be launching an online store in mid-2013.

While many fashion chains may offer only a fraction of their retail store inventory on their online shopping site, Uniqlo says it’ll be including everything in its Web-based store. In fact, it’s actually offering more items, with the addition of extra sizes such as XXS and XXL. Free standard shipping is available if orders exceed $100 ($7 fee for orders under $100), with items arriving in one to five days.

Keeping the Web-based store up to date will be no easy task, and could prove to be a costly exercise too. “You need to have photographs of everything. You need to be able to zoom in and zoom out, turn the image 360 degrees,” Paula Rosenblum, an analyst for Retail Systems Research, told Reuters. “When you’re turning merchandise eight to nine times a year, that’s expensive.” But Uniqlo evidently sees it as a price worth paying in its quest to make an impact in the US market.

Part of the Fast Retailing Company, Uniqlo is currently the world’s fourth biggest apparel retailer with more than 1,100 stores in over 12 countries.

You can check out the clothing company’s new online store here.

Source : digitaltrends[dot]com

Letterpress, a new game for iOS from the creator of Tweetie

If you’ve used the Twitter client Tweetie or the official Twitter apps for iOS, Android and OS X, you have one person to thank for them: Loren Brichter. Brichter rose to fame with his excellent Twitter app, Tweetie, for iOS and Android. These apps were so good that Twitter acquired him and his apps and since then he made the Twitter apps for iPhone, iPad, Android and OS X.

Last year, Brichter left Twitter to continue working for his own company, Atebits. He has been secretly working on his own app since then and yesterday it was finally released on iOS. Say hello to Letterpress.

Letterpress is a two player, online multiplayer game similar to Scrabble, where you have a grid of 5×5 tiles consisting of letters. Your goal is to form words using these letters. The word should have at least two characters and you cannot repeat words. Once you select your letters, they get assigned by your team color. The opponent then has to do the same.

If you choose from the white tiles, that is those that have not been used, you get one point per tile. If you steal tiles from your opponent, you get one point and the opponent loses one point per tile. Once stolen, the tiles turn the color of your side. If you use your own previously used tiles, you don’t get any points. Eventually, you have to use up all the tiles on the board and the one with the highest score wins.

The premise is pretty simple but despite that the game is fun to play. What I really like about this game is how well made it is. From the UI design to the slick animations, everything is top-notch and shows that a great deal of care went into making the game.

Now here’s the best part: Letterpress is completely free for download. There is an upgrade option for which you have to pay $0.99. which lets you use various themes for the board and you can also play multiple games at the same time but even without upgrading the game feels complete.

Click here to download the game on your iPhone, iPad or iPod touch. You’ll need a Game Center ID to play the game.

Source : blog[dot]gsmarena[dot]com

First Felix Baumgartner head-cam footage hits the Earth

Felix Baumgartner, the Austrian who happens to be the first person to break the speed of sound without mechanical gizmos, holds the record for highest manned flight in a baloon and highest free fall jump and fastest descent, filmed the whole extravaganza on his head-cam.

The video is now available to watch but it is pretty sickening if you’re the faint of heart – the whole earth is literally spinning ike crazy.

In case you’ve been living under a rock, or you know, somewhere out of touch with under the social networks, and you’ve missed Felix Baumgartner’s feat – he ascended about 38 km in a baloon and then jumped feet-first back to Earth. It’s quite astonishing, really.

And in case you missed the live feed from the jump itself, you can have a look at the mission highlights video.

Source : blog[dot]gsmarena[dot]com

Concept refrigerator with no door won’t let you forget what’s inside

The Impress refrigerator wall is one of the many Electrolux Design Lab 2012 entries that should get you excited about the future of industrial design.

Are you the kind of person who throws a box of leftovers in the fridge, only to forget it was ever there? One design student figured the solution to this would be if you could keep sight of what’s in your fridge whenever you walk by… so what’s a better way to do that than to eliminate the door as a whole? Wait, huh?

Sounds like a crazy idea, but according to Ben de la Roche’s logic, his door-less refrigerator might not sound as wild as you’d imagine. The energy-conscious design features hexagonal panels that act as an opening for each item inserted. The fridge — interestingly-named Impress — does not power to cool anything until it realizes an object is inside, and even then the machine will only cool the area where the item is located. 

“Impress is a refrigeration wall that holds your food and drinks for you, out in the open and not behind closed doors so you will always remember the lunch you prepared for work or find that midnight snack with ease,” de la Roche, 21, writes in his contest entry. “Waste no more leftovers, waste less space and save more money with Impress.”

Thanks to the honeycomb design, the fridge wall can shapeshift to fit whatever the item you are trying to refrigerate. While the idea will definitely work for beverage and or sealed containers, open plates of food or fruits will need a cover or a plastic wrap to keep the contents from spilling inside this proposed fridge design. We also wonder how well the design will work for soups or food items that need to be stored horizontally.

The eco-friendly and literally off-the-wall design earned de la Roche a trip from New Zealand to Milan to present his entry with the hopes of earning the grand prize: €5000 (approximately $6,453 USD) and a six-month internship with Electrolux at its global headquarters. Since 2003, Electrolux has hosted a Design Lab competition to undergraduate and graduate industrial design students. The 2012 final event for the design competition will take place on October 25, where we’ll hope to see more incredible designs come alive to make us feel one step closer to the future.

Image via Massey University

Source : digitaltrends[dot]com

Paraplegic Claire Lomas first person to take home ReWalk robotic suit

Brit Claire Lomas has become the first person to take home the ReWalk robotic suit for everyday use. Claire, who completed the London marathon in May using the special suit, was paralyzed from the chest down in an accident five years ago and was told by doctors that she would never again.

Brit Claire Lomas, paralyzed from the chest down following a horse-riding accident five years ago, has become the first person to take home a bionic exoskeleton that allows her to walk.

Claire first hit the headlines back in May when the 32-year-old paraplegic completed the London marathon with the aid of the ReWalk robotic exoskeleton, raising over £200,000 ($317,000) for spine injury research in the process. The impressive feat took her 16 days and won her many fans along the way. More recently, she also had the honor of lighting the celebration cauldron in London’s Trafalgar Square to begin the 2012 Paralympics.

Her life will be changed forever now that she can use the ReWalk during her everyday activities, bringing her a level of mobility she could never have imagined back in 2007 when, following her accident, doctors told her she would never walk again.

‘Excited’

“I am very excited to take the ReWalk home and incorporate it in my daily life,” Claire said in a statement. “With the help of the ReWalk I am able to stand, walk, talk to my friends and family eye-to-eye, and exercise in a way that I have not been able to since my injury.”

Built by Israel-based Argo Medical Technologies, the ReWalk enables a user to control the robotic exoskeleton through tiny changes in their center of gravity. Crutches can be used to provide the user with extra stability and safety.

The robotic exoskeleton is made up of a number of motors and gears strapped to the user’s lower body, with sensors attached to the upper body helping to control motion. When ReWalk detects the user moving their weight onto one foot, it raises the opposite leg and carries the person forward.

The device is powered by a computer and a rechargeable battery housed in a backpack. Once a user gets the hang of it and feels confident enough, even stairs no longer become an obstacle.

Official launch

“Years of research and hard work from a very talented team of engineers has made this product possible,” Larry Jasinski, Argo’s CEO, said. “We are officially launching the ReWalk personal use system in the EU with this start in the UK. It’s our aim to get as many individuals as possible walking again, and the launch of the ReWalk will allow customers to use the technology for a range of activities.”

The robotic exoskeleton was recently given approval by the US Food and Drug Administration, though it is yet to go on general sale in the country.

At £45,000 ($71,000), the ReWalk certainly doesn’t come cheap. However, it is likely to prove popular with rehabilitation centers and other medical institutions.

Source : digitaltrends[dot]com

Choose your own bloody adventure: Hands-on with Dishonored

Arkane Studios and Bethesda Softworks have a winner on their hands with first-person assassin’s tale, Dishonored.

If there has ever been a good argument for developers to continue supporting E3, it is Behtesda and Arkane Studios’ Dishonored. Before the convention earlier this year, Dishonored was a curiosity. It was the second most interesting sounding title of what many considered a relatively weak Bethesda offering compared to previous years. Prey 2 was AWOL, Skyrim and Rage had both released, there was no Fallout news, and the highest profile title was The Elder Scrolls Online which is still a long way from release. 

It isn’t a franchise title, Arkane Studios is not a well-known developer, and the game itself had only been seen a handful of times. But then came E3 and everything changed. The previously unknown game was suddenly a game of the year contender and it won several Best of Show honors (including ours). The most often comparison was BioShock, which seems obvious since Arkane helped out with BioShock 2 and both games use a similar ability and weapon offensive combination. But it was more than just a similarity in the gameplay, it was a feeling that you were seeing something special. Both games featured a rich and original world and both offered a mysterious and compelling story, but beyond that they both offered choice.

How you approach the world is entirely up to you. If you want to go stealth, you have several tools at your disposal. If you want to take on the world, you can do that too. If you want to be a prick to the citizens of the fictional town of Dunwall, you can get incredibly creative and then ruin their evenings. The choice is yours.

In the demo that Bethesda is currently showing off, you are tasked with entering an exclusive party and assassinating an aristocratic matriarch named Lady Boyle — there’s a catch though. The target and her daughters are all wearing similar outfits that include masks. The game randomizes which of the three ladies is the actual target, which means you have to approach the mission creatively and put in the legwork. You could always try to kill everyone, but that be somewhat like ordering a steak from a fine restaurant and then covering it in A1.

Almost immediately I noticed that my game was progressing differently from that of the people playing around me. My game took me through the courtyard of the estate where the party was held, and an optional sidequest offered me the chance to fight a duel with pistols. Throughout the game there will be optional events within main missions, which shouldn’t come as a surprise for this type of game.

Even entering the house can be completed in multiple ways. Assuming you take the main door, you then have options. If you wander around and explore there are other side-missions to partake in, or you can focus on optional objectives that will help with the main quest.

I chose to complete the secondary objectives to help with the main quest. This sent me to the second floor to explore while dodging guards. It would be easy enough to take out the guards one at a time, but there is always the risk that the bodies could be discovered. So I decided to get creative.

The gameplay uses both weapons and powers, and you can bring these up on a selection wheel. From there you can map the weapon or ability to one of the d-pad directions. Using the ability to see through walls, I stopped time as a guard approached, then teleported behind him and went on to find a note that said who the target was. There were several areas to explore after that, and some were accessible through unusual means like possession of a rat that could then navigate the heating ducts to get to the basement. But that was for another quest, and I had an appointment to keep.

Due to my limited time, subtlety took a backseat to speed. I found the target and eliminated her with prejudice, then had to run for it. Once outside it took a moment for the confusion to settle and the guards to mobilize. As bullets ripped by, I froze time to escape the grounds. I sprinted to the sewers and slid into a covered escape route, but came out and was facing tallboys, guards walking on mechanized stilts. These guards can quickly ruin your day, so I laid a trap on a nearby bridge, summoned rats to attack another guard, and threw a sticky grenade into a crowd to even the odds. The tallboy then came at me via the bridge and walked right into my trap. As guards closed in, I possessed a fish and swam to my escape route, a waiting boat.

I immediately wanted to replay the section since I thought of at least five different ways to complete the mission that I wanted to try. When I eventually have the chance, I will be sure to do just that. And then I will probably do it another way, and then try another and another. And that alone justifies making Dishonored not just a game to watch, but possibly the game to watch this year.

Source : digitaltrends[dot]com

Hands-on with the Archos 101 XS tablet, live pictures inside

The Archos booth was one of the stops during our tour around the IFA expo grounds and we got to see the newly announced Archos 101 XS slate in person and take a few live shots of the device.

The ICS-powered Archos 101 XS has a 10.1″ 1280 x 800 display and is powered by the TI OMAP 4470 chipest, featuring dual core CPU and the PowerVR SGX544 GPU. According to the company it should get its Jelly Bean serving by the end of the year.

Inside there will be 16 GB of on-board storage with microSD card support up to 64 GBs.

The Archos 101 XS has a mini HDMI on the left side along with a microUSB and 3.5 mm headphones jack.

The keyboard dock, dubbed Coverboard, attaches to the Archos 101 XS magnetically and features a full QWERTY and home, back and task switcher buttons.

Source : blog[dot]gsmarena[dot]com