Commodore Amiga lives again, in Mini PC form

One to provoke nostalgia, maybe, among Gadget Masters of a certain age... Commodore USA has breathed life into another old brand with the release of the Commodore Amiga Mini PC.

Taking a leaf of out Apple's Mac Mini book, it's a small form factor device with a bring-your own monitor and keyboard approach...

According to the company:

The new Commodore AMIGA mini case is ultra small and is made of 100% all aluminium housing, finished by sandblasting and anodic oxidation. It also includes a slot load Blu-Ray drive and internal space for two 2.5" hard drives. It measures 7.5 inches square, with a height of only 3 inches. There is no end to its placement possibilities.

The spec? Commodore USA says it features:

    * 16 Gigs of fast DD3 memory.
    * Integrated nVidia Geforce GT 430 Graphics with 1 Gig of DD3 memory.
    * The ability to drive 3 monitors displays.
    * HDMI, 2-Dual DVI and DisplayPort output. (includes VGA adaptor)
    * 7.1 channel high definition sound.
    * 6 Gb/s SATA HD
    * 4 USB 3.0 and 4 USB 2.0 ports for external data access.
    * A slot loading Blu-ray drive that can also write DVDs.
    * 2 WiFi antennae for outstanding signal reception.
    * A 1 Tb Hard Disk to store video and personal data.
    * Optional 300 or 600 Gb SSD drive

Thanks to Sue P for flagging this one. She says it is going to make her dig out the old Amiga buried at home, gathering dust...

[Via geeky-gadgets.com]

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DIY Geiger counter smartphone app helps measure radiation

Out of awful events sometimes the better side of human nature emerges... We previously highlighted - see How to build your own Geiger Counter - the work of some engineers at Libelium, a wireless sensor network company, to help the people of Japan, around Fukushima, determine levels of radiation for themselves.

Well, our sister site New Scientist's One Per Cent blog has recently reported on a Smarphone-based intitative to help people track the critically important levels of radiation around them.

Kat Austen, CultureLab editor, writes:

In the wake of Japan's Fukushima disaster, amidst a climate of  general mistrust of government radiation data, a number of crowdsourced initiatives for mapping radiation levels sprang up, such as Japan Geigermap, in which radiation readings from citizens are aggregated and displayed online using a web service called pachube.

But most Geiger counters for personal use cost around $200, prohibiting many from measuring radiation for themselves. That's where non-profit organisation radiation-watch.org has stepped in.

They have devised a way for people to construct their own smartphone-compatible Geiger counter at home. Pocket Geiger uses 8 photodiodes to detect the radiation, aluminium foil to screen alpha and beta particles, and a plastic "Frisk" sweet box for the housing. The total cost is just $46.

Ishigaki started the project in June last year, and with the help of supporting scientists and a team of hackers he has developed the self-assembly Geiger counter and app to allow anyone to measure radiation levels in their home or neighbourhood and upload them to a central server, where they can be visualised on a map.

The project has now grown to over 10,000 users, but due to privacy issues the maps can only be viewed within the radiation-watch.org community.

Continuing to develop the technology, the team have recently launched the Pokega Type2. The first Geiger counter without an internal battery, the Pokega Type2 uses the same technology as its predecessor, except that it uses the smartphone as a source of power.

Costing just $65, the Pokega Type2 was developed with the help of a variety of external organisations, such as Japan's High Energy Accelerator Research Organization and the Dutch Metrology Institute.

Read the full blog post >>

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National pie week ends on a Pi high

Sponsored by Digi-Key
Gadget Master features cool, homemade electronic gadgets proudly brought to us--by you!

Complete with build instructions for the design engineer who likes the silly side of inventing things and enjoys building stuff in his and her spare time, these gadgets range from highly silly and impractical to extraordinarily inspirational for your own engineering design work.

Why not submit your own pride and joy for publication in Gadget Master? Send us your project details here.

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Video: Get to grips with the BeagleBone

We're all for BeagleBoards here on Gadget Master and this is one I meant to flag before - Texas Instrument's system has a little brother: the BeagleBone, powered by the company's Sitara ARM Cortex-A8 processor.

"It builds in the most loved features of the BeagleBoard but has shrunk the size and price while adding more I/O connections," boasts TI in the video below. The RRP is $89.

To get started, simply plug it into your PC (Windows MacOs or Linux) and you can begin development... It will appear as a Flash drive and you will be able to extract the files to get you going.

Features of the hardware spec highlighted by BeagleBoard.org include:
    * Board size: 3.4" x 2.1"
    * Shipped with 2GB microSD card with the Angstrom Distribution with node.js and Cloud9 IDE
    * Single cable development environment with built-in FTDI-based serial/JTAG and on-board hub to give the same cable simultaneous access to a USB device port on the target processor
    * Industry standard 3.3V I/Os on the expansion headers with easy-to-use 0.1" spacing
    * On-chip Ethernet, not off of USB
    * Easier to clone thanks to larger pitch on BGA devices (0.8mm vs. 0.4mm), no package-on-package memories, standard DDR2 vs. LPDDR, integrated USB PHYs and more.

What is the BeagleBone capable of doing? They are glad you asked...

At over 1.5 billion Dhrystone operations per second and vector floating point arithmetic operations, the BeagleBone is capable of not just interfacing to all of your robotics motor drivers, location or pressure sensors and 2D or 3D cameras, but also running OpenCV, OpenNI and other image collection and analysis software to recognize the objects around your robot and the gestures you might make to control it. Through HDMI, VGA or LCD expansion boards, it is capable of decoding and displaying multiple video formats utilizing a completely open source software stack and synchronizing playback over Ethernet or USB with other BeagleBoards to create massive video walls. If what you are into is building 3D printers, then the BeagleBone has the extensive PWM capabilities, the on-chip Ethernet and the 3D rendering and manipulation capabilities all help you eliminate both your underpowered microcontroller-based controller board as well as that PC from your basement.

Read more details >>

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FTDI adds touch capability to its open source platform

Future Technology Devices International (FTDI) has added a touch control input/output application boards for its Vinco development module, writes Richard Wilson.

The Vinco Touch Key applications board, which the supplier calls a shield mates with the Vinco motherboard, and incorporates a STMicroelectronics STMPE821 8-channel general purpose input/output (GPIO) capacitive touch key controller IC.

The shield has 8 touch keys which employ a capacitive sensing technology, responding to physical input stimulus from the user. It also has a set of 4 push buttons and 5 GPIO-controlled LED indicators.

The touch keys are capable of passing input data to the Vinculum-II (VNC2) dual port USB host/device controller IC on the Vinco module via an I2C bus, where it can be processed by the IC's integrated 16-bit microcontroller core.

Access to the Vinco pulse width modulation (PWM) interface is also available on the header pins. The shield requires a 5V supply, which can be drawn from an external supply or through the Vinco motherboard connections.
 
"The new Touch Key shield demonstrates the Vinco platform's ability to utilise the Android Open Accessory initiative, so that devices using the Android operating system, such as tablet PCs, can control items of external hardware through a human machine interface (HMI), over USB," said Dave Sroka, global product director at FTDI.

The shield is supplied in a 55.4 mm x 68.6 mm  form-factor, the established format of the Arduino Duemilanove and Uno boards.

There are free software libraries, drivers and source code. An Integrated Development Environment (IDE) includes a code editor, 'C' compiler, assembler and debugger.

The FTDI Vinco Touch Key shield is available at a cost of $33.75 for single units.
 
More information is available for download at:
http://www.ftdichip.com/Support/Documents/DataSheets/Modules/DS_Vinco.pdf

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I can't believe someone makes... a "Shut-up" device

When the person next to you on the train or the bus insists on talking loudly into a phone about what's for dinner or who was drunkest last night, or you're on an early train home and it coincides with chucking out time for the local sixth form college and dozens of boisterous teenagers have to talk across each other at 90db, wouldn't you just love one of these...

 

Japanese researchers Kazutaka Kurihara (National Institute of Advanced Science and Technology) and Koji Tsukada (Ochanomizu University) have invented a "SpeechJammer".

 

It looks a bit like a speed-gun, but when you point it at a person's mouth peace and quiet dewscends.  It records the speaker's voice through a directional microphone, adds a 0.2 second delay and fires it straight back at the speaker.

Human brains need instant feedback and the continuous "echo" of their voice disrupts the thought process and brings "target" to a stop.

It may be hard to believe that someone makes these, but as a commuter I think I want one!

Source: Gizmag

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When you can't find the camera you want

Sponsored by Digi-Key
Gadget Master features cool, homemade electronic gadgets proudly brought to us--by you!

Complete with build instructions for the design engineer who likes the silly side of inventing things and enjoys building stuff in his and her spare time, these gadgets range from highly silly and impractical to extraordinarily inspirational for your own engineering design work.

Why not submit your own pride and joy for publication in Gadget Master? Send us your project details here.

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Robot helicopters perform James Bond tune

Sponsored by Digi-Key
Gadget Master features cool, homemade electronic gadgets proudly brought to us--by you!

Complete with build instructions for the design engineer who likes the silly side of inventing things and enjoys building stuff in his and her spare time, these gadgets range from highly silly and impractical to extraordinarily inspirational for your own engineering design work.

Why not submit your own pride and joy for publication in Gadget Master? Send us your project details here.

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Let the latest Gadget Master posts come to you, with RSS

The best way to get the very latest Gadget Master posts as soon as they are published? RSS!

And it's not just Gadget Master. Check out all the RSS feeds that are available for Electronics Weekly content. The feed for Latest News, for example, can be found here.

There are 12 Electronics Weekly feeds you can tap into:
News
Jobs
Products

(Blogs)
Mannerisms
LED Luminaries
Gadget Master
Made by Monkeys
Electro-ramblings
Directive Decoder
Tech Startups
Open Source Engineering
Parallel lines

To use an ElectronicsWeekly.com RSS feed you simply need to download and install a RSS reader. Alternatively RSS functionality is built into the personalised areas of sites such as Google & Yahoo, or in Internet browsers such as IE7 and Mozilla Firefox.

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication, by the way. And if you are unfamiliar with this technology, just check out the What is RSS section of our RSS page. electronics news

Wind River offers Qt Commercial on VxWorks

Wind River has collaborated with developer of Qt for desktop and embedded development Digia to offer platform support for the Qt Commercial development framework on Wind River's VxWorks real-time operating system (RTOS).

Qt Commercial is a cross-platform user interface (UI) and application framework with tools for the creation and deployment of applications for desktop and embedded platforms.

his collaboration opens the way for developers across a range of market segments including industrial, medical, and aerospace and defence to design and deploy rich UIs using the Qt development framework running seamlessly on VxWorks.

The Qt Commercial development framework in combination with VxWorks will support graphical user interface (GUI) development and standardisation across projects, revisions and organizations within the enterprise.

In addition, it will enable the users of VxWorks to create differentiated and user-appealing devices with advanced interactive GUIs and added support for 3D and 2D graphics through OpenGL ES and OpenVG.

Qt Commercial support will be offered on VxWorks 6.9 and subsequent versions, and will be available on selected Intel, Freescale and Texas Instruments platforms. Qt Commercial support for VxWorks will be available in a beta version based on the Qt Commercial 4.8.1 release.

Digia will be demonstrating Qt UI applications running on VxWorks platforms at Embedded World 2012, next week.

Richard Wilson

Self-balancing unicycle - the one true way!

This gadget may not yet be weatherproof enough for your daily commute in the UK, but for a pop to the shops for icecream on a sunny afternoon the Focus Designs self balancing unicycle, SBU V2.0 is a real treat.

The company reports that it's increasing production "to meet a quickly growing demand", with a lead time of 8-12 weeks.

The cycle is gyro stabilised, battery-powered and driven by an accelerometer, and the manufacturers claim green credentials for it too.

The SBU control unit basically controls the forward/backward motion and the rider controls the left/right balance - lean forward to go faster and lean backwards to stop makes that part of the ride entirely intuitive.

Focus Design's website says:

"The powerful 1000 Watt BLDC hub motor propels the rider forwards and backwards at up to 10 MPH. This advanced motor is built right into the wheel and is maintenance free. The SBU electronic balance control module is integrated into the wheel itself. The SBU control module performs several critical functions, including motor speed control, motor torque control, and regenerative braking. we've increased the number of sensors to seven for the SBU Version 2.0 which gives a smoother ride, a more accurate balance response and improved turning. Of course the most notable thing inside the SBU is the battery itself, our LiFePO4 lithium-ion nano-phosphate battery is powerful, safe, lightweight and able to take you more than 12 miles between charges."

Specifications:
    * Style: 1-seat, open-top, single-wheel-drive electric self balancing unicycle.
    * Drivetrain: Direct drive, variable speed with electronic motor control.
    * Motor: Permanent magnet brushless DC motor with variable drive.
    * Efficiency: 85%
    * Throttle: Rider lean detection determines speed and direction.
    * Chassis: High strength 7005 aluminum frame.
    * Seat: Deluxe gel unicycle saddle, adjustable height.
    * Suspension: The tire and your body.
    * Wheel: Heavy duty alloy hub motor.
    * Tire: Quality high PSI. Size: 20?x2.125?
    * Brakes: 1000W regenerative braking via the hub motor.
    * Speed: About 10 mph (depending on the rider's weight)
    * Range: About 12 miles (depending on the terrain)
    * Battery Life: Over 1000 cycles.
    * Battery: Custom high quality LiFePO4 lithium-ion phosphate 38.4 volt battery.
    * Full Charge Time: About 2 hours.
    * Charger: Custom international 2A fast charger. 100 to 240VAC.
    * Built: Camas, Washington USA

Dimensions:
    * Overall length (in. / mm) 20.0 / 508.0
    * Overall width - pedals folded: (in. / mm) 10.3 / 261.9
    * Overall width - pedals ready to ride: (in. / mm) 17.0 / 431.8
    * Overall height: (in. / mm) 34.5 / 876.3
    * Curb weight (lbs/kgs) 29 / 13
    * Leg Room (in./mm) unlimited / unlimited
    * Front Head Room (in./mm) unlimited / unlimited
    * Front Shoulder Room (in./mm) unlimited / unlimited

Find out more about it at http://focusdesigns.com/design/

Sue Proud

The Dead Platform Graveyard - mobile lessons to learn

Falling within the purview of "good ideas, bad execution", here's an interesting article that tries to take an overview of what makes a platform fail, when it comes to mobile devices. And there have been a lot of failed platforms...

The MD of VisionMobile, Andreas Constantinou, enumerates the more than 25 platforms that could be  classed as failed, from Meego and Aria (?) to UIQ and Prism...

He begins:

2011 turned out to be open hunting season for mobile platforms, with the MeeGo, webOS and LiMo projects coming to an end.

MeeGo, webOS and LiMo, together with Windows Mobile and Symbian are just the tip of the dead OS iceberg. The last 10 years have seen numerous companies launch operating systems or platforms for mobile devices, most of which have been fallen under the media radar. The table below lists all known mobile platforms that have died or are a 'zombie' (semi-dead) state - that's all 26 of them, from Access Linux Platform to Windows Mobile.

It is worth checking out the table - The Dead Platform Graveyard - a definitive looking summary.

The platforms failed for a combination of reasons such as cost of ownership, conflicting revenue models, lack of network effects, and high adoption barriers...

For example, discussing each of these factors in turn, when it comes to "network effects, he says:

It was Apple that proved how network effects - the positive feedback loop between app developers and users - can lead to enormous demand-side economies of scale. It was the power of well-oiled network effects that made Nokia realize that "it had to go to developers" (and not wait for developers to go to Nokia) before eventually losing the Symbian battle against Android and iOS.

But enough of failure. What is the success factor of modern platforms?

Firstly, Andreas  software DNA, that is a company with resources, processes and values routed in the PC or Internet world where developers, not OEMs are the platform's primary customer. Secondly, a successful platform vendor needs to have large pockets due to the billions of dollars in investment needed to build a stable and advanced software foundation, while attracting developers to the platform. Note that the bubble size in the chart shows last relative size of 4 quarters of vendor revenues.

Read the full blog post >>

Linux distributions, in graphical form

Thanks to Steve Bush, our Technology Eduitor, for flagging this amazing graphic. Ever wondered what a document of Linux distros would look like, in graphical form?

Check out the Wikipedia page for List of Linux distributions. Specifically, check out http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/8c/Gldt.svg

And there's anoher one for the Debian family tree.

Scan negatives with a DSLR and toilet-rolls...

Just like the LockCracking robot, this one is a project featured in Wired.com's dependable GadgetLab. The headline brings back fond memories of Blue Peter and its toilet rolls and sticky-back plaster - Scan Old Negatives with a DSLR and Toilet-Paper Tubes

Photographer, and Gadget Master, Claus Thiim has described a neat way to scan hundreds of nostalgic negatives and slides.

Charlie Sorrel writes:

Thiim's method eschews slow, bulky scanners and doesn't even think about mail-in scanning services. He uses the fastest scanner he has: his DSLR. Onto the front are mounted an old manual focus (90mm) lens, an extension tube (which moves the lens forward and allows closer macro focusing). Then things get creative, with a couple of toilet-paper tubes taped to an old filter with the glass removed, along with a plastic 35mm slide-mount on the end. The mount is opened at the sides to let the film slide through.

To scan, you just move the film through and snap a frame. If your camera has live-view, you can even check framing and focus from the comfort of the rear screen.

If the focusing distance is not enough, you can always add another toilet roll!

Read the full post >>

Read the original post on DIYphotography.net >>

Impossible Object #29: A table with two legs

Here's a bit of fun, and we haven't had an Impossible Object for a while... How about a table with just two legs?

This one is from the designer Shay Carmon, who also brought us the defibrillator toaster! When you see it, of course, it all seems obvious...

How does it compare a previous Impossible Object, the Liquid Table? What this one needs for adornment is a liquid lamp, an inside-out salt shaker, and the classic coffee pot, which kicked this whole series off!..

Previous Impossible Objects we've covered:

• the Doll's House computer
• the parallel of time clock
• the upside down buildings
  
• 
  
• the wall-sized light switch
  
• 
  
• the liquid table
  
• 
  
• the liquid lamp
• 
  
• the foetal bed
• 
  
• the flying carpet sofa
  
• 
  
• the electric butterflies
  
• 
  
• the wall stairs
  
• 
  
• the other dimension storage
  
• 
  
• the Colt electric guitar
  
• 
  
• the piano stairs
  
• 
  
• the clock that draws the time
  
• 
  
• the pocket light folding bulb
  
• 
  
• the shattering door
  
• 
  
• the wooden mirror
  
• 
  
• the inside-out salt shaker
• the Wingdings keyboard
• 
  
• the door lock maze
• the dark lamp
• the global chess board
• the curved keyboard
• the implausible plug
  
• 
  
• the infinite tap
• 
  
• the simplified calculator
• 
  
• the electric hammer
• 
  
• the signature coffee pot

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Video: Get to grips with the BeagleBone

We're all for BeagleBoards here on Gadget Master and this is one I meant to flag before - Texas Instrument's system has a little brother: the BeagleBone, powered by the company's Sitara ARM Cortex-A8 processor.

"It builds in the most loved features of the BeagleBoard but has shrunk the size and price while adding more I/O connections," boasts TI in the video below. The RRP is $89.

To get started, simply plug it into your PC (Windows MacOs or Linux) and you can begin development... It will appear as a Flash drive and you will be able to extract the files to get you going.

Features of the hardware spec highlighted by BeagleBoard.org include:
    * Board size: 3.4" x 2.1"
    * Shipped with 2GB microSD card with the Angstrom Distribution with node.js and Cloud9 IDE
    * Single cable development environment with built-in FTDI-based serial/JTAG and on-board hub to give the same cable simultaneous access to a USB device port on the target processor
    * Industry standard 3.3V I/Os on the expansion headers with easy-to-use 0.1" spacing
    * On-chip Ethernet, not off of USB
    * Easier to clone thanks to larger pitch on BGA devices (0.8mm vs. 0.4mm), no package-on-package memories, standard DDR2 vs. LPDDR, integrated USB PHYs and more.

What is the BeagleBone capable of doing? They are glad you asked...

At over 1.5 billion Dhrystone operations per second and vector floating point arithmetic operations, the BeagleBone is capable of not just interfacing to all of your robotics motor drivers, location or pressure sensors and 2D or 3D cameras, but also running OpenCV, OpenNI and other image collection and analysis software to recognize the objects around your robot and the gestures you might make to control it. Through HDMI, VGA or LCD expansion boards, it is capable of decoding and displaying multiple video formats utilizing a completely open source software stack and synchronizing playback over Ethernet or USB with other BeagleBoards to create massive video walls. If what you are into is building 3D printers, then the BeagleBone has the extensive PWM capabilities, the on-chip Ethernet and the 3D rendering and manipulation capabilities all help you eliminate both your underpowered microcontroller-based controller board as well as that PC from your basement.

Read more details >>

Video: The Four-bit Maze challenge, via Arduino

This is a good one, from Gadget Master Oskar van Deventer. He had a vision for a mechanical or electronic puzzle without a screen and without lights, purely tactile and purely mechanical...

Based on an Arduino UNO microcontroller, it's programmed for ten different levels of difficulty, with an Arduino Motor Shield operating the motorfaders, reports Engadget.

He writes:

The Four Bit Maze is an electronic mechanical puzzle that is 100% tactile. The object of the puzzle is to move all four sliders from the "0" position to the "1" position. 

Each challenge has only 16 binary states, and the operation of each challenge is 100% deterministic without any hidden states. Some challenges are easy and playful, whereas others are fiendishly hard.

How does it work? Check out the video below:

If you wish, you can buy the device for €435 from Oskar directly.

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Well, don't stress, help is at hand. If you can't come to us, we'll come to you!

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Go on, sign up - it will be the best decision you've ever made!

Most read Gadget Master posts in January

Well, the New Year is here and is already a month underway... Time to ask the question: which posts have proved the most popular on Gadget Master among your peers, in January?

Well, the answer covers IO boards, LED displays, the Raspberry Pi and a whistle-activated light switch...

Let's take it in reverse order:

10. How to build a rotating LED display

9. Build your own wand based barcode scanner

8. A DIY Android Gadget Starter Kit

7. How to build a whistle-activated light switch

6. Android advances to centre stage

5. Keep your property where you can see it

4. Build your own LED cube

3. The IOIO Android breakout board competition

2. Build your own laser harp

1. Raspberry Pi #0001 goes for £3,500 on eBay

Let the latest blog posts come to you, instantly. Get the Gadget Master RSS feed, delivering new entries as they are posted, whether to your browser or favourite Feed Reader.

Create your own Terminator Arm!

Are you up to the challenge of creating your own Terminator Arm, complete with LED lighting effect?!

I ordered an Android IOIO board from SparkFun recently - for the current Gadget Master compo - and this tutorial on the same site caught my eye.

It's a tutorial by one "T Zero", taking us through the creation of afore mentioned robotic arm....

They begin:

Being a solder jockey, I'm not the best at programming and making things light up and blink. But, I am a wiz with a soldering iron. I enjoy making sculptures and little objects you can set at the edge of your desk to strike up a conversation. For this tutorial, I was trying to come up with the best sculpture or desk ornament - something every nerd or geek like myself would be proud to put on display. Something that didn't cost much and was a good rainy afternoon project. This project was done with trashed parts I found around the shop, and if your workstation looks anything like mine, you should be able to find these or similar parts.

The full list of parts is as follows:

• Buzzer              
• Standoff
• Pogo Pins x2
• 10k Trimpot x2       
• Machine pin headers
• 16MHz crystal
• Reed switch
• Any PTH LED

And as pictured:

He takes you through the various stages of the project, with pictures. For example:

"Once you have soldered the reed switch into place, slide the stand off over both LED leads. This is probably the most difficult part. In order to solder to the stand off, you need to hold a glob of solder on it, heating it up."

Check out the full tutorial >>

Not-So-Smartphones of 2011

Not sure about about this one, the premises or the conclusion (that all older Android phones should be considered 'orphans' and that Android should be identified as the most vulnerable platform)... 

Anyway, starting at the top, the Mannerisms blog recently featured a Top Ten of "riskiest phones", which immediately caught my eye for Made By Monkeys.

The idea is that certain phones - most notably Android phones - are no longer getting software updates, which means known vulnerabilities or bugs are going unfixed or unpatched.

Bit9 - a company that specialises in application Whitelisting services - has identified the "Dirty Dozen" of such phones, in a snappily entitled blog, Orphan Android - The Not-So-Smartphones of 2011. Android, specifically, is in their sights:

The company writes:

Unlike Apple iOS, RIM Blackberry or Windows Phone, the phone manufacturer - not the software vendor - is responsible for providing Android software updates to their smartphone.  Phone carriers also inject themselves into the process, selling further customized models and sometimes charging data usage for software updates. The result is chaos. As anyone who has ever owned an Android phone can attest, waiting for your phone to receive the latest Android release is like walking through prickly bushes - slow, painful, and sometimes buggy.

They identify 'Orphan Android' devices as "phones running any Android OS 2.3.3 or less."

Which were Bit9's "Dirty Dozen" Android phones?

1. Samsung Galaxy Mini

2. HTC Desire

3. Sony Ericsson Xperia X10

4. Sanyo Zio

5. HTC Wildfire

6. Samsung Epic 4G

7. LG Optimus S

8. Samsung Galaxy S

9. Motorola Droid X

10. LG Optimus One

11. Motorola Droid 2

12. HTC Evo 4G

Instead of a Dirty Dozen they could have had a Baker's Dozen because there at number 13, they say, was the Apple iPhone (version 4 and older models)...

Bit9 writes:

The majority of smartphones worldwide are running the Android operating system. The open nature of the platform has enabled both innovation and creativity in the mobile space. However, the distribution model adopted by phone manufacturers and their carriers has created a chaotic and insecure environment where it can take several months for important updates to be distributed, if at all. At the heart of the issue, providing software updates for Android phones is currently the responsibility of the individual hardware vendors along with their different carriers.

This would be akin to buying a PC from Dell and relying on Dell to coordinate with your home Internet provider, instead of Microsoft, to update your Windows software. With so many PC makers and Internet providers, the result would be a complete fragmentation of the market, with different computers having different versions of Windows depending on where they purchased the PC and where they live. That is exactly what has occurred within the Android smartphone market. In many cases, the only recourse a consumer has, if they want the latest and most secure software, is to purchase a new phone. 

You can read more on their research on their website - Orphan Android: Not-So-Smartphones of 2011 (PDF)

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Most Read in January - The Made By Monkeys popularity stakes

Show us the Best of the Worst! If you've had a recent run-in with a cheaply-made, inferior product, tell us about it and you could win a shoddy, badly-made Made by Monkeys T-shirt! See how to submit an example.

Let the latest Made By Monkeys posts come to you, with RSS

The best way to get the very latest Made By Monkeys posts as soon as they are published? RSS!

And it's not just Made By Monkeys. Check out all the RSS feeds that are available for Electronics Weekly content. The feed for Latest News, for example, can be found here.

There are 12 Electronics Weekly feeds you can tap into:
News
Jobs
Products

(Blogs)
Mannerisms
LED Luminaries
Gadget Master
Made by Monkeys
Electro-ramblings
Directive Decoder
Tech Startups
Open Source Engineering
Parallel lines

To use an ElectronicsWeekly.com RSS feed you simply need to download and install a RSS reader. Alternatively RSS functionality is built into the personalised areas of sites such as Google & Yahoo, or in Internet browsers such as IE7 and Mozilla Firefox.

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication, by the way. And if you are unfamiliar with this technology, just check out the What is RSS section of our RSS page. electronics news