Mobile app analytics research firm (yes, one exists) Disitmo has released some interesting statistics about the pricing structure for all major app platforms. Among the findings is the fact that more than half of Android’s apps are free.

57% of all apps on the Android Market, according to Distimo. That’s nearly double the level of any other app store. Palm’s ratio of free apps ranked second at 32%. As for the iPhone? One in four of its apps are free. And the platform with the least free offering is Nokia’s Ovi, with 85% of its apps costing money.

These numbers open up some interesting thoughts. It would seem to suggest that the majority of Android developers take advantage of the open-source platform and create their own apps just for the fun of it. Meanwhile, others may see it as a less-commercially-viable outlet for premium content.

Distimo also crunched together the average price of all paid apps among the platforms. Blackberry’s apps topped the chart, with the average app costing $8.26. It comes as no surprise as the platform with the most business and enterprise consumers. Windows Mobile was second with an average app price of $6.99. All other operating systems clocked in at under $4.

Source : http://www.tgdaily.com

It looks like the company Haleron thinks we need a tablet in our lives and decided to enter the game with their 7″ Android 1.6 based iLet Mini HAL. In Malaysia, it named Ezy Ebook.  It isn’t the most powerful device; running a 600MHz VIA CPU with 128MB of RAM but for a low $199 price tag you can’t really ask for too much. The Haleron iLet Mini HAL will also have 2GB of onboard memory as well as 10GB of “cloud” storage for all of your stuff.

I think that this device is compelling especially considering the low price. Also, the size seems perfect to me. It’s about the size of a 7″ x 5″ sheet of tablet paper making it just the right size for entering text on the portrait keyboard. It also would be great for games and reading. I doubt that this device will be taken in by the masses (anyone ever hear of Haleron?) but it could prove to be quite the geek device.

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Building your own telescope is a fun optical experiment and it can be used to get a better view of the moon and other distant objects.

Materials:

• Two lenses with different focal lengths (We recommend 150 mm and 500 mm double convex lenses.)
• Paper towel roll
• 1 piece of paper or cardstock
• Tape

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Telescopes come in different sizes, designs and styles. The usefullness of the power of the instrument is limited by the size of the lens or primary mirror. The table below summarizes the three main typs of optical telescopes. Radio telescopes use the reflecting design, however, they focus radio waves instead of light.

Galileo used the refracting type of telescope to discover the moons of Jupiter. Most large observatories use the reflectors. These are sometimes known as “Newtonian” telescopes named after the inventor Isaac Newton.

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When describing distances on the scale of our Solar System, conventional units of measure are not conveniently sized. Miles are too small, and light years are too large, to permit easily compared numbers. For example, the distance between the Sun and Earth is about 93,000,000 miles; between the Sun and Pluto is about 3,700,000,000 miles. Comparing those two numbers, it is not easily seen that Pluto is about 40 times as far from the Sun as Earth is.

The Astronomical Unit (AU) represents a distance of Earth’s average distance to the Sun, or about 93,000,000 miles. Giving the distance between the Sun and Pluto as 40 AU allows the use of smaller, more easily comparable, numbers. Similarly, a table showing the distance between the Sun and Mercury as .39 AU gives a much better idea of that planet’s position in the Solar System than does 36,000,000 miles.

So just as it is more convenient to give distances between cities in miles vs. feet, the AU can be used for measurement in the scale of tens to hundreds of millions of miles.
Source : http://www.physlink.com