Apple contemplates head-mounted iPhone display, America cringes

We're pretty sure this isn't an April Fool's joke, and we're pretty sure that it could be. Essentially an iPhone dock that sits on your face like a pair of glasses, "Head-Mounted Display Apparatus for Retaining a Portable Electronic Device with Display" details a headset that contains a stereo display and either a camera or a window for your phone's camera. Also included in the patent application is a microphone, speaker, batteries, and an accelerometer for detecting the user's head movements. Something like this would be great for augmented realityapplications -- and something like this would make ever getting a date that much more difficult. We'll let you know if this one ever makes it past the drawing board, folks.

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Robot waiters serve food and dance moves in Thailand, secretly plotting humiliation reveng

The Far East just gets more surreal each day. For instance, how about a Japanese restaurant in Thailand served by robots? You can thank Lapassarad Thanaphant for her 30 million baht ($927,600) investment in the Bangkok-based Hajime restaurant and its four motorised servants from Japan. The brave souls who dare to enter can place orders on touchscreens, and in return watch a lanky humanoid deliver the dishes, followed by some slick dance moves if its not too busy serving others. Oh, don't worry, these samurais are tied to a track so they can barely reach you, plus you get to cook your own food in the style of Shabu-Shabu (Japanese hot pot) or BBQ, so enjoy your freedom before they take over your cookingas well. Videos after the break.

Apple's A4 SoC faces Qualcomm Snapdragon in knock-down-drag-out benchmarking test

Up until now, a shroud of mystery has surrounded Apple's custom engineered A4 system-on-chip; we know it's clocked at 1GHz, likely tied to Apple's prior acquisition of P.A. Semi and manufactured by Samsung. Outside of that, the only other knowledge we've gained has come not from the mouth of Cupertino, but from the extracting wizards over at iFixit. The A4 contains at least three layers of circuitry layered on top of each other, though it's packaged just like the iPhone processor: microprocessor in one package and two memory modules in the other package. We also learned that the iPad RAM is actually inside of the A4 processor package, and we're expecting to learn even more from those folks in the coming days. All that said, there's still much debate on whether Apple's own silicon can stand up to Qualcomm's heralded 1GHz Snapdragon, the chip powering Google's Nexus One among other things. AnandTech pitted their iPad against the iPhone 3GS (600MHz ARM Cortex A8) and the aforesaid Nexus One (1GHz Snapdragon QSD8250), using a number of website loads as the primary benchmark. Overall, the A4 proved to be around 10 to 30 percent faster, though it's impossible to say what effect the operating system has on things. Have a gander at that source link for more -- we get the feeling the competitions have just begun.