The mobile phone operating system world was rocked recently by the announcement that Nokia had acquired all of the shares of Symbian that it didn’t already own, and that it planned to transition the OS to an open-source licensing model. How significant is this move?
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Having recently been bit by the Netflix STB bug, I couldn’t resist checking out Roku’s latest SoundBridge “network music player.” In less than 10 minutes of fooling around with the device after its arrival, I was ensnared!
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Motorola-backed startup Camero has introduced a handheld radar device that can “see” through walls. Weighing about six pounds, the laptop computer-sized gadget is intended for use by military, law enforcement, fire, and rescue personnel.
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Microvision will showcase a tiny laser projector — small enough to be embedded in a mobile phone — at the CTIA Wireless show next week in Las Vegas. The company claims its mobile pico-projector technology produces highly focused DVD-quality WVGA (848×480 pixels) images of up to 100 inches in size (depending on distance).
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Five key trends are converging to make unified communications (UC) the “next significant frontier for technology growth,” according to IBM. The company expects the global UC market to be worth $17 billion by 2011, it said in a statement this week.
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MIT’s Technology Review magazine has just published its annual list of the top ten emerging technologies. Dubbed the TR10, these “revolutionary innovations” are “poised to have a dramatic impact” on computing, medicine, nanotechnology, our energy infrastructure, and more, say the magazine’s editors.
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Polymer Vision is demonstrating a 3G HSDPA tri-band phone with a unique, rollable e-paper display this week at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. The “Readius” device combines normal feature phone functions along with e-reader capabilities.
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Using its Deep Space Network, NASA will beam the Beatles song, “Across the Universe,” into deep space today at 7 p.m. EST. The transmission commemorates both the agency’s 50th anniversary and the 40th anniversary of the song’s first recording.
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NXP Semiconductor and Purple Labs have announced a reference design aimed at enabling the manufacture of 3G Linux feature phones that could be sold to mobile operators at under $100. Touted features of the “Purple Magic” phone include video telephony, music playback, high-speed Internet browsing, and video streaming.
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The growth in mobile phone shipments will slow slightly this year due to a “tougher” economic environment, but will still increase by 10 percent, to 1.24 billion units, a leading market research firm forecasts.
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The unoccupied radio spectrum between broadcast TV channels may soon become a source of low-cost, ubiquitous broadband connectivity. Earlier this month, the U.S. Federal Communications Commission began Phase II testing of prototype “white space devices” (WSDs), to determine whether they can operate without interfering with the wireless devices commonly used in homes, offices, and public locations.
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Redpine Signals Inc. has introduced what it claims is the first handheld device-oriented single-chip controller to conform to the IEEE’s 802.11n Draft 2.0 standard. The “Lite-Fi” RS9110 consumes under 250 mW during receive operations at the maximum link rate of 65 Mbps, according to the company.
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Boeing’s soon-to-be-deployed 787 “Dreamliner” will, among other state-of-the-art features, keep passengers jacked-in to the Web so they can keep up with email and other Internet-enabled pursuits. This new level of connectivity, however, has Federal Aviation Administration officials worrying that the 787’s control systems could become a target for hackers.
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WiMAX and Mobile WiMAX are poised to ramp up rapidly over the next five years. Nearly two billion dollars in annual chipset revenues are expected by 2012 — roughly 75 percent from base-station chipsets, and 25 percent from client device chipsets — according to a market study just published by In-Stat.
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In his Jan. 7 keynote talk at CES in Las Vegas, Intel CEO Paul Otellini focused on the continuing disruptive influence of the Internet on consumer electronics and entertainment. These changes create business opportunities for “those who embrace it,” he suggested.
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