September 2006 – Page 3 – Digital-Lifestyles

O2 XDA Stealth PDA Phone Coming Soon

O2 XDA Stealth PDA Phone Coming Soon Slated for an October release is the swish O2 Xda Stealth PDA phone, clad in ‘ebony black’ and featuring a slide-up numerical keypad.

Billed as a “fusion of functionality and versatility,” the tri-band GMS900/1800/1900 phone (but no 3G) is powered by an Intel Xscale PXA 272 Processor running at 416 MHz with a healthy 192 MB Flash ROM and 64MB RAM onboard.

O2 XDA Stealth PDA Phone Coming Soon The front panel is dominated by a 2.4 inch touch screen supporting a resolution of 320 x 240 pixels and 65,000 colours.

There’s a built in 2 mega pixel camera for your snapping pleasure and support for the usual audio formats like MP3,WMA and WAV with MIDI for those plinky-plonky ring tones.

Running on the Windows Mobile 5.0 operating system, the Stealth comes preloaded with Microsoft Office Suite for Mobile devices, and offers built in 802.11b and 802.11g Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 1.2 and USB1.1 for synchronisation.

O2 XDA Stealth PDA Phone Coming Soon A SD card slot takes care of expansion needs, while the 1300 mAh Lithium Ion battery provides a claimed 150 hours of talktime and 4.5 hours of standby time.

Unlike its Blackberry and Palm Treo competitors, there’s no proper QWERTY keyboard, so heavy users will either have to make do with the keypad or get mighty acquainted with the stylus.

The slider-tastic Stealth measures up at a bijou 53 x 110 x 22.5 mm, and weighs just 140g.

C|Net video preview

[Via: New Launches]

Warner Music Strikes Deal With YouTube

Warner Music Strikes Deal With YouTube Warner Music Group has announced a deal with YouTube to distribute music videos, as well as extras such as band interviews, behind-the-scenes footage and artist rockumentaries.

Warner Music’s vast music video library is set to become available with the launch of YouTube’s new content identification and royalty reporting system later this tear.

This comes with reporting and tracking tools to monitor music and video royalties, with YouTube claiming it can automatically identify copyrighted music and video content being uploaded to the site.

The companies hope that this new system will help YouTube get on top of the copyright issues that go hand in hand with video-sharing sites, with uploading punters rarely bothered about seeking the approval of copyright owners.

Uniquely, the system can also grant permission to other YouTube users to use any music from the WMG portfolio within their own videos, although we’re not sure if this will be made available for free or not.

Advertising revenue
YouTube and Warners plan to start sharing advertising revenue generated from running ads “on both WMG music videos and user uploaded videos that incorporate audio and audiovisual works from WMG’s catalog.”

Commenting on the partnership, Warner Music boss Edgar Bronfman said: “Consumer-empowering destinations like YouTube have created a two-way dialogue that will transform entertainment and media forever.”

Warner Music Strikes Deal With YouTube “As user-generated content becomes more prevalent, this kind of partnership will allow music fans to celebrate the music of their favourite artists, enable artists to reach consumers in new ways, and ensure that copyright holders and artists are fairly compensated,” he continued.

Chad Hurley, YouTube’s CEO was clearly an excited chap: “By providing a new distribution opportunity, we are paving the way for media companies to harness the vast financial potential of user-generated content on YouTube. We are thrilled that WMG had the vision to be the first music company, in partnership with its artists, to support the use of their content within user videos and to allow our community to interact with WMG music in new creative ways.”

Legal issues looming?
Of course, his gushing enthusiasm could also be seen an expression of relief as his company finally secures a big name backer to help pay off what must be truly formidable bandwidth bills.

He may also be facing some big legal bills too, as circling record company sharks look set to bite soon over alleged copyright infringements.

Doug Morris, head honcho of Universal Music, the world’s biggest music company, gave his sabre an extra long rattle in the direction of YouTube last week, saying, “We believe these new businesses are copyright infringers and owe us tens of millions of dollars. How we deal with these companies will be revealed shortly.”

With that kind of old fashioned refusal to try and work with new technology that can’t be uninvented, it looks like we might be in for another epic Napster vs The Man-type battle all over again.

YouTube
WMG

ChanSkype: Skype And Asterisk Talk To Each Other

Asterisk And Skype Talk To Each Other A Brazilian company has forged a software bridge between Asterisk and Skype.

Asterisk is an open source VoIP PBX that runs on Linux and other platforms which handles VoIP to VoIP calling as well as calls to landlines. Developed by Mark Spencer it has taken the community by storm, sprouting many tens of thousands of installations world-wide, with a thriving development community.

It can work with traditional telephony systems or POTS (plain old telephone system), with digital systems (ISDN etc) and modern VoIP protocols such as H.323, SIP, MGCP and more.

Digium (set-up by Spencer) now manufactures hardware and offers a commercially supported version of Asterisk known as ABE (Asterisk Binary Edition).

One feature that has been missing is Skype integration (the next version of Asterisk v1.4 supports GoogleTalk using Google’s libjingle library). A Brazilian company has now changed that, with their ChanSkype site.

ChanSkype
Currently the service is in test and you have to utilise ChanSkype’s own Asterisk servers. They offer a “free” trial whereby they allow a SIP connection and then by passing in a Skype address it sets-up a connection to the Skype user.

In the future they will be offering an actual chan_skype that plugs directly into any Asterisk server and can connect to the Skype network.

Of course it’s not quite so simple. The initial release only runs on RedHat’s Fedora Core or CentOS (which means it will probably also run on RedHat Enterprise Server too as CentOS is a clone of that). There must also be an X server running as well as the Skype for Linux client. So ChanSkype just bridges the two systems together.

A dual Xeon 3Ghz with 2 gigs of memory should run 30 simultaneous Skype calls without any noticable degradation of performance.

Pricing has not yet been set, but it will be licensed on a per-channel basis.

There may be licensing problems too as Asterisk modules should normally be available under a GPL license and with source code, but as Skype is proprietry they may get away with it.

Someone really needs to reverse engineer the Skype protocol and then a native chan_skype could be developed, but this is unlikely to happen in the western world as that could be illegal.

It’s a good idea, but really just a straight link into the Skype software which unfortunately is the only way it can be done.

ChanSkype

PDT Eye-Theatre Head-Mounted Multimedia Viewer

PDT Eye-Theatre Head-Mounted Multimedia Viewer If you’ve admired the look of that bloke in Star Trek with the funky sci-fi specs, then maybe the Eye-Theatre glasses might be just the thing for you.

PDT’s Eye-Theatre is a head-mounted multimedia viewer that promises to deliver an “immersive audiovisual environment” – that sounds a bit like what you get after a plateful of magic mushrooms, so we’re already interested.

The headset lets you watch movies in NTSC/PAL/SECAM formats, with the Eye-Theatre employing twin TFT LCD screens to display 320 x 240 video resolution – perfect for the video iPod’s output (you can plug the unit straight in).

While they’re not the first to do this, the makers claim that the display creates a similar effect to watching a big 50″ screen from around 2.5m with your eyes tricked into focussing at the same distance, so you’re not going to start suffering eyestrain.

There’s a pair of high-quality stereo earphones incorporated in the design, and to keep the unit secure on your noggin, a variety of nose-pieces promise a good fit, from kids to adults.

PDT Eye-Theatre Head-Mounted Multimedia Viewer Weighing just 78g, the Eye-Theatre should be good for eight hours between charges (USB charger supplied), and anyone desperate to get that cyber-berk look can pre-order their video glasses from PDT’s website for £149.99, with the launch expected in mid-October.

The unit is also compatible with other video devices such as the new Microsoft Zune, TV,VCR,DVD, video gaming systems, camcorders any any other video source with Video-Out.

Eye-Theatre

SMS m300 “World’s First Truly Mobile GSM Watch Phone”

SMS m300 Dick Tracy had one and when I was a kid I would have swapped my entire collection of 2000AD comics for one, but users down under in Oz will soon be able to start talking into their wrist watches and not face arrest on psychiatric charges.

Designed by SMS Developments Ltd in Australia, the m300 is claimed to be the world’s first “truly mobile GSM watch phone” with their Flash-tastic website confirming a release date of Dec 1st 2006 (excuse us while we decline to hold our breath on that one).

Just like a R’n’B star talking about his music, the makers are promising to take mobile communications “to a whole new level,” with the watch offering 70 hours standby time, full SMS functionality, Bluetooth compatibility and USB connectivity for software/ringtone uploads.

There’s also a 99 number memory storage, 40 embedded real tones and what they’re describing as a “sleek sophisticated design” (we beg to differ here – it looks more like the kind of cheapo watch you might win from those annoying funfair ‘grab’ machines – you know, the ones that always drop your prize in the last bleedin’ second).

SMS m300 Anyway, back to the M300, the specs say that it offers GSM/GPRS 900/1800/1900 MHZ connectivity, Bluetooth (with bluetooth headset for voice call only), a teensy-weensy 65K OLED (0.9″) display and “Speaker Phone Text base UI,” whatever that is.

In fairness, compared to some of the arm-dragging slabs of metal that have been served up as ‘watch-sized’ in the past, this actually is more or less the right size, albeit a slightly chunky affair at 43 x 56 x 14.8 mm.

The phone should work in the USA, Europe and Asia although whether it actually makes it out of Australia is anyone’s guess.

SMS m300 I guess the bit that the designers forgot about is that talking into a watch is going to make you look distinctly odd and that watch sales have been steadily declining as users are preferring to use the time displays on their phones, PDAs and MP3 players…

Oh, and as for the ‘world’s first’ claim, The Inquirer has already pointed out that Samsung announced such a phone at the CeBIT show, Hanover, some years ago.

SMS Developments

CSR Does Voice over WiFi Chipset: £11

CSR does Voice over WiFi CSR, a chipset design lab in Cambridge that specialises in radio, has released a voice over WiFi design (UniVox) which a bill of materials of around £11.00.

The reference design utilises CSR’s UniFi-1 Portable chip which supports 802.11b and g, while also supporting various security protocols such as 802.11i, WEP, WPA and WPA2. The design also incorporates CSR’s MAP (Multimedia Applications Processor) which is a RISC CPU which has DSP (digital signal processing) capability that allows it to support QoS (quality of service), various codecs, echo suppressions and intelligent power management.

A system built using the platform and a standard 1500mAh battery should support talk times of 8 hours and 250 hours standby time. Using WMM-PS (which requires an access point that also supports WMM-PS) talk time is extended to 40 hours and standby to 400 hours.

CSR does Voice over WiFi Both SIP (version 2) and IAX2 (Inter Asterisk Protocol v2) are supported. IAX is useful in NAT environments as it can traverse NAT without any special software, while SIP can be a complete headache.

If the chip is adopted, a multitude of new, very affordable handsets could soon hit the market further increasing the penetration of VoIP.

CSR

Leica, Canon, Olympus And Pentax Roll Out New Cameras

Leica, Canon, Olympus And Pentax Roll Out New Cameras There’s been a flurry of interesting announcements from some of the photographic bigwigs leading up to the Photokina ‘World of Imaging’ Trade Show, which is held every two years at the Cologne Exhibition Centre, Germany.

The show runs from 26th September to 1st October, and we can expect further product announcements in the build up to the opening day.

As well as the fantastic Leica M8 camera we’ve already drooled and dribbled over, Leica also revealed three other cameras, all based on current Panasonic models.

Leica, Canon, Olympus And Pentax Roll Out New Cameras Leica DIGILUX 3 dSLR
The DIGILUX 3 dSLR – which is essentially a Panasonic DMC-L1 – opts for the Four Thirds system instead of Leica’s own reflex lens mount, and comes with the innovative 7.5 megapixel LiveMOS sensor for real-time, live photo previewing.

Bundled in with the package is a LEICA D 14 – 50 mm ASPH (F2.8 – F3.5) lens with built-in optical image stabilization.

Leica, Canon, Olympus And Pentax Roll Out New Cameras Leica V-LUX 1
Based on Panasonic’s DMC-FZ50, the V-LUX1 looks to be a well-specified enthusiast digicam, with a beefy ten megapixel CCD, a 12x optically image stabilised lens (35 – 420 mm equiv., with mechanically linked zoom), a tilting 2.0″ LCD monitor, electronic viewfinder, flash hot-shoe and full manual controls.

Movie clips can be recorded at 848 x 480 (16:9), 30 / 10 fps, with ISO options running from 80 up to 800ISO (with a high sensitivity 3200 mode).

Leica D-LUX 3
The ultra-compact D-LUX 3 is based on the eagerly awaited Panasonic LX-2 camera, and sports a ten megapixel 16:9 ratio CCD, Leica 4x wide angle optical zoom lens (28 to 112 mm equiv.) with optical image stabilization and a 2.8″ 16:9 ratio LCD monitor.

All the cameras have had image processing adjustments as defined by Leica, and, of course, spot that lovely red badge that says to the world, “I have considerably more money than yow.”

(See DPreview.com for more Leica specs)

New Canon cameras
Canon have also rocked up with a full trolley of new products, with the most interesting of the bunch being the long overdue upgrade to the Powershot G6 which was launched as long ago as August 2004.

Canon PowerShot G7
The PowerShot G7 features a 10 megapixel (1/1.8-inch) CCD, a new Digic III processor and a 6x (35-200mm equiv.) image stabilised zoom lens.

The camera comes with a 2.5″ high-resolution LCD – sadly without a swivel-out feature – with wide viewing angle and anti-glare coating and 25 shooting modes including full manual control and 2 custom settings.

There’s also a hot shoe, face detection software and ISO settings up to 1600, but keen photographers will be disappointed to see that there’s no RAW mode. Price is set around $550.

Leica, Canon, Olympus And Pentax Roll Out New Cameras Canon PowerShot SD900
The $450/€450 Canon PowerShot SD900 Digital ELPH (Ixus 900 Ti in Europe), looks natty in its tough titanium finish and comes with Canon’s new Digic III processor, face detection, a 10 megapixel CCD with an ISO range of 80 – 1600.

Movies can be recorded at 1024 x 768 @ 15fps or 640 x 480 @ 30 / 15fps, and the camera offers a 3x optical zoom (37-111mm, 35mm equiv) at f2.8-4.9.

Canon PowerShot SD800 IS
Looking to be a well-specified compact, the SD800 Ixus/ELPH offers shift-type image stabilisation, a large 2.5-inch screen, face detection technology and 7.1MP sensor.

Leica, Canon, Olympus And Pentax Roll Out New Cameras Impressively, the $449 / €449 camera offers a wideangle 3.8x zoom (28-105mm) along with the usual zillions of scene modes.

Canon PowerShot SD40
Finishing off the rollcall of new Canon products, is PowerShot SD40 Digital ELPH (Ixus i7), an upgrade to their popular SD30.

The pocket sized compact comes with the new Digic III processor, ISO 1600, face detection and a 7.2 megapixel CCD and – look out fashionistas! – will be offered in a range of four ‘chic’ new colours.

Leica, Canon, Olympus And Pentax Roll Out New Cameras (See DPreview.com for more Canon specs)

Olympus E-400
Olympus’s new ten megapixel compact digital SLR looks to be a bit of a beaut to our eyes, offering the Supersonic Wave Filter for dust reduction, a 2.5″ LCD monitor, three frames per second continuous shooting and an improved interface.

Coming with a 14-42 mm F3.5-F5.6 kit lens, the dSLR uses the Four Thirds Standard and offers both CompactFlash and xD-Picture Cards storage.

There’s a veritable flotilla of scene modes onboard, as well as a host of advanced features for enthusiasts.

Bizarrely, Olympus have decided not to release this camera in the States.

www.olympus.co.uk

Pentax K10D
Last, but by no means least, is Pentax’s new ten megapixel K10D digital SLR.

This comes with CCD-shift type Shake Reduction, a dust removal system, environment sealing, eleven point auto focus, sixteen segment metering, and a new Sensitivity-Priority AE (Sv) mode, which is designed to automatically select the optimum combination of aperture and shutter speed for a user-selected sensitivity.

ISO sensitivity can be set from 100 to ISO 1600, with continuous shooting at approximately three images per second.

Pentax

Plug-in Microphone For Palm T|X and Tungsten T5 PDAs

Plug-in Microphone For Palm T|X and Tungsten T5 PDAs With it’s big and bright 640 x 480 screen, built in Wi-Fi and Bluetooth and pocket pleasing form factor, the Palm T|X is a near-perfect PDA, except for one thing – Palm forgot to fit a bloomin’ microphone!

Although some members of the Palm community managed to ingeniously add their own microphone courtesy of several hours sweating over pliers, soldering irons and screwdrivers, this clearly wasn’t going to be the ideal solution for your average consumer.

Seeing a gap in the market, Tech Center Labs rocked up with their own high-quality external microphone solution for the TX, which simply clips onto the bottom of the PDA.

Reports say the quality is reasonable enough, and at a price of just $14.95 (£8, €12), it looks to be a good investment for TX users – especially those investigating mobile VoIP options.

Plug-in Microphone For Palm T|X and Tungsten T5 PDAs There’s no need to buy any third party software either, as users can download the freeware SoundRec application, which provides a simple interface for audio recording to the Palm’s SD card.

More advanced users can download the $25 Personal Audio Pro recorder from Toysoft – or use Voice It software to enable voice navigation and dialling on their TX PDAs.

The company also offer a T|X Cradle with built in microphone for $25.

Tech Center Labs

FakeCall For Palm Treo 650

FakeCall For Palm Treo 650 You must all be familiar with this dreadful situation when you’re stuck in a late Friday work meeting that never seems to end, while your mates are already in the pub.

The boss is showing no sign of finishing his motivational Power Point presentation (backed by the soft rock ‘team building’ sounds of Boston and Foreigner) and you’re desperately trying to think of a good enough reason to get you out of this hell hole.

If only the phone would ring with an urgent call!

Thanks to Fake Call, there’s now a handy and convincing way to escape perpetual presentations (and unwanted social interactions) by setting up simulated incoming phone calls.

Using the programs straightforward interface, you can set an appointment in the Treo’s Contacts to activate the fake call (or discretely press and hold a preconfigured key) and a call will materialise right on cue!

FakeCall For Palm Treo 650 Ringtones can be set as required and when the phone rings, it’ll even display the name of the fake caller, so you can let your boss see how really urgent the call must be.

When you answer the call, one of four pre-defined “hello” greeting messages will blast out of your phone, or you can record your own one-sided ‘conversations’ in wav/mp3/ogg/wma file formats for added, boss-fooling authenticity

FakeCall requires 50k of memory and can be purchased from Toysoft Inc – it’s got to be worth the outlay for just $5.95 (£3.20, €4.70)!

$150Bn CapEx Projected For Mobile Companies

$150Bn CapEx Projected For Mobile Companies Those studious fellows at ABI Research are projecting that the CapEx (Capital Expenditure) of the mobile/cellular business worldwide will exceed $150Bn, with the majority being spent on WCDMA (Wideband Code Division Multiple Access).

Why the focus on WCDMA? Well, 3G runs on WCDMA and one of the strengths of 3G is that it likes handling data. As more applications and advanced data services such as mobile TV and mobile broadband rollout, demand for data will increase dramatically.

It’s not just about the aerials and cellular coverage. As ABI points out “To offer advanced data and content services with improved delivery and reduced network costs, mobile operators will have to invest in more leased capacity, upgrade to microwave technologies, and add fiber links where microwave technologies have been exhausted, in an effort to boost their networks’ backhaul capacity. Operators will also have to deploy advanced switching technology in the backhaul network, to improve traffic flow and maximize the performance of the backhaul infrastructure. ”

If you want to read details on this until your eyes bleed – like “In 2005, China Mobile’s CAPEX in China was $8.86 billion, more than Vodafone’s global total CAPEX ($8.74 billion)” – then ABI have just the document for you. They tell us that “Worldwide Mobile CAPEX Investments” examines global CAPEX spending by mobile operators on all major technology deployments, and forecasts the regional prospects for various technologies and equipment types.

With all of that cash being spent, it doesn’t give us that much hope that mobile data will get much cheaper – which we feel it must, as at current prices it’s just plain impractical for the man in the street to afford.

ABI Research – Worldwide Mobile CAPEX Investments
Wikipedia – WCDMA