Companies

Container for all companies

iPod With Video; New iMac; FrontRow; iTunes 6: Apple Summary
We’ve now had change to absorb this and ponder its impactAfter weeks of frantic speculation that a video-capable iPod was on the way, Apple have sure enough announced the very thing at their event in the California Theatre in San Jose and BBC Television Centre in the UK.
Steve Kennedy has been at the UK event for us. There was no live updating allowed during the event, so updates have been patchy and details were slow to emerge.
Here’s the highlights …
New iMac G5. A bit faster, but the big thing is FrontRow. It’s Apple’s Media Centre-killer. The new Apple Remote, a svelte 6 button remote control that looks like a shuffle, controls any media you have on your iMac. Makes the MS Media Centre 26+ button remote look very wrong – too tech. Simplicity reigns. iSight camera is built in. Parallel output to bigger screen, projector. Price is very tempting starting at $1,299 (17″ £899 inc vat, €1379) (20″ £1199, €1799).
Video-capable iPod. Next gen iPod with 30% thinner than current generation player but with a bigger 2.5″ colour screen. 320×240 QVGA (quarter VGA), but not wide screen as rumoured. Video playback supports MPEG-4 and h.264 playback. 30Gb & 60Gb. S-vdeo out through the doc, but video will appear pixelated on full size TV screen. The 30GB should go for $299 (~£219~€349), and the 60GB for $399 (~£300~€469). They’re on the Apple online Store and will be shipping next week.?
?Not quite the world shattering device that was expected, but from those who have seen it “sexy.”
iTunes 6 – Upgraded again after the 5.0 release of a few week ago. The big change. As expected from our first video of itms, downloadable video. A deal has (~£227~€331) been done with ABC/Disney to let five shows (Desperate Housewives, Lost and three disney shows currently) to be paid for and downloaded the day after they’re on TV – only in the US currently. Is there any co-incidence that the UK launch happened in the BBC TV centre?
“It’s never been done before, where you could view hit TV shows and buy them online the day after they’re shown,” Jobs said. While this may be true that people have not been able to _Buy_ it, but let’s not forget that the BBC has the iMP trial running, where you can get shows straight after they’re shown – but for nothing.
We imagine there’ll be lots of lost sleep in Redmond tonight.
We’ll have a more considered piece on the impact of the announcements once it’s sunk in.
Apple
13 October, 2005
E60; E61; E70: Nokia Launches Eseries Phones For Business Bods
Nokia has announced the Eseries phones, a new range of devices designed for swivel action execs and be-suited business bods.
With the range initially comprising of three new phones aimed at money-rich, time-poor office types, all the Eseries will run on the Symbian Series 60 platform 3rd Edition, sport QVGA or better displays and incorporate push email including BlackBerry and attachment editing.
The Nokia E60, Nokia E61 and Nokia E70 claim superior voice functionality and quality, with the devices supporting advanced voice services like Internet (Voice over IP) phone calls, Push to talk and SIP-based services, backed by a range of local connectivity options including WLAN, Bluetooth and Infrared and USB.
The devices are the first in the industry to support remote device management based on OMA DM*, letting IT managers remotely control and protect corporate data on the device and fiddle about with phone configurations. Or just have a good nose about.
“When we carefully considered the requirements of our customers when developing these devices, two clear new trends emerged: the need for IT departments’ to have a secure and manageable platform, and the need for devices to support a variety of employee preferences and different working styles,” said Niklas Savander, senior vice president of Nokia’s business device unit.
Nokia E60 (above)
Starting off the new range is the E60, an attractive, traditionally styled 3G phone with VoIP, speakerphone, a 24-bit 352 x 416-pixel display, and a low-voltage RS-MMC slot.
Offering useful business features like integrated speakerphone, conference calling and voice-aided applications like Push to talk, and IP-based telephony, the phone supports GSM/EDGE 900/1800/1900 and WCDMA 2100.
Nokia E61 (right)
Next up is the E61, which looks to be shoving its slimline oar (0.55 inches) into Treo/Motorola Q/Blackberry territory, with the device supporting multiple mobile email clients like BlackBerry Connect, GoodLink, Nokia Business Center, Seven Mobile Mail, Seven Always-On Mail, and Visto Mobile.
Looking like an E60 after an encounter with an elephant, the wide and flat E61 sports a full QWERTY keyboard, landscape 24-bit QVGA display (352 x 416-pixel display), miniSD slot and quad-band GSM/EDGE and WCDMA 2100 connectivity.
Full attachment handling (documents, spreadsheets, presentations, PDF viewer and ZIP manager) is built in with an editing function for documents, spreadsheets and presentations included.
Nokia E70 (left)
Finally, the E70 features the same, slightly strange, flip-open QWERTY keyboard phone seen on Nokia’s 6800 series.
The phone comes with a full party box of gizmos and gadgets, including a 352×416-pixel display, 2 megapixel camera with CIF-resolution video capture, USB 2.0, miniSD slot, and Wi-Fi 802.11g/e/i.
The phone will be available in a GSM/EDGE 850/1800/1900 version for the Americas, plus a 3G version for Europe and Asia.
All three Eseries phones are expected to be available in the first quarter of 2006 worldwide.
Nokia
12 October, 2005
Top UK Cop: iPods Fuelling Crime
Like a big flashing sign above the listener’s head saying “Mug Me!” the distinctive white headphones of iPods continue to attract the unwanted attentions of ne’er-do-wells in the street.
With the latest Home Office crime statistics expected to reveal that muggings rose by almost 40% in some parts of the country last year, police are blaming the sharp rise in the street robberies on the increasing popularity of iPods, MP3 players and expensive mobile phones.
Chief superintendent Paul Forrester of Merseyside police said students and teenagers strutting around with expensive gear were virtually asking for it, commenting: “Some children carry phones and iPods worth over £600 and they are making themselves walking targets.”
Metropolitan police chief Sir Ian Blair was equally quick to point the finger of blame at all things Apple Mac: “It is very obvious when someone is wearing an iPod. That is what is fuelling this.”
Figures from the Metropolitan police revealed that the practice of purloining iPods increased more than fivefold since last November 2004, with incidents rising from ten a month to 52 in May this year.
Similarly, the number of iPods pinched from motors went in an equally upward direction, leaping from 178 cases in November 2004 to 395 in May this year.
Insurance company Norwich Union have found themselves shelling out for pilfered iPods by the bucketful, replacing 1,721 lost or stolen iPods between January and September this year, compared to just 36 during the same period last year.
Our advice to iPod users: forget about making a style statement, dump those daft white headphones in double quick time and get yourself something more discrete!
11 October, 2005
P990: Sony Ericsson Offers 3G and Wi-Fi
Sony Ericsson has beefed up its flagship P-series smartphone range with the new 3G P990 phone.
The new phone builds on the huge popularity of the P-series – the single most popular smartphone design on the planet – and bolts on 3G, 802.11b Wi-Fi connectivity, adding BlackBerry Connect and VoIP support into the package.
The phone offers all the benefits of UMTS including video calling, high-bandwidth multi-media downloads and the ability to surf the Internet using the new Opera 8 browser which can work in landscape mode.
Naturally, Sony are keen to shove their oar into Blackberry’s waters, with the P990 prepared for all major push e-mail clients enabling full e-mail access with attachments.
As usual, the phone sports a removable numerical keyboard which can be flipped out to reveal a 35-key QWERTY button pad on the camera’s body.
Hardcore texters with fingers the size of prime beef sausages may have trouble using the teensy weensy keys, but as any Treo/Blueberry-owner will tell you, a hardware keyboard is a lot more fun than poking around a screen.
There’s also an improved autofocus camera onboard, offering 2 megapixel resolution, digital zoom and a photo light.
Although the P990’s touch screen display is physically smaller than its predecessors, Sony’s boffins have managed to squeeze in more pixels, upping the resolution to 320×240 with 262k colours.
The P990 will be the first commercially available smartphone to use the enhanced Symbian OS version 9.1 and the UIQ 3.0 user interface, which has been optimised for one handed use.
Boasting 80MB of RAM with support for Memory Stick Duo Pro cards up to 4GB, delivery is expected in Q2 of 2006, with variants of the phones including P990i Dual mode UMTS (2100MHz) – GPRS 900/1800/1900 for Europe, Asia Pacific, Middle East, Africa and P990c Dual mode UMTS (2100MHz) – GPRS 900/1800/1900 for Mainland China
Sony Ericsson P990
11 October, 2005
Yahoo Podcast Search Site Launches
Keen to get their size nines stamped all over the fast-growing podcasting revolution, Yahoo have launched a spanking new podcast service designed to make it easy for punters to rummage through the zillions of audio files available and find the stuff that interest them.
The beta Yahoo Podcast service aims to let folks search podcasts by keyword, categories or user-generated topic coding (‘tagging’), with the home page flagging up notable podcasts, based on popularity, user recommendations and ratings.
Surfers will also be able to listen to or subscribe to RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feeds for individual shows, episodes or entire series.
“We intend to be the most comprehensive source for podcast content,” said Geoff Ralston, Yahoo!’s chief product officer.
The service will offer a unique feature that lets users find content quicker by speeding up playback without the the broadcaster’s voice sounding like Mickey Mouse on helium.
As Geoff Ralston explained in an interview with PodTech, “You can hear someone and understand someone talking at a much higher speed. The problem is that when you speed it up naturally the pitch goes up, but we done some work to lower the pitch down. So it actually stays relatively normal and much more comprehensible.”
Although Podcast search services aren’t new – companies like AOL, Blinkx, Odeo.com and Podcast.net already offer services – Yahoo’s heavyweight clout make this move significant, with Ralston commenting, “We feel like we are really getting ahead of the curve with this.”
Unlike rival Podcast search sites, Yahoo! isn’t bundling in tools for creating podcasts at the moment, although that’s likely to happen in the future, with Joe Hayashi, Yahoo!’s director of product management saying, “This is all about discovery for now. Step One is all about growing the ecosystem.
With search engines constantly trying to dream up new advertising revenue-boosting services to retain and attract punters, it can only be a matter of time before the other Internet big boys respond with their own Podcast services.
Yahoo! Podcast
10 October, 2005
T-Mobile Web’n’Walk – Is Google Behind It?
Anybody who really thinks that T-Mobile is behind the new “Web’n’Walk” offering it trotted out last week, has really not being paying attention. It’s Google Talk, a VoIP service normally available for PC users, now sneakily able to go out over 3G data services.
The question to ask is: if Web’n’Walk is all T-Mobile’s doing, why is Google the Home Page of the new service?
Answer: the system is seen, inside Google, as a Trojan Horse to hook the mobile phone companies on VoIP and other Google Web services – and it is really part of the fierce rivalry building up between Skype (eBay) Yahoo (France Telecom) and Google (T-Mobile) to control the nascent “presence” business, with Instant Messenger and voice as the lever.
Exactly why all these people want to be in the presence business is another story – but anybody who knows what is really happening in the advertising business won’t need an explanation. The question, as far as the mobile phone operators is concerned, is whether they will actually end up with the slightest profit.
Officially, the new service gives you the Web in your pocket. This is not new; the Opera press release went out announcing Web’n’Walk back in June! it would only have been in any sense new last month, if we were discussing the “3” Internet service was being leaked, since Hutchison had previously been resolutely adamant that its users would have access only to the “3” web in a walled garden. That news was known to NewsWireless readers back in broke in early September: Hutchison will be opening up its 3G phones to full Internet browsing shortly.
Indeed, the only real surprise in today’s announcement is the discovery that the Danger-designed HipTop phone, which achieved such fame as the Sidekick in the North American market, will be one of the 3G announcements from T-Mobile later this year (according to Silicon.com).
But 3G phones that can access the Internet are not a T-Mobile invention. There’s no sudden change in the way people use the Internet, and 40 megabytes of data per month isn’t worth £30 of anybody’s money, even with 100 minutes of talk time. As Tim Richardson reported on The Register, it’s hype: “Hyping up the launch of its new service T-Mobile said it believes Web’n’Walk will lead to a considerable growth in total internet usage and, ultimately, more internet traffic being carried by mobile than by fixed line.”
It will do no such thing. What it does, is open up the mobile companies to a cuckoo’s egg; Google Talk, Yahoo! Messengerwith Voice, or even MSN Messenger – not to mention Skype- all on an IP backbone.
The idea that UMTS is a suitable IP backbone will be exposed in due course. Some of the gilt will flake off as soon as next week, when the first nationwide Flash-OFDM technology network will be rolled out by Flarion in a major European capital.
UMTS will work – sort of – but it adds latency to voice which rival systems won’t suffer from – rivals like IP Wireless, like Flash-OFDM, like WiMAX-WiFi mesh networks. Effectively, it turns the expensive mobile data networks into bit pipes, fit for carrying Internet Protocol traffic – at several times the price of rival systems.
Can UMTS really compete?
T-Mobile group CEO Rene Oberman [right] either knows nothing about home broadband, or this is an attempt to bamboozle the market. “T-Mobile will turn on a High-Speed Downlink Packet Access (HSDPA) network next year that will provide download rates of up to 1.8Mbps” he told Iain Thomson, who reported that T-Mobile appears to believe that the average download speed for home fixed line broadband ranges from under 264KB to 1MB.
In fact, by the time T-Mobile gets HSDPA working for a minority of its 3G users (a tiny fraction of its market) typical cable modem speeds will be ten megabits in the UK, and ADSL2 will be matching that.
Costs of home broadband, however, will continue to be flat rate, not £30 and upwards for no more data than will allow you to transmit a couple of dozen five megapixel photos. And you will only ever get 1.8 megabits out of a 3G HSDPA wireless mast if you are right next to it, and nobody else is trying to use the same cell for mobile data. Let’s not even mention the fact that the upload speed will remain below 64 kilobits per second – slow modem speeds.
What T-Mobile gets out of this deal, is some breathing space. It is making forward-looking pronouncements, and allowing investors to imagine that this will mean “jam tomorrow” after all.
NewsWireless
10 October, 2005
Businesses Are Blasting Out One Billion IMs Daily
According to a study by IDC, instant messaging in the business world is going bonkers and looks set to continue its huge growth, but experts are warning of security risks.
Their research found that the worldwide enterprise instant messaging market (which includes instant messaging server products as well as enterprise instant messaging security, compliance, and management products) leapt 37% in terms of year-over-year revenue in 2004, and is expected to skyrocket from $315 million in 2005 to $736 million in 2009.
“With more than 28 million business users worldwide using enterprise instant messaging products to send nearly 1 billion messages each day in 2005, and many more crossover corporate consumers who use consumer instant messaging networks in the workplace, these products are clearly reaching more mainstream users,” said Robert P. Mahowald, program director for IDC’s Collaborative Computing research.
“Especially in compliance-driven sectors like Wall Street, financial services, and government, instant messaging is a critical differentiator. In the next few years, IDC expects instant messaging – once the plaything of teenagers – to continue to grow into its role as a substantial business collaboration application,” he added
The growth in the enterprise segment is being fuelled by domestic users of IM tools like MSN Messenger bringing their online chatting habits into the work place and using the service as a business collaboration tool.
The report identified financial services and the public sector as the keenest to take up enterprise IM, with business IM monitoring and archiving tools able to keep a watchful eye on yapping employees.
According to a recent Gartner poll, instant messaging is now used in 70% of all companies, but figures from the Yankee Group reveal that only 15-20% of those companies operate IM administration, leaving 50% of office IM use unmonitored.
This wouldn’t appear to be the brightest idea as a new IMLogic study reveals that an increasing number of virus authors are starting to focus on IM clients as virus spreading agents.
IMLogic says that the attacks on the IM clients have reached record values – up 14 times on last year – with the complexity of the attacks also increasing.
The company’s IM monitoring service showed that MSN Messenger suffered the highest attack rate at 62% of the reported cases, with AOL’s AIM client coming at second with 31% of the attacks and Yahoo third with 7% of the attacks targeting their client.
IMLogic’s research found that the majority of the attacks were worm-based (87%) with 12% of the attacks aimed at spreading a virus.
IDC
IMLogic
6 October, 2005
Microsoft In The Sights As Google And Sun Announce Deal
Google and Sun Microsystems have come up with a broad, but fuzzy, deal which will see the two companies developing and distributing each other’s technology in a move to challenge Microsoft’s Office suite dominance.
“We’re going to put our assets together so we can leverage one another’s distribution,” said Eric Schmidt, Google’s chief executive officer (and former Sun executive).
Under the deal, Sun will bundle the Google toolbar as an option when consumers download the Java Runtime Environment (JRE) from Java.com, while Google will distribute the java technology.
With Sun’s JRE already registering 20 million downloads per month, the move looks set to dramatically increase the number of Google toolbar deployments.
It’s also expected that the deal will make it easier for freeloading punters to obtain OpenOffice, Sun’s well-regarded, freely distributed office productivity suite which directly competes with Microsoft Office.
“Working with Google will make our technologies more available more broadly, increase options for users, lower barriers and expand participation worldwide,” said Scott McNealy, Sun’s chief executive officer.
“We want to leverage the network economics. There are 80 million unique Google site users per month,” he added.
Both companies have suggested that the toolbar bundling is merely the start of a beautiful friendship, although neither would offer any specific details.
Schmidt dropped a few hints, “Google and java are two of the most widely recognised technology brands because they provide users with online tools that enhance their lives on a day to day basis,” he said. “We look forward to exploring other areas of collaboration.
Bundling the two products together seems a wise move, increasing the appeal of the Google Toolbar and making Java a more attractive proposition for software developers.
Although Schmidt wasn’t in the mood to chat about it at the launch event, many pundits are expecting Google to offer a hosted version of the OpenOffice productivity suite.
“We will work to make the distribution of [OpenOffice] become broader. We are not announcing specifics,” he said.
Execs were equally tight-lipped when asked about the financial terms of the deal, although they expected it to generate substantial revenue.
“We’ll use their advertising and they’ll use our technology,” said Sun’s McNealy.
“There is going to be a lot of money flowing both ways if we do this thing right,” he added.
Java
5 October, 2005
Sony Gets Colourful With Vaios
Fashion aficionados concerned that the hue of their laptop may clash awfully with their high fashion clobber will be delighted to learn that Sony is releasing their Sony F-type laptops in four stylish colours.
With Sony offering the laptops in white, pink, green and blue, fears of a haute couture faux-pas should be banished forever, although uptight Daddy-o’s can still purchase the laptop in sensible, corporate silver.
The slimline F series Vaios come in F20, F30, F50, and F70 flavours, with the top of the range F70 offering a 15.4inch widescreen with 1680×1050 pixels, fast Pentium M780 2.26Ghz processor, 1 gig of RAM, Geforce GO 6200 and 128MB of video RAM in a 2.8kg package.
Measuring 14.3-inches wide, 10.4-deep, and just 1 inch-thick, Sony’s engineers have managed to wedge in a 100GB drive, dual-layer DVD±R/RW/RAM and a Webcam for showing your friends your latest Pierre Cardin outfit.
Carbon Fibre Laptops
It seems that Sony can’t get enough of the funky finishes right now, with Sony Korea announcing two new carbon fibre laptops last week, the VGN-TX17LP/B and VGN-TX16LP/W 2.
Using space age technology usually being used for, err, planes and racing cars, Sony claims that these new VAIOs are twice as strong compared to existing T series notebooks, and weigh 30% less.
The display panel is a mere slip of a thing at 4.5mm thick with the designers waxing lyrical about the “sapphire black and platinum white” finish.
The Vaio TX series offer a handy AV mode button which makes the machine available for watching movies or listening to music in just 12 seconds with no need to boot up Windows.
The claimed battery life is impressive – up to 9 hours and 14-15 hours with an extended battery.
We’ve no idea of the price yet and – yes, you’ve guessed it – it’s only being released in Korea for the time being.
5 October, 2005
Sony Layout TV Plans For PSP’s Future
Listen to Howard Stringer’s speech
Those coming all the way to Tokyo from around Europe and the US, in a hope that Howard Stringer would continue his already well documented shake-up of Sony by making big announcements at his Keynote at the first day of Ceatec would have been disappointed.
If you’re interested in the development of Sony products and where Sony will be going in the future, you were in luck.
The queues to get in for press and punters were huge, with one wag wondering if the hall was full of Sony people trying to find out if they still had a job.
The message from Stringer was strong. It needed to be. Sony is undergoing a massive transformation.
Politically, presenting in Tokyo was an important act – delivering this radical message in the home town of Sony’s head office.
The summary? The three pillars – Restructure, Sharpen, the use of software to “use Sony’s marriage of content and technology to create unique competitive advantages and compelling user experiences.”
While admitting that they have “fallen short in matching innovation with the expanding appetites of our customers,” he told those gathered that gone are the competitive businesses units (silos in Sony lingo) that many claim are partially responsible for Sony wobble. The future will be a united Sony, with a centralised management, looking across the business creation tools; content; phones; games.
Of all the tempting nuggets that Stringer, we’re going to focus on the PSP.
In the nine months that its been on the market, it’s sold 6m units worldwide, making it, they claim, the most successful portable games machine to date.
That’s all fine and dandy, but how will they change the way PSP users consume other media?
Well, here’s the exciting part, he promised that owners will “soon be able to deploy the device’s built-in WiFi, to watch video from home entertainment terminals, anytime, anywhere in the world.”
Now if that doesn’t excite, he also said “to expect to see” a PSP with a high capacity MemoryStick which can be synchronised a Digital Video Recorder (DVR).
The tempting morsels cry out for more details, ones that weren’t provided – which I guess is the point saying them at a big event like this.
Quite what Sony’s definition of a ‘home entertainment terminal’ is, wasn’t explained, nor was if it will require the purchase of another piece of kit.
It’s also unclear if the PSP that we should ‘expect to see’ will be a new model of the machine, or a new MemoryStick with increased capacity.
We’d imagine that PS owners will be prepared to put their hand in their pockets to get any of these and will be tempted by being able to download their choice of TV shows to PSP overnight ready for the trip to work does.
If you want to check out further details, feel free to listen to Howard Stringer’s speech (30Mb) yourself.
4 October, 2005