Components

Components provided to OEMs

PortalPlayer: Nvidia Buy iPod Chip Maker
Nvidia are extending their expertise in providing the chippery for portable devices by buying PortalPlayer, who are responsible for the controlling chips for the hard-disk-based iPods, or “powers some of the world’s most recognizable portable digital music players,” as they chose to describe it.
Nvidia will pay $13.50 in cash for each outstanding share of PortalPlayer common stock, which adds up to approximately $357 million, dropping to around $161 million excluding the cash PortalPlayer’ has on its balance sheet.
Highlighting the companies logic in buying PortalPlayer, Jen-Hsun Huang, president and CEO of Nvidia enlightened all, “Modern mobile devices are miniaturized yet powerful multimedia computers. At the core of their architectures are complex Application Processors integrating microprocessors, system logic, networking, and multimedia processors.”
There’d been some speculation that Nvidia might have sold out to Intel, following their graphics-chip competitor ATi being bought by AMD, but moves like this make it clear that they’re taking a different path. This was outlined by Huang, “With this acquisition, we are combining the two essential technologies of next-generation PMPs, PDAs, portable game players, and phones: PortalPlayer’s innovative Application Processor technology and NVIDIA’s industry-leading GPU technology. With the products created through this combination, we intend to drive the next digital revolution, where the mobile device becomes our most personal computer.”
PortalPlayer
Nvidia
7 November, 2006
Brando USB Christmas Collection
If you’re having problems thinking of that perfect technological widget to make your Christmas go with a seasonal swing, look no further than Brando’s fabulous feast o’ festive trinkets.
USB LED Snowman
First up is a USB LED Snowman, who doesn’t do a great deal apart from add a seasonal touch to your desktop by cycling through a range of colours.
He has got a nice hat mind, and he only costs $10.
USB Fibre Optic Christmas Tree II
Going upmarket a tad, the $14 USB Fibre Optic Christmas Tree II apparently, “actually looks like a miniaturised version of the real Christmas tree” and comes in its own little pot.
Like the USB Snowman, it doesn’t do very much apart from cycle through pretty colours, but it is perhaps a little more dignified than a clattering USB Snowman Drummer (see below).
USB LED Music X’mas Tree
For office workers keen to impress, there’s no denying that the USB LED Music X’mas Tree pulls out the stops, offering 12 – yes twelve – built in Christmas songs, cycling colours and a “shining golden star” on the top. Beautiful.
And it’s yours for just $15, squire.
USB Drumming Santa
The real showstopper of Brando’s collection has to be the top-of-the-range USB Drumming Santa.
Billed as “bringing happiness at Christmas” their $18 USB Drumming Santa Claus (Snowman version also available) looks set to redefine festive tack with an all-out assault of PC-powered lights and music.
Plug him into the nearest USB port and whoop with joy as he drums along to a selection of five Christmas songs, complete with synchronised blue lights.
Imagine the delight of your co-workers when you leave that running all day!
Brando Christmas Collection
3 November, 2006
USB Foot Warmers And Gloves
With the evenings drawing in and artic breezes circulating around your workstation, it may be time to invest in some handy USB-powered warming devices.
First up is the USB Foot Warmers, designed to get your tootsies toastie within minutes.
The USB Foot Warmers are covered in soft brown and white fake fur backed by a ‘leather fabric’ base with the slippers being warmed through a compact, ultra-flexible heat panel lurking in the lining of the base. The heat panel can be removed for washing.
Once the slippers are plugged into a USB port, this panel will immediately begin to heat and will remain at comfortably warm until unplugged. Or your machine crashes.
The foot warmers come with a 107cm-long USB cable (how long before the user wanders off and drags the PC with them?) and it has to be said that the whole ensemble is quite exceptionally unstylish.
The USB Foot Warmers are available from the Gadgetshop for fifteen quid. No thanks Santa!
USB G-Gloves for girlies
Somewhat more attractive – but equally daft – are the USB G-Gloves from our favourite purveyor of frivolous goods, Brando.
In case you didn’t know, the ‘G’ stands for ‘Girls’ who Brando hope will be wooed by their knitted (real wool!) pastel colour schemes on offer.
The gloves feature an open ended design that lets girls show off their nail varnish do some typing, with the gloves offering two USB-powered heating levels.
Each mitten comes with two built-in warming pads that heat by 10 degrees n five minutes, and you can pick up a pair for $22 (£13).
Brando also do a men’s version, but they weren’t the mean’n’macho, black-leather, studded affair we’d hoped for.
2 November, 2006
Nokia 330 Auto Navigation Announced
Nokia has announced its first dedicated personal navigation device covering all of Europe-land, the Nokia 330 Auto Navigation.
The Nokia 330 includes full Europe coverage, sports a large 3.5 inch colour touch screen, spoken directions and comes with a raft of multimedia widgets to keep le continental traveller ‘appy.
Featuring an integrated GPS receiver, the Nokia 330 device comes bundled with a 2GB memory card containing the preinstalled Europe-wide map data aling with detailed travel information.
The Nokia 330 uses the ROUTE 66 Navigate 7 application and views can be flipped between 2D/3D and day or night views, with options to change the language or volume of the spoken guide.
To help stave off boredom in Brussels and ennui in Eindhoven, the Auto Navigation also includes a music player, photo viewer and video player (but don’t go watching Rocky V when you’re driving folks! Well, we wouldn’t recommend you watch it any time, but that’s a different story).
And now some corporate guff
“Consumers are increasingly eager to use personal navigation devices while driving and we are delighted to introduce the Nokia 330 Auto Navigation device to meet this demand,” purred Razvan Olosu, vice president, Multimedia Enhancements at Nokia.
“Nokia 330 Auto Navigation complements the recently announced GPS and navigation solutions from Nokia.”
“Finding your way across Europe is simple with this comprehensive navigation package, including an integrated GPS receiver and European maps,” he added.
The Nokia 330 Auto Navigation is expected to turn up in “select channels” in Europe during the fourth quarter 2006 for around EUR 360 – £240 (sans le taxes).
Nokia
30 October, 2006
AMD Complete ATi Purchase
AMD, the second largest microprocessor manufacturer has complete the purchase of graphics, chipset and CE specialist ATi Technologies in a deal worth around $5.4Bn.
From day one they’re talking a new game – “Fusion.” The integration of the central processing unit (CPU) and graphics processing unit (GPU) at the silicon level. Interestingly they claim this will give them a significantly increase in performance-per-watt – benefitting both portable devices, by giving them longer results from batteries, and more efficiencies for mains-powered computers, vital in the world we’re entering with a need to keep an eye on power consumption. The Fusion products are expected late 2008/early 2009.
Phil Hester, AMD senior vice president and chief technology officer summed it up, “With the anticipated launch of Windows Vista, robust 3D graphics, digital media and device convergence are driving the need for greater performance, graphics capabilities, and battery life.”
The capabilities of graphics processors have been gathering pace over the recent years to the point where they come close to rivaling the main processor themselves.
To get hold of ATi, AMD are splashing $4.3Bn in cash and also handing over 58m AMD shares. $2.5 billion of the cash mountain comes courtesy of a term loan from Morgan Stanley Senior Funding. The intention to do the deal was made in July this year.
At the time of the original announcement there was some speculation that ATi rival, nVidia would sell to Intel. This didn’t come to pass, possibly because already has a strong graphics chip division. To minimise the impact of todays deal on nVidia, Mike Hara, Nvidia’s vice president of investor relations, told Reuters, “It reinforces our philosophy that we don’t want to be tied up. I don’t think anything changes. In fact, what we’ve already felt and seen I think gives us the energy to push faster.”
AMD
26 October, 2006
NEC’s Chip To Play Blu-Ray And HD-DVD
The almighty ruck between Blu-ray and HD-DVD could have found a bridge for the consumer.
The clever sticks at NEC have come up with a chip that will play both HD-DVD and Blu-ray disks.
A smart move for NEC, this could save the consumer having to make a choice between the two formats they have little or no knowledge of, but are being told that they simply must have.
The difference between the two standards is pretty considerable, not just in the capacity of the disks that Blu-ray has tried to make much of – as they saw it as a competitive advantage. One of the major differences is the interactivity, with Blu-ray going the route of Java, giving them both a considerable processing overhead in the machines that need to play it and huge flexibility in the depth of interactivity that can be achieved.
It’s not the first time that bringing together the two formats has been suggested. Over a year ago Samsung said that they’d produce a dual format player. Mysteriously they’ve dropped this idea, and gave a serious amount of umm-ing and ahh-ing when asked about it at IFA this year.
NEC is telling all those who will listen that the chips should be shipping from April 2007 onwards.
12 October, 2006
O2 Jet Phone Promises Stratospheric Battery Life
Primed and ready for take off, O2’s own-brand Jet supersonic mobile boasts that it can deliver 67% more talk time than its nearest comparable rival.
Created for heavy-yakking business users, the O2 Jet comes with a battery life that would see off an amphetamine-fuelled Duracell Bunny, claiming a mighty 540 hours on standby and 9.9 hours of talk time – adding up to double the talk time of O2’s most popular phone, the Nokia 6230i.
The phone’s business-like styling reflects its targeted demographic, with an austere black casing and ne’er a whiff of any fun stuff to be found – this grumpy old handset hasn’t even got a camera or an MP3 player.
However, stern-faced business users may grow to love the simple user interface, dedicated volume and profile switches, quad band GPRS and full POP3 and IMAP4 email connectivity.
There’s also a dedicated Bluetooth button on the candybar shaped 117 x 47 x 20mm phone, 56MB of internal memory and a macho little metal speaker grill, perhaps suggesting that the owner might be a bit of a tiger in the boardroom.
The O2 Jet will be ready for slipping into pin striped suit pockets from 19th October, with prices varying according to monthly tariffs. There will also be a pay-as-you-go (PAYG) version available for sixty quid.
O2 Jet
10 October, 2006
Dyson Airblade: Feels Like The Future
Dyson have this morning launched a new product, the Dyson Airblade, a replacement for tired old hand dryers.
You know the problem. You go to the toilet, wash your hand then you met with the air blowing hand dryer. You stand there for what seems like ages, rubbing your hands together in the vain hope that they are drying. Getting frustrated with it, you walk away and run your hands on your trousers in frustration, reminiscing about the days when towels used to inhabit bathrooms.
The clever sticks at Dyson were working on an unnamed product using what they term ‘Air blades’ – air shot out at 400MPH through a 0.3mm gap, when one of the engineers noticed that they were pretty effective at drying the water from his hands. The genesis of the product had occurred.
To use the Airblade dryer you place your hands in at waist height, the airblades switch on, and you slowly draw your hands out, up towards you. Do it slowly enough – Dyson claim 10 seconds for the process.
What’s it like to use?
Having used it, I was pretty impressed. It actually felt like ‘the future’. We’ve all seen the films where people walk in to the air shower and are clean and dry within 30 seconds – well think of that on a small scale.
There’s no discomfort, and because the air passes through filters before it gets to your hands and no germs. This anti-germ theme is extended to all of the external surfaces which have an anti-microbial coating.
The water removed is drained to the bottom, through an iodine chamber to purify it, finally dropping on to a piezo element which vibrates like billy-o and turns the water into vapor.
Dyson are betting large on this one having committed £10m to the 2.5 years of development.
A success for Dyson?
This is a smart move by Dyson and their first step into ‘trade’ appliances. Every public toilet in the world has a hand-dryer of some sort. Products like this provide a great, steady source of income – possibly for a very long time.
Beyond public toilets, there’s a huge potential for sales to hospital, where UK residents will know, there’s considerable concern about the spread of germs.
Trials have been running in motorway service stations, hospitals and other locations for a number of months, but not under the Dyson name – they invented Kai-Don Airstrip to throw off the competition.
The competing products are considerably cheaper, but Dyson claim that due to low energy usage their Airblade will pay for itself in a year.
If you are fed up with washing the towels at home, you’ll be able to buy on from mid-November for £549 and sample the feel of the future.
Dyson
3 October, 2006
CSR Does Voice over WiFi Chipset: £11
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.
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
19 September, 2006
Smell The Radio With USB Aroma Geur
We can’t say we like the thought of being bombarded by different whiffs while we’re listening to the radio, but it seems someone in Japan liked the idea so much that they’re about to launch a fragrance-pumpin’ product in October.
Apparently called the ‘Aroma Geur,’ the device takes the shape of a USB connected sphere which is capable of generating different pongs depending on what content is playing on the radio (perhaps the smell of dirty leather for Motorhead, and Guinness for the Pogues?).
Soon to be introduced by NTT Communications – the corporate business arm of Tokyo-based Nippon Telegraph & Telephone Corp and Tokyo FM Broadcasting – the curiously named Aroma Geur comes loaded with six oil-based perfume compounds, which can be instructed to mix up the right whiff on demand.
The gadget connects to your desktop via USB, with the PC downloading the aroma instructions from the radio station via the Internet, with odorous wafts synchronised to match whatever song is currently being played.
Lurking inside the gadget is a set of solenoid valves which open and close magnetically to ensure that just the right amount of perfume fills the air.
To further enhance the ‘experience’, the whiffo-sphere (as we like to call it) accompanies blasts of perfume with a show of random, shifting coloured lights, apparently to help you have a “more soothing experience.”
The USB Aroma Geur is available for 49,900 Yen ($430), with the service scheduled to start up in Japan from 2nd October 2006.
We can’t wait to get a whiff of some Bob Marley tunes on the thing.
Tokyo FM
5 September, 2006