China – Page 4 – Digital-Lifestyles

China Develops its First Digital TV Chip

China Digital TV Chip Shanghai-based Fudan University has developed the country’s first home-made digital TV chip. Not only that, but the chip has passed appraisals by experts from the Chinese Academy of Sciences and Chinese Academy of Engineering, and it’s outperformed European and US standards in terms of sensitivity and anti-jamming capacities – at lower costs.

The ‘Zhongshi No.1’ chip, which is based on China’s DMB-T standard and is made by Grace Semiconductor Manufacturing and Semiconductor Manufacturing International, integrates more than 70 storages, 2 million logic gates and 20 million transistors. It’s expected that the mass production of the cost-effective chip will help to boost China’s digital TV industry as it will pave the way to a new generation of high-definition televisions (HDTV).

Apparently, dozens of electronics makers have integrated the new chip technology into their products, including Changhong, TCL, Skyworth and Haier. China’s Henan Province has applied the new technology to launch mobile TV programs, and other localities have reported success in trial operations. US-based Time Warner has also announced that it plans to offer subscription-based digital TV programs to China.

According to official statistics, China has more than 370 million TV sets and an average 40 million sets are being sold each year. China plans to broadcast the 2008 Beijing Olympics on digital TV and hopes to roll out the service nationwide by 2015.

Collapse-to-Zoom Could Aid Mobile Browsing

It’s the same old problem – a Web page is simply shrunk to fit a handheld screen and you waste time playing ‘blind man’s buff’ with the screen contents because you can’t tell the relevant from the irrelevant tiles.

Browsing large pictures, or simply navigating the Web on a mobile device is as unsatisfactory as trying to watch “The Return of the King” on a portable TV.

Opera have what they call Small-Screen Rendering technology to counter this but Patrick Baudisch and Xing Xie from Microsoft Research, Wei-Ying Ma from Microsoft Research Asia, and Chong Wang of Tsinghua University have provided a workaround to this limitation that will automate the scrolling and navigation of a large picture with a single pen stroke.

It’s called Collapse-to-zoom and offers an alternative exploration strategy. In addition to enabling users to zoom into relevant areas, Collapse-to-zoom allows users to collapse areas deemed irrelevant, such as archive material, or advertising. When you collapse the irrelevant content all remaining material expands to display more detail, thus increasing your chance of finding what you want. Collapse-to-zoom navigation, explain the researchers, is based on a hybrid between a marquee selection tool and a marking menu, that they’re naming “marquee menu”. There are four commands for collapsing content areas at different granularities and switching to a full-size view of what’s left on screen.

The system is controlled with pen gestures and are fully detailed in the Technology Review (linked below). Dragging the pen diagonally downwards from right to left collapses all page content in the rectangular area covered by the pen, and replaces it with a thin placeholder that can be restored by clicking if required. Dragging the pen diagonally upwards from left to right zooms that area into a 100-percent-scale reading mode and collapses everything around the area.

Baudisch, Xie, Ma and Wang will present their work at the ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (UIST 2004) next week.

Microsoft Collapse To Zoom paper (PDF)

Technology Review article

Opera for Mobiles

China Issues Digital TV Licenses

China’s government has issued digital television broadcasting licenses to four companies, ending the state monopoly. The move is also intended to increase competition and innovation in China’s nascent digital broadcasting industry.

However, the move is not as open as first appears – the four companies are themselves state owned. The companies are CHC Home Cinema, China Broadcast Network Company, Shanghai TV, and a five company consortium including China National Radio.

By opening up digital broadcasting in this way, the government hopes to create more opportunities for private and foreign-funded ventures, though foreign companies are not allowed to hold broadcast licenses. Regulators have approved a small number of overseas channels for broadcast on cable in Guangdong and hotels, though much of the overseas investment is likely to take the form of creating content, developing platforms and infrastructure.

A recent project in Qingdao converted 600,00 homes to digit television, with 60 government channels. China is expected to have 30 million viewers by 2008.

Digital TV in China

China: 300 Million Mobile Users by 2005

The Chinese Ministry for Industry has released new figures which demonstrate the vast scale of the mobile market in China, and its potential for growth.

Although the percentage of mobile phone owners in China will still be relatively low at just 24.5% of the population in 2005, this will still mean 300 million subscribers. In contrast, approximately 65% of Europeans own a mobile phone, with the US catching up at 50%.

Currently, China’s 295,700,000 mobile phones account for half of all money spent communications. There are still another 800 million potential customers to reach, though the barriers of bringing access to rural areas and the cost of services must yet be dealt with.

Chinese mobile users send 300 million text messages a day – accounting for one third of the World’s total 510 billion of SMS sent every in 2003. Not bad for something that was tacked onto GSM as a afterthought and costs network operators virtually nothing to handle.

China Mobile

First Reviews of Nintendo IQue Player Arrive

Back in September this year, Nintendo announced they would be creating a home games console that would sell exclusively in Chinese market. Initially to be sold in Shanghai, Guanzhou and Chengdu, this will be the first games console to be sold in China.

As details emerged of the IQue Player (rough translation, God’s Playing Machine), we realised that its form would be a handheld games controller that plugged directly in to the TV, doing away with the box under the TV. Based on N64, which at its original launch in 1996 was one of the most powerful consoles available, Nintendo clearly plan to leverage its large amount of licensed game content to run on it – very clever when you consider it is currently just sitting earning nothing. It also has hardware-emulation of Nintendo’s pre-N64 console, the Super Nintendo, enabling it to play the enormous library of games that were available for it. The games will be converted to Chinese language and, to minimise piracy often perceived as a problem in China, games will be loaded on to the 64Mb Flash-based memory cartridges at local retailers and will be, at least to Western standards, very cheap.

Time and thinking has moved on a long way from the N64 and the IQue Player benefits from a number of innovative features. It will be launched with one full game and four other demonstration versions of titles will be preloaded on to the cartridge, that will last for between one and ten hours of playing before removing themselves. As touched on above, the new software will be distributes electronically to shops located around China and will be loaded on to Flash memory cartridges at the shops. The operating system, dubbed UOS, is automatically updatable when new games are bought and installed, this may well be to ensure they stay ahead of hackers attempts to copy games.

The IQue Player has now been released in China priced at 598 Yuan (~$72, ~€59, ~£41) slightly above the originally expected 498 Yuan. The games sell for a very competitive, at least to Western eyes, 48 Yuan (~$6, ~€5, ~£3.50).

Two site have now published the first European reviews of the IQue Player, one in English and another slightly more technical one in German.

The video games and content worlds will be watching the progress of this platform in China, not just to get a grasp of the level of enthusiasm for gaming in China, but also for the success of the anti-piracy measures and to see if they are prepared to pay for reasonably priced content.