Input devices – Page 3 – Digital-Lifestyles

Samsung P207 Phone Offers VoiceMode STT Control

Samsung P207 With VoiceMode Speech-to-Text Technology Those busy bee boffins at Samsung have announced the Samsung p207, billed as “the world’s first EDGE phone with VoiceMode provided by VoiceSignal.”

Promising to liberate users from the tyranny of texting on tiddly keypads, the smarty pants p207 uses “revolutionary” Speech-To-Text (STT) input technology.

Like its PC desktop counterparts, the user first has to ‘train’ the p207 through a series of spoken prompts that captures voice tone and intonation.

Once the user has adapted the system to their own dulcet tones, they can start dictating away – and the more that the learning VoiceMode is used, the more it adapts to the user’s voice.

Cleverly, voice texters can also address their message by dictating the recipient by name or number.

Peter Skarzynski, senior vice president of wireless terminals at Samsung wasn’t one to underplay the product’s capabilities: “Samsung is dedicated to integrating first-to-market technologies into its wireless phones to empower users in their everyday lives.”

“It is a great accomplishment for Samsung and a monumental day in the industry, as the p207’s advanced voice technologies transform day-to-day communication.”

Samsung P207 With VoiceMode Speech-to-Text Technology The phone – looking a bit Alvin Stardust-esque in its tight, all-black covering – also comes with EDGE high-speed network, an integrated VGA camera/camcorder, MP3 ringtones, wireless multimedia messaging and instant messaging.

If this voice-to-text technology actually works (and we have a few doubts), it could prove a real boon, especially to people with fingers the size of large Bavarian sausages.

But the name’s a bit silly though. Who’d want to call a phone ‘page 207’?

Samsung

UPDATED – Mac Mini Announced by Jobs – $499/£339

apple mini mac box In what isn’t a surprise move Steve Jobs has announced the Apple “Mac Mini”, a low cost addition to the Macintosh computer range. Priced at $499 (~€380, ~£265) and $599 (~€457, ~£319), it can sit in the palm on your hand (measuring 6.5 inches (16.51 cm) square and just 2 inches (5.08 cm) tall and weights just 2.9 pounds (1.32 kg). True to form for Apple, it looks great.

Disappointingly Apple plan to sell the Mac Mini for £339 (~$634) and £399 (~$746) in the UK. Which, when converted back in to dollars at current exchange rates, don’t sound quite so sweet. Quite why UK uses will have the privilege of paying more is currently unclear.

The bargain-basement prices are because it comes with quite a few things not included – like keyboard, mouse, screen – or “BYODKM, bring your own display, keyboard, and mouse” as Jobs put it.

What do you get for your money? The different prices give you either a 1.25GHz PowerPC G4 or a 1.42GHz (you know when they’re talking about 0.02 of a GHz they’re talking about a budget machine) processor and a 40GB or 80GB hard drive. Two included optical drives are available; a combo, that reads CD & DVD and writes CDs; or a SuperDrive, that reads and writes CDs & DVDs.

Interestingly, the video output is via DVI (Digital Video Interface) and support up to a 1920 x 1200 resolution. DVI is used on many Plasma TV and large LCD screens as the standard interface. Additional adaptors will enable the DVI to be connected to a VGA, S-video and composite video output.

Cleverly they are including lots of software – iLife 05 ( iTunes, iPhoto, iMovie, iDVD and GarageBand); Quicken 2005 and AppleWorks 6, providing word processing and spreadsheets.

It’s connectors to the outside world are – One FireWire 400 port and two USB 2.0 ports. The keyboard and mouse (extra cost) can be connected using these. An optional internal Bluetooth module enabled the connection of a wireless keyboard and mouse. 10/100Mb Ethernet and a 56K modem.

Wireless networking is possible using the internally fitted AirPort Extreme Card – which comes at extra cost.

We see this as Apple’s chance to cash in on all of the non-Macintosh owning iPod users, whether they be computer-virgins or current PC owners who are looking to upgrade.

We were wondering what the final cost of the machines would be when spec’d up with wireless networking, etc. It appears that many other people around the planet were thinking the same thing, as the ordering section of the online Apple Store has fallen over from the demand.

This baby is going to sell – by the truck load. First truck load arriving 22 January 2005.

Apple Mac Mini
Watch Jobs keynote

Vaio U: Sony’s Tiny Tablet Media PC, US Launch

Sony VGN-U750P1 The latest addition to Sony’s VAIO range of personal computers is really, really different. The VAIO VGN-U750P (around US$2,000) is a palmtop computer that also goes under the more firendly name of the Vaio U and weighs considerably less than the average laptop (167x108x26mm, 550g), yet boasts a fully fledged Intel-based environment running Windows XP Professional SP2 as opposed to the specialised platforms powering other handhelds, such as Palm OS, Windows Mobile or even Windows XP Tablet PC Edition.

Empowering you to actually work and view photos and video on the move – rather than simply manage e-mails and calendars – the diminutive system boasts a 1.10GHz Intel Pentium M processor, 512MB of system RAM, an accommodating 20GB hard disk drive (4,200rpm), as well as an Intel 855GM graphics card with 64MB of shared video RAM. In addition, it has a touch-sensitive, 5in. colour display with XBrite LCD technology that has a relatively high native resolution of 800×600 pixels (16-bit colour depth) and can output to an external VGA display, courtesy of an add-on port replicator. Of course, similar to any handheld worth its money it’s heaviliy connected, there’s also built-in 100Mbit/s Ethernet and 802.11b/g connectivity, as well as single FireWire and Memory Stick ports, four USB 2.0 ports and a CompactFlash Type II card slot for importing files or digital photos from a variety of digital cameras.

Sony has thought about productivity, too. Utilising proprietary software, the VAIO VGN-U750P supports handwriting recognition and other features similar to those found in Tablet PCs, such as a virtual keyboard and a multi-point navigational stick to control the system. There are also a few dedicated buttons to perform frequently-used commands, and thumb controls let you change the display orientation on the fly, from landscape to portrait mode and back. You can also connect the supplied foldable keyboard for ‘rapid’ text input on the move, or hook up the bundled headphones with remote control capabilities for audio and video playback.

It’s encouraging that Sony is actually releasing this after the many rumours that it had been shelved.

www.sony.com

DVR Wireless Kit for Police from Avalon RF

Avalon Rugged Police Tablet PC Designed for law enforcement, perimeter security and long-range video links, AValon RF’s new wireless range includes receivers, transmitters, remote display units (RDUs) and a variety of specialised antennas. The company’s technology provides broadcast quality, interference-free video links over the frequency spectrum of 56MHz to 2.5GHz, allowing security personnel to use a rugged PDA and Tablet PC to wirelessly view video from remote cameras while driving in a patrol vehicle.

For instance, the AValon ICV04 is a four-channel video recorder that lets you record streaming audio and video on an internal hard disk drive at 30fps. It is designed to fit under a vehicle seat and receive commands through a remote control, a computer, or a remote smart display. Recording is triggered manually or automatically by an external signal, such as a siren, flashing light activation, or code 1-2-3 in a police patrol vehicle. The recorded streaming video can be read via a USB port or archived on a standard CD-RW media.

Other features of the neat device include four video/audio inputs for a wireless LC618M lapel camera (or MX416 microphone), windshield camera, back seat camera and a trunk camera, VITC time/date stamping on all recorded video, support for up to 1 hour of recording on a 400MB Dataplay CD, and a USB 2.0 interface-to-vehicle computer/gateway. It utilises standard 12-volt powering and comes in ruggedised enclosure.

AValon RF

Clothing Mounted Computer Sensors Discussed by MIT

How would you like some magic fabric that you could use to make, and remake useful objects depending upon the job you neededon a given day? A wallet might inform you that you have run out of money, a belt might tell you that the pollen count is low, or a hat might tell you that the sunburn index if high. The wallet, the belt and the hat will be the same set of patches used in different ways on different occasions.

The New Scientist Magazine reports on a system of computerised fabric patches developed by engineers Adrian Cable, Gauri Nanda and Michael Bove at MIT’s Media Lab (Massachusetts Institute of Technology). Each patch contains a functional unit of the system – a microprocessor and memory plus either a radio transceiver, a sensor, a microphone, batteries or a display. It’s like intelligent Lego or transformers – you can put the patches together in different ways to create a variety of information-providing or environment-sensing objects. You can then pull it apart and put it together again to perform an entirely different function.

In order to remain waterproof, the circuit board inside each patch is first coated with a hard transparent resin and then padded with a thin layer of foam before being housed in the chosen fabric. It can be populated with a variety of components, from Bluetooth transmitters to a cut-down PC motherboard, reports the New Scientist.

The dressmaking exercise continues as the patches, which can be square or triangular, are joined using Velcro. Wires from the circuit board are attached to silver-coated contacts in the Velcro so that data and power can flow from between modules.

To make a bag that prevents people forgetting things, Nanda and Cable have incorporated a sensor module in the bag’s handle that detects when the bag has been picked up, indicating that the owner might be leaving, says the New Scientist. This triggers the reader to check through the objects the computer module has been programmed to look for, and it uses a voice synthesiser module to warn the owner if items are missing.

All Grandparents should get this bag for Christmas!

New Scientist – Smart fabrics make for enhanced living

Sega Superstars 1st non-Sony use of EyeToy

Sega Superstar with EyeToy Sega are launching a wide reaching, active and colourful campaign to trumpet in the arrival of Sega SuperStars, the first non-Sony game developed for the EyeToy. Available from October 22nd, the campaign will highlight the excitement and interactive nature of the game.

For those of you who may not know – and they’re might be some – the hugely innovative EyeToy is a camera that plugs into the PlayStation 2 and sits on top of the TV. An exercise in body mnemonics, it projects an image of the gamer onto the TV screen and tracks player’s movements, as they use different body parts to control characters, allowing the player to become an intrinsic part of the game.

“Eye Toy is not as well known as we would like it to be”, says Sega’s Tina Hicks as she elaborated on the military precision of the campaign. “We are targeting the games press and putting sig sheets in phone booths. A number of roadshows will be taking place at shopping centres across the UK, as well as in-store promotions from the 28th to the 30th of October.” Point-of-sale material will also be displayed throughout specialist gaming outlets and mainstream entertainment chains including Blockbuster and Gamestation.

Features have also been written in those pillars of modern teenage culture – Bliss, Sugar, Smash Hits, Top of the Pops, and TV Hits, so if you are too young to be frequenting the hairdressers, perhaps your Granny might do the necessary reading. This may be the case since the core target audience for the campaign is children aged between six and 14.

Sega SuperStars features 12 unique mini-games, each with one of the characters, offering 12 unique interactive experiences. It uses the in-game motion capture abilities of the EyeToy camera to allow gamers to transpose themselves into some of the most popular Sega characters — including Samba De Amigo, Sonic the Hedgehog, House of the Dead, and Virtua Fighter.

Sega SuperStars

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

Vodafone Launch BlackBerry 7100v – With New Form

Vodafone BlackBerry 7100v Vodafone have today announced a new form of BlackBerry, the 7100v. It has been designed with the BlackBerries creator, RIM (Research In Motion) and will be the first release of a new form factor.

I’d seen BlackBerries around but had dismissed them as a suits tool, and frankly had looked down on them a little. I saw them as used by people who didn’t know better, just getting them out to show off.

While I was in Amsterdam for IBC, there were a couple of occasions where a BlackBerry saved the day. In one, a speaker arrived in Amsterdam without knowing where his hotel was, fortunately I had sent him an email as he landed at the airport – he picked it up on his BlackBerry and we were able to sort things out quickly.

Now having studied them in detail, I can see they are about the most efficient use of space a text input device could have – a thumb-able keyboard and compact screen.

The new model from Vodafone differs from the ‘normal’ BlackBerry approach of full QWERTY keyboard and large screen. Vodafone’s new 7100v takes its design cue from a mobile phone handset. It has a slightly expanded numeric keyboard, taking it from three keys across to five.

To maintain the ease of input of text, the 7100v uses the RIM-developed SureType. It appears to be very similar in function to T9, but it has only two possible characters on each key, rather than up to four with T9. Paul Stonadge, Data Solutions Executive at Vodafone UK, told us the best way to get acclimatised to it is to “get into the mind set that it is a QWERTY keyboard”

It has a built in library of 35,000 words that can be user-expanded. Another smart feature is the automatic reading in of the contact address book, leading to all your contact names being included in the typing dictionary – very smart.

Vodafone have also taken the opportunity of heavily branding both the handset and the interface – it will be clear to the user that they’re using a Vodafone.

Vodafone previously released BlackBerries, the 7230 and slightly larger screened 7730 were aimed at medium to large enterprises. They are aiming this at the SME and SoHo market – a smart move considering how often small business people are away from their desk and how vital it is form them to stay in touch.

One of the winning features of the BlackBerries has been that email was pushed to the handset rather than the normal method of repeatedly asking the mail server if it had anything new. To use the push feature, the BlackBerries originally needed to run in conjunction with MS Exchange and Lotus Domino servers – the Enterprise solution, as they labelled it. This changed a while back to allow mail to be picked up for the widely spread POP servers.

It is due for release on 1 Oct in the UK and will vary in cost depending on the call plan, ranging from free on the higher call plans to £82 (~$146.56, ~€120.60) on the Anytime 100. The email charge will be on top, varying from £8.51 (~$15.21, ~€12.51) for a heavy voice plan to £15.74 (~$28.13, ~€23.15) if it is only used for email.

We’ll be testing in October, so stand by for a review.

BlackBerry 7100

Microsoft’s New Patent on Clicking

Microsoft have a new patent, relating to launching applications on PDAs. The patent describes launching different programs according to how many times a hardware button is pressed, for example one press for Contacts, twice for Calendar, three times for Hover Bovver.

If you still have a digital watch, it’s exactly the same technique you use every six months when the clocks change and you have to remember how to set the damn thing. Thankfully, this MS patent only applies to hardware buttons on PDAs running Microsoft’s PocketPC operating system.

The irony is not lost on Digital Lifestyles, as we reported last week that Microsoft have just joined a group whose very existence to is prevent obstructive patents and overhaul the US Patent and Trademark Office, renowned for issuing daft patents. We’re also reminded of our very own BT’s claim on owning the patent on hyperlinks.

Microsoft’s patent and licensing programme

BT’s hyperlink patent

Sony EyeToy gets Sociable

Slowly and steadily, Sony is building on the usage and application of the ground-breaking EyeToy webcam add-on for their Playstation 2. The latest announcement is EyeToy:Chat, which expands the tool into a far more social area.

As you probably already know, EyeToy is a low cost Webcam that plugs into Sony’s Playstation 2 and is placed on top of the television, pointing into the room. The player controls the game by moving their arms, body and head around, which in turn interacts with the games. There is no need to use a joypad. It was originally released as EyeToy:Play and came with twelve mini-games; Kung Fu – chopping opponents, the inevitable dance games – Saturday Night Fever-style arm waving, even Keep-up – using the head to keep a ball in the air and knocking it into objects.

EyeToy: Chat brings voice, chat, video mail, video chat and a selection of video-enabled simple games such as chess and checkers. Utilising the broadband adaptor the text chat rooms allow 256 people to talk together, with 16 people able to converse at one time in the voice chat rooms, as well as real-time video. When people are in one-on-one video chats, the options to play the simple games are presented. The video mail feature will allow users to send 30-second video messages to anyone on their buddy list.

Clearly safety will be a big concern for parents and Sony’s London Studios, the original inventors of EyeToy, who developed Chat and have spent considerable efforts in trying to make the product as safe as possible. User will need to register with Playstation Net to use it and will only be bale to take part once they enter the PIN that is send to their home address. With Chat rooms being moderated and a clear processes for grievances Sony feels “‘EyeToy: Chat’ is one of the safest communication packages available on any system on the market.”

The whole of the Digital-Lifestyles office is looking forward to its European Summer release.