Category: Platforms

3D Mobile Menus

Is this really easier to read?HI Corporation have launched a new 3D menuing system for mobile terminals. The company believes that by presenting menus in 3D, depth of field enhances the users’ visual recognition of icons.

The menu application will be used as an extension to its Mascot Capsule Engine, a 3D engine already adopted by the three major carriers in Japan and licensed around the world to Motorola and Sony Ericsson.

The company’s plans don’t stop there though – it sees potential for the new UI in many other mobile devices with LCDs, such as digital cameras and camcorders.

With applications like Swerve and Mascot reaching phones around the world, I have to ask if advances in menu systems like this actually make using small devices easier, or if it’s just a way of selling new devices to customers. After all, people do have a tendency to judge a device not just on its looks and perceived capabilities, but tend to make a decision on its sophistication based purely on its display UI.

HI Corp

Microsoft Smart Phone, Sierra Voq, on Sale in Europe

Nifty fold-out keyboardSierra Wireless’ Voq phone, a handset built around Microsoft’s Smartphone Platform, has just gone on sale in Holland, through Dutch carrier KPN.

The 5 ounce phone contains a 200MHz XScale processor and has 48mb of Flash memory alongside 32mb of SDRAM – expansion is through the usual SD card slot. The display is 2.2 inch, 64,000 colour LCD. A flipout QWERTY keyboard differentiates the phone from most other handsets, emphasising that it’s a business phone for emails. Or for youths that like to send a lot of text messages.

The phone is not yet available in the US – though is expected to be on sale within the next two weeks, priced at about US$500 (€404).

KPN

GNER Trains Get WiFi

GNER Trains in the UK is launching a new WiFi service for commuters on its East Coast Main Line. Ten trains will be equipped with wireless internet access, so if your train actually turns up, you can let people know how late you’re going to be. You can even email pictures of the motionless countryside, if you have a camera. A further ten trains will have WiFi installed in them over the summer.

First class passengers will get “free” access (i.e. it’s included in the astronomical cost of a train ticket), whereas standard fare ticket holders will pay between UK£2.95 and UK£9.95 (€4.40 and €14.83), depending on the length of access. Could be particularly expensive in the Autumn, depending on which kind of leaves fall.

The service can operate on trains travelling up to 125 miles per hour, but given that nothing has moved on our rail network at that speed for at least 100 years, passengers should enjoy uninterrupted access.

GNER Mobile Office

Sharp e-book, 1mm thin

Sharp e-bookNot to be outdone by Sony, Sharp have announced their own e-book reader. The stunning-looking device is under 1mm thin and Sharp are projecting that it will be available in the shops by 2007.

Any problems with content not being available for it should be lighten by the fact that, In a very smart move, Sharp has already signed up over 7,000 content providers for its Zaurus handheld/PDA.

Clearly from the length of this piece, details are light, but the potential in this field is huge.

FujiSankei Business i

Print Your Fingernails with ImagiNail

It’s Friday, so this is our light-hearted selection.

Following the explosion of nail painting shops in both the US and the UK, some bright spark has come up with the idea of a printer that can decorate your fingernails.

The NailJet Pro appears easy to use; select the pattern or images that you want on your fingernail, apply a preparation coat to the nails, place the hand into the machine (which looks like a clumsy old style DeskJet printer), and finally apply a sealer.

Amazingly the process takes less than seven minutes to decorate all 10 fingers.

The selection of graphics is extraordinary and varied. From letters of the alphabet, through painting to religious symbols, they have it all. Anything they might have left out, can be download to the printer.

We’re now off to get our nails sorted out for the weekend.

ImagiNail

Portable Music Watch: Dell’s Cheeky iPod Deal; New Sony Players

The Sony Vaio Pocket - yes, yes, we know you want one...Dell have come up with a slightly controversial deal to attract customers who are disgruntled with the iPod’s less than impressive battery life: tempt them to buy a Dell DJ as a replacement by offering them US$100 (€82) for their dud iPod. With the rebate, this makes the 15gb music player half-price.

Dell are clearly capitalising on the iPod’s “dirty secret” – that promised eight-hour battery life doesn’t stay eight hours for very long. Battery inefficiency and memory effects mean that after a year or so, some users are lucky to get two or three hours of tunes out of their player, with some reporting batteries that have completely given up.

Apple have recently introduced a US$99 replacement service for players that are more than a year old, but Dell’s promotion is aimed at enticing iPod owners to jump ship by offering a shiny new (though less capacity) player, with 25 free downloads, for the same price.

“Is your iPod battery starting to fade? Before you pay for a replacement battery for your same old device, consider upgrading to a brand new Dell 15GB1 DJ with more than double the battery life”, yells the website.

In other portable music player news, Sony have unveiled two new portable players – the Network Walkman Player NW-HD1 and the Vaio Pocket VGF-AP1L. Sony don’t make cars because you wouldn’t know if you were looking at the model name or the registration number.

The NW-HD1 is a 20gb player for US$400, and is claimed by Sony to be the smallest in its class. It also incorporates 256mb of Flash memory too.

The VGF-AP1L is a 40gb player with a 2.2 inch colour screen for displaying photos and album artwork and is US$500. The player also can store photos from Cybershot cameras, rather like the iPod’s picture storage function, with the upside that the Vaio player can actually display them.

To put further pressure on Apple, both devices will work seamlessly with Sony’s new music download service, Connect. Supported formats are MP3, WAV and WMA, but no AAC – so Sony Walkman owners won’t be doing much business with iTunes. Given that they invented the entire portable music player market with the Walkman, if anyone can compete with the iPod, it’s Sony.

Dell’s Deal

Sony

Home Technology Monitor: 4% US Homes Have a PVR

The 2004 Ownership and Trend Report from the Home Technology Monitor shows that advanced video devices are becoming more and more popular in home entertainment.

According to the study of US homes:

  • 4% own a PVR – double the number six months ago
  • 6% own a HDTV – against 4% six months ago
  • 18% now own a dual DVD/VCR deck
  • 5% have a PC TV tuner
  • “The proliferation of video technology in the past 10 years is transforming the media use habits of mainstream consumers,” said David Tice, Vice President, Knowledge Networks/SRI. “Though the options for reaching consumers with marketing messages are multiplying, viewers are also exerting greater control over their entertainment options. To maintain an informed marketplace, measurement systems must keep pace with these changes; but current approaches can exclude the very households that advertisers need to understand most. This is troubling news, because these consumers are disproportionately affluent and heavy media users.”

    • Knowledge Networks

    Macintosh gets its First HDTV PVR

    Macintosh OS X users now have their first HDTV PVR – and it’s digital too. Elgato Systems have released the EyeTV 500, a Firewire-powered box that sits next to your mac and can be used to record, rewind and edit over-the-air digital TV. Elgato have had a range of digital tuners for the mac, but this is the first HD offering to the market.

    Digital television is gaining popularity in the US after a slow start, with more than 1200 DTV stations now reaching almost 100% of the population. HD television has been popular there for some time, with broadcasters boasting four times the picture quality of DVD.

    Elgato are hoping to capitalise in the new interest in that DTV is attracting with this new HD product. “We have designed EyeTV 500 in line with the growth and success of free over-the-air HDTV services in North America,” said Freddie Geier, Elgato’s CEO in a statement. “Mac users can now enjoy free prime-time programming from the major U.S. broadcasters (including ABC, NBC, CBS, FOX, UPN, and WB) – and all in TV image quality never seen before on the Mac.”

    Users will have access to more than 20 HDTV and SDTV channels, and will be able to archive programmes directly to their Macintosh’s hard disk. The box can even be programmed directly over the internet with TitansTV’s electronic programme guide.

    The EyeTV 500 costs US$349 (€288) and is available now.

    Elgato Systems

    Instat: Digital Set-top Box and PC TV Tuner Market US$3.8 billion in 2008

    In-Stat/MDR are projecting that the worldwide market for digital tuners in set-top boxes and PC TV cards will be worth US$3.8 billion (€3.12 billion) by 2008.

    PC TV cards are growing rapidly in popularity, due to PCs being more readily accepted as the entertainment centre of households. Many lifestyle PCs are being sold with cards preinstalled and preconfigured – and even if a PC doesn’t ship with one, the installation of a decent card will enable the owner to turn their PC into a fully functional PVR.

    Consumers now expect their PC to be able to satisfy all of their entertainment needs, and television is an important aspect of this. A home entertainment computer without digital television will not be acceptable for much longer.

    Motherboard manufacturers are also getting in on the act, and are producing boards with integrated tuners. Motherboards have always demonstrated a trend for integration – many features which previously required an expansion card, like 5.1 sound, RAID arrays, graphics accelerators and Bluetooth, are now built into some boards.

    In-Stat predict that international growth (i.e. non-US) will be key, and that Europe will continue to lead the market for some time. Lifestyle PCs are remarkably popular in Europe, with many major brands such as Sony, HP and Shuttle doing well out of products aimed specifically it the entertainment niche. Asia is rapidly climbing into second place – will there be a time when Asia becomes the world’s largest entertainment market?

    In-Stat

    Hauppage

    H.264 Codec Adopted for Next-Gen HD DVDs

    The DVD Forum has ratified the new H.264 Advanced Video Codec (AVC) for inclusion in the forthcoming High Definition DVD platform.

    The H.264 codec, formerly known H.26L, was was developed by the Motion Picture Experts Group (responsible of course, for the various MPEG formats) and the International Telecommunication Union, and has now been ratified into the MPEG-4 codec. The codec enables a variety of video content to be compressed for transmission and decompressed for playback in a highly efficient way.

    Apple has already made an announcement to the effect that H.264 will be included in a release of its QuickTime platform next year.

    “Apple is firmly behind H.264 because it delivers superb quality digital video and is based on open standards that no single company controls,” said Philip Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of Worldwide Product Marketing in a statement.

    H.264 is intended to be used on a number of platforms, and as such covers a wide spectrum of bandwidth requirements – from HD television to mobile phones. The codec is highly efficient, and has been demonstrated playing back 1920×1080, 24fps HD movies at up to half the data rate of MPEG-2. Less data means room for more channels – or better audio and video.

    Don’t expect HD playback performance on your new mobile phone – Apple’s test detailed above required a dual processor G5 to do the playback. The new codec will be more suited to digital television broadcasts to phones and mobile movies with a much lower resolution.

    How H.254 works – and it’s not too technical, either

    MPEG resources on the internet