Category: Portable

Sony Connect: Video Content Within 12 Months

Sony is to extend its Connect music download service to cover video downloads within the next twelve months. The chairman and and chief executive of Sony Pictures Entertainment, Michael Lynton, said: “Sony Connect will not be just a music service but also a video business within the next year.”

Of course, no-one dropped their latte at that announcement, but this is the first time that the move has been confirmed.

Sony’s consumer electronics business is developing devices that will be able to download and play videos from the Connect store, in exactly the same way that their new range of audio devices do now. The new service will be called Movielink, and given Sony’s enthusiasm for DRM, will probably only be compatible with Sony devices and PCs.

Movielink is a joint distribution venture with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Paramount, Sony Pictures, Universal Studios and Warner Brothers, and will feature content from all five studios and others.

Sony Connect

Internet Radio – On a Radio

The Reciva Reference Wireless Household Internet RadioI would listen to a lot more internet radio if I didn’t have to be in the vicinity of my computer to do so. Internet radio stations are great, but just not convenient around the house for most people – not being able to carry a small radio from room to room to listen to programmes often means that a lot of people just don’t bother listening to the huge range of programming out there.

Reciva have come up with an ingenious way round this – without even needing a computer. Their Wireless Household Internet Radio modules allow consumers to listen to broadcasts in any room of the house by using a WiFi receiver to access streamed content. You could even use it in the park if it’s in a hotspot.

Reciva don’t make the finished devices themselves, instead manufacturing the modules for their partners. They also provide a reference unit for module evaluation, and an Application Development kit. There are more than ten thousand internet radio stations in existence covering most niches, and as they don’t rely on over the air transmission, are not geographically dependent. This means that anyone can set up a station in the UK to reach the 15 million expatriates living abroad, with bandwidth as their only consideration.

If PC-less internet radio devices like this take off along with ubiquitous WiFi coverage, it could mean that digital radio will lose some of it attractiveness. After all, there are considerably less stations and the selection available is dependent on which ones are carried by your local broadcast masts.

Reciva

Mini iPod Gets a Global Launch

iPod Mini, the tiny hard drive-based music player that suddenly makes standard iPod players look the size of a bus (with thanks to my newly-developed conscience there for rewriting that to take out a reference to Kirsty Alley), has finally got a global release date.

After months of component shortages, Apple are now confident that they can supply global demand. Coming to a shop near you, the player will cost about UK£179 (€268) in the UK – but will without any doubt be considerably cheaper everywhere else in the world.
10:35 08/07/2004 When? 24th of July.

The iPod Mini will be competing with the lower end of the digital music player market, and will probably steal even more of the market from Rio and Creative. No doubt the imminent arrival of Sony’s new models prompted a personal visit from Steve Jobs, Return of the Jedi-style, to the Toshiba factory to encourage productivity. My thoughts go out to those poor workers who were possibly beaten to within an inch of their lives to produce enough 4gb Microdrives to ensure that no rollerblader will have to go without a pink MP3 player in Hyde Park this summer.

(Simon has asked me to point out that, to our knowledge, no-one was actually harmed in the production of the iPod Mini.)

iPod Mini

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

Sun’s Radical Java Update

Sun Microsystems, purveyor of all things Java have introduced the most significant update to their platform in five years.

Java2, Sun’s write-once-run-anywhere software platform, popular in everything from mobile phones to PCs to smart cards has gone from version 1.4 to version 5.0.

Previously known as Tiger (stripy mammal, now mostly employed to sell breakfast cereal), the new release hopes to address previous concerns related to speed and scalability. This release of the platform has over 100 new features, including updates to the language and metadata. The amount of memory required by the virtual machine and code has been reduced, and new management tools have been included to help developers and administrators keep track of resources, applications and services. The compiler and code interpreter have been tweaked, providing performance that exceeds C++ … in some applications.

Java was originally seen as a computing platform for small devices, but got a new lease of life with the world wide web as a way of adding interactivity to web applications on a variety of host machines. Recently, Java has received a second huge boost in the form of mobile phones – many modern phones incorporate a Java virtual machine so that games and applications will work across a range of mobile hardware.

Java2

Record Your Day With SenseCam

There is a certain someone here at Digital Lifestyles who records everything – and I mean everything. He even records conversations with me. Whether or not he listens to them afterwards is a different matter, but he archives everything. When I saw the SenseCam this morning, it was clear that it’s his Ultimate Gadget.

With an accelerometer, passive IR detectors, light sensors and thermometer and wide angle-lensed camera, the SenseCam isn’t next year’s mobile phone, it’ a wearable device to help people with memory problems or assist obsessives in blogging their entire day.

The SenseCam has been developed by Microsoft Research Labs in the UK, and will be trialled at Addenbrookes Hospital in Cambridge.

The device captures 2000 images a day onto its 128mb Flash memory, and all sensor data can be fed to a system like Microsoft’s other archiving project, MyLifeBits.

MyLifeBits can then organise the data so you can go over the days events, or perhaps work out how you got into that lap dancing bar in the first place.

Future plans for the SenseCam may include heart rate monitoring or other physiological metrics – and no doubt there will be some military applications along shortly.

SenseCam

MyLifeBits

eBooks on the Rise?

For as long as there has been ASCII, there have been electronic books, but every attempt to make eBooks into a commercial product with mass-market appeal has been a disappointment. However, new sales figures from the Open eBook Forum point to a 46% rise in eBook revenues in the first quarter of this year.

Additionally, Forum President Steve Potash claims that “eBooks represent the fastest growing segment of the publishing industry.”

Sadly, the titles that are shifting are not the forward-looking science, philosophy literary masterpieces I’d hoped for: Dan Brown’s nonsense numerology pot boiler The Da Vinci Code leads the bestseller chart, followed by Van Helsing by Kevin Ryan at number two.

Figures are still modest: 421,955 eBooks were sold in Q1 2004, compared to 288,440 for the same period last year. This translates into US$3.2 million (€2.6 million) in revenue, opposed to US$2.5 million (€2 million) for Q1 2003.

The market is still dogged with issues: competing formats, lacklustre content, over-priced products and expensive reading devices. People still prefer reading printed books, but the sheer convenience of being able to carry a number of titles for consulting at will has prompted people to experiment in the format. There’s still no “killer application” for eBooks (like iTunes was to the iPod), and certainly no “system seller” (for example, the Matrix DVD prompted many thousands of people to buy a DVD player), and there possibly never will, but we hope that this important media format gets the attention it deserves.

Open eBook

Mobile Peer to Peer File Sharing with PDAs

Simedia, a small software publisher in Bucharest, has ported a clone of Apple’s Rendezvous application to PocketPC and teamed it with a web server. The result? A mobile P2P file sharing program.

The application discovers other devices on the same WiFi network and allows people to share files and documents. And of course, music.

Simedia themselves give various uses for the application, including using it to “share your music collection with passers-by or listen to their collections whilst sharing a ride on the bus”. Features like these will no doubt have music execs jumping out of windows, whilst RIAA lawyers will be lighting cigars with $100 bills.

The software will be available from 16 June in two versions: a free version, and a paid version with corporate functionality.

Simedia already have a history for off-beat PDA products – they are well known for their SounderCover application which plays background noises (trains, the dentist, a errr, circus parade) over phone calls for those wishing to deceive spouses and employers that they somewhere different to their real location.

Simedia

Sony Leaves US/European PDA Market

Sony has decided to leave the US and European PDA markets. The company will continue to develop and sell its popular Clié range in Japan, but will be concentrating on smartphones and its Vaio computer brand in the West.

Sales of conventional PDAs have suffered of late, in the face of increased popularity for smartphones. Smartphones now tend to feature the very same applications and functions that PDAs have traditionally offered, with of course integration with mobile communications and data.

PalmSource, makers of the Clié OS, suffered a 13% drop in their share price when the news that they had lost one of their largest customers was announced. PalmSource’s market share has declined over the past year, and is now level with Microsoft Windows CE, with both holding 40%. PalmSource, however, are optimistic about the smartphone market and their ability to produce a competitive smartphone OS.

At its height, Sony was the second largest seller of PalmOS devices, its success due to innovative support for multimedia such as video and MP3 playback.

ZDNet Reports

Windows Media 10 beta Announced Wednesday

Microsoft will be rolling out the beta programme for their Windows Media Player 10 application today, with the emphasis on portability and DRM.

One of WM10’s new features will be easy synchronisation of media libraries with portable devices – something that iPod users have enjoyed since iTunes was released. WM10 needs to be able to see portable devices as a disk drive in order to perform synchronisation, but many modern players behave like this when connected to a Windows machine.

For devices that run Windows Media Centre Portable OS, such as the Creative Lab’s offering detailed yesterday, Microsoft have developed the Media Transfer Protocol to automatically synchronise files between the two.

Synchronisation is not straightforward for Microsoft as many different manufacturers provide a range of disparate hardware – something that Apple, with two basic iPods, does not have to worry about.

WM10 will also feature the new Janus DRM technology, allowing subscription music sites like Napster to employ seamless licensing across devices.

Many of the new features of WM10 will of course be dormant until portable devices supporting them start to appear later in 2004.

Windows Media