HP’s iPod – Microsoft Protest

Following the HP announcement at CES that it would be working with Apple and selling a rebranded version of the iPod (possibly called HPod, or more officially ‘HP Digital Music Player’) and bundling the Apple iTunes software on to HP PC’s, the general manager of Microsoft’s digital media division, David Fester has gone on record suggesting that HP going with Apple is a mistake as it would restrict consumer choice, “Windows is about choice – you can mix and match software and music player stuff. We believe you should have the same choice when it comes to music services.” Clearly the printed text alone cannot detect any irony that might have been in Mr Festers voice when talking about Windows and choice. What is also clear is that Microsoft must be seriously concerned about the perceived threat from Apple and their iPod.

There is a long, and previously frosty history between HP and Apple, starting way back when Apple co-founder, Steve Wozniak, who was working at HP, asking them if they would be interested in marketing the personal computer. When they turned him down, he went off with Jobs to form Apple in 1976.

This is all now water under the bridge and as part of the deal HP gets “instant access to Apple’s technology and music rights and the opportunity to offer a full range of popular digital products to consumers”. Benefits for Apple include exploding the number of shops selling products based on their technology, leveraging HP current relationships with their 11,000 retailers around the world and widening the install base of Apple iTunes.

Further development of the HP Digital Music Player continues and it is thought that HP are working on integrating Microsoft’s Windows Media Audio (WMA) format to play back on the iPod for the first time and plan for the device to go on sale in June.

We find the Apple/HP deal interesting for a number of reasons, including that it is the first Jobs has done with an external hardware company since his return to Apple in 1997, when he cancelled all of the disastrous OEM deals that had been previously signed.

HP Chairman and CEO Carly Fiorina keynote at CES

Sony Announce Location Free TV

Among the many announcements at CES was an interesting portable 12″ LCD TV screen from Sony, that can be carried around a house and have various content delivered to it from its base station, enabling the showing of video from many different sources, as well as playing music, viewing photos and browsing the Internet. Sony calls it LocationFree™.

It is based on a similar device released just in Japan called AirTact and a few TVs. Kunitake Ando, president and group COO at Sony Corp has realised the potential to freeing the screen. At Sony “Dream World” held in Paris, Sept. 2003 was quoted that transforming traditional TVs to “location-free” TV or displays could take the 125 million TV sets sold worldwide and “easily increased to four or five times that number.”

The basestation can have many different sources plugged in to it, including; video, be that TV ariel/cable, DVD, VCR, DV video camera; audio sources; other media files stored on computers via Ethernet. There is a wide selection for possible connections to the network, wirelessly (802.11a, 802.11b (WiFi), or 802.11g) or an Ethernet cable. The content is delivered to the remote, battery-powered 12.1″ LCD touch screen, which can also run from a main source. There are also plans for a pocket sized 5.8″ version. The viewer is free to move around the house while continuing to access the different media sources, selecting them by touching the screen. As yet, Sony has not discussed battery life.

For the first time Sony have brought technology from their high-end TV sets to the LCD display including 3D Y/C separation circuitry for clear, vivid picture and colour blur reduction; angled line correction circuitry for smoothing out jagged lines; motion adaptive I/P conversion circuitry for improving fast moving action scenes; and digital audio amplifier circuitry for crisp sound and minimized distortion.

It looks like Sony have carried out considerable research to find what function user may want. The five pounds screen itself has a lot of connectors includes an Ethernet port, a USB port, Memory Stick media slot, headphone jack, keyboard port and an AV input for connecting to a camcorder. Useful features include viewers being able to “freeze” and save a TV scene by using the “capture” button on the remote screen – saving a mad scrabble for pen and paper where information appears on the TV.  Prints of the images or homepage data, e-mail attachments and digital photos can also be made to USB printers connected to the base-station.

While using the screen to browse the Internet, the viewer will be able to watch their choice of TV/video source displayed in a Picture in Picture (PiP) window, but given the screen is 800×600, we imaging this might not be used much beyond demos to friends.

Sony has omitted to give any precise dates for the shipping of Location Free, preferring to say it would be “Later in the year”.

Sony say one of the benefits of the screen being an IP device is that access your media does not need to be restricted just to your own home network. By taking the screen with you on your travels, you can access the self same content through any IP connection, which are increasingly found around the world in offices and hotel rooms. One example cited gives an interesting twist to the product – a person on the road, unable to attend their child’s birthday, has an opportunity to tune in, watching the live video being shot on a camcorder plugged in to the basestation at home. We believe application such as this, which can be used to bring together families distributed over great distances, will be a major driver in purchasing products.

We are excited about this step of remote access to your home media, firewall configuration allowing of course. It could be an interesting early step into a future where your home media server becomes the focal point of your media ownership, with your various remote IP devices having access, via your home server.

At this point it is worth highlighting that hard facts about which protocols are used to transfer content back and forth between base-station and screen. It would be a great shame if the protocols were proprietary. We think there is real potential in this device, and by using open standards; there could be a real potential for a product like this to become a standard for interfacing analog media to an IP device. There is a real need for a device like it and it appears that Mr Ando at Sony Corp is trying to fill it.

Record 11m SMS’s Sent New Years Day in the UK

A stunning 111 million mobile phone text messages (SMS’s) were sent person-to-person in the UK between midnight on 31st December 2003 and midnight on 1st January 2004, nearly double the normal daily average. New Year in 2002 set the previous record, which for the first time broke the 100 million level.

The trend for SMS is still continuing to increase, as is illustrated by the 8% increase on the most recent New Year. Further examples of growth are October 2003 hitting a new monthly record, by reaching 1.8 billion messages sent, and 76 million being sent on the day of England victory in the Rugby World Cup.

It has been know for along time that the younger generations are big SMS users and further proof of this was shown on 14th August 2003, when 67 million text messages were sent on the day that A-level (pre-university examinations) results were announced, which at that time was the previous highest number of message sent.

The figures come from the Mobile Data Association (MDA) and were collected from the four GSM operators in the UK, O2, Orange, T-Mobile and Vodafone.

Mobile Data Association

Multimedia over Coax Alliance Forms

Getting digitised media moving around the home has remained a question without a fixed answer. CAT5 network cabling, powerline, phone line and wireless have all been tried with varying levels of success and ease of installation. A new approach has been floated by a collective of networking, cable and Consumer Electronics (CE) industry big-boys under the banner of the Multimedia over Coax Alliance or MoCA.

They suggest that the coax cable routed around 70% of US homes, could offer considerable bandwidth, ideal for multi-use, digital video and data applications, while simultaneously carrying existing analog and digital cable as well as satellite services currently on the cable.

Cisco Systems, Comcast, EchoStar, Entropic Communications, Matsushita Electric (Panasonic), Motorola, RadioShack and Toshiba, among others, have formed a non-profit, mutual benefit corporation to develop and promote the specifications. These will be used as the basis for the certification process to validate products as interoperable with other MoCA enabled products.

MoCA plans to build on technology developed by Entropic Communications Inc, a closely held company in San Diego formed in May 2001, which designed chips to help send data over coax at up to 270 megabits per second. Expected to translate into a guaranteed bandwidth of about 100 megabits per second with a Quality of Service (QoS), provided by prioritised asynchronous services (802.1p), and what they describe as state of the art packet-level encryption, DES link layer baseline privacy. It will carry Ethernet (IP), 1394, MPEG applications.

Coaxial cabling is already connected to over 300 million television sets and is the preferred in-home video distribution medium for 90+ million cable and satellite homes in the US today. It offers a number of positive drives for the current content producing and distribution worlds; the innate security of a shielded, wired connection and a long-standing familiarity – the cable companies buy the stuff by the mile.

The MoCA technology is designed to be sold at retail, be as simple as a cable TV to install and be virtually transparent to the consumer. The final specification is expected to be available within 12 months.

Multimedia over Coax Alliance

Review – Gateway FMC-901X

Extreme Tech have reviewed Gateway Computers latest media PC that runs Windows Media edition, the FMC-901X, and they like it.

The Gateway FMC-901X is a far cry from the original Gateway Destination (anyone remember those?) It’s sleek looks and high degree of usability makes it an appealing choice. TV image quality is excellent, and so is TV recording. Burning your favorite shows to DVD with a few button clicks is incredibly easy.

Apple Launch iPod Mini

The rumours of the mini-iPod have been proven as true with Steve Jobs announcing a small version of the iPod, the iPod mini at Macworld yesterday.

The smaller-than-current-iPod device will have an anodised aluminium body available in five colours; silver, gold, pink, blue or green and be capable of holding 1,000 128-Kbps AAC encoding, CD-quality songs on its tiny hard drive. It will also only weigh 3.6 ounces (102 mg).

The iPod mini runs the same software as current iPods, so no functionality is lost, despite its slight smaller backlight LCD screen (1.67 inch vs 2-inch and 138-by-110-pixel resolution, 0.22-mm dot pitch vs 160-by-128-pixel resolution, 0.24-mm dot pitch). In a further refinement to the design, the four buttons have been integrated into the touch wheel – Apple labels it Click Wheel.

Recharging times will be the same as the current model, but the mini will be able to pull its power from either the FireWire or USB 2.0 cable.

It will be available in the US in February and worldwide in April with a suggested selling price of $249 in the US and a UK price of £199 (inc VAT).

Apple also announced they have sold two million iPods and by way of a celebration they also announced that they will be upgrading the smallest capacity from 10Gb to 15Gb without increasing the price.

Apple iPod & iPod mini specs

TiVo Claim Patent Infringment by EchoStar

PVR pioneer, TiVo, has filed a patent infringement suit against US satellite TV provider, EchoStar. They are claiming that EchoStar are using technology that violates their patent, “multimedia time warping system”, that enables viewers to “store selected television broadcast programs while the user is simultaneously watching or reviewing another program” that they filed for in 1998 and were granted in 2001.

The headline is clear, TiVo start to see the PVR world become accepted by the general public and want to start gaining income from their patents – they have 40 awarded and a further 100 applications pending. It is also in TiVo business plan to increase their income from patents and reduce their reliance on selling boxes.

We wonder if there is another, less immediately obvious, intention. One of TiVo’s largest customers is US satellite TV provider DirecTV, who were recently taken over by Rupert Murdoch and amongst the many companies that Mr Murdoch has as interest in is NDS. NDS market a PVT, the XTV PVR, which could be a major threat to TiVo and their continuing relationship as a supplier to DirecTV – unless DirecTV know legal action would following the changing of suppliers.

EchoStar PVR

NDS XTV PVR

Philips and Samsung Announce Universal CE API

Consumer electronics (CE) companies, Philips and Samsung have today announced the Universal Home Application Programming Interface (UH-API). Aimed at simplifying the development of software, be that applications or middleware that uses their semiconductor-based systems, thus reducing the time to market for home consumer devices. This is a reaction to, and acceptance of, the need for increasingly complex software to operate and combine digital consumer electronics. Drafts of UH-API are expected to be available in the first quarter of 2004.

The UH-API consists of a set of software interfaces for configuring and controlling the audio and video-related components of a semiconductor platform targeting the consumer market, and it is complementary with the leading operating systems across the industry. It is designed for target devices including analog and digital televisions, Set Top Boxes, DVD players and recorders, personal video recorders, home servers and other consumer audio-video devices.

Leon Husson, executive vice president of Consumer Businesses, Philips Semiconductors said, “This is a fundamental change from developing standalone consumer electronics products that fit proprietary schemes to a universal choice of hardware systems that can support the multiple features of the diverse consumer electronic brands.”

Both companies have said they will “realign their internal resources” to develop UH-API-compliant semiconductor chipsets and solutions. They will also invite other CE companies to participate in enhancing and deploying the UH-API specification.

Philips plans to make their Nexperia Home semiconductors range UH-API compliant. Samsung will start by making its HD TV chipset compliant and plan to expand its coverage from there.

Philips Nexperia IC’s

Philips Announces Digital Media Adaptors

Philips have announced two wireless digital media adaptors that enables the playing of computer-stored content, be that films, photos or music, to be played on TV or in a traditional HiFi system.

The SL300i and SL400i have both been labelled by Philips as a Wireless Multimedia Link can be used with a supplied remote control. Only the SL400i comes with an LCD display, so users can select music without having to have the TV on, and includes the 802.11b USB wireless adaptor.

We feel with year will be the year of the Digital Media Adaptor (DMA) with products expected from many of the major players as well as new entrants.

Philips SL300i

Philips SL400i

DVD-Jon Officially in the Clear

Norwegian computer programmer, Jon Lech Johansen will be relieved to hear that his countries state prosecutor that handles computer crime, ØKOKRIM, today that they will not appeal the court ruling clearing him of wrong doing on 22.Dec.03.

His alleged crime was that he circumvented the copy protection scheme on his film DVD. His plea was that he wanted to play his legally purchased DVD on his Linux computer, and as there was no software that enabled him to do this, we wrote deCSS that removed the protection enabling him to play it. This is not normally something the general public would hear about, but DVD-Jon, as he became known as, uploaded the software to the Internet enabling others to use it.

In January 2000, he was awarded the Karoline Prize, a prestigious national prize in Norway, given annually to a high school student for academic excellence and making a significant contribution to society outside of school for deCSS.

When he turned 18, ØKOKRIM Chief Prosecutor Inger Marie Sunde indicted Johansen for violating Norwegian Criminal Code section 145(2), which outlaws breaking into another person’s locked property to gain access to data that one is not entitled to access. The US MPAA gave considerable support to ØKOKRIM.

On 22 December 2003 the Norwegian courts came to the decision that DVD-Jon could not be held accountable or punished for others’ use of his program and that “DVD is so vulnerable to damage that the purchaser must be entitled to make a copy, for example of a movie he is particularly interested in preserving”. Today ØKOKRIM confirmed that they would not be appealing the decision to a higher court.

Hollywood will not be pleased with the outcome of this. It will be seen as a now legal “leak” for their DVD content in Europe.

Aftenposten report

ØKOKRIM