Into Tech

We’ve seen it all too often over the years. After a technology company has failed to get anywhere in the market with its products, it decides to sue everyone possible for patent infringement. As has been said: Those who can, innovate. Those who can’t, litigate. The latest to join the bunch is a failed multimedia device company, e.Digital, who is suing a ton of companies, claiming to hold a patent on using removable flash drives in portable devices. Seriously. It’s already sued Casio, LG Electronics, Olympus, Samsung, Sanyo, Vivitar, Avid and Nikon (all in Texas, of course) and says that’s just the beginning.

The patents in question are as follows:

• US5491774: Handheld record and playback device with flash memory
• US5742737: Method for recording voice messages on flash memory in a hand held recorder
• US5787445: Operating system including improved file management for use in devices utilizing flash memory as main memory
• US5839108: Flash memory file system in a handheld record and playback device
• US5842170: Method for editing in hand held recorder

To think that others weren’t thinking about removable solid state storage on devices seems rather ludicrous. The real innovation in the space may have been the creation of flash memory, but to claim that using removable flash memory is an innovation worth limiting with patents just doesn’t make any sense. But, once again, this shows how the patent system is being used for the exact opposite of what it’s supposed to do. The company that failed in the marketplace gets to hold up those who are succeeding because they made a better product.

For additional irony, by the way, it should be remember that one of e.Digital’s failed media devices looked almost identical to the iPod, and was named the “Treo 10″ — quite similar to the Treo mobile phone device. I would think that charges of “copying” would apply a lot more to that device than anyone using the fairly obvious idea of using removable flash storage in a mobile device.

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Nokia moved to counter the growing threat of Apple and Google in the race to supply the next generation of mobile phones by taking control of the British software company Symbian yesterday and announcing plans to make its mobile phone software free of charge.

Symbian, which Nokia helped create with the UK-based Psion 10 years ago, makes the operating system software that sits on so-called smartphones, handsets that can access the internet and play music. As mobile phones become more powerful and people do far more than just make calls and send texts, the software that powers these devices has become a crucial battleground.

Symbian has about 60% of the global smartphone market with its technology in more than 200m handsets already. But the recent entrance of Apple into the market with the iPhone and plans for Google to do likewise with its Android operating system later this year have threatened the positions of Symbian and Nokia, which makes four out of every 10 phones sold worldwide.

Kai Öistämö, Nokia’s vice-president, insisted that the company’s move, which has been under discussion for several months, had nothing to do with the threat posed by Google or Apple. “Looking at this as a response to anybody would not do any justice to the boldness and magnitude of what we are doing.”

Analysts were in no doubt about the Finnish company’s motivation: to prevent Google’s Android operating system, due to appear on phones towards the end of the year, grabbing a significant slice of the market. Nokia’s plans to stop charging for operating software also pose a threat to Microsoft and the BlackBerry developer, Research In Motion.

Nokia is spending €264m (£209m) on the 52% of Symbian it does not own and bringing on board its 1,600 staff - more than 1,000 of which are in London and Cambridge. Ericsson, which has 15.6% of Symbian, Sony Ericsson, with 13.1%, Panasonic, with 10.5%, and Siemens, with 8.4%, have already agreed to sell. The last remaining shareholder is Samsung and Nokia expects the Korean firm also to sell its stake. Nokia then plans to integrate its own smartphone operating system - called Series 60 - with the UIQ standard developed by Motorola and Sony Ericsson and the MOAP platform of Japan’s NTT DoCoMo. It will roll together all these systems, in the form of about 10m lines of computer code, into one free-of-charge software product that is “open source”, or accessible to all, within two years.

That new product will be controlled by a non-profit organisation called the Symbian Foundation, which already has more than 20 members including Vodafone, Orange, Nokia, Samsung and LG. All members will be able to use the new operating system to install on handsets or develop applications free of charge.

Many mobile phone firms complain that the sheer number of operating systems makes it very hard to develop new revenue-generating services.

Setting up the foundation means Nokia will be abandoning hundreds of millions of pounds of software-licensing revenues. Symbian alone made £160m last year by charging mobile phone makers for its software. For Nokia, however, the ambition is to make it as easy as possible for engineers to develop applications for the new system, which will make Symbian handsets more attractive to consumers and consequently to mobile phone companies.

“I am convinced this will lead to us selling more phones,” said Öistämö.

Symbian’s chief executive, Nigel Clifford, described the creation of the Symbian Foundation as “epoch-making”. Analysts said it would also frustrate Google, whose Android system is also “open source”.

Emeka Obiodu, at the industry analysts Global Insight, said Google’s plans had been “fatally derailed” by Nokia’s move.

“Nokia is taking the fight to Google on its own terms,” he said. “Google prides itself on open-source credentials and is eager to build up a coalition of industry players to push through with its agenda (which is to cultivate a viable platform for mobile advertising). However, Nokia has nipped that in the bud.

“By tying up the top five mobile handset makers, key chipmakers and the likes of AT&T and Vodafone, Nokia wants to starve Android, and similar initiatives, of influential industry players, leaving them to toy around with smaller players with lesser chance of changing the status quo.”

It will also be a blow to Microsoft, which has toiled for most of the past decade to get into the mobile phone market and now faces the prospect of its main rival becoming free of charge. Microsoft’s Windows Mobile operating system has only 13% of the market and costs handset makers $8 to $15 a phone to use.

My puny Vaio laptop has a weenie sub-80GB hard disk drive that I’ve been promising to upgrade but, considering that all the other components could do with an overhaul too, it would be a waste of cash.

Still, I wouldn’t say no to a laptop with the new Spinpoint M6 hard disk drive from Samsung, boasting three 167GB platters for a 500GB drive. Touted as the “world’s biggest and fastest” laptop hard disk drive, the M6 spins at 5,400rpm, has an 8MB cache, 3.0Gbps SATA interface and an optional Free-Fall-Sensor. It meets Microsoft’s fast-boot design requirements and supports ramp load and unload of up to 600,000 times.

So what fits on a 500GB hard disk drive? [cue the silly photo stats...]

It wasn’t so many years ago that laptops were sniggered at by PC users waving their big fat HDDs around. Today, all of that is well and truly over as Samsung becomes the first company to ship a 500GB hard disk drive for laptops.
The 2.5in Spinpoint M6 HDD is just 9.5mm high and [...]

Now that people have gotten over the novelty of how big HDTVs can get, manufacturers are waging a new war about who can make the skinniest.

Sharp is claiming that its new X Series AQUOS LCD TVs in 46in, 42in, and 37in flavours are the thinnest out there, with a waistline of just 3.44cm thick. That’s at the thinnest part, of course, but it’s still thin. Samsung however showed an LCD TV recently with a ridiculously thin 1cm waistline but since it’s not in production, Sharp gets to keep the Size Zero crown. For now.

The really clever bit about these TVs though is the use of a removable tuner section which can stored elsewhere and connected to the display with one cable. This means you don’t have to fiddle around the back of the telly trying to install cables.

The TVs are all Full HD, boast a high contrast ratio of 15,000:1 and use 12-bit BDE (Bit Depth Expansion) colour value rendering for brighter colours. They sport three HDMI inputs each, have 120Hz image processing for smoother fast image processing and house a 3-way, 8-speaker system.

They launch in Japan first in March.-Martin Lynch

TV HDTV LCD

Samsung says it has developed the world’s largest microSD memory card. At 8GB, the fingernail-sized card can store 2,000 MP3 files, 4,000 digital photos or around five DVD-quality movies. With a read speed of 16 MB/s and a write speed of 6MB/s, the 8GB memory card is one-and-a-half times faster than the Speed Class 4 SDHC standard. Jump for more.

Up until now, SD cards have mainly been used for storing data in digital cameras and TVs. The MicroSD version is a quarter of the size of its big brother and, if used with an extender, can allow any files downloaded via your mobile to be played on any other media device which uses an SD card. – Ad Dugdale

Samsung develops mobile phone memory card with record storage capacity [Samsung Press Release]

The oddity that is the UMPC continues to gain traction, albeit really slowly, and sitting at the forefront of the drive is Samsung, which has just delivered the Q1 Ultra. Yesterday, we had Fujitsu enter the fray while Sony is commanding the high-end with its pricey Vaio UX-1.

Promising that’s it better than the overpriced original Q1- which was pretty slow, had no keyboard and poor battery life - this one is powered by either a 600MHz or 800MHz Intel processor, has 1GB of DDR2 memory and comes with an integrated split-QWERTY keypad, mouse, and user-defined function keys.

Battery life has been boosted to 4.5 hours [claimed] and performance speeds have been increased. There’s a 7in LED display with a native resolution of 1024 x 600 and a brightness rating of 300nits. On the comms front, it sports integrated 802.11b/g Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 2.0 + EDR and an optional 3.5G HSDPA modem. It weighs 1.5lbs.

There are four versions of the Ultra on the way, and the first to arrive is the Ultra-V, sporting a 60GB hard disk drive, Vista Home Premium Edition, biometric fingerprint scanner, camera and a $1,200 price tag. A budget version, the $799 Q1 Ultra-EL, has a 40GB drive, slower processor and no camera and is due out in a few weeks. Remember, none of these attractive prices are a useful indicator of what they will cost over here, just prepere to be gouged.

The Ultra-XP, due in June, is aimed at businesses and will use the Windows XP Tablet PC Edition OS. Top of the range will be the Q1 Ultra-CMV, due in August, with in-built HDSPA modem and an 80GB HDD. No prices for those yet.-Martin Lynch

UMPC portable laptop samsung

This UMPC was little more than a concept a few months back but apparently it’s gotten the green light and will be launching later this year. This new look also seems to ditch this fold-out keyboard concept we covered at the tail-end of last year.

It’s a stylish little number that hides a QWERTY keyboard with sprung keys, without being too big and bulky. At least that’s the claim. A proper keyboard on a UMPC is a nice idea but will it arrive at a price point most of us can afford? Here’s the key specs:

Intel Sealey processor (800MHz)
1GB memory
40GB hard disk
SD reader
2 cameras
5.6-inch (1024 x 600) display
Comes with a two core battery but there’s an optional four core version promising 7 hours

I’ll have more UMPC stuff in the morning with details of the new and improved - and hopefully cheaper - Samsung Q1.-Martin Lynch

UMPC portable laptop fujitsu

Black is the new white and skinny is in when it comes to new home cinema kit. That said, whereas thin and tall might equal good looking it does not guarantee that it’ll be good sounding.

Still, the design folk at Samsung have taken a leaf from their stylish TV designers and come up with this new glossy, piano-black home cinema system.

Launching now in Korea, the TWQ120 is certainly pretty but there’s not all that much information beyond the above photo and the fact that’s it a 5.1 system with an in-built DVD player. It certainly strikes a Habitat-type pose and would look nice draped around any glossy, piano-black HDTV.-Martin Lynch

home cinema audio movies samsung

Texas Instruments, the creators of the DLP projection technology used in most of the world’s new projectors, think there could a be a quid or two in mini-projectors for mobile phones. That would make it smaller than even the world’s smallest projector.

The company recently previewed a DLP Pico-Projector prototype to a few lucky industry sods, small enough to fit on the tip of your finger. Texas already has a pocket-projection technology out in the market, with products available from Toshiba, Mitsubishi and Samsung.

Researchers, Pacific Media Associates (PMA), thinks the pocket projector category (a bit bigger than this) to hit more than 1 million units by 2010.

The weenie projection tech is being touted for use in phones, digital cameras and MP3/video players. A camcorder with this in-built would be handy. Don’t expect to see anything real though until next year.-Martin Lynch

projector mobile phone video geek