Nokia was rumored to be building it, but according to the WSJ Verizon Wireless‘ first 4G handset will debut mid-2011, running on the LTE network that’s launching end of this year after Boston and Seattle guinea pigged the service. More »
Popularity: 4% [?]
In Nokia’s own words, what we’re looking at is a “piezoelectric kinetic energy harvester.” Working along the same principles as kinetic wristwatches have done for a long time already, Nokia’s idea is to capture the energy generated by the phone’s movements and to refashion it into beautiful, clean-as-a-whistle electric power. By allowing the heavier internal components to move on rails within the phone as part of a “force-transferring assembly,” the Espoo think tank has figured out a way to capitalize on all the small forces of acceleration and rotation that we subject our phones to on a daily basis. It would seem overly ambitious to expect this to replace the trusty old charger, but we give credit to Nokia for even thinking about it. Check out some schematics of how this would work after the break.
[Thanks to everyone who sent this in]
Nokia wants patent on self-regenerating phone batteries, piezoelectrics and much magic involved originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 08 Mar 2010 03:29:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
Permalink 
Symbian Freak | 
UPSTO | Email this | Comments
Popularity: unranked [?]
I’ve lost count of the number of products that mobile phones have replaced – but now they’re bringing new ones into being
The march of the mobile goes on and on but it is now taking off in a new direction with goodness knows what consequences. Until recently, the mobile phone’s distinguishing feature was its ability to gobble up competing products in a way that no other consumer product ever has. I used to keep a tally of all the products that could have been sold separately but which have been cannibalised by the mobile: cameras, calculators, books, video cameras, music players, satellite navigation and so on. When the list reached 60, I gave up, because the arrival of the iPhone and iPod Touch made the list of extra products grow exponentially.
Now the mobile is moving into new terrain. Having satiated its ravenous appetite for existing products, it is creating services that only exist because of its unique technology. For those who don’t have one of the new smartphones boasting augmented reality – say 99% of all the people on the planet – it might be helpful to imagine the screen of your mobile as a radar device. When you are looking at the screen as if you are about to take a photo the “radar” (a mixture of wireless, satellite positioning and cellphone triangulation) picks up whatever data there is within whatever distance you choose. If you are looking at the screen using, say, Google’s Layar, and rotating yourself 360 degrees, you might find dozens of messages left by twitterers less than a mile away, photos from websites, relevant data from the Wikipedia or whatever. One new iPhone app, Worksnug, gives you a panoramic view of all the public Wi-Fi hotspots around you: the idea is to build up a community of people working in public spaces. If you point Google’s Goggles app on its new Nexus One phone at a picture of, say, the Mona Lisa on a computer it immediately recognises what it is and comes up with all sorts of relevant information. Google’s SkyMap app enables you to see current patterns of stars in the sky. Owners of these smartphones in effect have a CCTV camera in their pockets, only with a far wider range than the static ones libertarians complain about. The only difference is that in this case people have (mostly) given their permission for the data they generate to be monitored, even if they are often unaware of what they have let themselves in for. We are only at the very beginning of a new era in the application of mobiles where the sky is literally the limit.
Notice I have been writing about apps for once without much mention of the iPhone. This isn’t because the landscape has suddenly changed. The iPhone family is still galaxies ahead in the popularity of its apps. But the arrival of Google is suddenly a big, big threat which helps to explain why Apple is suing HTC, the manufacturer of Google’s Nexus One phone, for infringement of patents. Apple’s own augmented reality screen can see a huge threat from Google looming over the horizon.
Why? It is partly because Google apps are based on open source – balm for the bedroom coder – rather than being behind Apple’s beautiful though closed wall. But it is mainly because Google controls the world’s information. If data is the gold dust of the new era, then Google will own the deepest mine. If, like me, you are willingly immersed in a snowstorm of Google products from GMail to mapping and Google Earth, then a phone like the Nexus One (sold from Google’s website) which has access to everything about me is both a potentially awesome product in its own right and a huge threat to my liberty if Google misuses that information. It may be of significance that my cameraphone comparison site – which reached a peak of more than 21,000 views a day this week – shows a far higher level of initial interest in Google’s Nexus One phone than in any previous one. Apple, be warned.
Google is nicking one of the secrets of Apple’s success: the more you can control, the better user experience you can give. This is very bad for individual freedom and for the openness of the web but it probably won’t worry most users if it delivers a great experience: you can always change your phone every 18 months or sooner on pay-as-you go. But what if years from now Google’s monopoly of search is extended to the phone itself? Or what if Nokia – which has been agonisingly slow to get its apps store together but still has a claimed 37% of the global market for phones – exploits its latent strength with more vertical integration? There may not be any danger to the world economy as a whole if there are a cluster of vertically integrated silos as long as one – whether Apple, Google, Nokia orSamsung or HTC – doesn’t become as powerful as Google is in search and Microsoft in operating systems. There is a kind of underlying paradox at work: the greater the user experience, the worse the dangers of an unacceptable monopoly developing.
While on the subject of economics, the profession, distracted by the credit crunch, has a lot of work to do to understand the impact of phones on economic growth. There is evidence that the explosion of mobiles is a stimulant to GDP (gross domestic product) particularly in developing countries such as India, as a recent report funded by Vodafone showed.
But what about the huge number of products not now being purchased because they are bundled into your mobile – let alone the thousands of products that come free? Since mobile devices are still falling in price in real terms, it is certain that far less is being spent on mobiles than would have been on the products they absorbed.
Of course, GDP is not necessarily affected, because not having to purchase so many different products will leave more money in our pockets to buy other things. But it is almost certainly the case that GDP has fallen compared with what would otherwise have been the case while our personal satisfaction – with having so many products in a single device – will have gone sharply up. The disruptive power of the mobile knows no end.
Popularity: 7% [?]
Apple’s patent theft accusations against HTC got a lot of press this week, as they should! But it’s just the most recent case in a gun-slinging mobile landscape riddled with patent lawsuits. This’ll end about as well as Reservoir Dogs.
The NY Times breaks it down today with this handy chart of who’s suing whom. Nokia has been particularly active, along with Kodak. The biggest target? Apple.
Companies sue each other over intellectual property all the time, of course. But this volume of mobile technology patents is unusually high. According to the Times:
Although patent litigation is not new in the technology world, these suits, specifically around mobile, point to the drastically changing mobile landscape. Lawyers I spoke with explained that mobile technology is still in its infancy and these large computing companies are trying to stake their claim to the future of computing.
Basically, it’s a land grab. Companies that know they’re being left in the dust (Nokia, Kodak) are scrambling to assert any claims that they can, while market leaders (Apple) become fat targets.
Where does that leave the us? For now, nowhere. Business as usual. But if things keep escalating, the consequences could range from companies passing legal fees onto the consumer to ITC-imposed product bans. In these kinds of gun fights, it’s rare that anyone wins. [NY Times]
Popularity: unranked [?]
pimg src=”http://cache.gawkerassets.com/assets/images/4/2010/02/340x_nokia_logo2.jpg” class=”left image340″ width=”340″ /Remember Nokia? They make cellphones (still!), and at CeBIT they’re hinting hard that two more, possibly the C5 and C6, are about to join their ranks./ppThe hint was packaged in the Nokia Conversations newsletter. C if you can figure out what it is:/p
blockquote
p”Of course, we don’t comment on rumours or leaks, but we are looking forward to C BIT for the next series of Nokia announcements. Right we’re off to pack our rucksacks and lederhosen, C you there.”/p
/blockquote
pDo you C? Because they’re laying it on pretty thick (and so am I!). So coy, that Nokia. Too bad they’re a href=”http://gizmodo.com/5382438/told-ya-nokia-was-doomed”doomed/a. Maybe these phones will help. Otherwise, C ya later. [a href="http://mobile.engadget.com/2010/02/26/nokia-c6-gets-fcc-approval-launching-at-cebit/"Engadget/a]/pbr clear=”both” style=”clear: both;”/
br clear=”both” style=”clear: both;”/
a href=”http://ads.pheedo.com/click.phdo?s=f97968ced7ea29a68900475d2b6ff5bbp=1″img alt=”" style=”border: 0;” border=”0″ src=”http://ads.pheedo.com/img.phdo?s=f97968ced7ea29a68900475d2b6ff5bbp=1″//a
img alt=”" height=”0″ width=”0″ border=”0″ style=”display:none” src=”http://a.rfihub.com/eus.gif?eui=2226″/div class=”feedflare”
a href=”http://feeds.gawker.com/~ff/gizmodo/full?a=RVtLj97vzak:4ZfyoLh1DI0:H0mrP-F8Qgo”img src=”http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/gizmodo/full?d=H0mrP-F8Qgo” border=”0″/img/a a href=”http://feeds.gawker.com/~ff/gizmodo/full?a=RVtLj97vzak:4ZfyoLh1DI0:yIl2AUoC8zA”img src=”http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/gizmodo/full?d=yIl2AUoC8zA” border=”0″/img/a a href=”http://feeds.gawker.com/~ff/gizmodo/full?a=RVtLj97vzak:4ZfyoLh1DI0:D7DqB2pKExk”img src=”http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/gizmodo/full?i=RVtLj97vzak:4ZfyoLh1DI0:D7DqB2pKExk” border=”0″/img/a a href=”http://feeds.gawker.com/~ff/gizmodo/full?a=RVtLj97vzak:4ZfyoLh1DI0:V_sGLiPBpWU”img src=”http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/gizmodo/full?i=RVtLj97vzak:4ZfyoLh1DI0:V_sGLiPBpWU” border=”0″/img/a
/divimg src=”http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/gizmodo/full/~4/RVtLj97vzak” height=”1″ width=”1″/
Popularity: unranked [?]
Maybe it’s the lack of a banging soundtrack, but we’re finding ourselves somewhat underwhelmed by these first video appearances by Symbian’s highly anticipated S^4 user interface. What we’re shown is a now familiar layout for touchscreen devices, with a trio of home screens that can be customized with widgets and live information trinkets such as a clock and a weather app. It is, as promised, very touch-centric, but it is by no means revolutionary. Both videos are titled as mere “first glimpse” offerings, however, so the eternal optimist in us likes to believe that there’ll be plenty more to get excited about as we move closer to that early 2011 launch. See them after the break and let us know what you think.
Continue reading Symbian S^4 makes video debut, fails to wow
Symbian S^4 makes video debut, fails to wow originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 26 Feb 2010 08:11:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
Permalink Phone Arena | Fierce Wireless | Email this | Comments
Popularity: 6% [?]
pimg src=”http://cache.gawkerassets.com/assets/images/4/2010/02/500x_500x_palmappre.jpg” class=”left image500″ width=”500″ /When Palm issued a release announcing lowered guidance and sales expectations for this year, a class=”autolink” title=”Click here to read more posts tagged #jonrubinstein” href=”http://gizmodo.com/tag/jonrubinstein/”Jon Rubinstein/a didn’t even try to cushion it, admitting, “driving broad consumer adoption of Palm products is taking longer than [he] anticipated.” OK. Now what? strongUPDATED/strong/ppThe implication of “longer than expected” is that success will come if everyone emjust waits long enough/em. But to say something like that in February of 2010, over seven months after the Pre launch, three after the Pixi launch, and weeks after a a href=”http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/20100212/is-verizon-deal-enough-to-turn-palm-around/?mod=ATD_rss”by all counts/a anemic launch for their barely differentiated Verizon counterparts is to tacitly admit that there’s a emserious problem/em. If Palm’s current lineup doesn’t have momentum now, it never willmdash;and their investors a href=”http://www.google.com/finance?client=obq=NASDAQ:PALM”know it./a/p
pFor Palm, this leaves two options: either build a new productmdash;something they may not be able or positioned to domdash;and hope it’s a wild success; or sell out. So who’s buying? a href=”http://www.businessinsider.com/palm-slashes-guidance-2010-2″BusinessInsider/a throws the regular suspects on the tablemdash;RIM, Nokia, Dell, HPmdash;but they seem chosen because they’d be eminteresting/em buyers, not because they’ve shown any real interest. Hey, wouldn’t it be neat if Nokia or BlackBerry absorbed webOS, so they could both have truly modern, user-friendly smartphone operating systems? Yeah it would! Someone should tell them./p
pThis leaves Palm with nothing to do but wait: to a href=”http://gizmodo.com/5392799/how-palm-lost-like-apple-in-the-80s”die/a; or to be saved by a hero it hasn’t even glimpsed yet, and that probably doesn’t exist./p
pstrongUPDATE/strong: Here’s Rubinstein’s a href=”http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2010/02/25/palm-ceo%E2%80%99s-letter-to-employees/”memo/a to Palm employees re: their lowered guidance for the year. It’s far from defeatist, but even further from reassuring:/p
blockquote
pTeam,/p
pThis morning we announced preliminary results for our 2010 third quarter. Since the quarter has not yet closed, it is too soon to offer exact numbers, but we stated that we expect to report revenues for Q3 between $300 and $320 million. We also announced that we expect our revenue for this fiscal year to fall below the guidance we gave to Wall Street, which ranged from $1.6 to $1.8 billion. As we mentioned in our press release, our softer than expected performance is due to slower than expected customer adoption of our products, which in turn has prompted our U.S. carrier partners to put additional orders on hold for the time being. On a positive note, we expect to exit the quarter with over $500 million in cash on our balance sheet. We’re scheduled to announce our full financial results in March./p
pI realize this news is difficult to swallow. We made this announcement today to prevent a surprise for Wall Street when we announce quarterly earnings in March. In the meantime, the entire executive team has been working extremely hard to improve product performance, and have implemented a number of initiatives to increase awareness and drive sales./p
pDave Whalen and I just returned from a very successful meeting with Verizon Wireless, where they acknowledged that their execution of our launch was below expectations and recommitted to working with us to improve sales. strongTo accelerate sales, we initiated Project JumpStart nearly three weeks ago. Since then, nearly two hundred Palm Brand Ambassadors, supplemented by Palm employees from Sunnyvale, have been training Verizon sales reps across the U.S. on our products. Early results from the stores have already shown improvement on product knowledge and sales week over week. You may have also seen a growing number of Palm ads on billboards, bus shelters, buses, and subway stations-all getting the word out about Palm.br/strongbr
All of these efforts are examples of how we are working to accelerate adoption and grow distribution of webOS. In the next few weeks, your management will work with you to make sure your priorities are laser-focused, primarily on helping to increase sales, improve product quality and differentiate the Palm product experience./p
pOur goals are taking longer than expected to achieve, but I am still confident that our talented team has what it takes to get the job done./p
pWe’ll schedule an all-hands meeting after our earnings announcement in March, and I’ll be happy to answer your questions./p
pGo team!!!/p
pjon/p
/blockquote
p200 brand ambassadors and emmaybe/em some local advertising? That’s more worrying than if Rubinstein had said nothing at all. [a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/palm-slashes-guidance-2010-2"BusinessInsider/a]/pbr clear=”both” style=”clear: both;”/
br clear=”both” style=”clear: both;”/
a href=”http://ads.pheedo.com/click.phdo?s=9e29019077deb072b570915db7d5cdb8p=1″img alt=”" style=”border: 0;” border=”0″ src=”http://ads.pheedo.com/img.phdo?s=9e29019077deb072b570915db7d5cdb8p=1″//a
img alt=”" height=”0″ width=”0″ border=”0″ style=”display:none” src=”http://a.rfihub.com/eus.gif?eui=2226″/div class=”feedflare”
a href=”http://feeds.gawker.com/~ff/gizmodo/full?a=3Pr-nQjOU3M:7CeEICsQqg0:H0mrP-F8Qgo”img src=”http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/gizmodo/full?d=H0mrP-F8Qgo” border=”0″/img/a a href=”http://feeds.gawker.com/~ff/gizmodo/full?a=3Pr-nQjOU3M:7CeEICsQqg0:yIl2AUoC8zA”img src=”http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/gizmodo/full?d=yIl2AUoC8zA” border=”0″/img/a a href=”http://feeds.gawker.com/~ff/gizmodo/full?a=3Pr-nQjOU3M:7CeEICsQqg0:D7DqB2pKExk”img src=”http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/gizmodo/full?i=3Pr-nQjOU3M:7CeEICsQqg0:D7DqB2pKExk” border=”0″/img/a a href=”http://feeds.gawker.com/~ff/gizmodo/full?a=3Pr-nQjOU3M:7CeEICsQqg0:V_sGLiPBpWU”img src=”http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/gizmodo/full?i=3Pr-nQjOU3M:7CeEICsQqg0:V_sGLiPBpWU” border=”0″/img/a
/divimg src=”http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/gizmodo/full/~4/3Pr-nQjOU3M” height=”1″ width=”1″/
Popularity: 1% [?]
Nokia’s downright seductive X6 just started shipping to those across the pond, and shortly after the company announced a Comes Without Music edition, along comes this: a NAM version for those who call North America home, sweet home. The pre-order page (which is live this very moment, by the way) makes no mention of a Comes With Music requirement, giving you complete freedom to shove whatever you darn well please onto what’s left of that 16GB after the OS install and a hidden ‘thank you’ note from Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo. So, is that $455 peeking out of your Fifth Pocket really that important to you?
Nokia serves North American X6 up for pre-order: $455 unlocked originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 24 Feb 2010 12:09:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
Permalink Nokia Mobile | Nokia | Email this | Comments
Popularity: 1% [?]
In today’s Remainders: solutions! Solutions for distilling water vapor into drinkable water; keeping your lunch warm with only a USB port; beaming an entire Springsteen album to your phone in under 10 seconds, and more.
Wossy
Jonathan Ross, a UK television personality, isn’t the first person you’d expect to deliver the latest news on Microsoft’s Project Natal, but we’ll take what we can get. Apparently he’s had some time to play around with the system and likes what it has to offer:
OK. Before bed. Natal on X Box impressive. Not quite there yet i think but tye have til october and if they get it right…skys the limit.
Of course we’ve known that the sky is the limit with Natal, but the Tweet also serves to confirm what we’ve heard before in terms of release date—Microsoft is shooting for a Fall launch, sometime in October or shortly thereafter. Get ready to look silly. [Engadget]
Intel Intel
In an annual filing with the SEC, Intel revealed that they, too, were the target of advanced cyber attacks early this year. The relevant section of the report read:
We regularly face attempts by others to gain unauthorized access through the Internet to our information technology systems by, for example, masquerading as authorized users or surreptitious introduction of software. These attempts, which might be the result of industrial or other espionage, or actions by hackers seeking to harm the company, its products, or end users, are sometimes successful. One recent and sophisticated incident occurred in January 2010 around the same time as the recently publicized security incident reported by Google.
A NYTimes source confirmed that they were not only at the “same time” but were in fact part of the same wave of attacks that struck Google back in January. No need to feel sheepish, Intel, plenty of companies got attacked in that last go around. [NYTimes]
No Wires Nokia
Nokia’s no stranger to concepts, and the newest video from their Nokia Research Center fits the usual bill: pretty exciting and only partially explained. The Explore and Share concept shows a system in which a portable device—in this case a Nokia N900—interacts with a retail kiosk wirelessly by being placed on a small “writer.” Here’s where the magic happens. The kiosk registers the n900 almost instantly, and, using a “new radio technology,” is able to beam an entire Bruce Springsteen album to the device in under ten seconds. That’s fast! Faster than NFC and Bluetooth 3.0, as Engadget points out. Concepts have the tendency to, you know, stay conceptual, but this type of snappy, functional wireless technology is something we’d be happy to see more of in the future. And the Boss? More of him in the future, too, please. [Engadget]
Net Some Water
Dropnet, a concept designed by Imke Hoehler, is a system of large polypropylene nets that snatch droplets from water vapor clouds and distill them into potable water. They not only provide low-infrastructure areas with drinkable water but also lend the hillsides on which they’re installed an exotic Avataresque vibe, so they’re doubly fine by me. [DesignBoom]
Lunchtime
Apparently Thanko’s last USB-powered lunchbox was enough of a hit to warrant an upgrade—two, in fact—and today they’ve delivered, piping hot to our desks, two new “Hot Lunch Bag” devices. You have the compact model, which is basically a rehash of the older design, but now there is also the “super slim,” a more space-efficient USB-powered hot lunch solution that looks like a pencil case and slips conveniently into your laptop bag. Because if there’s any word I’d use to describe keeping my lunch plugged in to my laptop, it’s convenient. [CrunchGear]
Popularity: 2% [?]
So the Nokia N97 was a bit of a disaster. Normally, companies pretend that all of their products are great, even when they aren’t. But one Nokia VP is willing to admit that the N97 was a steamer.
Nokia’s VP of Markets Anssi Vanjoki recently said in an interview that the N97 was a “tremendous disappointment in terms of the experience quality for the consumers and something [they] did not anticipate.” How refreshingly candid!
Of course, he’s using such candidness as an excuse to claim that they’ve learned their lesson and are working to make the N97 a real contender via firmware updates. I’m gonna go out on a limb and say that it might be a little late for firmware to save the N97, but if Nokia really is learning from its mistakes, bring on the next gen devices. If Microsoft can retool its mobile division after the abortion that was WinMo 6.5, there’s no reason Nokia can’t do the same. [All About Symbian via Engadget]
Popularity: unranked [?]
 |
 |
Website Design and Development by activeDesigns.
Tech2Crave is proudly powered by WordPress
Entries (RSS) and Comments (RSS).
