Its Electronica

Posted Apr 9th 2008 1:28AM by Darren Murph
Filed under: Wireless

Talk about putting the cart before the horse. Without a bona fide WiMAX network for mass consumer use up and running yet here in America, Siemens is making sure you’re really ready for its onset by announcing its first WiMAX ExpressCard. The Gigaset SE68 WiMAX is based on the IEEE 802.16-2005 standard and complies with Wave 2 specifications (including MIMO A / B), supports beamforming and has actually been demonstrated as functional way over in Singapore. With a network in place, users can expect mobile broadband speeds of up to 20Mbps, and while no price is given, you can just circle the entire summer of 2008 in anticipation of its arrival.

This is arguably one of the most useful improvements in Google Presentation: the ability to save a PPT file that a fellow marketer can view. To export a PPT file, just go to File=>Save as PPT. and Voila.

Toshiba has begun to ship its SpursEngine SE1000 image processor - while that might not ring a bell with you, it is actually a similar processor that is found in your PS3, which also translates to having this images processor offering superior performance where MPEG-2, MPEG-4 AVC/H.265 hardware encoding/decoding is concerned. Samples have already started to ship, and Toshiba is pretty optimistic about sales, projecting around half a dozen million units moved within the first three years of the SpursEngine’s release.

Here’s an excerpt from the press release :-

SpursEngine is a co-processor that integrates a hardware codec for Full HD encoding and decoding of MPEG-2 and H.264 streams with four SPEs derived from Cell/B.E. These advanced processing elements offer high performance media streaming capabilities, with a clock frequency of 1.5GHz, while achieving low power consumption range of 10W to 20W.

Yoshio Masubuchi, Director of Toshiba’s System LSI Division mentioned, “We are very pleased to have started sample shipping of SpursEngine. The design of this powerful co-processor is dedicated to bringing the advanced capabilities of the Cell/B.E.™ to consumer electronics, particularly video processing in digital consumer products. We are sure that SpursEngine will accelerate the market for full-HD applications.”

Toshiba will be offering support for developers who are currently working hard on SpursEngine applications, assisting them with a comprehensive reference kit that consists of a reference board and essential middleware APIs. The reference board itself comes with a PCI-Express edge connector which can be hooked up to an x1 layer slot in a PC. Toshiba won’t be stopping there though, providing an integrated development environment (SPE compiler, SPE debugger, and performance monitor) and sample applications in order to show the way on using the provided middleware. I wonder when will the first notebooks and desktops feature this new processor?

Source: Akihabaranews

I-Axe USB Guitar

You can have this for ?99.95

The BEST advertising that any company did in 1996 was Iomega. EVERYONE was carrying around their bags and everyone was collecting their buttons. If you notice on yesterday’s entry, all the people at the Mylex “virtual reality” booth were carrying Iomega bags.

Here is a photograph of an Iomega employee wearing all their buttons. You can’t see it in the picture, but each of the buttons said different things. They were all pretty funny and collecting the entire collection was a goal of many of the people who attended. I still have a large collection of them in storage somewhere.

Back then, Iomega was selling ZIP disks and drives. They are still around and have branched into external hard drive storage as well as their own proprietary disk storage.

• Iomega Data Backup: Data Storage Devices: Removable Storage: Managed Services

This photo of the booth for AT&T was another disappointing one. So many of the companies insisted on trying to “entertain” us with skits and bad actors spouting computer information. Within two minutes of the start of the AT&T skit, Mike and I couldn’t take anymore. We stood up and walked out on their presentation because it was so bad.

Back then, AT&T was a telecom monolith. Now, they are the proud and exclusive providers of wireless for the iphone.

• AT&T Wireless

More Comdex 1996 reminiscing tomorrow.

Posted Apr 8th 2008 3:42PM by Nilay Patel
Filed under: cellphones

Oh Unkie Walt, you toy with us so. Just a couple days after promising that the 3G iphone would be out within 60 days, the Moss-man is saying that he was simply making a prediction based on the same data as the rest of us: price cuts, dried-up inventory, and all kinds of rumors. That’s not at all what it seems like on the tape, but sure. Walt also thinks that a little meta-media-analysis is due here, asking Silicon Alley Insider, “If I knew when this date was, why would I announce it in the middle of a sentence at the Finnish embassy, rather than report it in the Wall Street Journal?” Excellent point, but you might want to be a little more careful the next time you flatly declare “The iPhone will be 3G in 60 days” with no caveats and the cameras running, okay?

Speedy is a UK company that pimps wheelchairs. Its range of add-ons will turn the chair into a handbike, a comfy tricycle or a full-on electric chair (no, not that kind). You might be thinking, along with Oh Gizmo’s Luke Anderson, that a pedal powered wheelchair is something of an oxymoron. The Pedalofit is in fact a rehabilitation device rather than a means of propulsion, but Speedy’s other kits, all of which clamp onto your own wheelchair, can be used to ease getting around.

The best, to our mind, is the Tandem, seen at right. Sit back, relax and let some other sap do all the work.

Product page [Speedy via Oh Gizmo!]

No one in the media has touched the actual device yet, but an image was shown during a recent developer presentation held in Redwood City (Silicon Valley). Of course, everyone will point out that it does look like the iPhone (well, anything that has only a display would more or less look like it).

It is Nokia’s first Touch-only device, and the company is confident that it will be able to compete with Apple’s iphone. It might run the Symbian OS, which was ironically designed for touch devices…

Related
Future of Nokia Smartphones, Will the iPhone Continue to Dominate?

At first at glance, the Ray Flash seems like a needlessly spendthrift way to get flat ring flash lighting. For the same $300 you could buy a standalone ring strobe, right? Yes, but then you end up carrying around two guns instead of one flash unit and one slim and sturdy adapter.

The Ray Flash clamps on to your flash head and uses a series of prisms and reflectors to guide the light around the circle. Unlike some homemade solutions, the Ray Flash only loses one stop of light, and as it is simply redirecting the flash output, the camera’s TTL flash keeps working. Aside from the price, there is another problem. The Ray Flash will only fit the Canon 580EX and Nikon SB800 speedlights, although you can try squeezing it onto other models and it should work ok.

It’s a pricey, specialist piece of kit to be sure, but if the runaway sales of digital SLRs is anything to go by, the enthusiast market for these kinds of thing is only getting bigger. If only the prices of the accessories would drop as fast as those of the cameras themselves.

Product page [Expo Imaging. Thanks Christina!]

A 73 year old ex-teacher has developed a Braille cellphone. Instead of the custom pads used by Samsung’s two year old concept, Sadao Hasegawa’s phone uses six of the phone’s buttons to represent the six-point Japanese Braille system. The user, who must know Braille, keys in symbols which can then be sent to other phones and will cause a connected keypad to vibrate, spelling out the words.

It sounds hideously clunky, but then, that’s what most people thought about text input with a phone keyboard, and look how that turned out. Right now it is still impractical, as the output device is huge (it’s the white box in the picture). Boffins are working on shrinking it, at which point SMS messages for the blind could become a reality.

World’s first Vibrating Braille cell phone developed in Japan [Far East Gizmos]