Hasta La Gadget!

We first met Chul Bae Lee — VP of LG’s mobile design lab — in Seoul last fall and were lucky to spend a few minutes with him in the company’s booth at MWC. LG’s flagship Optimus G Pro made quite the splash in Barcelona but looks rather different from the Optimus G. We asked Mr. Lee to walk us through the design process behind the company’s new superphone. He mentioned that LG offers two high-end product lines, one focused on premium design (Optimus G), the other on high-performance design (Optimus G Pro) and shared a diagram with us to illustrate this (after the break). The new handset puts an emphasis on ergonomics rather than style by featuring a comfortable and a friendly shape, with soft edges and round corners.

We discussed the extremely narrow display bezel, striking RGB notification ring around the home button, recessed camera lens and IR blaster (for the QRemote functionality). Mr. Lee explained that the placement of the buttons around the Optimus G Pro was carefully chosen to minimize interference with the power / lock key — this includes the QNote button, which can be remapped to invoke other apps, and even double as a shutter key. We then talked about the new Optimus F series, which blends the design DNA of flagship devices with performance specs (like LTE) at a more affordable price, and the Optimus L II line, which offers unique designs for specific markets (single SIM in Europe, and dual-SIM in Latin America). Hi the break for our video interview and to check out the aforementioned design diagram.

Filed under: Cellphones, Mobile, LG

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I feel bad for Mozilla, I really do. Competitors and the march of time are closing in quicker than it can raise its defenses. Her crown jewel, Firefox, is feeling the squeeze as Chrome encroaches on its hard-won territory and mobile offensives have proven largely fruitless. This leaves Mozilla in an awkward position: that of out-of-touch industry stalwart. Being late to the mobile game and Apple’s reluctance to open up iOS to third-party browsers has left the company boxed in. (Developers can create browsers for iOS so long as they use the same rendering engine as Safari — a deal breaker for the Gecko-based Firefox.)

Mozilla has responded by borrowing a page from the Google (Chrome)book: build an operating system that is essentially nothing more than a browser. Firefox OS is yet another mobile platform built entirely on HTML5 that treats websites as apps. In fact, websites are the “apps” — there is no such thing as native code. And while there are legitimate arguments for such a model, I’ve yet to see it convincingly executed. We’ve caught glimpses of Mozilla’s smartphone offspring before, but Mobile World Congress 2013 was really the proper coming out party. Finally we’ve been given a chance to touch it, see it action and peek at the hardware it’ll be running on. Unfortunately, at this cotillion, Mozilla failed to make a good case for anyone to court its debutante.

Filed under: Cellphones, Software, Mobile

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The future of TV is supposed to involve streaming video, and it’s also supposed to involve 4K TVs — but melding the two has been difficult. Telefonica wants to show that the feat is at least possible with mere mortal connections: it’s been using Mobile World Congress to show 4K video streaming on a 100Mbps fiber-to-the-home link. As our Spanish teammates can attest, the (admittedly very local) demo works as well as you’d hope, providing all the fine details without buffering or other hiccups. There’s no estimated timeframe for a commercial service, but we wouldn’t hold out hope of a version that would fit on cable or DSL when there’s a raw 40Mbps bitrate.

Filed under: Home Entertainment, HD

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Source: Engadget Spanish (translated)

Another Mobile World Congress has come and gone. While we weren’t treated to a mountain of device launches, as seen in previous years, we definitely all came away with some favorites. LG outed a few handsets, HTC‘s One made its first public appearance and Firefox OS made a grand entrance with additions to the new platform from a few different handset makers. And, on the wireless side, we were treated to what has to have been the biggest NFC love fest we’ve ever witnessed. Follow on past the break to check out some of our favorites from this year’s MWC, then weigh in and let us know what you think about the show.

Filed under: Cellphones, Handhelds, Peripherals, Sony, HTC, Nokia, Google, LG, HP

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For better or worse, the advent of smartphones and tablets mean that we’re rapidly moving away from the more tactile user experiences that were the hallmark of a bygone era in computing. As it turns out, the folks at Fujitsu are eager to close the book on the days of the physical keyboard if what they were showing off here at MWC was any indication.

Tucked away in a corner of Fujitsu’s booth here in Barcelona’s Fira Gran Via was a gentleman typing out words onto a tablet via a keyboard for anyone who would watch him. It sounds like a completely mundane occurrence, except the keyboard he was typing on wasn’t actually there.

Here’s the idea: thanks to some clever software and the front-facing camera on a tablet, Fujitsu has worked up a way for users to type on just about any flat surface. The software is purely a prototype at this point, but it doesn’t need anything in the way of exotic gadgetry to work properly — it appeared to be running just fine on a generic Fujitsu Windows 8 tablet, albeit with a lamp of sorts to keep the user’s hands nice and bright.

Using the gesture keyboard seems so simple when you’re watching it live — a person calmly tapping on the surface of a table is actually typing out sentences — but the underlying tech is nothing to sneeze at. There’s some serious machine learning going on here, as the system gets a feel for the features and movements of a user’s hands to determine their placement on a keyboard that really isn’t there.

Sadly, that means there’s a fair amount of optimization that needs to happen before someone could actually start using it. The Japanese gentleman pecking out missives on top of a table was kind enough to let me try it anyway, and while the camera clearly noticed my hand it wouldn’t track any of my finger inputs.

Apparently, the software is capable of using skin color to figure who it should actually be accepting input from — at that moment the system was setup to only track his alabaster hands, so my brown mitts were promptly ignored. Certainly a bummer for me, but a still useful feature, especially since one can never tell how many alien hands they’ll encounter as they try to get some work done on the go.

Fujitsu is considering turning this into a working product for inclusion on some of its tablets and smartphones and has been at it for a while now — company researchers published a paper on the concept back in 2011. Still, the gesture keyboard strikes me as one of those things that may be too clever for its own good in that it’s a very neat solution to a problem that doesn’t really exist. Trying to get some work done on a tray table on a plane? There’s plenty of room for a physical keyboard. Stuck slaving away in close quarters? Just pound out some text on the touchscreen.

The gesture keyboard is clearly very cool (it hearkens back to those neat laser keyboards) and I’d certainly love to a take it for a long-term spin, but I doubt that Fujitsu’s keyboard-less keyboard approach is one that will take the world by storm — for now. Its value as a standalone typing solution is questionable, but if Fujitsu baked it into a tablet or a phone as a novel alternative? Or better yet, if Fujitsu found some willing, ambitious OEM to license it to? Sign me up.