Hasta La Gadget!

Microsoft’s new Kin phone sits between two worlds. It isn’t really a smartphone — there’s no access to apps, games, document editing or viewing — but it’s more than a feature phone. It integrates social networking updates, news feeds and contacts, in a way that aims to be hip and cool.

And Kin just about manages to pull it off, but only if you buy into the idea that there are hordes of consumers hungry to have every bit of Facebook or MySpace broadcast to (and from) their phones in near real-time.

The Kin phones — the squat, compact Kin One and the bigger Kin Two — will launch exclusively on Verizon Wireless next month in the United States and on Vodafone in Europe later this year. There’s no word on pricing yet for these phones.

I spent a few minutes with both models during Microsoft’s launch event today, and my first impression is that it’s well-aimed at its target market. Assuming you are one of those people who lives and breathes Facebook or MySpace, the Kin might not be a bad phone to have. Its industrial design is interesting (especially the smaller Kin One model), has respectable hardware under the cover and sports a pretty user interface.

Hardware for the masses

Kin is the culmination of Microsoft’s two-year project codenamed “Pink.” The Kin phones have been manufactured by Sharp, which also produced the original set of Sidekick phones. That’s no coincidence, since the Sidekick was developed by Danger, a handset maker that Microsoft acquired in 2008.

The Sidekick, originally launched in 2002, became a popular hit among text-happy teenagers, although it was never taken seriously as a smartphone. A data-center glitch that wiped out many T-Mobile Sidekick users’ data in 2009 may have been the final nail in the Sidekick’s coffin. Now it looks like Microsoft wants to update the Sidekick’s M.O. for a new decade.

The smaller Kin One has a 2.6-inch display and a 5-megapixel camera, while Kin Two has a 3.6- inch screen and a 8-megapixel camera. Both phones have a slide-out QWERTY keyboard.

The Kin One is almost the size of a lady’s compact. It’s an interesting form factor that does get your attention and fits well in the hand. The Kin Two is a standard candy-bar shape. The devices are lightweight, but they have a cheap “plasticky” feel to them. Buttons on the QWERTY keyboard, though raised, are difficult to use. Overall, there’s no feeling of luxury here.

That said, the Kin is not entirely lacking in tech firepower. The phones run Nvidia’s Tegra processor and feel pretty zippy. The touchscreens are responsive and the displays are bright. The cameras are easy to use and the built-in flashes meant the photos shot in low light (at the bar where Microsoft launched the device) were just a tad better than what I could get with my iPhone 3G.

User interface built around social networking

The Kin phones have three home screens. The first screen offers access to e-mail, messages, phone, news feeds, photos, music and the browser.

Swipe to the left and the next screen throws up a stream of status messages updated from contacts and your news feeds. This screen, called the Loop, is the home screen for the device, says Microsoft. The Loop screen connects to four social networks: Facebook, MySpace, Twitter and Windows Live. And, you can go to your contacts list — which is drawn from all the social networking sites that you have added on the device — and mark some people as favorites. Their status updates will get prioritized on the Loop screen.

The Loop feels a lot like MotoBlur, Motorola’s custom skin for Android, or HTC’s Sense UI, but it is easier to navigate. That doesn’t mean it’s not a visual overload. Loud colors like lime green and bright pink make you feel like you have had a few magic mushrooms, while photos, status updates and news headlines all jostle for attention. You’ll feel like you need a can of Red Bull just to keep up.

The third screen shows the contacts you’ve marked as favorites. Instead of a stream of updates, it just shows the most recent status update from each one.

One well-designed feature is the sharing button on the phone. Called the Kin Spot, it lets you share almost anything — photos, texts, web pages — by just holding on it for a second or two and then dragging it to a small circle at the bottom of the display. When you’re ready to publish, you tap that circle icon to see all your shared items. From there you can sent them as e-mail, texts or picture messages.

Music, movies and extras

Finally, the Kin phones integrate Zune, Microsoft’s elegant but struggling attempt to get into the digital-music service business. The music player on the Kin devices use the same impressive interface as the Zune HD. And those 5 percent of users who have a Zune pass can sync the music already on their Zune players with the Kin phones, either wirelessly or by hooking the phone up to a PC.

Microsoft is also counting on Kin Studio, a service that syncs the phone to a password-protected website where your photos, videos, messages and even call history get backed up.

It offers unlimited storage in the cloud for free. That means if you click more photos than what your phone can store on the device, it just gets moved to the cloud but not deleted. Deleting anything on the phone, though, means it will be gone from both the device and the online site.

Kin Studio includes a neat visual timeline feature, where you can use the slider to go back month by month and see what was on your phone at any given time.

The phone’s web browser doesn’t support Adobe Flash or Microsoft’s Silverlight.

Overall, the Kin phones aren’t particularly innovative or fresh, but they will help put Microsoft back in the mobile game. If Microsoft and Verizon can get the pricing right on these devices (under $100 with an attractively priced data plan) then they might just be able to sell a few million of these to teens and Facebook fiends.

Top two photos: Jim Merithew/Wired.com. Bottom photo: Microsoft

Video cameras on your cellphone could soon be good enough to record a jazz concert, a nighttime street scene, or a candlelit dinner. A Swedish start-up has created an algorithm, inspired by dung beetles, that can be integrated into camera modules to offer high-quality video in extremely low light situations.

“We are talking about shooting video in situations that seem almost pitch black,” Benjamin Page, business development manager for Nocturnal Vision told Wired.com. “We can offer an unbelievable amount of noise reduction and contrast enhancement at the same time.” Nocturnal Vision presented its technology at the ISE 2010 imaging conference in London Thursday.

Toyota, which financed a significant portion of the research and development, has secured exclusive rights to use the technology in night-vision systems for cars.

Nocturnal Vision says it is now working with mobile phone companies such as Sony Ericsson to test its technology and find a way to integrate it into phones.

As more consumers use the cameras on their cellphones for video and photographs, companies are looking for ways to improve the quality of the camera modules. Earlier this week, Palo Alto startup InVisage Technologies said it has developed a new technology using a nanomaterial called quantum dots that would offer four times the light-gathering performance of current silicon-based sensors.

Nocturnal Vision says its software can be complementary to hardware-based improvements.

The company’s algorithm is based on research by a Lund University zoologist Eric Warrant on dung beetles, bees and other nocturnal bugs. Dung beetles are remarkable because of their ability to see enough detail in the night to find food and escape predators.

Their night-vision capability is the result of their ability to “sum the visual signal locally in space and time,” says Henrik Malm, one of the creators of the algorithm in his research paper. It’s known as adaptive spatio-temporal smoothing. That means the brain analyzes what’s going on across each frame of an image and what’s going on from one frame to another. (See Malm’s research paper on noise reduction and image enhancement in low light video.)

In most digital cameras today, the short, one-time exposure (usually a fraction of a second) and imaging sensors that have uniform sensitivity across their area combine to produce pictures that have underexposed dark areas. Amplifying the dark areas uniformly means the low signal-to-noise ratio becomes pronounced, writes Malm. Instead, adaptive spatio-temporal intensity smoothing can even out the noise, while reducing motion blur.

To do this, Nocturnal Vision’s algorithm pools information from about seven frames before and after a shot to brighten, reduce noise and sharpen the video stream, says Page. The technology can work in real time as scenes are shot, or can be applied to video in post-processing. However, because it requires multiple frames, it won’t work with single-exposure still images.

For instance, a video on the company’s website shows a clip of a man walking in the night. The algorithm first enhances the darker pixels in the frame more than the lighter ones to reveal additional details. But that also introduces a noise into the frame. The algorithm then pools brightness information from adjacent frames to correct for the noise.

The challenge for Nocturnal Vision is that the algorithm sucks up processing power. Most smartphones today, including those featuring the 1-GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon processor, don’t have enough muscle to run the software.

“Currently, we are running it on test devices via GPU computation power,” says Page. “For a standard video with resolution of 640 x 480 it requires approximately 14 billion calculations per frame.”

Nocturnal Vision’s technology works best on uncompressed images. Since most camera phones compress photos as soon as they are taken, that means Nocturnal Vision’s technology would need to be integrated into a phone’s firmware — or directly into a new line of chips. The company says it is looking for chip makers to do just this.

Page says Nocturnal Vision hopes to see its software in the hands of consumers within the next two years. “If we can work with the chip makers, we could be in millions of smartphones,” he says.

And your next nighttime videos might not be quite so dark.

See Also:

• Cellphones Edge out Inexpensive Digital Cameras
• New Bill Asks For Cameraphones To Go Clickety Clack
• 5 Reasons You Can Ditch Your DSLR for an iPhone
• Cameras in iPods. Game Over?

Photo: (Chris_Moody/Flickr)

A tiny device promises to make video conferencing a better experience by using the TV that’s already in your living room.

Nyoombl, an interestingly named startup, makes a gadget called Greypfroot that will sit on top of your TV and allow you to make calls from one TV to another or to a phone mobile or a PC.

“Why can’t [people] with laptops today enjoy video calls with loved ones who are currently familiar with TV sets?” Oladayo Olagunju, CEO of Nyoombl said during his presentation at the DEMO Spring conference Tuesday. “Teleconferencing really doesn’t have to require any corporate dedicated setup that has to cost thousands of dollars.”

The caller and receiver don’t have to always have the Nyoombl device, except in case of TV-to-TV teleconferencing, says the company. The only requirement is that one of the users have an account with an online e-mail service that also offers video chat such as Google Talk or Yahoo.

“We are working on open clients similar to Google Talk, and hope that the proprietary ones will open up to interoperability as we continue to engage them in talks,” says Nyoombl in its website.

Increasingly, TV makers are looking to add video conferencing as one of the applications built into TV sets. Samsung and LG, for instance, offer Skype on newer TVs. Skype on TVs will be similar in its interface to the application that PC users are familiar with, but it is not available on all TVs.

Nyoombl says its advantage is that it works with existing TV sets. The Nyoombl Greypfroot is a “palm-sized device” that sits on top of the TV screen. The device includes a webcam and comes with its basic conferencing own software that can send and receive calls from TVs. Nyoombl’s Greypfroot “connects via the TV’s coaxial connection and adds an interface to accept or reject incoming video chat requests,”  says CNET.

To initiate a call from a TV, you can use the TV’s remote, while the other person is on a laptop, say Google Talk. When the call’s connected, the TV screen is split into two halves, even as the show the TV is running continues in the background.

Nyoombl hasn’t disclosed pricing for the device yet but Olagunju says it will be more affordable than a “current smartphone on the market.”

Check out the video to see Nyoombl’s demo.

Say the words “tablet computer” and ten bucks says it’s Apple’s iPad that springs to mind. But that doesn’t mean other companies aren’t busy building their own version of a touch-enabled, multimedia-sporting, slab of portable computing goodness.

Dell’s first effort at a tablet will be the Mini 5 (a name that is still in beta) — a slice of plastic and glass with a 5-inch capacitive touchscreen that according to Michael Dell will debut “in a couple of months.”

The Mini 5 will sport a 5-megapixel camera on the back, a separate front-facing camera that can be used for video conferencing, a standard 3.5mm headphone jack, Wi-Fi and 3G connectivity and a Qualcomm Snapdragon 1-GHz processor. The 5-inch screen also means it will be be closer to the Sony PSP in its form factor than the longer legal notepad design of the iPad.

The Mini 5 will run the latest version of Google’s Android operating system, version 2.0 or higher. And instead of the 4:3 aspect ratio of the iPad, Dell’s tablets will support the 16:9 ratio. Widescreen films anyone?

“It’s a device optimized for media consumption,” Neeraj Choubey, general manager of the tablets division at Dell told Wired.com. “It will offer the full web-browsing experience so you have something that you are holding in your hand that replaces everything the smartphone does and takes on quite a bit of the features of a laptop.”

The Dell 5 Mini will also just be the first in a series. “We are going to have a family of tablets,” says Choubey. “The first one is a 5-inch screen but we want to scale that up to a variety of screen sizes.”

That means future versions of the Mini 5 could have larger screens that will be closer in size to the iPad.

Dell wouldn’t comment on pricing, beyond saying it will be “competitive,” or when it will launch this year. Apple’s iPad ranges from $500 to $830.

With the launch of iPad in January, the tablet PCs are going through a renaissance. Though PC makers have offered slates and convertible notebooks for nearly a decade, consumers haven’t bought them in droves. With its 9.7-inch display, sleek design and Apple’s relentless hype, the iPad could alter the way we experience mobile computing. And Dell knows this.

Three years ago, Dell started expanding its product line to include mobile products. Dell smartphones are now sold in Brazil and China and it hopes to bring a version to North America. Meanwhile, the company set up a tablet division, and three weeks ago Choubey joined Dell from venture capital firm Venrock.

As he sees it, the Mini 5 will offer the apps that are available on smartphones, a set of specialized tools and programs for business users, a strong movies and music experience and web surfing — flash and all included. Take that, iPad.

Along with the apps on the Mini 5 users will have quick access to e-mail, YouTube, Amazon’s MP3 store for music, as well as spreadsheet, presentation maker and documents. It will also support voice recognition.  And these are characteristics that will be common to all tablets from Dell.

Still it will be a hard sell to consumers, says Van Baker, an analyst with research firm Gartner.

“If all you are bringing to the market is another media-playing or handheld-gaming device, then it’s not going to work,” he says. “It’s all about the services you have behind the device.”

And that’s where the iPad scores, with its strong developer ecosystem and 100,000 apps, along with iTunes and iBooks, says Baker.

Dell is betting it can offer that and add a compelling value proposition for business users: a promise that its tablet won’t just be a coffee-table device but instead a powerful productivity tool.

“There’s no reason why you can’t use the tablet to take notes in class,” he says.

Dell will also offer services such as syncing that will allow users to move music, documents and other data between their PC and tablet easily.

“At a very basic level, you would have a service that will share content across the devices seamlessly and have it in the cloud,” says Choubey.

Dell also hopes to draw on the Android ecosystem by offering developers the opportunity to port their Android apps to the Mini 5 and its successors.

For the Mini 5, though, its PlayStation Portable-like form factor could be a big drawback, says Baker. The Dell Mini 5 is closer in its looks to gadgets better known as mobile internet devices or MIDs, a category that has been languishing despite products from companies such as Lenovo and Archos.

“If the Dell Mini 5 is this small and it is pocketable, then why isn’t it a phone?” asks Baker. “If I am going to carry a second device, it better have something that’s a significant advantage over what I can do with my phone. With the iPad, the value proposition is a much larger display.”

But Choubey says the innovation is not just in the form factor but also in the business model. Dell will work with carriers to bundle inexpensive data plans for the Mini 5 and other tablets.

“That type of model — the way iPad was able to do with AT& T — will become more prevalent with these tablet devices,” he says. “It allows the carrier to increase number of devices per user.” Apple introduced a $15 for 250 MB, or an unlimited $30 a month, no-contract data plan for use with the iPad.

See Also:

• Dell Plans Its Own Smartphone, Analysts Say
• Why 2010 Will Be the Year of the Tablet
• Can Apple’s iPad Save the Media After All?
• Hands-On With the Apple iPad
• Designers Unearth Apple Tablet Prototypes — From 1983

Photo: Dell Mini 5 (ndevil/Flickr)

Mobile app analytics company Distimo has compiled their findings on the six largest mobile app stores offered by Apple, Palm, Research In Motion, Google, Nokia and Microsoft.

Distimo presented its findings about app store size, growth, average price and free-versus-paid-app ratio at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain last week.

For quantity of apps, the results aren’t surprising: It’s common knowledge that Apple’s App Store and Google’s Android Market are in the lead. More interesting is the lesser-known state of the smaller players. Windows Mobile has 690 apps, Palm has 1,450, Nokia carries 6,120 and BlackBerry serves 4,760. (Figures are all rounded.)

Distimo also analyzed growth rate of the stores. Android is in a distant second with 19,300 apps compared with Apple’s 151,000 apps. However, Android’s growth rate is faster relative to the number of apps housed. Android’s growth is picking up with 3,000 new apps per month (15 percent). Apple is growing with about 14,000 new apps added per month (9 percent).

As for the average cost of apps in each store, RIM’s apps were the priciest at an average of $8.26 for apps, followed closely by Windows Mobile’s, priced at $7 on average. Apps sold by Nokia, Apple, Google and Palm all came out in roughly the same average price range ($2.50 – $3.60).

Other observations? Android has the most free apps, and for the iTunes App Store, games were the most popular category. A full summary and more charts of Distimo’s presentation are available at ReadWriteWeb, which first reported the story.

See Also:

• For the iPhone’s App Store, Quantity Really Does Matter
• Apple’s App Store Hits Six Digits; How Many Apps Do You Need …