May 05

Intel Introduces Ultra-Low-Power Processor for Smartphones

Posted in: intel, Phones, processor, Smartphones, Today's Chili

aava-mobile-smartphone-2
After a few false starts, Intel is making yet another attempt to get inside smartphones by launching a new Atom processor designed specifically for mobile devices.

The chip, codenamed “Moorestown,” will be extremely power efficient, yet pack enough computational muscle to enable features such as video conferencing and HD video, says Intel.

“This is our second-generation, low-power Atom platform that can exceed our competition in terms of power and performance,” says Anand Chandrasekher, Intel senior vice president and general manager of the Ultra Mobility Group.

The system-on chip package will be based on Intel’s 45-nanometer process and will pack 140 million transistors.

Intel’s chips run the show in netbooks, notebooks and desktop processors, but the company has been sidelined in the fast-growing smartphone market. Processors based on the rival ARM architecture are in most smartphones today. For instance, Qualcomm’s Snapdragon processor, which has an ARM-based CPU, is in the Google HTC Nexus One phone and HTC’s upcoming EVO 4G phone.

Intel tried its hand in the phone-chip business earlier, but in 2006, sold its XScale ARM-based division to Marvell. More recently, Intel tried to pitch its current generation of Atom processors to smartphone makers, but the chips were never accepted because they consumed too much power for phone use.

This time, Intel says its made major improvements to power efficiency so its Moorestown chips can stand up to, or even beat, the competition in energy efficiency.

“This is the third time Intel is entering the smartphone market,” says Flint Pulskamp, an analyst with IDC. “The difference is this time they realize being inside phones is essential to their long-term viability so they are being very aggressive with their design and architecture.”

The Moorestown system-on-a-chip has three parts. The first is an Atom processor that combines the CPU core with 3-D graphics, video encoding, memory and display functions. The second is a controller hub that supports system-level tasks. The final piece is a mixed-signal integrated circuit that handles power delivery and battery charging.

Together these chips use just 1.75 percent of the power that the current Atom chips do, in the idle state: Instead of the 1.2 watts drawn by current Atom CPUs, the new Moorestown chips will draw just 21 milliwatts.

Similarly, Intel is promising 5 percent of the power consumption of current Atom processors, or 115 milliwatts while browsing the web; and one-third the power consumption while playing video.

These power savings translate into more than 10 days of standby time, up to two days of audio playback and four to five hours of browsing and video battery life, says Intel.

“We can generally dynamically detect what the phone is doing and adjust the power consumption,” says Belliappa Kuttanna, the principal architect of Intel’s Atom architecture.

The new Moorestown chip supports clock speeds of up to 1.5 GHz for high-end smartphones (compared to the 1 GHz seen in Qualcomm’s Snapdragon processors) and up to 1.9 GHz for tablets and other handheld designs. The chips have been designed for the Android operating system and for Intel’s Moblin OS.

Intel says it is already producing these chips and consumers can expect mobile devices that use Intel chips later this year.

But so far, the company hasn’t announced any smartphone models that will use Moorestown. Earlier this year, the company demonstrated Atom processors in a phone produced by LG.

Breaking into the smartphone market will be tough for Intel, says IDC’s Pulskamp. Intel will have to compete with companies such as Qualcomm, Texas Instruments and Infineon, all of which use ARM-based architecture.

“Intel is trying to move step-by-step in the mobile market,” says Pulskamp. “They did well with netbooks and now they are looking at phones. But they are going to face more a challenge in smartphones than they did with netbooks.”

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Photo: Prototype of a smartphone using Intel Moorestown chip/Intel


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May 03

Jailbreak App Turns iPhone Into 3G Modem for iPad

Posted in: Apple, Hacks, iPhone, jailbreak, Phones, Today's Chili

img_0554Data-hungry iPhone owners eager to grab iPads can forgo paying for a 3G model altogether and save a good buck. That is, so long as they’re willing to take a risk.

MyWi, an app available for hacked (i.e., jailbroken) iPhones, turns the handset into a wireless 3G modem that can be tethered to an iPad. That means you can skip paying the extra $130 on a 3G-only model, along with the $15 or $30 fee for data, and get internet access for free from your iPhone’s unlimited data plan, instead.

The process of turning your iPhone into a wireless modem for the iPad looks quite simple. According to AppAdvice, which originally reported on MyWi, all you have to is launch the app and flip the “WiFi Tethering” option to “On.” Then, your iPhone will create a Wi-Fi network that you can choose with your iPad.

There is a drawback, of course: Jailbreaking comes with risks. Apple recently issued a support bulletin stating that hacking your iPhone can result in application instability, unreliable voice and data service and other issues. And of course, turning your iPhone into a modem drains its battery pretty fast.

Nonetheless, the jailbreak community has come a long way. The MyWi app looks less cumbersome to set up than an official tethering app we reported on in 2008 called NetShare, which actually made it into the App Store briefly — it was almost immediately pulled and banned by Apple.

The MyWi app can be downloaded through the Rock app store available for jailbroken iPhones. It costs $10, and it comes with a free 10-day trial. For information on jailbreaking an iPhone, visit the Dev-Team Blog.

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Apr 30

BlackBerry Breaks Into Worldwide Phone Bestseller List

Posted in: BlackBerry, LG, market, nokia, Phones, research in motion, RIM, sales, samsung, Today's Chili

smartphones-vendors-q1-idc

BlackBerry fans can break out the bubbly. Growing demand for its phones has helped Research In Motion move into the top five mobile phone companies worldwide in sales during the first quarter, says research firm IDC.

RIM replaced Motorola in the Top 5 chart and tied with Sony Ericsson for the No. 4 position. RIM shipped 10.6 million phones in the first quarter, while Motorola, which had been a fixture in the top-five ranking since 2004, shipped 8.5 million phones.

“This is also the first time a vendor has dropped out of the top five since the second quarter of 2005, when Sony Ericsson grabbed the number five spot from BenQ Siemens,” says Kevin Restivo, senior research analyst with IDC’s Worldwide Mobile Phone Tracker.

Apple doesn’t feature in the Top 5 chart because the company shipped 8.75 million phones worldwide in the first quarter, says IDC. Next week, IDC will release data on the top five mobile phone makers in the United States.

However, Apple has taken the top spot among U.S. phone makers, a rather small group that includes Motorola, Apple, Palm and a handful of minor players.

The worldwide rankings take into account both smartphones and feature phones. Though feature phones (cheaper, simpler devices) are still a big percentage of phones sold worldwide, low-cost smartphones are picking up in sales, says IDC.

Nokia, whose devices don’t get much love in the United States, held on to its No. 1 position worldwide, shipping 107.8 million phones in the first quarter of the year. That’s up 16 percent from the same quarter year before.

Samsung ranked second with 64.3 million phones sold, and LG shipped 27.1 million phones to bag the third place. RIM, which ranks fourth, sold nearly 2 million more phones than Motorola, says IDC.

“Key to its success in the first quarter was the popularity of its BlackBerry Curve 8520 and BlackBerry Bold 9700 across multiple markets, as well as its global prepaid offerings,” says IDC. “Strong consumer adoption, particularly among text-crazy teens, has also fueled demand for BlackBerry devices.”

Here’s a look at the top five companies worldwide by their market share:

marketshare-mobile-phone-co

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Charts data supplied by IDC


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Apr 30

Adobe CEO, Ex-Adobe Engineers Weigh In on Jobs’ Flash Attack

Posted in: adobe, Apple, flash, Miscellaneous, Phones, steve jobs, Today's Chili

In an open letter published Thursday, Steve Jobs outlined a half dozen reasons why Apple is not supporting Flash on its mobile platform. Adobe’s CEO has defended Flash in response to Jobs, but some ex-Adobe employees interviewed by Wired.com shared many of the Apple CEO’s thoughts.

In his letter, Jobs highlighted the major reasons Apple is leaving Flash behind. Most relevant to users, Flash is the top cause of application crashes on the Mac, Jobs said, and Flash’s video-decoding method is a major battery drainer.

If Adobe crashes on Macs, that actually has something “to do with the Apple operating system,” Adobe’s CEO Shantanu Narayen told The Wall Street Journal. He added that claims about Flash draining battery life were “patently false,” but he didn’t appear to elaborate.

Carlos Icaza and Walter Luh, former Adobe mobile engineers, said they were raising flags at Adobe in 2007 about the same complaints that Jobs detailed Thursday.

“Walter and I, being the lead architects for Flash Lite, we were seeing the iPhone touch devices coming out, and we kept saying ‘Hey, this is coming along,’” Icaza said in a phone interview. “You have this white elephant that everybody ignored. Half the [Adobe] mobile business unit was carrying iPhones, and yet the management team wasn’t doing anything about it.”

Icaza and Luh have a vested interest in this dispute: After leaving Adobe, they launched a startup, Ansca Mobile, which produces a cross-platform solution called Corona that competes with Flash.

They said they left Adobe because executives did not take the iPhone seriously when Apple announced the touchscreen device in 2007. Instead, Adobe focused on feature phones (cellphones with lightweight web features, not smartphones) and invested in development of Flash Lite to play Flash videos on such devices. Subsequently, Adobe shut down the mobile business unit in 2007, and has suffered from a brain drain in the mobility space ever since, Icaza and Luh said.

The relationship between Apple and Adobe dates back years, as Jobs acknowledged in his blog post. Apple in the past has relied heavily on Adobe’s Creative Suite to market the Mac as a platform for creative types. But the relationship has been eroding ever since Apple introduced the iPhone and opted against supporting Adobe’s Flash platform on the mobile device. Tensions increased when Apple released the iPad, which continues Apple’s steadfast lack of Flash support.

Adobe last year announced it was developing a work-around for Flash developers to easily port their programs into iPhone apps. But this month, just a week before Adobe was scheduled to release the feature, Apple issued a new clause in its developer policy, which stipulated that iPhone apps must be coded with Apple-approved programming languages (not Flash).

Adobe’s 2007 decision to focus on Flash Lite and feature phones instead of iPhone compatibility is the reason Adobe is behind and still has not offered a fine-tuned version of Flash for any smartphone, including the iPhone or any Android device, Icaza and Luh said.

The pair echoed many of the same concerns expressed by the Apple CEO.

“Flash was designed for the desktop world, for web and large screens, not the user experiences you want to create in these new devices with touch, accelerometers and GPS,” Luh said. “It wasn’t designed with that in mind at all.”

Luh was also formerly employed by Apple on the Final Cut Pro team. He said that because Adobe’s iPhone Packager didn’t use Apple’s toolchain to create apps, the resulting code would not work well on an iPhone or iPad. For instance, apps made with Packager are much larger than they would be if they were made with Xcode. A simple “Hello World” app created in Flash and compiled to work on the iPhone is substantially larger in file size, and it would take up 3.6 MB when it should be no larger than 400K when made with Xcode, according to James Eberhardt, a mobile developer who has tested iPhone Packager.

Macromedia, the original maker of Flash, was acquired by Adobe in 2005. Luh said it was disappointing that Adobe failed to translate Macromedia’s success into a compelling mobile platform.

“The biggest irony of all is that Adobe Macromedia was so far ahead of the game, it was unbelievable; it was a billion-dollar industry,” Luh said. “Macromedia was essential to that entire ecosystem…. The fact that through Adobe, they couldn’t find a way to convert that to the rest of the world through smartphones, they really kind of just lost sight of what was really important.”

Adobe declined to speak on the phone with Wired.com in response to Jobs’ and the ex-Adobe employees’ statements. However, a representative provided a written statement:

Adobe/Macromedia launched its mobile business about eight years ago to bring a version of Flash (Flash Lite) designed specifically for phones with very limited performance, memory and web-browsing support. Since then Flash has enabled rich user interfaces, mobile data services and access to some of the rich content on the Web on more than 1.3 billion mass market handsets worldwide. From 2002 thru 2007, device capabilities for supporting the full web or desktop versions of Flash Player were very limited. Smartphones capable of rendering the full web began reaching interesting volumes in 2008, which led Adobe to begin the important and complex optimization work with mobile platforms partners including ARM, Intel, Broadcom, nVidia, Qualcomm, Texas Instruments and others. With Flash Player 10.1, which was unveiled at MAX 2009, numerous improvements have been made to enable a rich, compelling, web experience. We are now in the final stretch and are excited to make the full Flash Player available on first mobile platforms including Android in the first half of 2010.

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Photo: Brian Derballa/Wired.com


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Apr 29

Jon Stewart Calls Apple ‘Appholes’ Over Lost iPhone Debacle

Posted in: Apple, Phones, Today's Chili
The Daily Show With Jon StewartMon – Thurs 11p / 10c
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The Daily Show’s Jon Stewart has weighed in on the missing iPhone debacle, and the man is bewildered about Apple’s actions, to say the least.

Stewart isn’t pleased with the aggressive behavior of the police force investigating a lost iPhone prototype, which was purchased and published by tech blog Gizmodo. Last week, San Mateo police reportedly bashed in Gizmodo editor Jason Chen’s door to enter his home and confiscate his computers and other electronic gear.

“The cops had to bash into the guy’s door?” he said while a screen reading “Appholes” appeared in the background. “Don’t they know there’s an app for that?”

Stewart proceeds to mourn over the Apple of old times, when the company depicted itself as a rebel. Now Apple is acting more like “The Man,” he suggests.

Say what you will about police actions, but without apparent modesty, my favorite part of the clip is around the 4:45 mark — where Wired.com gets a mention for our scoop about a tipster claiming that Apple last week traced its missing iPhone and showed up at the finder’s front door.

Check out the Daily Show segment in the video above.

Via TechCrunch

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Apr 28

HP Buys Palm for $1.2 Billion

Posted in: HP, merger, Phones, Today's Chili

Palm Pre

After months of speculation, smartphone maker Palm has finally found a buyer. HP has said it will buy Palm for approximately  $1.2 billion.

The move will give HP a foothold in the fast-growing smartphone business, at a time when HP rival Dell has its own smartphone available on AT&T.

Palm’s chairman and CEO, Jon Rubinstein, a former Apple executive, will remain with the company, says HP.

Over the last two years, Palm has tried to reinvent itself by introducing a new smartphone operating system called webOS and new phones such as the Palm Pre and the Pixi. The phones have been well-received, with positive reviews, especially for the latest versions, the Palm Pre Plus and Pixi Plus.

But Palm has been stymied by lack of a big marketing budget, particularly when compared to its rivals such as Apple, Motorola and HTC. Palm has been steadily losing money and market share. And acquisition rumors have been rampant with companies such as HTC and Lenovo reportedly interested in Palm.

Now that HP has bagged Palm, it could mean a new direction for the latter. Access to HP’s distribution channel and coffers could help turn the tide for Palm.

That’s especially true for the enterprise channel — computers and smartphones for business users — where both Palm and HP have historically been strong. This might ensure Palm a healthy future as the corporate sidearm of choice, even if it fails to gain significant consumer traction.

“HP’s longstanding culture of innovation, scale and global operating resources make it the perfect partner to rapidly accelerate the growth of webOS,”  said Jon Rubinstein, chairman and chief executive officer of Palm in a statement.

HP and Palm are expected to close the transaction in the third quarter.

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Photo: (Patrick Moorehead/Flickr)


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Apr 28

HTC Cuts Patent Deal With Microsoft Over Android

Posted in: Android, Apple, HTC, Microsoft, os, patent, Phones, Software, Today's Chili

htc g1

Taiwanese smartphone maker HTC has friends in powerful places: The company has inked a patent licensing deal with Microsoft. The move will allow HTC to continue using the Google-designed Android operating system in its phones while mitigating its risk should Microsoft aim any patent lawsuits at the OS.

Microsoft and HTC did not disclose specific details of the agreement but they have said HTC will pay Microsoft an undisclosed sum for the patent rights.

“The license agreement itself isn’t as interesting as the fact that Microsoft chose to publicize it,” says Matt Rosoff, an analyst with Directions on Microsoft, a research and consulting firm that focuses entirely on Microsoft. Microsoft has more than 600 licensing agreements relating to its patents.

Rosoff says the patent agreement is a signal that Microsoft is a company to reckon with in the smartphone business. It also suggests that Microsoft and HTC are likely to continue working together, he says.

“They want to let everyone know that Microsoft and HTC are partners and HTC is going to continue to create Windows Mobile-based devices,” says Rosoff.

HTC’s meteoric rise as a cellphone handset maker has largely been attributed to the company’s big bet on Android. HTC created the first Android phone for T-Mobile and Google, and the Nexus One phone that is directly sold by Google. HTC is one of Android’s biggest cheerleaders with more than six Android devices in its portfolio.

The rise of Android has also come at the expense of Microsoft’s Windows Mobile platform. And while HTC still produces Windows Mobile phones, they are fewer in comparison to its Android devices.

Meanwhile, HTC’s close relationship with Google’s Android OS caught the attention of Apple. Last month, Apple sued HTC alleging infringement of the former’s 20-odd patents relating to user interface and touch. That lawsuit was widely seen as an indirect hit against Google.

The patent agreement with Microsoft is unlikely to help HTC in its battle with Apple, says Allen Nogee, principal analyst for research firm In-Stat.

“There are two separate issues here,” says Nogee. “Apple’s lawsuit against HTC is largely about the user interface and use of touch, while Microsoft is concerned with the software stack used in the smartphone OS.”

In the past, Microsoft has said that companies that use Linux-based operating systems infringe on some of Microsoft’s patents. But it has never really disclosed details of its patents, says Rosoff.

Android, which is a Linux-based operating system, could pose similar patent-related issues, which is why HTC and Microsoft may have entered into an agreement, he says.

As smartphones get more powerful and turn into handheld computers, the software holds the key to the device, says Horacio Gutierrez, Microsoft’s deputy general counsel of intellectual property and licensing.

“Now the industry is in the process of sorting out what royalties will be for the software stack, which now represents the principal value proposition for smartphones,” he says in a blog post.

“In the next few years, as the IP situation settles in this space and licensing takes off, we will see the patent royalties applicable to the smartphone software stack settle at a level that reflects the increasing importance software has as a portion of the overall value of the device,” says Gutierrez.

Microsoft is also talking to other handset makers about its “concerns relative to the Android mobile platform,” he says. Motorola and Sony Ericsson better be prepared to hear Microsoft knock on their doors.

Photo: avlxyz/Flickr

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Apr 28

New iPhone Expected at Apple Developer Conference

Posted in: Apple, iPhone, Phones, Today's Chili

Apple announced the dates Wednesday of its Worldwide Developers Conference, where the company is expected to introduce a new iPhone (even though tech blog Gizmodo may have spoiled the surprise).

Taking place June 7 to June 11 at San Francisco’s Moscone West convention hall, the five-day conference includes hands-on sessions for software developers to become familiar with iPhone OS 4 and Mac OS X. In previous WWDC events, Apple has announced new products during a keynote presentation that kicks off the conference.

Apple announced new iPhones during both WWDC 2008 and WWDC 2009, so we expect the introduction of a fourth-generation iPhone. Because the conference is software-centric, we can also expect more details about the next iPhone operating system, iPhone OS 4, which was previewed in early April.

Meanwhile, the tech community is still bubbling with a mixture of excitement and anger over Gizmodo’s publication of a lost iPhone prototype, which many believe is a near-final version of that fourth-generation iPhone. Apple engineer Gray Powell reportedly left the iPhone in a bar, which was retrieved by an individual who later sold the device to Gizmodo. The tech blog published photos and videos of the device and later returned it to Apple.

Police have since launched an investigation on the case of the missing iPhone, which involved raiding the house of Gizmodo editor Jason Chen and seizing his electronic equipment — an action whose validity is being disputed. Wired.com’s Threat Level reported Tuesday that police have identified the finder of the phone, but a name has not yet been disclosed to the public.

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Copy-and-paste on iPhone OS 3
Jon Snyder/Wired.com


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Apr 28

Bike My Way, a Bare-Bones iPhone GPS-Logger

Posted in: gps, iPhone, Phones, Software, Today's Chili

screen-shot-2010-04-28-at-122606-pm

Bike My Way is a cheap and simple application that will turn your iPhone 3G or 3GS into a GPS track-logger for cyclists. It eschews the rather distracting frills of other biking or multi-purpose GPS apps for a simple, battery-saving feature-set.

The $2 app records your progress to a GPX file, allows you to add waypoint (spacial “bookmarks”) and snap photos with the iPhone’s camera to add to the route. You can add notes, and then export GPX 1.0 or 1.1 files to EveryTrail (an online route-sharing community) or via email. And that’s it.

You can see your progress as a line creeps Indiana Jones-style across a map, but most people will probably want to switch off the iPhone’s display to save batteries: Bike My Way keeps logging when your iPhone is sleeping – just don’t close the app.

If you have compatible software, you can also use the exported info to geotag photos taken with another camera, thus taking care of the most common GPS tracker needs. Sure, you can get other, better featured apps for free of a few dollars more, but perch those info-overkill HUDs on your handlebars and you end up crashing or draining your batteries in minutes.

Bike My Way [Bike My Way via Bike Hugger]

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Apr 27

Apple Just Says Yes to iPhone Game for Smokers

Posted in: Apple, apps, Games, iPhone, Phones, Today's Chili

smoke1

Blogs and message boards have been lighting up with the buzz about Apple’s family-friendly App Store policy, which bans soft porn and satire — but a game that glorifies smoking somehow got the green light.

Apple on Monday approved Puff Puff Pass, a $2 game whose objective is to pass a cigarette or pipe around and puff it as many times as you can within a set duration. So much for taking the high road, Apple.

The game allows you to choose between smoking a cigarette, a cigar and a pipe. Then, you select the number of people you’d like to light up with (up to five), the amount of time, and a place to smoke (outdoors or indoors). And you’re ready to get right on puffing.

“During gameplay you can listen to a phat track,” the game’s description reads in the App Store. Apple rates Puff Puff Pass 17+ for “Frequent/Intense Alcohol, Tobacco, or Drug Use or References.”

Marijuana is not present in the game. However, an Urban Dictionary entry says the slang phrase “Puff puff pass” refers to a game in which “a circle passes a spliff, bong or other smokeage.”

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Apple did not immediately respond to a request for comment regarding Puff Puff Pass. But given Apple’s goal to retain a wholesome shopping experience that’s appropriate for people of all ages, including children, it’s safe to guess this was a mistake on a reviewer’s part, and the game will eventually be nipped in the bud.

The App Store last year generated controversy with a number of questionable decisions. The most notable example was the approval of Baby Shaker, a game whose premise was to shake a baby to death. Apple later pulled the app amid parental outrage, admitting it was a mistake.

More recently, the company’s rejection of Mark Fiore’s Pulitzer-winning editorial cartoon for “ridiculing public figures” inspired a wave of bad press. The move raised concern among journalists (including yours truly) about the state of editorial independence for media companies distributing iPad and/or iPhone editions of their publications through the App Store.

Apple eventually approved Fiore’s cartoon app, but it did not disclose whether its rules regarding “ridiculing public figures” had changed. Then this week, Apple rejected an editorial cartoon mocking Tiger Woods.

In regard to App Store content, Apple has been blunt that it does not wish to sell porn through the App Store. At a recent iPhone event, Steve Jobs said that Google’s Android OS is a place where people can download porn, but not the App Store.

“There’s a porn store in Android,” Jobs said. “You can download porn right onto your phone. Our kids can download them. That’s a place we don’t want to go, so we’re not going to.”

Even with that said, Apple’s App Store serves the Playboy and Sports Illustrated apps, because they come from “more reputable companies,” according to Apple’s vice president of marketing, Phil Schiller. Given that rationale, perhaps Apple will pull Puff Puff Smoke but approve a game made by a more reputable company such as Marlboro.

A hat tip to Krapps for originally reporting this story.

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