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Oled, ebooks, smart surfaces, and an ancient Egyptian PC
BERLIN, August 29, Pictured here is the 31in AMOled screen unveiled by Samsung today, surrounded by 14in models. The screens look very impressive, with vivid colours, but closer inspection of the large one showed what look like a few missing pixels dotted about.
Smaller Oled screens are becoming commonplace, but if one shows up with a defect you have not wasted a large panel. But the pictures on the screens look great, so if companies get the manufacture sorted out we might se them on laptops soon.
There were two interesting examples of smart surfaces at the show. The one on the right is being developed by by the Japanese Institute of Information and Communications techology.
It is covered with a metalling matrix that communicates with the machines using a feeble electrical field that induces a tint current in the base of the machines, which can be in any orientation.
In theory the system can be used to transmit power to devices too, but that is niot being done in this demonstration. Regular PCW users may remember that we reported a similar system developed in Cambridge a while back. Few details about those tiny PCs, I am araid, except that they are available in Japaen and are Atom-powered.
In a much more playful vein is the system on the left, an electronic Scrabble board. Each scrabble tile and each position, on the board has an RFID module, so that the state of the board can be relayed to the PC - or to web if you are playing online.
Judging by all the fuss about Scrabulous, and the dispute with the company Hasbro that owns the right to Scrabble, the system could find a big market if it could be made at the right price. It's being developed at the Fraunhofer Institute in Berlin
Pictured on the right
is a picture of Panasonic's Wireless HD modules. I'll be posting another story about the technology tomorrow so I won;t write much about it here.
Walking the halls today reinfocred by first impressions yesterday that screens are getting thinner, more efficient, and bigger, They are also pushing up frame rates. Both Sony and Samsung showed 200Hz screens, refreshing four times faster than the picture they are screening.
The in-between frames are filled in by clever interpolation. Samsung had a demonstration of a 100Hz screen next to a standard model and there was an appreciable difference, though I am not sure you would miss the extra quality if it wasn't there.
Sony is showing the latest version of its ebook reader here but also on show is one called the BeBook from a Dutch company of the same name. It looks rather more elegant that the Iliad, which I reviewed recently, and has a slightly smaller screen that is not touch senstive. It costs £229, which is a little more expensive than the Sony.
Most major vendors are now offering mini-notebooks. One comes from a name from the past, Commodore, the company that produced the much loved Commodore Pet. Or rather from the company that bought the brand Commodore.
As you can see from the picture it looks like a dozen other makes doing the rounds. It has a 10in display and uses a Via C7-M processor, and weighs 1.4Kg.
I have to confess that I have never quite 'got' the craze for modding PCs, though some of the designs can be amusing. The one one the left was entered into a competiton at IFA. The only way yo can tell what it is by peering at the back, where USB ports and drive bays are hidden among the hieroglyphics.
LG X110 netbook includes sat nav
LG's entry into the netbook market, the new X110 range, will include an integrated GPS receiver module as standard for use with satellite navigation software.
The X110, which looks like an MSI WInd but with a keyboard layout more like the Acer Aspire One, will go on sale in late October in the UK. The netbooks will initially be sold through mobile phone outlet Phones4U, including a variety of 3G mobile broadband bundles. Only the Windows XP version will be available.
No pricing information has been released.
Key specs below:
- CPU - Intel ATOM 1.6GHz + 945GSE + ICH7M
- OS - Windows XP Home
- Display - 10-inch WSVGA (1,024x600)
- RAM - 1GB
- HDD - 80GB
- Keyboard - 82 full-size keyboard
- Weight - 1.19kg
- Wireless - WLAN 802.11 b/g , 10/100 Ethernet
WirelessHD sees off UWB for fast links - and oh for an Oled TV!
Vendors have been plugging the green credentials at the IFA consumer electronics show in Berlin, through whether from fear of destroying the planet or under pressure from governments or the market is far from clear. Sharp, Panasonic ad Sony all declared that their latest screens draw less power than previous models.
Sony and Panasonic screens sensing ambient light and adjust the brightness accordingly, saving sometimes 50 percent of the power drain. But as we report today, screens are also getting bigger - the one picture above is 150in.
Also noticeable is that they are using WirelessHD instead of Ultrawideband (UWB) for short-range wireless transfer of high-definition content. Current data rates go up to 4Gbits/sec but the theoretical limit is 25Gbits/sec. Multiple aerials get round the need for lightof-sight opration because the signals bounce of the walls. And of course the 60GHz band is way above the frequencies used for other data links linke Wifi.
Where this leaves UWB is anybody's guess.
Sony's XEL-1 TV (above right and left) looks great though it is very small - about the size of a portable DVD player. No prices are available yet but I guess it will be a long time before we see these screens in notebooks. An advantage of the fact that the Oled pixels generate their own light is that you should be able to switch them off. That means if you are doing something that only uses half the sreen, you don't waste power on the other half.
Cases get cooler as gamers get more power hungry
Coolermaster is best known for its cooling products but it also make systems cases. It has decided to split its product line between those aimed at mainstream users, and those for gamers who tend to have very different requirements.
This chassis (above) the first to be targeted at gamers, is called Sniper and is sold under a new Storm brand - macho names that the company feels will appeal to shoot-'em-up enthusiasts.
The power supply goes at the bottom, which is raised to facilitate cooling, and the space is designed for units draining the equivalent of a two-bar electric fire. There are grommeted apertures near the top rear for water-cooling pipes and the whole chassis is perforated to let in air.
The five drive bays slide out for easy access and a space behind the where the system board would be allows you to push from both sides when clamping on cooling fans. On the top of the box is a knob (right) controlling all the fans on the board, so that when you have finished gaming you can turn them down for less damanding tasks like writing an email.
USB plugs and leads are sited to prevent the peripherals thefts which are apparently common at gamefests.
The whole box, which will cost around £130, depending on the Euro exchange rate, looks big enough to house an entire data centre. But it is the first and smallest of a projected range to allow for biger water cooling systems. Coolermaster reckons gaming machines are going to get more and more power hungry, wuite the opposite to desktops, mobiles and servers for which designers are begining to count every milliwatt.
Free backup utility will create bootable USB drives
Back-up and data-management specialist Paragon has made its latest Drive Backup 9.0 Express software freely available for download. It offers basic backup and recovery tools and the ability to create a bootable flash drive to enable the recovery of entire systems.
Belkin gives audio cables the magnetic slip
Apple got a lot of Brownie points for its magnetic notebook power input, which pulls off when you trip over the lead to that you do not drag the notebook to the ground. In practice you can detach it by accident without noticing, so that the battery runs down, but that is a small price to pay.
Belkin uses the same idea on its £14.99 BreakFree plug, a 1/4in TRS audio jack as used
for guitars and some mics. On a flexible extension at one end is a socket into which you plug a standard lead; the other end, which is gold-plated, plugs into your amplifier, or whatever. The two ends are held by powerful magnets which break apart under stress.
One advantage is that you don't wear the plating on the jacks with repeated use; the other is that you are less likely to trip up and break your neck on stage. Spare tips (pictured above) cost £12.99 a pair.
It was one of the gadgets on show at a Playbite product preview event yesterday.
Hauppage showed a rather neat little portable terrestrial digital TV with a 3.6in screen that doubles as a media player. The MyTV Player, which will cost around £140 when it becomes available in the next few weeks, has a high-capacity SD slot so you can pack in 32GB of storage if you need it, But you cannot record directly from the onboard TV, which may be just as well you will not be able to get a good signal everywhere. The device does have a slot for an external aerial, though.
Netgear was showing its first dual-band Wireless N router (see Will Stapley's blog). Regular readers may recall that I was ranting about these, or rather about the lack of them, a few months back. My point was that vendors have been more than a little economical with the truth over early 11n wireless routers using only the 2.4GHz band.
You can only get the full 11n speeds, as stated on the box, if you use 40MHz channels - the radio equivalent of using to lines instead of one. At 2.4GHz, Wifi is supposed to default to 20MHz channels if there are contending networks within range - ie almost everywhere in cities. Uses could switch this off if they did not care about being a channel hog, but if they didn't they were never going to get more than half speed they would get from 40MHz.
Dual-channel routers allow you to use legacy and slower devices at 2.4GHz, leaving 5GHz free for turbo use.
Netgear also showed its ReadyNAS Duo network-atached stoage device, which packs many of the functions of a home server including media streaming and networking printing via one of its three USB ports. There are 500GB, 750GB and 1TB versions costing between £240 and £340 and you can add more storage using a spare drive bay or a USB port.
The leaves are falling off Photosynth
Well that's what Microsoft's new Photosynth website - just released from its long beta phase - keeps telling us. Photosynth is now live for users to create their own 'synths', although every time we try to view one we get the bizarre message pictured here. Usually followed by IE7 crashing.
To create a 'synth' (a funky stitched-up 3D view of a photo collection), you need to upload between 5-300 photos (yes, upload - don't dig out your high-res pics just yet) of your subject using the Photosynth desktop application and let Microsoft's servers do all the grunt work. Oh, and you need a Windows Live account to sign in as well.
It's a fascinating technology, but one that seems to be in desperate search of a useful practical application for the masses.
ADSL customers left out in the cold as dual-band routers surface
D-Link launched its DIR-855 dual-band router earlier this month, and now Linksys has announced its rival WRT610N model at £149.99.
Dual-band means it can operate on both 802.11g's 2.4GHz spectrum and the much less cluttered 5GHz using 802.11n.
With only three clear channels on 2.4GHz spectrum, if you're within reach of three or more of your neighbours' Wifi networks you'll experience problems.
5GHz, on the other hand, has eight non-overlapping channels, so it's far less likely you'll suffer from such interference.
However, unless you're a cable broadband customer you're going to be left disappointed since neither the D-Link nor Linksys dual-band router is available with a built-in ADSL modem.
Worse still, both Linksys and D-Link couldn't provide us with a date when one will actually be available.
Although the US broadband market is mostly cable-based, in the UK roughly 50% of broadband users are on ADSL via a BT phone line.
Of course, you could buy an external ADSL modem for around £25 and hook it up to one of these routers, but it's an extra unsightly box that requires its own power supply.
Surely one of the major router manufacturers will leap in to save the UK's ADSL broadband users from the misery of 2.4GHz? I, for one, hope so as there are now five networks within close proximity of my house, all jostling for space.
Intel systems-on-a-chip are still too power hungry
Arguably the most interesting announcement to come out of the Intel Developer Forum was the CE 3100 system-on-a-chip, which shows the company exploiting miniaturisation for purposes other than increasing raw computing power. Instead of packing in more cores, it is bringing onto the processor functionality previously performed by peripheral chips.
Intel actually announced several new SoCs a couple of weeks before IDF. Significantly all were targeted at applications for which power drain is not considered critical. The CE 3100 is designed for tasks such as set-top-boxes and TVs, allowing the latter to get access to web features.
Anand Chandrasekher, head of Intel's ultra-mobility group, hinted at the reason in his IDF keynote when he said the standby power on the next version of Atom, codenamed Moorestown, will be cut by a factor of ten.
This is important because low standby power is one of the major advantages of ARM cores that currently dominate mobile phones (including the iPhone) and other portable devices such as media players. Emerging portable internet access devices need to be always on, so they need a very low standby drain.
Moorestown, if it turns out as Chandrasekher promises, should be able to compete better in this market. But it will not arrive until late 2009 or early 2010, by which time the next generation ARM cores will be appearing in products.
Just how profligate current designs can be is shown by announcement by UK Bluetooth specialist CSR of a collaboration with Intel that has reduced notebook power consumption by up to a watt, potentially extending battery life by a half-hour on Intel motherboards.
It turns out that polling of the Bluetooth subsystem, to check if data needed shifting, was stopping the notebook entering a sleep state. The tweak means Bluetooth polling is done only when necessary.
Ironically, standby power is becoming important on set-top-boxes for which the CE 3100 is designed. A recent Ofcom report highlights the fact that consumer electronics consumes 45 percent of the electricity used in the home, heating apart.
It is estimated that set-top-boxes, routers, and battery chargers left on in Britain when they are not needed waste the equivalent of the output of a 1500Mw power station.
There will, of course, be more on all this in the next print edition of PCW.
O Bold, where art thou?
When Blackberry came in to show off its new Bold handset a couple of weeks back, we were assured it would be available mid-August.
However, with stores such as The Carphone Warehouse still listing it as 'coming soon', there appears to be something of a delay. It's also unclear if it will be exclusive to a particular operator.
We're currently waiting to hear back from Blackberry as to the whereabouts of its Bold and will post an update soon.
Update (21/08/08): Orange now has the Bold in stock, but there's no sign of it on the T-Mobile, O2 or Vodafone websites.
USB hub gets networked
Following our blog yesterday about Lindy's sharable USB hub, which can be switched between two PCs, we got a press release from the Taiwanese company Pilotech about a networkable four-port USB 2.0 hub. According to Pilotech, devices attached to the USB-over-IP hub (model number O1P001) appear to be local to the computer using them and provide the same plug-and-play features.
We have seen networkable hubs at trade shows but they are thin on the ground in shops, so one suspects there must be a snag with them. Pilotech says the hub supports storage devices as well as printers, human-interface devices such as mice and keyboards, and media streaming. But there is no information on whether the system can cope with multiple users, and if so how. It may be that the primary use is as a cable extender, allowing devices to be sited beyond USB's five-metre limit.
There are no details of UK pricing or availability.
Switchable hub - use with care
Lindy's £34.99 (inc Vat)USB 2.0 four-port sharing hub allows two machines to share scanners, printers and other peripherals. You switch the hub to whichever machine needs access; either or both can be a Mac or PC. We haven't seen the product yet but it looks like you have to switch the whole hub rather than individual ports.
You get similar facilities with some KVM (Keyboard, Video, Mouse) switches, though these are more expensive.
The one caveat (at least on the ones we tried) is that they are not good for use with storage devices like USB keys or drives, unless you are very careful. Physically switching a device like this is the same as unplugging it, so you should unmount formally before switching it or your operating system will sulk and you could lose data.
Free remote control
The German company TeamViewer is making its flagship remote control product available free for private use. Rival Logmein offers a similar deal and GotomyPC is available as a free trial.
Teamview looks good for providing instant support to friends or customers, provided they have a web link. They can download a client module that requires no installation and provides an ID and key; this can be phoned or emailed to you to give you full control of the machine.
The company says you can also set it up as a service, allowing you to access an unattended PC. It supports remote access between PCs and Macs.
Bring back the command line, all is forgiven...
The advent of graphical interfaces such as Windows and the MacOS was rightly hailed as an advance in usability, but as anyone who ever used Unix or pre-Windows DOS will know they could make some tasks more cumbersome and less natural to perform. You could, for instance, tell DOS with a single command to list to a file all filenames in a particular folder containing the letters xkz; try doing that in Windows.
One of the least-appreciated aspects of speech-recognition programs is that they have brought back the command-line in a new form. Instead of writing near-English commands, with obscure and daunting modifiers, you can tell your program verbally what to do - which is far more natural than clicking a mouse.
They show that commands can make things easier even for that majority of people who would run a mile at being asked to cope with anything that looks like a line of code. Take, for instance, the task of setting up four-column-by--row table in Word 2003. First you need to know the difference between Draw Table and Insert on the menu; then you have to complete a dialogue box. With a spoken command you need to know nothing about the menu structure; you just say something like: Insert 10 by 4 table.
Natural-language processing has come a long way since DOS days so it should be possible for commands to be closer to the way we speak. There are problems, such as possible security breaches or data loss stemming from ambiquities. Firefox is making a start with its about-to-launch Ubiquity command interface. It looks like a project well worth watching.
Passport to a rip-off?
If you Google the Passport Office and click on the first available links, you might be surprised to be told that the only way to get information is via a £1.50-a-minute phone call. Is this what we pay our taxes (not to mention a considerable passport fee) for?
No it isn't, as it happens. These are sites selling information you can get for free via the official Passport Office website at the top of the unpaid-for links.
The voice on one is very... very... very... slow... so that people with poor English can better understand. Presumably, also, they are less likely to know the diffference between a sponsored and an unsponsored link.
If there isn't a law against passing yourself off as a government organisation, perhaps there should be.
Intel Nehalem to be called Core i7
Intel has just announced that the upcoming 45nm 'Nehalem' processors will carry the Core i7 moniker. The logos above show the variants for mainstream models (blue) and the Extreme Editions (black). Nehalem is due to launch by the end of 2008, and includes novelties such as an integrated memory controller and a graphics chip built into the CPU package. It also introduces Intel's replacement for the traditional front-side bus, known as QuickPath Interconnect (QPI). Hyperthreading also returns, allowing two threads per core.
Lock up your daughter's webcam?
There have been two reports in the past week of men getting into trouble for hacking into the computers to spy on young women through their webcams. One man gained access by sending his victim a Trojan by email and the other allegedly used a Logmein remote-access client.
Sophos, which reported the first case, lists three others that have reached the courts. What is worrying, paradoxically, is that there are so few of them. The Home Office does not give numbers for 'traditional' Peeping Tom convictions, which are logged under 'miscellaneous sex offences', including flashing. These have hovered at around 10,000 a year in the UK for the past six years.
These are just the figures for the people caught and charged, and they probably represent only a fraction of the number of actual offences. So even if Peeping Toms are involved in only a small proportion of these cases, it's a fair bet that there are thousands of them active and many of them will be computer literate. And that is just in the UK.
You would not need to be a computer genius to find software capable of accessing a remote webcam, provided it could be planted in a remote machine. Millions of machines are already infected with Trojans capable of providing access.
Both the men in the latest cases appear to have left themselves wide open to discovery, one by trying to blackmail his victim and the other because the young woman involved noticed that her PC had slowed down. This leaves the question of how much is going on that is not discovered.
Security firms will stress the need to buy more protection. But surely the best rule, particularly for for wives and daughters, is: Never do in front of your web camera what you would not do in the street.
Blackberry Bold available next week
Announced back in May, the Bold will be available to buy towards the end of next week.
We met up with Blackberry this morning to see its new Bold handset up close.
The handset certainly looks impressive and is the first Blackberry to feature HSDPA - something that's long overdue.
Marketed as an aspirational device, it has a good mix of business and consumer features, including a 3.5mm headphone jack, GPS and built-in stereo speakers that can really pack a punch. And with video looking excellent on the 480x320 display, high-flying city executives will no doubt delight in sharing their movies with fellow commuters.
We'll have a full review of the handset soon.
When quizzed as to whether rumours of a touch-screen Blackberry were true, the representatives looked particularly awkward and said they couldn't comment, but judging by their body language we suspect it won't be long before a Blackberry "iPhone killer" surfaces.
Lessons of hacking case
The alleged hacking ring that is said to have stolen 40 million bank-card details in the US is likely to increase calls for a new look at UK laws. Only last month a House of Lords committee reiterated earlier calls for more protection for shoppers which it said had been ignored by the government.
The Science and Technology subcommittee said organisations should be obliged to reports data losses, and that banks should be held responsible for losses from e-fraud. It heard evidence that banks often refuse refunds for losses involving the use of a PIN or password.
But Jonathan Armstrong, a partner in law-firm Eversheds' technology group, points out that the alleged ring did not appear to have been thwarted by security-breach legislation in some of the US states affected. "UK companies are already obliged to make sure attacks like this do not happen," he said.
David Hobson, managing director of security-systems specialist GSS, said the scam seemed to have involved quite sophisticated hacking of the wireless networks in stores and showed the need for the best possible protection. "It's all very well using complex encryption passwords, but if you've left the admin password on your wireless router at its default setting, you might as well not bother using encryption in the first place," he said.
Lenovo unveils Atom-powered laptops
Scrambling onto a passing bandwagon isn't something Lenovo does very often, but the exploding popularity of netbooks has prompted it to join the fray of Atom-based products.
The IdeaPad S9 (8.9in screen) and S10 (10.2in screen) come in some seriously un-Lenovo-like colours: deep blue, pastel pink, ruby red, classic white and bold black. From the press photos, they bear a strong resemblance to the Acer Aspire One, although the inclusion of an Express Card slot indicates they're not straight clones. They will feature up to 1GB of memory, 160GB hard disk or 4GB SSD and run Windows XP or Linux.
They will be on sale from early October at £279 for the S9 and £319 for the S10.
