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Always a leader in shaping the work environment — from legislated work weeks and vacations to mandated computer power-offs — some German workers have negotiated for what might be the first email blackout agreement. Carmaker Volkswagenhas agreed to turn off work emails for their union employees after work. They’ll only be bothered by their BlackBerries 30 minutes before their work shift starts until 30 minutes after it ends.

Since the agreement only applies to employees who are part of Volkswagen’s collective bargaining agreement, this won’t end stressful weekends for executives, but it will keep bosses from taking it out on their employees with late night missives. The Reuters article on the blackout agreement cites a study that found 88% of Germany’s workers are available for clients and colleagues after hours, up from 73% two years ago. They imply that this is part of the reason for 10 million sick days a year blamed on burnout in Germany.

Other German firms, including Deutsche Telekom and Henkel, have experimented with policies limiting the off-hours use of mobile devices, but the VW agreement is the most far-reaching. It is far too early to tell whether this pact is the first sign of a spreading distaste for around-the-clock work connectivity, or merely another reason cited for moving jobs and factories to developing countries with looser work rules. It is also unclear how practical an “off-hours” ban will wind up being for any company that has global operations. With workers in multiple timezones, around-the-clock communication has become the norm at most multinationals. Even here at ET we are spread across a range spanning eight timezones, so there is almost always something going on — which may explain why we are all internet junkies.

An unexpected consequence of device blackouts may be a loss of personal connectivity for those employees who use their company smartphone or email for personal communications off hours. Fortunately for those in most of the world, phones with dual-SIM cards are a viable option — including Samsung’s Galaxy Y family, some of the first modern smartphones with dual-SIM card capability. Unfortunately for those of us in the US, our carriers have refused to introduce any modern dual-SIM phones, so if we need multiple lines we’re stuck buying an unlocked version from overseas at full price, with no carrier subsidy. Do after-hours business communications help or hurt your productivity and quality of life? How would a ban on them affect you and your company?

If you have Verizon’s FiOS service, be on the lookout for a new set-top box coming out sometime in 2012. Verizon’s plan is to replace every set-top box in your home with one that will talk to all of your IP-based devices and allow media streaming to them in HD — including PCs, televisions, consoles, and tablet/handheld devices. Verizon are currently running tests to stream 3D HD video over wireless, as well, making this a one-stop solution for media in the home.

The benefit of such technology is obvious: having a single interface to control media streaming on multiple devices is going to be a welcome addition to home media consumption. Verizon is taking pains to point out the Energy Star compliance of its devices, and in today’s economy smaller, low-energy devices are becoming decidedly more popular.

The setup currently includes a “server” or main set-top box that will manage the incoming media, and smaller satellite units that will connect your other media devices (at least until Verizon’s high speed WiFi is done testing) to the server. The details are sparse, but it seems like a good thing coming. All-inclusive media management solutions tend to be home-grown and relatively complicated, best kept in the realm of folks whose hobby is electronics and media.

Of course, there is the risk of Verizon sandboxing the experience to only allow certain content (ala iTunes) to be watched through the system, but enclosed media systems seem to be where the technology is going and consumers are eating it up.

Check out Verizon’s promotion video outlining the plan below:

Specifications and benchmarks of Intel’s 32nm Medfield platform — Chipzilla’s latest iteration of Atom and first real smartphone- and tablet-oriented SoC — have leaked, and if I held stock in an ARM-based company like Qualcomm, Nvidia, or Samsung, I’d be a little jittery right now.

According to the leak, the Medfield Tablet Platform (i.e. the base specs of the SoC) consists of a 1.6GHz CPU, 1GB of DDR2 RAM, WiFi, Bluetooth, and FM radios, and some kind of GPU. The smartphone variant will probably be clocked slower — and also there’s no mention of whether a GSM/LTE radio will be baked into the chip.

Benchmark-wise, according to VR-Zone, this 1.6GHz Medfield chip scores 10,500 in CaffeineMark 3, a Java-based cross-platform benchmark. Nvidia’s Tegra 2, by comparison, scores just 7,500; Qualcomm’s Snapdragon MSM8260 scores 8,000; and Samsung’s Exynos (which one?) scores 8,500. These scores might sound impressive, but it’s important to note that Nvidia, Qualcomm, and Samsung’s SoCs have all been out for a year — and the chip that’s most likely to contend with Medfield in the short term, Tegra 3, doesn’t have any CaffeineMark data yet. Benchmark data is useless in the absence of real-world, hands-on testing, too; will Intel’s x86 version of Android be as optimized as the ARM version? We don’t know anything about the GPU, either.

The leaked specs continue with some very tenacious power consumption figures: The Medfield Tablet Platform currently has a 2.6-watt TDP when idling, which peaks up to 3.6W when playing 720p video. The final chips, which ship early next year, aim to cut this down to 2W and 2.6W respectively. This is in-line with the latest ARM chips, though again, we’ll need to get our hands on some production silicon to see how Medfield really performs.

Suffice it to say, if the x86 Medfield really can outperform its strict, utilitarian ARM comrades, and if Intel has polished x86 Ice Cream Sandwich until it shines, 2012 might finally be the year that the ladies and gentlemen of Santa Clara, California win some of that incredibly juicy mobile computing market share.

When Apple’s iOS 5 premiered last October, it shipped with the new Bluetooth 4.0 hardware and software implementation. Bluetooth is an open wireless technology that allows wireless communication over short distances. It’s a secure protocol that connects mobile as well as fixed devices, most commonly used in pointer devices like mice and headsets for phones.

What makes Apple’s release so important is that there have been some major changes to the Bluetooth stack that will be a huge disruption to targeted advertising as well as most short-range wirelessly connected devices as we know it.

First and foremost among the changes is that Bluetooth 4.0 does not require pairing in order to communicate. That might not seem like a big deal, but it’s the single most profound change. It means communication with your device can happen at the application level instead of you having to go into your settings and pair up.

Imagine walking down the street in a city by a sign advertising a new music CD by some famous artist. Interested, you stray within Bluetooth range to look at it. The sign contains a Bluetooth 4 embedded device, of course, and sees your smartphone come into range. Without any prompting, that sign can (if you allow your device to do so) send you a link to a special on the album you’re looking at. The implications of just that interaction are staggering. If you take that one step further into the uncomfortable zone, that same API could be grabbed by Facebook’s application and the app could write on your wall that you just looked at a sign for that particular artist. (They already tell everyone what you’re listening to, right? What you’re looking at is next, logically!)

Alarms could be sent to your mobile device as well, via all sorts of wireless sensors. Anything from spiking blood sugar to heart attack monitors could work with mobile or stationary devices to beam a warning. Mechanics could know what was going on with your car (and when it was last serviced) as you were pulling into the station.

Obviously, there’s some good and bad as with any new technology, and Bluetooth 4 has the real potential to be incredibly intrusive if proper privacy protections aren’t put in place. Perhaps the old adage “With great power comes great responsibility” works here, as with many things related to high technology. The biggest question is why this hasn’t been promoted as a powerful new function. Perhaps the lack of associated technology to utilize the standard is keeping it on the down-low, or maybe with the recent spat of privacy debates something with so much potential for breaches in privacy isn’t something that many people want to advertise.

What do you think of Bluetooth 4 and its implications? Are you ready for targeted advertising the likes of which we’ve never seen? Would you wear a Bluetooth pacemaker?

Two days ago, China turned on Compass(Beidou-2), its homegrown replacement for the US GPS and Russian GLONASS global navigation satellite systems. Then, yesterday, if you needed any confirmation that it’s in it for the long haul, China published its full space plans up until 2016. Most notably, China will launch manned space craft, space laboratories to analyze our solar system and universe (like Hubble), and the beginnings of a space station to rival ISS.

China’s own personal space race has been tearing along with terrifying momentum. In 2003, some 44 years after the USSR launched Yuri Gagarin into space, China became the third country to launch a human into space — and now, eight years later, it has a functional satellite-based navigation system, is working on an orbiting space station, wants to send probes into deep space to explore the planets, asteroids, and the sun, and eventually manned expeditions to the Moon and Mars. By 2016, China will improve its launch vehicles, launch advanced communications and meteorological satellites, launch deep space probes and laboratories, and launch more Compass satellites until it rivals GPS and GLONASS in terms of accuracy and coverage.

At this point it’s safe to say that China is serious about its space program, and its continued success is now a matter of national pride and prestige. While its space agency (CNSA) has a tiny budget compared to NASA, its efforts seem to be heavily focused on space exploration, while NASA has its fingers in many different pies. Obviously, it is also easier and cheaper for China to follow in US and Russian footsteps, too, rather than forging new ground like the incredibly-expensive Apollo program. With the world’s largest high-tech workforce and the best access to the rare earth metals that bleeding edge technology requires, China is perfectly poised to take the space exploration crown from America.

Now, I know it’s fashionable for American sites to prophecize the downfall of the US and rise of China as the One True Superpower, but it would be remiss of us to not point out that China, four years ago, launched a ground-based missile into one of its dead satellites. Unlike NASA, which is a civilian organization, the Chinese space program is run by the People’s Liberation Army, China’s military. The US and Russia, seeing China successfully hit a satellite from Earth, were understandably rather nervous — and when combined with Compass, which could guide intercontinental ballistic missiles from China to anywhere on the globe, perhaps it’s OK to be a little concerned. China maintains that its space program is peaceful, however, and currently cooperates with Russia, Brazil, and Europe, but not the US.

With the recent report that Sony sold all of its S-LCD interests to Samsung in return for $939 million another flare has been shot, warning that the former king of electronics remains on a downward spiral that has no end in sight. A lack of innovation and misguided decisions (not to mention a few natural disasters) have eroded at the foundation of the company while competitors like Samsung and LG have overtaken the electronics giant in markets such as televisions and mobile phones. It wasn’t that long ago that Sony products were considered the creme de la creme of consumer electronics, the pinnacle for technophiles the world over. What factors have caused this the company’s slide into mediocrity? To answer that question, we need to take a look at Sony during its most successful period, the explosion of the ’80s and early ’90s.

It’s difficult to explain to people born after 1990 what kind of cultural impact Sony had during this time. Simply put, Sony was the Apple of its day, a company that released products that were the result of innovation being merged with everyday media consumption habits. When Sony unveiled the now-legendary Walkman in 1979, it fomented a revolution in the way people interacted with music. Buyers flocked in droves to retailers to get their hands on the device that would allow them to bring their music, in the form of analog cassette tapes, wherever they wanted. It was the must-have device of the decade, cementing the Sony brand in the mind of consumers as the name in electronics. Even when rival companies began churning out lower cost knockoffs, consumer demand for the Walkman remained high because consumers trusted the name. No matter the price, people would buy a device if it had the Sony name printed on it. Sony, not Apple, invented the extreme consumer dedication Cupertino now enjoys.

Following up on the Walkman craze of the ’80s, Sony once again changed the entire face of audio recording when it teamed up with Phillips to perfect the compact disc media format. CDs opened up a vast array of possibilities with the ability to give users a “master” copy of audio files as well as the convenience of being able to quickly select different tracks. The quality and amount of music that can be stored on a compact disc vastly outstripped the cassette tape, and once again thrust Sony into the forefront of media consumption innovation.

Unfortunately, the CD can be seen as the peak of Sony’s influence on the market. While it continued to develop new formats, such as the MiniDisc, none enjoyed the mass adoption that its previous efforts had enjoyed. (Sure, MiniDV and Blu-ray have done well, but only because of a lack of affordable alternative storage mediums. Flash media and streaming online content delivery are making these obsolete.) Sony became a nebulous company that fell prey to both its own avarice and the ability of its competitors to correctly gauge where consumers were going to look next for the next generation of media technology. Namely, the MP3.

If I had to point to a specific day in history that marked the decline of Sony as the worldwide leader in technology, it would be October 23, 2001. This was the date that Steve Jobs took the stage in his mock-turtlenecked glory and announced the next revolution in music, the iPod. In one fell swoop, Apple beat Sony to one of the most important technological advances this century. By giving consumers a device with instant purchasing power and the ability to listen to high quality audio files on the go, Cupertino completely changed the playing field for music consumption, a feat that Sony was no longer capable of.