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Email blackout: Victory for workers or last gasp for trade unions?

2012-01-03T19:55:00.001-08:00

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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?

TiVo? Roku? Not in Verizon’s vision of the future

2012-01-03T19:54:00.001-08:00

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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:

Intel Medfield 32nm Atom SoC power consumption, specs, and benchmarks leak

2012-01-03T19:53:00.000-08:00

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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.

The future of advertising: Omnipresent Bluetooth 4.0

2012-01-03T19:52:00.001-08:00

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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?

China accelerates space program, plots out course to beat US and Russia

2012-01-03T19:51:00.000-08:00

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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.

Shenzhou 5: China’s first manned space flight

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.

The rise and fall of the Sony empire

2012-01-03T19:49:00.001-08:00

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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.

Lawn mower with iPod adapter debuts at Detroit auto show

2012-01-03T19:48:00.001-08:00

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Ready to mark your ballot for the hottest new ride at next week’s Detroit auto show? There’s the re-invention of the Lincoln brand, hybrids up the wazoo, and… a lawn mower. Sears’ Craftsman brand will debut a high-speed riding lawn mower, the Craftsman CTX, with a big engine (for a lawn mower), traction control, digital instrumentation, cupholders and an iPod adapter. No word on airbags. The CTX line will cost $3,000-$6,500, which is at the higher end of riding mower prices.

Mowing a big lawn looks exciting, if you’re 12 years old, for the first 10 minutes. Thus the advent of creature comforts: less noise, vibration, and harshness (NVH), faster mowing speeds, beverage holders, and radios (now that lawn mowers aren’t so noisy). Craftsman is one-upping the competition with an iPod jack on some models. The Briggs & Stratton engine outputs 30 horsepower, good for 8 miles per hour, 3 mph in reverse. For efficiency, there’s electronic fuel management in place of a carburetor, “full digital instrumentation,” power steering, and a 12-volt adapter. CTX isn’t just a tractor/mower, Craftsman explains: It’s the “Craftsman Tractor Experience.”

The North American International Auto Show (NAIAS) has been suffering in recent years from the weak economy, the rapid growth of the Los Angeles Auto Show, and the defection of international auto makers. Porsche and Nissan left (they’re back) and this year Jaguar defected from Detroit in favor of the New Delhi AutoExpo. But India doesn’t have a made-in-America, big-engine riding mower that’s red, white and blue (even if the model shown is black and silver). It’s built for Craftsman and Sears (“where America used to shop”) by Briggs & Stratton in New York and Georgia.

Not everyone is happy with lawn mowers at an auto show, including Bob Lutz, the ever-quotable former exec at BMW, Chrysler and GM. “It’s an automobile show, stupid, not motorcycles or garden implements,” Lutz fumed to Reuters. “What’s next? Plumbing and bathroom fixtures? A Toto-toilet stand? An Art Van furniture stand?” An auto show spokesman was quick to note Craftsman will be in the concourse outside the main exhibit hall.

Why Qualcomm’s Mirasol color e-ink display isn’t vaporware… yet

2012-01-03T19:47:00.001-08:00

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There has been buzz amongst fans of e-readers since the news leaked in 2010 that Qualcomm has been working on a color e-ink technology named “Mirasol” to replace the existing black and white technology currently found in Kindles and Nooks. The promise of a color, power-sipping Kindle-like device sent bookworms scrambling to find out when they could get their hands on one. Unfortunately, Qualcomm has hit several hurdles in the past two years that have signaled that perhaps Mirasol is the very definition of vaporware. However, consumers should not be rushing to pronounce Mirasol’s Last Rites just yet.

While it may seem that devices like the iPad and the Kindle Fire have caused consumers to look upon e-ink as an old technology, there is one big advantage that it has over touchscreen devices: Lower power consumption. Users of the first generation (2007) Kindle can confirm getting up to fourteendays between charges, even with heavy usage. This far outstrips the touted ten-hour battery life of Apple’s tablet device. The reason e-ink based devices can achieve this kind of longevity is that they only use power when a user “turns” a page or performs another operation. Qualcomm has statedthe Mirasol-based screens use even lesspower to operate, making them even more efficient when it comes to battery life.

I believe that, between the extraordinary battery life and the fact that there are a good number of consumers out there that are not looking for a converged device like the iPad or Kindle Fire, that Mirasol actually has a good chance at market success. Executives at Qualcomm must agree since the company has put almost three billion dollars into production facilities to develop the technology. To have the screens become profitable, however, Qualcomm must make two moves.

First and foremost, the company needs to find a quality device to put a Mirasol screen on. The first commercially available color e-ink device, the Kyobo Mirasol e-reader, is receiving dismal reviews. In fact, critics are saying the only good feature the device has is the color screen. At $300, the Kyobo is an overpriced piece of clunky tech that is going to bury Mirasol in obscurity. Somehow, Qualcomm needs to strike a deal with Amazon to create a Kindle device that features Mirasol. If not Amazon, perhaps Qualcomm could peddle the feature to Microsoft to produce a totally new reading device. Mark my words though, if we see Qualcomm partner with Sony to create an e-reader, the critics will be rightwhen they label Mirasol vaporware.

Second, if Qualcomm can perfect a smartphone screen that takes advantage of Mirasol technology it could create a strong source of revenue for further development. The company has put prototypes in the public view before, but says the tech is three to four years away from being put into wide production for cell phones. That is an eternity when it comes to technology, and there is a need right now for power saving screens. Just ask Android users about the battery woes they contend with, then offer them a new screen technology that will help extend the time between charges. They will rush to their nearest mobile retail outlet ready to purchase a device making use of Mirasol.

If Qualcomm can get on the ball, Mirasol could become an important part of future media technologies — it just depends, as always, on whether Qualcomm can secure the strategic partnerships to make sure its color e-ink display gets the love it deserves.

Hacker hopes to force Apple’s hand by hacking Apple TV to run iOS apps

2012-01-03T19:46:00.000-08:00

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Yet again proving the ingenuity of software hackers, two iOS devs have taken the second-generation Apple TV and created a hack that allows them to run iOS applications through the device via an emulator. Their hope is that Apple will take notice and be forced to create an app store that is usable by the device.

Steve Troughton-Smith and Nick “TheMudkip” worked together on a jailbroken Apple TV to code an emulator called MobileX that takes advantage of the fact that the device is in essence an iOS device under the hood. Sporting an iPad-like A4 chip as well as a modified version of iOS 5, the new Apple TV has the horsepower to run apps in the emulator smoothly. In videos demonstrating MobileX in action, the duo had Facebook, Angry Birds and YouTube running on their television screen, as well as Cydia, the rogue app store for jailbroken devices. A video of the hack in action is embedded below.

Before you go rushing to download the hack package to enjoy some Angry Birds action on your television, here’s the bad news: Troughton-Smith says they aren’t releasing the hack to the public just yet. He does say, however, that the team is giving away the proper software libraries so app devs can optimize their code for use with the Apple TV remote.

Until apps are optimized using the aforementioned libraries, you can control the action on the screen using a Mac Magic Trackpad. While this solution sounds feasible, it can slow the performance of applications down because of the fact that it connects over a VNC connection. Simply put, the Trackpad has to connect to a middleman to talk to the apps running in the emulator.

I admire the fact that the team has set out to achieve the lofty goal of being the catalyst that forces Apple to release an Apple TV app store. I think that they will get their wish, but not because of the hack they created. With the rumors of an all-in-one Apple television set continuing to fly around, an app store dedicated to iOS-enabled televisions is most likely already in the works. It also wouldn’t be surprising if the upcoming iPad 3 can connect to these new display devices in more than just an AirPlay display-mirroring capacity.

Microsoft Surface and Kinect are on a collision course

2011-11-22T20:31:00.001-08:00

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If you have $8,400 kicking around, you can now preorder the monstrous Samsung SUR40, a 40-inch, Gorilla Glass-covered, 1080p, Microsoft Surface 2.0-powered 50-point-multitouch TV. First showed off in January 2011 at CES, it looks like Microsoft has finally ironed out the remaining bugs, and before the year is out you should start to see the SUR40 in banks, offices, and in extremely well-appointed bars and restaurants.

At this point, if you haven’t seen Surface 2.0 in action, watch the two videos at the end of this story. The basic gist of the technology, called PixelSense, is this: Microsoft has worked with Samsung to create an LCD panel where every single pixel has a built-in sensor/camera. Below this LCD panel is the usual array of LEDs to illuminate the display, but it also includes infrared (IR) LEDs too. IR passes through the panel and the Gorilla Glass cover, and if there’s an obstacle on the other side — a finger, a mug, a piece of paper — the IR is reflected back into the sensors. A built-in computer (a dual-core Athlon X2 245e in this case, pictured below right) running Windows 7 and the Surface 2.0 software processes the output and then passes the sanitized data to whatever app is currently running.

Now… does this sound like another piece of exciting technology that also originated at Microsoft Research? Kinect, perhaps?

Kinect has an infrared light source and two IR cameras. These work in concert — as you have surely seen in numerous Kinect hacks — to provide full 3D depth sensing and movement tracking.Samsung’s SUR40 and Surface 2.0 are fundamentally the same, but with millions of sensors. The main difference, judging by the first video below, is that PixelSense is much shorter range than Kinect — it can only see a few inches above the screen, while Kinect is a few meters. This won’t be an inherent limitation of PixelSense, however — in reality, the IR LEDs in the SUR40 are probably not as bright as those in the Kinect, and so the infrared light simply doesn’t reach as far. Surface is is all about touching the surface, after all, not waving your hands or making gestures above it.

But what if the next version of Surface, Microsoft Surface 3.0 Kinect, perhaps, extended the range of its IR light sources and cameras to a few feet? Instead of just using your fingers or other 2D objects to interact with the screen, what if Surface could also read the expression on your face or track the movements of your eyes and hands? Touchscreens are cool — but spatial, Minority Reportesque interfaces are cooler.

Better yet, don’t forget that the SUR40 is also usable in the upright position. As a tabletop, Surface is perfect for arranging images, graphs, and data — but upright it becomes a huge touchscreen that’s ideal for kiosks and public spaces. Again, imagine what it would be like to interact with Surface from a couple of meters away — you could point at the screen, rather than touch it (germaphobes rejoice!) When leaning over a table, only your head is visible — but upright, Surface could react to your complete body language, just like Kinect.

Finally, one parting thought: The Samsung SUR40 contains a complete PC: an AMD CPU and GPU (HD6750M), 4GB of RAM, gigabit Ethernet, four USB ports, and so on. What if the next Surface display is designed for home use? What if, instead of PC innards, there was an Xbox 360 or 720 under the hood? What if the price could be brought down to $2,000?

It was only yesterday that we wrote about the possibility of a big-screen Apple TV video game console — but with society’s love affair for interactive, extending-into-the-living-room experiences, Surface Kinect would give Microsoft the perfect piece of consumer electronics.

Galaxy Nexus and ICS: Android’s inflection point

2011-11-22T20:30:00.001-08:00

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While the US waits patiently for the launch of the titanic, 4.65-inch Samsung Galaxy Nexus, Google’s new superphone has now been available in the UK motherland for a whole 24 hours. The first batch of reviews from the major tech sites are in, and some early user reviews are starting to trickle in as well. Unexpectedly, and unique for the launch of a new version of Android, the Galaxy Nexus — and its heart, Ice Cream Sandwich — are receiving almost uniformly spectacular reviews.

When the first flagship Android phone was released, the Nexus One, some reviewers threw around words like “over-hyped” — and then there was the fact that the Motorola Droid already had Android 2.0, making the Nexus One a little less special; most reviews were around the 3.5- to 4-star mark. At least when the Nexus S was released, Gingerbread was unique to the handset — but then many lamented its lack of 4G, dual-core processor, or expandable memory; again, 4 stars seemed the norm.

And then we have the Galaxy Nexus, which still has some niggles — a 5MP rear camera, no microSD — but reviewers are giving this newfangled beast 5-out-of-5, 10-out-of-10, and hyperbolic honorifics like “The Best Android Phone Yet” and “Better Than The iPhone 4S.” Seemingly, something about the Nexus, when combined with Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich, just feels right. The beautiful, 1280×720 Super AMOLED interface, which we feared might be too big for the OMAP 4460′s fledgling GPU, is slick and responsive. The chassis, which is basically an iteration of the Nexus S, is large, but light and thin enough that it isn’t cumbersome.

The main takeaway from each and every one of the reviews, though, is that the software — ICS — is amazing. In much the same way that someone at Google — probably Larry Page — woke up one day and realized that its slew of web services desperately needed a new coat of paint, ICS finally brings ease-of-use and a beautiful design paradigm to Android. Where Froyo and Gingerbread are utilitarian, ICS is pretty. Where Honeycomb has rough edges, the Sandwich is polished until it shines.

In short, ICS has finally reached a point where it can stand alongside iOS and Windows Phone 7 and not be embarrassed. This is major. No longer must I defend my Nexus S’s crashes by saying “yes, but does your phone run custom ROMs?” With Ice Cream Sandwich, I can finally give my phone to my mother without her muttering “an iPhone is easier to use.”

The question now, though, is how long it will take Ice Cream Sandwich to replace its ugly, dishevelled forebears. At the end of the day, the dual-core OMAP 4460 at 1.2GHz is not the fastest chip on the block, and yet the Galaxy Nexus is the smoothest Android phone yet. Is this because ICS is fine-tuned for OMAP SoCs, or because ICS itself is inherently slicker? There are no other devices on the market that use the 4460 SoC, and only a scant handful that use OMAP4 at all. Will ICS work just as well on the Snapdragon and Exynos chips that power the most successful and prevalent Android phones?

Historically, thanks to upgrade cycles and an endemic lack of pant pockets with infinite money supplies, it takes more than a year for a new version of Android to reach critical mass. In a year, iOS 6 will be here — and perhaps even Windows Phone 8 (and Windows 8 for tablets!) The 5-star reviews that the Galaxy Nexus and ICS are receiving today are relative; for today, and today only, Android crowd surfs on the heads of iPhone 4S and Lumia 800 owners — but now it needs to settle down, take stock of the situation, push the advantage, and seize the throne. Google: I hope ICS works really, really well on older phones. Carriers: You need to put out an update for the Bionic, Razr, and Galaxy S II as soon as possible.

Taiwanese tableteers tease Tegra, snap up Snapdragon

2011-11-22T20:28:00.000-08:00

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Nvidia’s Tegra 3 debuted earlier this month in a flurry of impressive figures related to its power consumption, performance, and GPU capabilities. The new quad-core chip is a significant leap forward compared to Tegra 2, and it’s already achieved notable design wins, including a front-and-center position at the heart of Asus’ upcoming Transformer Prime.

A report from DigiTimes (quoting unnamed industry sources, natch), claims that while notebook/tablet vendors are interested in Tegra, they’re strongly considering platforms based on chips by Qualcomm or Texas Instruments. The former’s Snapdragon S4 has already been adopted for use in HTC’s Jetstream and Lenovo’s IdeaPad U1, and there are reportedly another 30 tablets in development that’ll use the Snapdragon solution.

Here’s how the two stack up. Tegra 3 is a quad-core ARM Cortex-A9 MPCore that runs at up to 1.3GHz. It’s built on a 40nm process and includes a 12-core GPU. The A9 itself supports out-of-order execution and ARM’s NEON SIMD instruction set and supports a single 32-bit LP DDR memory channel (albeit at speeds of up to 1500MHz).

The Snapdragon S4 is a 28nm dual-core chip clocked at 1.5-1.7GHz and uses the Adreno 225 GPU. The “Krait” CPU at the heart of the S4 is wider than the Cortex-A9 and decodes three instructions per clock cycle rather two. Qualcomm claims that the Adreno 225 GPU is 50 percent faster than the Adreno 220 — but the latter’s performance was nothing to write home about.

Nvidia’s greatest challenge with Tegra 3 will be convincing developers to write apps and games that take advantage of all four cores. The LG Optimus was the first dual-core smartphone, and it isn’t even a year old. The first dual-core tablet, the Viewsonic G-Tablet, only shipped a year ago. While it’s true that dual-core chips are now the norm across smartphones and tablets alike, software developers have little reason to specifically target quad-core products.

The Snapdragon S4′s CPU should be at least moderately more efficient than the Cortex-A9 clock-for-clock, while building it on 28nm likely gives Qualcomm a power consumption advantage over Tegra 3′s 40nm technology. Tegra 3 will likely outperform its competition in fully threaded workloads, and it’s a definite advance over Tegra 2, but NV may have trouble long-term if dual-core solutions prove a better real-world fit for device workloads.

Folding@home client can now run on supercomputers

2011-11-22T20:26:00.001-08:00

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Earlier this week at the supercomputing SC11 conference, researchers from the long-running Folding@home project demonstrated a new distributed framework named Copernicus that’s designed to allow F@h to scale across geographically-dispersedsupercomputing clusters. It’s a logical step for a project that, over time, has grown to support GPUs, PS3s, and all major operating systems — but leveraging the power of an HPC cluster requires more than an OS port and a few design tweaks.

That’s where Copernicus comes in. F@h’s primary mission is to understand each step in the protein-folding process. Copernicus, in contrast, lets the user specify the desired end results, rather than a detailed, step-by-step description of how to obtain them. The Copernicus run-time, taking into account all of the available computational resources, then breaks down the desired end results into specific, efficient task packages.

Based on this diagram, my earbuds are actually proteins

As an analogy, consider balloon animals (without any creepy clown references). Folding@homefocuses on examining every fold and twist that transforms a balloon into a giraffe, a rabbit, or Optimus Prime. It also measures the mistakes that occur when a balloon doesn’t fold properly, and what the resultant mutant creature looks like.

Copernicus allows researchers to start by describing the characteristics of the balloon animal they’re looking for. The software is then designed to scale across supercomputing clusters and leverage their massive parallel processing capability to locate best-fit balloons. One of the primary challenges, according to Vijay Pande’s team, was ensuring that the software could scale effectively across wide deployments.

“It opens the door to huge crowds of people using these methods, which have matured with Folding@home,” Pande said. “This method should be able to use any supercomputer on the planet completely,” Pande said. “Strong scaling to these extremes is unusual.”

In a discussion thread in the Folding@Home forums, Pande stated that, in essence, Copernicus is Folding@home for supercomputers — but went on to note that the project’s primary goal was to “take all of the scientific methodological advances in FAH’s backend and bring it to other researchers.”

The researchers behind FAH likely wouldn’t argue with more processing power, but as of today, Folding@home has an actual output of some 9.075 x86 petaflops. The combined output of the network’s seven million-plus CPUs would put it just under the current TOP500 supercomputer,RIKEN’s K.

OnLive to bring desktop software to your TV, smartphone, netbook

2011-11-22T20:24:00.001-08:00

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If you have never used OnLive, the streaming, cloud-based gaming service, let me tell you about its most surprising feature: It actually works. Somehow, despite the fact that all of the computation and rendering is done on a remote server, and that the graphics and audio have to be encoded and sent across the internet, gaming with OnLive is really very good. Now, however — starting in 2012 — OnLive wants to tap into the real money: It wants to use its technology to provide the PC desktop as a service. It wants to give you access to Photoshop running on a high-end server, from the OnLive client on your laptop, smartphone, or TV.

Desktop-as-a-service (DaaS) is kind of like software-as-a-service (Office 365, Gmail), but taken to the next level. It’s like using Remote Desktop on Windows Thin PC to log into an instance of Windows running on a Windows 2008 Hyper-V server — but instead of the server being located in your local office, it’s in a third-party data center somewhere. Basically, DaaS is all about providing a desktop-like experience over an internet connection, both for employees at the office, or those at home or on the road. This is quite tough because the average internet connection is only a few megabits — but fortunately, that’s all that OnLive needs.

Just like OnLive for games, which replaces an expensive Xbox 360 or PS3 with a “mini console” for your TV (or just an app on your Windows or Mac computer), OnLive DaaS would mean that a business would only ever have to buy minimum-spec computers for its employees. Instead of investing in expensive workstations that can run Final Cut Pro or Photoshop, all a business needs is a big display attached to an internet-connected thin client capable of decoding OnLive’s signal. Imagine the smile on the IT admin’s face when you tell him that the only software he ever has to update is the OnLive client. If your company still has an IT admin after switching to OnLive, that is…

The other important aspect of DaaS is platform agnosticism: It doesn’t matter if you want to run a Windows app or game, but you only own a Mac; as long as your device can decode OnLive’s codec, you’re fine. This also extends to mobile devices — OnLive is coming to iOS and Android, meaning you’ll soon be able to play Crysis on your iPhone — and dumb devices like TVs or projectors. In other words, assuming a decent 3G or 4G connection, you’ll be able to keep all of your files in the OnLive cloud, and then just tap into it when needed; at the office, at home, at the airport, on the plane, and when giving a presentation in a foreign country.

Of course, once you nail the deal, you’ll be able to retire to your hotel room and play a few rounds of OnLive Modern Warfare 3, too.

Wireless contact lens display now a reality

2011-11-22T20:23:00.000-08:00

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It has finally been done: A team of US and Finnish bioengineers have embedded an antenna, radio receiver, control circuitry, and LED into a wearable contact lens. If you’re a rabbit, you can hop along to their research lab at the University of Washington, Seattle, and try it out right now — but if you’re ahuman, you’ll still have to wait a couple more years for the bionic, Terminator-like HUD of your dreams.

The team, led by Babak Praviz, has successfully displayed a single, remotely-controlled pixel onto a contact lens worn by a rabbit. Power from an external battery is transmitted via RF to an antenna that runs around the edge of the contact lens (the gold ring that you see in the image below), so that the wearer’s vision isn’t obstructed. An integrated circuit harvests the energy, and then powers an LED (which emits a nice blue light, incidentally, and is focused by way of the entire contact lens being a Fresnel lens). The IC doesn’t do much else at the moment — it’s basically just a 450 picofarad storage capacitor built with a 130nm CMOS processor — but this is enough to discretely control an on-lens pixel from a remote radio source.

There are caveats, of course: The single-pixel contact lens display, because of its tiny antenna, has to have a power source within 10cm (it’s very similar to RFID/NFC in this regard). This problem could be overcome with a battery pack hooked over your ear, though (or if you’re a hardcoretranshumanist, embedded into your scalp or spine). The other issue is that this is just a single pixel — but even there, you can imagine military uses (“missile lock!”) or perhaps just as a custom notification (“you have email!”)

Niggles aside, this invention is significant because the rabbit was alive, and no damage to the rabbit’s eye was found after the lens was removed. The research team have already drawn up plans to project multiple pixels onto a single contact lens by using an array of micro-Fresnel lenses, too (see main image). The point is, our grasp of semiconductors and optics is now so advanced that we can shrink all of the necessary components for a computer display into a contact lens. Bionic vision really is just around the corner now.

Reports of exponential Android malware growth greatly exaggerated to freak you out

2011-11-22T20:21:00.001-08:00

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The stories show up in dribs and drabs. They explain in simple, yet frightening terms the terrible, catastrophic conundrum Android users find themselves in. There is malware designed to exploit users as there always had been, but now it’s after Android devices. Surely, if these doom and gloom reports are accurate the sky must be falling, and it is landing primarily on Android. But when one looks beyond the skewed data and big, scary numbers, the reality is much less daunting.

It has long been known that Android’s more open platform is technically more exploitable than a closed one, like iOS. According toJuniper Networks, the bad guys are taking note of this in a big way. Juniper claims that Android malware has exploded 472% since July of this year. With a number like that, things must be positively falling apart in the Android Market, right?

What the report cleverly dances around, is that the numbers cited include all malware signatures detected across the entire internet, not just those in the Android Market. It even counts variations of existing threats as new incidents, which also serves to inflate the number. A large proportion of Android malware is found in online “warez” forums where users trade pirated apps. Many more are found in legitimate third-party application repositories hosted in other countries.

While the Android Market allows anyone to upload apps, Google actually does police it fairly well. Apps that exhibit suspicious behavior are pulled very quickly, and the company can even remove malware remotely if it has to. That makes the unregulated forums and unofficial application stores better hunting grounds for scammers and attackers.

The Juniper report is not even a unique document; the well-known antivirus company McAfee recently issued a similar statement claiming that there was a significant (though much less eye-popping) increase in Android malware of 37% since last quarter. The vastly different conclusions these two reports come to should be a clue that things are not necessarily what they seem.

It’s not really about offering an accurate measurement of threats, but about scaring users and getting attention. Googler Chris DiBona said as much in a recent Google+ post where he railed against security firms using inflammatory language to warn of Android viruses and malware. DiBona reminds us that the sandboxed mobile platforms, such as Android and iOS, are not as vulnerable as the old-fashioned desktop systems are. Things like drive-by downloads just can’t happen on Android.

It’s that desktop paranoia that security firms are relying on; the idea that the phone is vulnerable just browsing the web. Instead, because most Android malware is on the open internet, it is incredibly hard to get infected. Users that want to install more risky downloaded application packages have to jump through a not insignificant number of hoops to do it.

Apps manually downloaded from the internet require that the user first set the device to allow unknown app sources, which is down in a sub-menu that most people never see. Then the malicious APK file has to be downloaded. When the package is on the device, a user has to find the file and launch it. Android pulls up an installation dialog that lists the permissions requested by the app, and only then is the user allowed to install it. For the overwhelming majority of sketchy Android apps, the user has to go far out of the way to get infected.

Especially when looking at a company like McAfee, which sells antivirus, users should remember to be skeptical. The firms producing these reports are counting on people to be gobsmacked by multi-hundred percent increases, and millions of new malware signatures. The reality is that mobile operating systems are much safer than most analysts would have us believe.

Ice Cream Sandwich runs well on Nexus S

2011-11-22T20:18:00.000-08:00

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Yesterday we showed you how to install Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich on a Nexus S — and now we have a hands-on video of ICS running on Google’s superphone of yesteryear (embedded below). If you’ve already seen a video review of the Galaxy Nexus, you won’t be too surprised by what you see — but if you’re curious about how ICS will work on older phones, or if you own a Nexus S but you’re holding off for an official build, then you might find the video very interesting indeed.

Basically, the 1GHz Hummingbird processor (Cortex-A8 + SGX 540 GPU) found inside the Nexus S is more than strong enough to power Ice Cream Sandwich — but, unsurprisingly, it isn’t quite as smooth as the Galaxy Nexus. The framerate isn’t quite as high, and so instead of totally-smooth transitions and icon jiggles, it’s sometimes slightly choppy. As you can see in the video, though, it’s still very usable — and only marginally less snappy than Gingerbread. For a custom, non-official build, ICS on the Nexus S is very impressive.

It’s important to note that the Nexus S is only a year old, though — and its hardware spec, along with its doppelganger the Samsung Galaxy S, was market-leading at the time; you would expect Windows 7 to run fine on a computer that’s three or four years old, so why not Android? Regardless, the performance of ICS on the Nexus S indicates that the Galaxy S 1 & 2 should run ICS perfectly, as should its contemporaries — HTC Desire HD, the Droid X2 — and any recently-released smartphone (Razr, Bionic, and so on).

The excellent performance of ICS on the Nexus S does cast a little doubt over Google’s claim that the Nexus One is too old for Android 4.0, however; the One’s hardware isn’t that slow. As we have covered before, this might simply come down to the lack of ROM space rather than raw grunt. It’s a shame, though: The Nexus One is just two years old, and a lot of people still use it — or one of the many phones based on its hardware spec (HTC Desire, HTC Evo 4G, Droid Incredible) — and ICS is sodifferent from its predecessors.

The first minute of the video is part of the installation process — skip it, if you just want to see what ICS looks and feels like on the Nexus S. Face Unlock isn’t shown, by the way, but it does work.

Windows 8 install/upgrade process 50% faster, 83% less clicks, web-based

2011-11-22T20:15:00.000-08:00

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In a monster blog post that would stretch the 640KB memory limit of early PCs, Microsoft has detailed the streamlined, just-11-clicks! upgrade process for Windows 8 — as in, the installer that appears when mom or pop insert a Windows 8 disc into their Windows 7 or Vista computer. Don’t worry if you’re a power user or IT admin, though: the reboot-into-installation-environment process is fundamentally unchanged, but 50% faster.

Basically, the Upgrade Advisor and Easy Transfer tools are being integrated into a single, end-to-end installer that’s capable of performing all of the preparatory tasks — compatibility checking, settings/files transfer, suspending blockers like BitLocker, and so on — and then carrying out the install. Additionally, the upgrader now has the option of downloading the Windows 8 installation files from the internet. This marks the first time that Microsoft has offered a consumer-oriented digital download of its Windows OS — and obviously might have been inspired by OS X Lion’s availability in the digital Mac App Store. To further lubricate the process, the Windows 8 install image has been squeezed down to a svelte 1.51GB (Windows 7 x86 is 2.32GB), and the digital download comes “pre-keyed” — you don’t have to enter 25-digita serial number during installation. Windows 8 will still be installable from DVD or USB key, incidentally.

Beyond changes to the upgrade front end, the actual behind-the-scenes installation engine has been improved. A clean Windows 7 install was fast — around 30 minutes — but, rather famously, the upgrade process could take more than 24 hours on a mature, workhorse computer. With Windows 8, a clean install should take 20 minutes, and a “super upgrade” (Microsoft’s term) should never take more than an hour. A lot of changes took place to make this happen, including hard linking to transferred files and settings instead of physically moving data on the disk, but check the Building Windows 8 blog if you want more details.

In case you were wondering, all of these changes are the result of consumer research: in 2010, when MS was making Windows 8 plans, it discovered that upgrading a PC is perceived as difficult. Presumably, in this case, “PC” refers specifically to Windows, and not Mac OS X. Finally, the blog post doesn’t mention how you purchase a digital copy of Windows 8 — but it’s probably too much to hope that it’ll be integrated with Windows Update or the Windows 8 installer. You’ll probably have to buy it from the Microsoft website.

Read more at Building Windows 8 (IT admins: there’s some more info about automated installation using the Assessment and Deployment Kit, too) — or check out our extensive Windows 8 coverage.

Intel to add TRIM support for RAID 0 in upcoming drivers

2011-11-22T19:47:00.001-08:00

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One of the barriers to using SSDs in RAID setups, other than the high price of the drives themselves, has been the lack of TRIM support when running in that mode. TRIM is a command that allows an OS like Windows 7 to inform an SSD which blocks of data can be wiped and marked for re-use. This process, sometimes referred to as garbage collection, mitigates the performance degradation that inevitably occurs as an SSD becomes “dirty.”

It’s been difficult to add TRIM support to RAID controllers because they weren’t historically designed to do so; standard hard drives don’t need to differentiate between blocks of data that have actually been erased, versus those that have simply been marked as erasable. To date, TRIM has been incompatible with RAID controllers. Various manufacturers, including Intel, have claimed to be working on the problem for years, but with precious little to show for it — until now. According to the folks at StorageReview, a note inside Intel’s 11.5 Alpha Rapid Storage Technology (RST) driversstates: “This release will not enable the TRIM on RAID0 feature, but it will be added in the next RST 11.5 release.”

If so, it’s an important first step towards extending TRIM support across multiple RAID levels. SSD RAID 0 setups may find little use outside of the performance-crazed enthusiast market, but TRIM is equally important for anyone interested in a RAID 1 or RAID 5 configuration. The introduction of triple-cell level (TLC) drives next year may spark a fresh interest in RAID as a means of overcoming the lower performance such drives will offer, particularly if TRIM is available in RAID 0+1 configurations.

The wording of Intel’s driver tidbit implies that this functionality won’t be limited to certain chipsets; boards from the Core 2 era may also benefit from the changes. The drive controller portion of Intel’s southbridges hasn’t changed much in several years — hopefully this is a bit of functionality that’ll stretch across multiple chipsets.