Our review of the super-size Archos 705 WiFi portable video player is now up on CNET. If you’ve been squinting at your puny PVP and want to upgrade, you owe it to yourself to witness the screen size and features of the Archos 705 WiFi. You can also check out our Archos 705 WiFi slide show to see all its aluminum nooks and crannies.
(Credit:
Corinne Schulze/CNET Networks)
To see our Archos 705 WiFi photo gallery, click the photo.
Toshiba and Matsushita Electric Industrial will jointly manufacture small electroluminescent displays in an effort match the output from Korea-based makers, according to a Japanese report.
Toshiba and Matsushita Electric Industrial will make EL display panels.
Toshiba has a 60 percent stake in the venture Toshiba Matsushita Display Technology, while Matsushita holds 40 percent. The operation is capitalized at 15 billion yen ($140 million).
(Credit:
Toshiba Matsushita Display Technology)
In December, Toshiba said it would postpone production of larger (up to 30-inch) organic EL displays and would focus initially on mass production of smaller displays.
This is a first for domestic Japanese production of EL displays on this scale, the report said. The displays are targeted at cell phones and other small devices.
The companies are chasing Samsung, which has already begun mass production. The goal is to bring costs down and stabilize quality. This then can be applied to the manufacture of larger-size TV panels.
The two companies will set up manufacturing lines in Ishikawa Prefecture in the fall of 2009, aiming to produce 1 million “high-quality” 2.5-inch organic EL displays, according to a report in Monday’s Nihon Keizai Shimbun.
EL displays are based on organic light-emitting diode (OLED) technology that uses electroluminescent organic materials. The display panels are extremely thin because they don’t need backlights. The electroluminescent layer contains a polymer substance that directly converts electricity to light.
The FBI is warning that Valentine’s Day e-mails you see this year might be coming not from loved ones, but from the Storm worm botnet. In a press release Tuesday, the FBI warns users to be on the lookout for e-mail that “directs the recipient to click on a link to retrieve the electronic greeting card (e-card). Once the user clicks on the link, malware is downloaded to the Internet-connected device and causes it to become infected and part of the Storm worm botnet.”
If you don’t have antivirus protection, get some. See CNET’s latest antivirus performance test results here. If you already have an antivirus product installed, make sure your subscription and the data files are both up to date.
Dr. Jose Nazario of Arbor Networks said the authors of Storm have launched a carefully orchestrated series of lure campaigns to bring new members into the network. One of them is Valentine’s Day-themed. Nazario said the creators of Storm have in recent weeks “grown the network by as much as 50 percent.”
“Generally speaking, when you only have something like 25 percent or less who are updated with the current patches and Best Practices in AV software, it doesn’t really matter. You can be caught up with the latest AV fix, but if other people aren’t really applying it, it doesn’t really matter.”
Nazario blamed fresh spam and incomplete antivirus protection on users’ desktops for the new botnet infections.
“We must get rid of some baggage,” he said. “This means getting rid of practices and policies that no longer make sense to our customers and listen even more closely to customers and respond quickly. That is how we un-invite potential regulation.”
Martin said that the wireless industry’s efforts so far have “not gone unnoticed.”
Consumer advocates say that the industry’s promises of openness are not enough.
McAdam intimated in his talk that the industry made these changes on its own. But the reality is that Congress mandated number portability and the FCC demanded carriers adhere to e911 requirements. So while McAdam likes to pretend that he and his wireless brethren were simply listening to what customers wanted, that is a little disingenuous.
Updated 12:30 p.m. PDT with comment from the Open Internet Coalition.
On Tuesday, Federal Communications Commission Chairman Kevin Martin said he was rewarding U.S. wireless operators for their efforts to open up their networks by not pushing for more regulation.
Verizon Wireless CEO Lowell McAdam made it clear during his keynote speech here that the industry has to be proactive to keep regulation at bay. He said that if the carriers open up their networks and listen to what customers want, there will be no need for regulators to get involved.
LAS VEGAS–It seems mobile operators have dodged a regulatory bullet by promising to open up their networks on their own.
“The requirements of open access is leading (the wireless operators) to realize the benefit of open access,” he said. “And they’ve gone from vocal opponents of open access to vocal proponents, embracing open platforms.”
During a keynote address here at the CTIA tradeshow, Martin said he is going to circulate an order among the FCC commissioners to dismiss Skype’s petition to apply Carterfone rules to the wireless industry. The Carterfone decision by the FCC in 1968 forced the Bell telephone monopoly to open up and allow outside devices to run on its closed network, as long as the devices didn’t cause damage to the system.
AT&T has followed suit with its own open access network offering. And T-Mobile and Sprint Nextel are also moving in this direction by working with Google in its Open Handset Alliance to help promote Google’s open software platform called Android.
Kevin Martin, chairman of the FCC, addresses attendees at CTIA 2008.
Mobile operators responded to the threats of more regulation and rules by voluntarily opening up their networks. In November, Verizon Wireless, which has been known to have the tightest “walled garden,” did an about-face and said it would create a new service in addition to its traditional service that allows any device that meets basic certification requirements and any application to operate on its network. This means that customers will be able to buy any pre-certified device from a retailer or device maker and add any applications they want to use without restriction. In addition, customers won’t be bound to a contract.
“It is important to recognize that despite the wireless carriers’ discussion of increasing openness, the existing wireless handset marketplace for all consumers still remains closed,” Markham Erickson, executive director of the Open Internet Coalition, said in a statement. “It would be a serious mistake for the FCC to dismiss Skype’s Petition before we’ve seen whether the telcos will follow through on their promises.”
“The ‘walled garden’ networks are a thing of the past,” he said. “As a charter member of Open Handset Alliance, we will explore and push wireless data even further than it’s ever been pushed before.”
Skype’s petition was part of a growing lobbying effort to get the phone companies to open their networks. Google successfully pushed the FCC to add open access rules in the big 700MHz spectrum auction.
(Credit:
Tom Krazit/CNET News.com)
Last year, Skype, which offers free software to let people make phone calls over the Internet using their computers, asked the FCC to apply these rules to the wireless industry so that applications, such as Skype’s, could be used on cell phones. Most mobile operators today ban Skype on their phones, mainly because it competes directly with their own voice service.
Dan Hesse, Sprint Nextel’s CEO, who also spoke at
CTIA on Tuesday morning, said the company will continue to make it easier for customers to get access to any application and to use a wide variety of devices on its network.
“Remember what regulation has done to the wireline communications industry,” he said. “We can’t allow (wireless) to become a 21st century regulated phone company…To tamper with a formula that built this growth engine is extremely dangerous. Even as the economy has worsened in recent months wireless is one of few bright spots.”
Clearly the FCC’s pressure has worked to hasten mobile operators’ movement in this direction just as it helped push operators to allow cell phone subscribers to take their phone numbers with them when they switched providers and when operators implemented e911 location information to help emergency responders locate callers.
Still McAdam urged regulators to stay out of the wireless business.
“Panasonic will be introducing a freestanding Blu-ray recorder/player in the US during the first half of 2009. (BTW, Blu-ray recorder prices have really dropped in Japan. I spotted a Sharp Blu-ray recorder at Yodobashi camera for around $800 US).”
That’s news to us. In fact, we met with Panasonic engineers recently, and when we brought up Blu-ray recorders they had no news for the U.S. market.
So while there’s certainly a limited market for Blu-ray recorders, it will be interesting to see if they’re able to expand beyond that niche audience.
Although we do get plenty of reader e-mail concerning Blu-ray recorders, there’s plenty of reasons to believe they won’t be popular in the U.S. First up is the high price. An $800 recorder might be a big price drop, but it’s still much more than standalone Blu-ray players, which most consumers already consider too expensive. Secondly, HD DVRs are relatively cheap and convenient, especially when you consider that a blank 25GB BD-R Disc costs about $8-$10. Lastly, we’ll be interested to see exactly what you’ll be able to record with a Blu-ray recorder. We’re assuming people would be most interested in recording premium content from networks such as HBO, but we’d be surprised if content providers didn’t start using copyright protection to make that impossible. Meanwhile, remember that anything you record off of most network and cable channels will be chock full of onscreen ads and snipes–hardly the sort of version we’d want to archive to our permanent collection.
Will Blu-ray recorders finally reach the U.S.?
One of the more frequent e-mails we receive is, when are Blu-ray recorders coming out? Blu-ray recorders have been available in Japan for quite some time now, but we haven’t seen any manufacturer planning to offer a recorder in the U.S. However, HD Guru recently blogged about the CEATEC trade show in Japan, and we noticed this little nugget buried in the middle:
The second agreement is an amendment to a previously announced settlement that Transmeta and Intel entered into on December 31, 2007, which granted Intel a perpetual nonexclusive license to all Transmeta patents and patent applications, including any patent rights later acquired by Transmeta before December 31, 2017.
That settlement provided for Intel to make five annual future payments to Transmeta of $20 million per year for each year from 2009 through 2013. “This amendment accelerates Intel’s remaining future payment obligations under the settlement agreement,” Transmeta said.
The Santa Clara, Calif.-based company, which has remade itself into a supplier of chip-related intellectual property, said that after exploring a range of “strategic alternatives” over the past few months and after strengthening its balance sheet, it will seek a sale as a way to “enhance value for all its stockholders.”
Back in February, Transmeta weighed an unsolicited offer from Riley Investment Management, which the company ultimately rejected. At that time, Riley claimed Transmeta had an unconvincing business strategy based on its LongRun2 technology–described by Transmeta as a suite of technologies for advanced power management and “leakage control.” Riley claimed at the time that there was no “credible evidence” that shareholders would benefit from the LongRun2-related operating expenses.
Transmeta’s chips are on the block. The former supplier of low-power Intel-compatible processors said Wednesday that it is actively seeking a buyer, and also announced two agreements with Intel.
Transmeta is working with financial adviser Piper Jaffray.
Transmeta also announced Wednesday that it had entered into two agreements with Intel relating to the licensing of Transmeta technologies and intellectual property. The first agreement is a fully paid-up, nonexclusive technology licensing agreement that provides for the company to deliver “proprietary Transmeta computing technologies” to Intel and grants to Intel a nonexclusive license to use them.
As a result, Transmeta expects to receive cash payments from Intel totaling $91.5 million before the end of Transmeta’s current fiscal quarter ending September 30, the company said.
(Credit:
Via Technologies)
Henry also noted that Intel is following Via into the low-cost, small-device market–where Via has been a player for many years–not the other way around.
Via Technologies is shipping samples of the new Isaiah processor targeted at low-cost compact computers.
Via’s current C7 processor is already used by Everex in its CloudBook, by OQO in the Model 02, and by Hewlett-Packard in thin-client computers and in certain models that the computer maker sells in China. Both the C7 and Isaiah are x86-compatible processors, meaning they can run the same software that Intel amd AMD chips do.
Via is also planning a dual-core version of Isaiah but Henry would not provide any more details.
Correction: Isaiah’s TDP (Thermal Design Power or power envelope) is not confirmed at this point. However Henry said that Isaiah will consumer more power than Intel’s Atom processor.
Samples of the Isaiah-architecture-based x86 chips are now being shipped “aggressively” to customers with a release timeframe of May-June, said Glenn Henry, CEO of Centaur Technology, the Via subsidiary that designed the chip. The first generation of Isaiah-based products will be pin-compatible with the C7 processor family and offer two to four times the performance, according to Henry. Fujitsu is manufacturing the chip.
Other differences include: Atom uses a more simple “in-order execution” design compared to Isaiah’s Superscalar, out-of-order design. Because of this more sophisticated design, Isaiah may deliver higher performance than Atom, though independent benchmarking will be the final judge.
Isaiah is targeted specifically at the low-cost “thin-and-light notebook area,” Henry said. The same market segment that Intel is targeting for the upcoming Atom “Silverthorne” processor. (Intel prefers to call this segment “netbooks.”)
Via will need all the technological advantage it can muster just to avoid getting buried by Intel’s marketing juggernaut. Intel is “formidable but won’t take it all. We’ve already got design wins. The cost to a manufacturer to change their whole design is quite high unless there’s some real benefit to it,” Henry said.
Via Isaiah Architecture die plot
I like her line on mainstream media vs. blogs: “Mainstream media have an attention deficit disorder, blogs have an obsessive compulsive disorder.”
The (fabulous) “Communities Dominate Brands” blog points at a Guardian video interview with Arianna Huffington on the future of news journalism. Not too surprisingly, Huffington’s view on traditional news reporting is not too rosy - in fact, she predicts a slow but inevitable demise.
commentary
You like open source, and you prefer the
Mac. You’re in luck! I stumbled across a great site today - MacForge - which hosts over 50,000 open-source applications written for the blessed operating system, Mac OS X.
MacForge is not nearly as feature-rich as Sourceforge is, but if you’re looking for a great repository of Mac-based applications, MacForge is a useful destination.
Another big problem was performance. Processing raw-image files is a computationally onerous job, but Lightroom outperformed Aperture, and speed is essential for either to meet their potentially.
Schorr wouldn’t share further details about the plug-ins architecture, but did say Apple will release its own SDK.
On Tuesday, though, Apple came back with the new Aperture 2.0, a version that addressed many common gripes, caught up with Lightroom in several important respects, and signaled that the company hasn’t lost interest in the market. On the contrary, a price cut to $199 from $299–also Lightroom’s current price–shows Apple wants to expand Aperture’s use.
“We’ve laid the groundwork for an image-editing plug-in architecture,” he said. Asked about the difficulties of nondestructive editing, he said, “We’ve found a way of implementing a plug-in system we believe is very effective.”
“There’s huge interest from the hobbyist market,” said Joe Schorr, Apple’s senior product manager of photo applications. “It was clear this was the right price to make that more palatable to them.”
That, loosely paraphrased, is what some Aperture customers had been asking after Apple went too long without updating its higher-end photo editing and cataloging software. It got to the point where some were plotting strategies on Apple forums about how to flee to Adobe Systems’ rival Photoshop Lightroom software with their photo metadata intact.
Lightroom’s future here is fuzzy, though Adobe has released a beta version of a software development kit (SDK) for plug-ins limited to actions during the photo-export phase.
However, since then, Adobe came on strong with Lightroom in 2007, outpacing Aperture’s adoption among professionals in a matter of months, even after factoring out the fact Lightroom also runs on Windows. Apple has clout with creative professionals, but that’s the center of Adobe’s business.
With the ability to manage images, edit them in large batches, and export them as Web galleries, Aperture and Lightroom have liberated raw images from the one-by-one plodding interface of regular Photoshop and other raw-processing tools. The vision was ahead of the technology, though: a free-wheeling editing style, jumping from one photo to another, only works if you don’t have to spend a lot of time waiting for the computer to laboriously construct and update images from the raw originals.
Schorr bridled a bit when I asked him Wednesday about some people’s fears that Apple isn’t committed to Aperture. “Releasing a new version is as big a commitment as you can demonstrate,” he said. “This is not a maintenance release. It takes quite a bit of engineering resources. Apple’s commitment is unmistakable.”
• It handles highlights better and lets photographers use a recovery slider to pull back overexposed regions.
Plug-ins ahoy
One of the unknown factors for Lightroom and Aperture is what the future holds for third-party editing plug-ins. Photoshop has a rich supply, but the nondestructive editing requirements of Lightroom and Aperture throw a wrench into the works of an algorithm that permanently alters an image’s pixels.
Aperture 2.0 will accept editing plug-ins, though, Schorr said.
• It’s got changes in color rendering to handle skin tones better.
Raw engine overhaul
Aperture 2.0 got several of its new editing abilities through Apple’s new raw-processing engine. So what’s so great about the new raw engine? Schnorr points to several changes:
Whipping Aperture into shape
Schnorr knows the company hit a rough patch with Aperture 1.5, which wasn’t able to support many high-profile new cameras such as Nikon’s D3 and D300 and Canon’s 1Ds Mark III and PowerShot G9. Apple’s new raw support only arrived this week, months after Lightroom could handle those cameras’ raw files.
I also liked the single-keystroke ability to switch editing controls swiftly into metadata controls. I find that adding tags and captions is a process that’s not as far removed from editing as Lightroom’s separate library and develop modes would have you think.
CUPERTINO, Calif.–Apple, why hast thou forsaken me?
Apple has supported many cameras much closer to their debut in the past, sometimes even releasing new camera support software independently from operating system updates. With the new engine now done, adding support for new cameras “should be easier for us,” Schorr said.
The problem: Apple’s product cycle was out of sync with the camera companies. The new cameras “happened to hit when we were in the thick of replacing the entire raw engine…It was a perfect storm,” Schnorr said.
The flip side of the new raw engine, which is built into
Mac OS X Leopard 10.5.2 is that it requires the latest software to use it. That means Aperture 1.5 users will have to pay the $99 upgrade fee if they want the new camera support, Schnorr said. For iPhoto users, the newer version 7 released last fall, is required.
Aperture is designed to edit the detailed and flexible but unwieldy and proprietary “raw” image files taken unprocessed from higher-end cameras’ image sensors. Apple was first to market with software that not only handles this computing-intensive editing task but also lets photographers sort images into catalogs and add metadata such as captions, tags, and titles.
I’m not alone in noticing Aperture’s kick in the pants. “I feel like someone snuck a new CPU into my machine,” gushed photographer Josh Anon in a Wednesday blog posting about Aperture 2.0.
(Credit:
Apple)
• It preserves more detail in shadow regions rather than blocking them up into a dark murk.
• It handles noise better, preserving details and changing the turning speckles into a something closer to the grain of high-speed films of analog photography days.
Apple’s Aperture is used to edit and catalog photos.
He said Apple’s October 2007 market research showed 54 percent of iPhoto users thought of themselves not as mere snapshooters but rather as photo hobbyists, some serious enough to aspire to sell photos. Apple is trying to bring those customers into the fold while also catering to the professionals whom the company initially targeted with Aperture.
Apple has done well with Aperture 2.0, based on my test of ingesting and editing a batch of my own photos on a dual-core iMac. On top of a general performance boost, it’s got a new preview mode that specifically emphasizes speed by using only fast-rendering JPEGs instead of the full-on raw images. Lightroom and Aperture are geared to map a photographer’s image workflow, but I generally take an extra step to review images with BreezeBrowser to cull out the duds before I import the rest into Lightroom.