PURE Sensia touchscreen digital radio | Technophile
PURE packs a lot into its promising all-singing touchscreen radio, but it's more than its poor little processor can handle Last year, digital radio maker PURE began integrating DAB with internet radio with their Flow range . Now they've taken this one step further with the Sensia , bringing internet applications to your radio. Shipping with two of what PURE says will be many applications, the Sensia's 5.7in capacitive touchscreen allows you to check the weather or update Twitter.
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PURE Sensia touchscreen digital radio | Technophile
Nokia’s war with Apple heats up thanks to new complaint
• Latest salvo in war between technology rivals • iPhone, iPod and Mac computers targeted in complaint Mobile phone giant Nokia has stepped up its dispute with Apple by claiming that "virtually all" of the Californian company's products infringe its patents. In a statement issued on Tuesday, the Finnish handset manufacturer said that Apple was unlawfully using proprietary Nokia technology to help power its best-selling iPhones, iPods and Macintosh computers. "Nokia has been the leading developer of many key technologies in small electronic devices" said Nokia's Paul Melin . "This action is about protecting the results of such pioneering development." It is the latest salvo in an ongoing – and increasingly acrimonious - battle between the two companies. After licensing negotiations broke down earlier this year, the rivals launched a flurry of claims against each other in the courts. In October, Nokia filed a lawsuit in Delaware claiming that Apple's iPhone was infringing a number of its wireless technology patents and demanding payment for every handset sold. Apple responded earlier this month by launching its own countersuit, suggesting that Nokia had copied the iPhone and infringed a number of its own patents in the process. Lawyers for the Californian company also claimed that Nokia had refused to license other technologies on fair terms. Nokia's latest complaint, made to US regulator International Trade Commission, marks a serious step up in hostilities since it covers almost all of Apple's major products. "While our litigation in Delaware is about Apple's attempt to free-ride on the back of Nokia investment in wireless standards, the ITC case filed today is about Apple's practice of building its business on Nokia's proprietary innovation," the company said.
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Nokia's war with Apple heats up thanks to new complaint
Google phone could arrive next week
Google could be preparing to launch its new mobile phone as early as next week, after the company called a press conference at its Californian headquarters. Speculation has been rife that the company is planning its own branded phone, known as the Nexus One , as it tries to tempt customers and handset manufacturers into using its Android mobile phone software. Earlier this month it confirmed that employees have been testing the device for some time , with reports suggesting that could be ready to launch early in 2010. But in an announcement sent to journalists today, the company said it would hold a "press gathering" next Tuesday to showcase Android and demonstrate new products - giving the strongest indication yet that the Nexus One's release could be imminent. "With the launch of the first Android-powered device just over a year ago, we've seen how a powerful, open platform can spur mobile product innovation - and this is just the beginning," it said. While plenty of Android handsets have hit the market since Google first launched the software two years ago , the manner in which the Nexus One has come together signals a distinct shift in the company's strategy In the past, Google has worked alongside partners such as Motorola - offering assistance and advice to mobile makers and networks, but not taking a leading role. This time, however, the phone is being manufactured by Taiwanese technology company HTC - with Google overseeing design and development. Taking a stronger hand in the development of the Nexus One could help it to push its way into a market already crowded with more established rivals such as Apple's iPhone, the BlackBerry and Nokia. It is not yet known which networks the Nexus One will be made available on, but there are suggestions that Google could sell the handset direct to customers through its website, and the Guardian has previously reported that the company has held talks with a number of operators - including T-Mobile and Vodafone in the UK - about linking up for the launch. The event appears carefully timed to spoil announcements from its rivals, as it comes on the eve of the annual Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas - where the world's largest technology companies unveil their forthcoming products and plans. In particular, the timing will prove an irritant to Google's greatest rival, Microsoft, whose chief executive Steve Ballmer is due to give the opening keynote at CES next Wednesday.
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Google phone could arrive next week
Amazon says it was a Kindle Christmas - but still no sales figures
To all intents and purposes, Amazon's continuing push into the electronic book market with the Kindle looks unstoppable. Its latest landmark? On Christmas Day, it said, Amazon.com sold more ebooks than paper ones for the first time ever . That well-timed announcement led to a number of glowing media reports. It's good for Amazon that ebook sales appear brisk, but the company still isn't releasing sales figures - which means it's actually a pretty meaningless comparison. Christmas Day, after all, is not peak shopping season, but when you get an empty Kindle from Santa, you're going to need to put some books on it. Without numbers, it's impossible to determine whether or not the Kindle is firing up bookworms - did its record-breaking day involve hundreds, thousands, millions of book sales? Who knows. This is exactly the sort of statistical massage I wrote about last week , in a piece that detailed the guessing game over the Kindle's sales figures and how Amazon cleverly chooses its phrasing to make it sound like the Kindle is everywhere. That may be the case, but when I asked whether readers had seen a Kindle in the wild, sightings, while encouraging, were not overwhelming : Andrys: "[on a recent trip], 4 of the other 10 travelers owned Kindles and 2 more (a couple) had tried to order them from Amazon hoping they'd arrive in Israel where they were at the time." simonsomething : "Never seen a Kindle, but have spotted a couple of Sony eReaders on planes." Reggaestar : "I have seen one on the train on my daily commute." dgsweet : "A recent subway ride in New York -- I was reading a Kindle and my wife was reading a Kindle. As we got off the train, a woman getting on was carrying hers." It's hardly surprising that a company chooses to show itself in the best possible light. Kindle sales may well be very strong indeed. But Amazon has always made a point of trying to appear straight and honest ( Jeff Bezos's forthright apology over the 1984 debacle was one of the best I've seen, for example). Even Apple, the most secretive company I've dealt with, gives out sales figures. And don't forget: finding out how many Kindles are being sold isn't just about checking whether Amazon is telling us the truth
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Amazon says it was a Kindle Christmas - but still no sales figures
Breakfast briefing: Apple’s tablet rumours and Twitter splashes out on geo startup
• Fans of Apple won't be the only ones sent into a spinby the news that the company could be making a product announcement in late January . Rumours were fuelled by the news that the company has hired the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco for a January 26th event. The venue is slap-bang next to the Moscone Center, where Apple has traditionally held its Macworld keynote, and is where we saw new iPods launched in September . Expect other manufacturers to try ramping up their own announcements at the Consumer Electronics Show, as a way of fighting the Apple hype machine. • After surprising everyone by making money , Twitter caught people off-guard again by announcing that it had purchased Mixer Labs , a geo-location software company. It's not the first purchase the startup has made, having previously sucked in search service Summize and Values of N . Expect more geo features soon
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Breakfast briefing: Apple's tablet rumours and Twitter splashes out on geo startup
Have you seen a Kindle in the wild?
You have probably seen a succession of puffs from Amazon about how the Kindle is its "best-selling item" - but without any numbers to back up its claims. The company's secrecy isn't surprising, but it's problematic for several reasons - not least because people are now starting to make major bets on the future of their businesses based on those claims. That thought process is what led me to write a piece about that secrecy, and how Amazon's refusal to talk about sales figures could cause a number of problems . In addition to the people quoted in the article, I just spoke by email with James McQuivey, an analyst with Forrester who keeps track of the electronic book market, to get his view. Amazon doesn't reveal sales figures because it's the market leader, he says. "It's hard to argue that Amazon hasn't been successful in its business, so correspondingly it's hard to pinpoint any way in which Amazon's secrecy has hurt it," he said. "They know that to lead requires marshalling all your resources to beat everybody else even to obvious strategies. To do that, you often have to keep your lips sealed." The big question - how many Kindles are being sold right now - remains slightly elusive. But according to Forrester's analysis, the market will keep growing during 2010 in a way that suggests it will have an "iPod moment" (between 2003 and 2004, iPod sales rose by nearly 500%). "We estimate that by the end of 2010 there will be 4 million ereaders in the US, with more than half of them Kindles, probably close to 2.5m or so." He admits that even those numbers make the Kindle a long way from being mainstream, however. "Even at 2.5m possible Kindles in the market, that's less than 1 for every 100 people in the US - so while there's a lot of room to grow, it means that very few of the people around you at any given moment are likely to be Kindle owners. Plus, given that people do most of their reading at home – only 5% of the population travels regularly for business, an obvious Kindle target customer – it's unlikely that we'll see Kindles reach the public visibility that iPods and their white headphones had back in 2003." And there's the extra difficulty in divining what Amazon means when it says the Kindle is the biggest selling item on its site: it feels that the hype is a bit off base because, while I've seen people reading chart-topping books on the bus and train, I have yet to see a Kindle in the wild. Paul Biba from Teleread.org told me that he's seen them being used
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Have you seen a Kindle in the wild?
The iPhone isn’t perfect | Victor Keegan
With most examples of new technology, the owner's desire to be seen at the cutting edge blinds them to admit any faults When hostages defend their kidnappers, it is known as "Stockholm syndrome". Something similar happens to iPhone users, according to the Danish analyst Strand Consult , when they fall so in love with the device that it blinds them to its defects such as a poor camera, lousy battery life for heavy users and no Bluetooth facility that can transmit photos. This provoked a predictably outraged response from iPhonistas, but the truth is that a kind of Stockholm syndrome happens not just with iPhones but with most examples of new technology where the owners' desire to be seen at the cutting edge irrationally blinds them to admit any faults. A few weeks ago I had a meeting at the British Library with CoPilot the highly successful maker of iPhone apps for navigation. At the beginning I declared an interest – that no sat-nav device I had tested during the past few years had worked speedily first time or in heavily built-up areas though they were usually brilliant in open country when you didn't need them so much. Throughout our long and entertaining discussion the CoPilot iPhone app failed completely to find our location. To be fair, as soon as we got outside when it picked up a satellite signal (inside it was restricted to Wi-Fi and mobile phone triangulation) we got an instant fix on the map which pointed me along the route I wanted to go). Last week a taxi driver was raving to me about how good sat-nav was, but when I asked him why he wasn't using it that night (when he had taken me in the wrong direction) he said it wasn't so good in heavily built-up areas. Stockholm syndrome also happens with other smart phones with an added variant for reviewers: the fear that not being able to make some of the functions work may be due to your own stupidity or the temporary defects of a pre-production model. I have just finished trialling two rivals to the iPhone – Nokia's flagship N900 (running on a Maemo open source operating system) and Samsung's Galaxy (running on Google's Android operating system, also open source). Both of them come with five megapixel cameras and online stores for selling applications of a kind that have been such a runaway success for the iPhone. First, the upside. Both are technologically superior to the iPhone in terms of the quality of photos and video. The N900 is beautifully engineered. It has a slide-out keypad which will be popular with those who have smaller fingers than me but also results in it being heavier than the iPhone whose lack of moving parts means the screen can, unlike the Galaxy, fill the whole of one side of the device. Curiously, the N900, unlike the Galaxy, doesn't have a single key to press to make a telephone call (yes, some people still do that)
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The iPhone isn't perfect | Victor Keegan
Asus 1201N netbook reviewed | Technophile
The Asus 1201N is the world's nippiest Windows 7 netbook, but the keyboard layout lets it down When you buy a netbook, you expect to compromise on performance, but the Asus 1201N makes the compromise acceptable. It's noticeably nippy when running Microsoft Windows 7 Home Premium, and it runs videos full screen without stuttering. In most situations, you'd think you were running a decent notebook PC, apart from the lack of a DVD drive. When the 1201N appears early next year (15 January in the US), it should be the most powerful netbook ever. The 1201N has two secrets. First, it's using an nVidia Ion (ie GeForce 9400M) graphics chip, like the one in new MacBooks. Second, it has a 1.66GHz dual core Intel Atom N330 processor, instead of the usual N270 or N280, and 2GB of memory. Windows 7 sees the N330 as four processors, and it makes a big difference to the system's general snappiness, especially with Windows 7's more pointless sliding and fading effects turned off. I found the dual core Atom a lot more responsive than a single-core CULV (Consumer Ultra Low Voltage) chip. When it comes to the hardware, the 1201N is recognisably a new-style thin Asus. It has a good quality 12in screen and a full-sized isolated keyboard of the sort common on much more expensive Sony and Apple laptops. The review sample had a very glossy black top that looked terrific, though it does show fingerprints. At 3.1lbs, it's also a fraction lighter than some rivals. The 1201N has a good set of connections including three USB ports, an RJ-45 Ethernet port, an SD card slot, and two ports for monitors – one of those is, of course, HDMI.
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Asus 1201N netbook reviewed | Technophile
Breakfast briefing: Dark matters for physicists, but a burst of light for BlackBerry
• How could we ignore the news that scientists believe they may have - finally - detected dark matter ? We couldn't. The announcement yesterday possibly marks the end of nearly 80 years of searching to find the material which, we're told, keeps the universe glued together. I'm rubbing my hands together in glee at the prospects for a sudden burst of development in physics. Surely teleportation can only be a few years away now. • Canada's BlackBerry-making Research in Motion surprised quite a few people when it announced a surge in profits for the past quarter , on the back of more than 10m handsets sold around the globe. And according to ComScore, the BlackBerry continues to extend its lead in mobile phone web browsing - with the iPhone now creeping up to a point where it has now overtaken Windows Mobile. • Mark Shuttleworth , the open source pioneer who is a driving force behind the popular Linux OS Ubuntu announced yesterday that he was stepping down as CEO of his company, Canonical . He still plans on being heavily involved in the Ubuntu community, but didn't really give a solid explanation on why he's stepping back now. For more insight, check out an interview we did with him last year , and (for comparison) another one from 2002 focusing on his role as a space tourist . You can follow our links and commentary each day through Twitter ( @guardiantech , or our personal accounts ) or by watching our Delicious feed . BlackBerry Mobile phones iPhone Windows Microsoft Open source Software Computing Bobbie Johnson guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
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Breakfast briefing: Dark matters for physicists, but a burst of light for BlackBerry
Is this what the magazine of the future will look like?
Touchscreen concept design certainly has wow factor - but the publisher behind the project says it could be on the market within two years This video, a concept piece put together by my friends at the design collective BERG , has been doing the rounds today - and for good reason. It's an idea of what a digital embodiment of the magazine might look like in the near future, based around a touch-sensitive tablet/Kindle/iPod style gadget. And it is beautiful. In the video, the user navigates their way around a series of magazines, iPod touch style, using their fingers and there are some interesting tricks including a neat little fan-like pop-up menu. It's still very much a magazine, and some of the design cues might seem a little obvious, but when you compare this video to this one produced by Sports Illustrated - similar, but less polished - you realise that perhaps they weren't as obvious as you think. Despite appearances, though, Mag+ (as they call it) isn't just a blue sky piece of design noodling. The project is being conducted by Bonnier, the Swedish media group that bought a string of high-profile US magazines - including Popular Science, Parenting and Outdoor Life - from Time Inc a couple of years ago. In the video, Jack Schulze explains precisely what drove them to make some of the choices behind the design , but I thought I'd ask them a few more questions. Is this what magazines might look like in the future? Is it just a pipe dream? Sara Öhrvall , the head of research and development at Bonnier, told me that this was a serious effort that could bear fruit sooner than you think. "We are working with a two year timeline," she said. "We believe that there will be devices in the market as from 2010/2011 and we will be pragmatic so we can adapt our prototype concept to whatever technology is adopted by consumers." BERG's design director Matt Jones , meanwhile, said that what they wanted to capture something of the comfort and warmth of the magazine format. "For the video concept we focused in on the reading experience, and creating something that echoed the attributes of traditional mags - so there are a bunch of things still to be explored," he told me. "That's in the next phase, where our friends at Kicker Studio in San Francisco are taking the vision further into interactive prototypes and more research.
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Is this what the magazine of the future will look like?