Google Android good for Australia

MOBILE phones powered by Google are poised to whet Australia's insatiable appetite for wireless devices, pushing the market beyond $2.4 billion in two years.

A prototype of the Google Android mobile by Qualcomm on display at the Mobile World Congress. Photo: Albert Gea/Reuters
Google entered the mobile world late last year with its Android operating system.
Smartphone makers say Android could slash the development time of the phones from 18 months to six months, leading to a flood of cheap models. About 30 mobile phone, chip and software companies globally have signed up to adopt Android. The list includes LG Electronics, High Tech Computer, Motorola and Samsung - all partners of Australian telcos. The phones will carry their own brands instead of Google's, an arrangement the search and advertising giant is happy with.
Yesterday, highly anticipated prototypes of Android mobile phones were unveiled at the World Mobile Congress in Barcelona. Operating systems that compete with Android include Nokia-backed Symbian, Microsoft's Windows Mobile, Research In Motion's BlackBerry and Mac OS X, which powers the Apple iPhone. Taiwan's HTC plans to launch smartphones based on Android this year with LG following suit next year. All this should be music to Telstra and its rivals' ears, says Warren Chaisatien, managing director of Sydney-based research firm Telsyte.
He estimates that 10 million mobile phones were shipped in Australia in 2007, creating a market worth around $2.4 billion. Mr Chaisatien said Android-based phones are a boon for local operators as the use of smartphones is expected to double quickly. Smartphones offer advanced capabilities such as email, internet access, and other PC-like features. Last year, about 800,000 mobiles shipped locally were smartphones, Mr Chaisatien said, constituting 8 per cent of the total market. "We estimate that share of smartphones will double by 2010 in Australia. "In three years, one in six mobile devices shipped will be a smartphone compared with one in 12 currently," he said. Leading carrier Telstra welcomed the news. "There's a growing appetite in Australia for the all-in-one mobile device and this is reflected in the fact that Telstra's revenue for non-SMS data is now higher than for SMS," Telstra spokesman Peter Taylor said.

New Technology TV

When it comes to electronic gadgets Apple's iPod pretty much sets the standard these days. When the iPod first appeared in the marketplace it was the major portable digital audio player available. More commonly called MP3 players, the class of device that the iPod falls into were extremely appealing because they appeared at a time then the best way to listen to music while carrying it on one's person was using an audio cassette deck or a portable CD player. In the case of the audio cassette deck (more commonly called a Walkman after Sony's name for its version of the device) this meant carrying a single cassette inside of the device that could only carry about an hour of music. Most audio tapes stored single albums by a specific artist or group and making a mix tape took time, was inconvenient, and could only be played in a fixed order.
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Posted by Larry Dixon at 09:26 AM. Filed under: Technology News
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DLP Is The Technology For Really Big ScreensEven though flat panel HDTV sets get the most attention, there are several other kinds of TV technology that provide a lot of benefits that flat screens using LCD and Plasma technology can't provide. The most promising of these other types of technology is DLP, or digital light processing.
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Posted by Larry Dixon at 10:19 AM. Filed under: Technology News
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Lowering Cost of Technology Could be Decisive in HD Disc Format WarAs the hold that Sony's Blu-ray high def DVD format has on the market continues to get stronger in the face of opposition from the competing HD-DVD format, there are a number of things that Sony could do in order to secure a sure victory. One of them is lowering the cost of its Blu-ray disc players.
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Posted by Larry Dixon at 09:03 AM. Filed under: Technology News
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Connectivity And Entertainment: Comcast Leading The Way!There are a lot of advantages to buying in bulk including getting better value for what you buy and that's true with the bundled high speed Internet, digital cable TV, and phone services from Comcast. Comcast Cable Service bundles all three of these indispensable services together into one plan that makes them easier to afford and since you only have one bill for all three, they're simpler to deal with as well.

Technology

Teaching a machine to understand love
If computers are ever to understand the complicated nature of human existence, then love is probably the last thing they will truly grasp.But that doesn't mean we can't try to teach them. This blogger provides a blow-by-blow account of his attempt to teach his database of knowledge what love is. After a kind of Socratic dialogue between man and machine, the computer boils down the concept of love into 24 machine-friendly facts (see image, below right).The system built by Cambridge, UK, firm True Knowledge uses a large database of machine-understandable knowledge to answer questions, and infer new knowledge from what is in the original dataset.The system already understands a range of different kinds of objects such as people, books, etc, as well as a range of relationships between them. To add "love" to that list, the company's founder William Tunstall-Pedoe has to answer a few questions about it from the machine.Some of them are entertaining, almost revealing. For example, at one point Tunstall-Pedoe has to respond to machine-musings about whether love is forever:
"Ouch. This question asks about the permanence of the relationship. For example, [is a parent of] is permanent, as is [is the date of birth of]. Unfortunately, this relation is not (necessarily) permanent."Other questions include what kinds of things can love, whether it matters if one or the other person is dead, is love always mutual, can someone be loved by more than one other person, and can one person love more than one other.The results of this slightly odd exchange are that love is reduced to 24 machine-understandable facts and that True Knowledge's "mind" is now able to (attempt to) answer questions about love.You can see a demo of it answering questions such as "Is Jennifer Lopez single?" here and also sign up to question it about love yourself.Tom Simonite, online technology reporter
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Tuesday, February 12, 2008
Bamboo bikes
Here's a nice engineering project: making bike frames from bamboo in parts of Africa where the materials normally used are hard to come by. Some parts still need to be imported, but making bikes becomes a lot easier.It's a project that started as a collaboration between specialist bike builders Calfee design and engineers at the Earth Institute, Columbia University.A gallery of images shows bamboo bikes being built and ridden. The frames are made from bamboo, held together with resin and sisal fibre.The project has two main goals. First to develop high quality and affordable cargo bikes for Africa, and second to encourage local people to start making and selling their own.Last year the team went over with a bamboo bike, and taught the locals by building another using bamboo growing in the area.I asked Craig Calfee - owner of the bike design firm involved - how building with bamboo is different.
"The stiffness is similar to aluminum, so the tube diameters must be similar to aluminum frames. The stiffness to weight ratio is similar to steel, so the weight of the frames is close to steel. The vibration damping is similar to carbon fiber, so it absorbs a lot of road buzz."That makes for a smooth ride, he tells me. Craig will next week be heading to Ghana again, although this time without funding from the Earth Insitute.
"I want to make sure we get some individuals started up with some microbusinesses there. I'll be setting up the supply chain for the parts that need to be imported and will be finding customers for the bikes over there as well.If you want to try a bamboo bike for yourself you have two options. Either joining him in Ghana, or having one built for you back in California.Tom Simonite, online technology reporterVia
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Monday, February 11, 2008
Why won't the car makers play ball?
Why won't the world's biggest car manufacturers enter a $10-million contest to make a production car capable of 100mpg?It's a question that the organisers of the Automotive X Prize are asking themselves. All kinds of small startups have entered, but the big boys of the car industry don't seem interested. This blogger has a good stab at explaining why.The most interesting point he makes, for me, is that as soon as one big firm enters, the rest will likely feel compelled to follow. I think he's probably right, and that it wouldn't take much for that to happen either.Most of the big car makers are already prototyping advanced "green" vehicles, which could probably be entered without too much trouble. They have likely given some thought to entering, and could probably do so at short notice.The task facing the organisers is clear - work out how to tempt one or more of the big boys and thereby draw in the rest.Perhaps the auto giants are just waiting out the contest, and will buy up any useful technology that comes out of it. After all, unlike the small startups they are in no hurry. Or are there other barriers holding them back?Tom Simonite, online technology reporter
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Friday, February 08, 2008
Towards the Facebook phone
Social networking online is grabbing all of the headlines. But huge numbers of people have been using cellphones to socialise electronically for much longer. Surely the mobile platform is a better one for social networking.Computer scientist Vassilis Kostakos certainly thinks so. He recently told me about some FaceBook plugins he is developing that can connect people you meet in real life with their online profiles. It uses software installed on your phone to look for nearby devices using Bluetooth.One of his plugins, called CityWare, was launched last summer. If you get close enough to another person who is also running the plugin on their phone, you are provided with a link to their profile the next time you login to Facebook. It was developed as part of a research project also called CityWare, partly funded by HP, Nokia and Vodafone.Kostakos is working on more plugins, one of which really brings social networking and phones together.Called Little Bird, it gets your phone to update you with information from your friends' profiles whenever you meet them. "When you walk into a room, a message on your phone tells you what events your friends in the room are attending in the near future," explains Kostakos.I think we'll be seeing more applications like this. It makes sense to help people get at this information on their phones; for example, telling you when contacts stored on your phone come online.Kostakos says that since gaining publicity last year for his first Facebook application, he has spoken with several large European mobile operators interested in bringing social networking and phones together.I imagine the handset makers will also be interested. I wonder how long it'll be before the first 'Facebook phone' appears. Perhaps the first wave of devices based on Google's 'open' Android platform will see that happen.Tom Simonite, online technology reporter
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Thursday, February 07, 2008
Hark! Is that a proton I hear?
The video clip at the end of this post (or here) lets you hear the sound of hydrogen molecules being hit with a high-powered laser beam. I won't give it away, but it isn't a Hollywood-style 'zzzap'.Physicists Uwe Thumm and Bernold Feuerstein made the clip because they are musical as well as scientific collaborators ??? the result lets you hear one of their greatest scientific hits. They made the sound by slowing down the vibration of the pairs of protons that make up hydrogen molecules into the range of human hearing.When you hit hydrogen molecules with a laser, the pairs of protons start vibrating more violently than normal. At first it is possible to calculate the changing distance between proton pairs, but after about 60 femtoseconds (one billionth of one millionth of a second) quantum effects make it impossible to know accurately.But Thumm and Feuerstein found something weird as they worked through their quantum calculations ??? after about 600 femtoseconds it became possible to calculate the distances again. They call that event 'revival'.In the video clip, you can hear the regular pulses of the well-defined initial vibrations, which become lost in noise before they return as the "revival" appears.That has to be one of the best ways to communicate a result. The pair say performing the same trick on other molecules would make it possible to hear the differences between, say, water and methane undergoing the same laser treatment.


Launch in external player Tom Simonite, online technology reporter
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Wednesday, February 06, 2008
Hide the Wii-mote
Nintendo has filed a European patent suggesting a bunch of new ways to use the motion-sensing Wii-mote at the heart of its blockbusting console in new ways.They suggest designs that make it possible to shove the accelerometer-packing unit into steering wheels, crash helmets, glasses, racquets, chairs, action figures, bike pedals, skateboards and more.Over at The Register they're quite sceptical. But I think the proposals make sense. For example, third parties are already selling bats and steering wheels that hold a Wii-mote as a way to play sports and driving games. And sticking the Wii-mote into everyday objects like eyeglasses and bikes could be even more interesting.One hacker - see video - has already shown that the Wii setup can be used to track your head for a 3D display. A pair of glasses that hold a Wii-mote might allow similar things.Going further, we recently ran a story about a set of wearable accelerometers and other sensors that can capture your movements in 3D as you perform any activity from walking to skiing (see video). A similar trick might be possible if you could fit your Wii-mote into a bike or skateboard. You could reconstruct your real-life movements, or have them affect onscreen events. For example, your toy truck could become part of a game.Given the large community of hackers experimenting with what the Wii-mote can be used for, the real question raised by this patent is whether Nintendo will try any of this stuff first.Tom Simonite, online technology reporter
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Tuesday, February 05, 2008
Turn an old cellphone into a robot's brain
Here's a great way to reuse an old cellphone.Software engineer Jatinderjit Singh built a simple robot out of Lego Technics parts, a cheap micro-controller, and an infrared interface, then attached a cellphone so that it could control the robot's wheels and arms via the IR link.His "tele-operated mobile internet robot" or TeMo can be controlled from anywhere in the world where there's cellphone network coverage, using a tiny web server and a graphical interface installed on the phone.The robot also sends images from the phone's camera back via the web link to let the controller see what they are doing, and Singh hopes to have video running soon.Here's a video overview of TeMo on YouTube (also available on his project homepage).Next, he wants to put infrared or laser sensors on TeMo, so that it can accurately map out its surroundings.It's an ingenious project and it makes me wonder if the hundreds of millions of cellphones discarded each year could find a new lease of life. Perhaps there's even money to be made in repurposing them as remote controllers for household robots or appliances.Via: HackadayWill Knight, online technology editor
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