Science and technology news blog

Apple CEO Steve Jobs announced a price cut on the iPhone barely 2.5 months after its launch. This irked a lot of existing customers and Jobs quickly went into damage control by announcing that all existing iPhone customers would be getting a $100 credit towards their phone bill. This has by far been the quickest price cut that I have seen, but it makes sense as Apple can afford a cut right now. The iPhone is supposedly costing Apple around $250 in manufacturing costs and sells at $499 and $599 for 4GB and 8GB models respectively.

The following is a good article to read on the recent price cut from Apple:

http://www.efluxmedia.com/news_The_iPhone_vs_the_PS3_A_Price_Cut_Comparison_08398.html 

There has been plenty of talk for quite some time about Google releasing its own mobile phone. While there is plenty of speculation on what type of service Google would introduce, one thing seems to be pretty clear, Google WILL launch something in the next couple of years. Most likely it is going to be a mobile phone, with Linux based OS, and loads of Google software. Google’s gPhone would be the most likely product that should arrive within the next 12-18 months:

Not only was Google instrumental in winning concessions in the rules of an upcoming auction in the US of radio spectrum that will guarantee that any device or service can be used on that spectrum, but Google has poured hundreds of millions of dollars into developing mobile phone designs.

This should be sending all sorts of mobile players into planning mode, including Nokia, Apple (with its recently launched iPhone) and Motorola. Google may end up getting LG to make the hardware. But one thing is sure, if and when Google does launch its own mobile, it is going to be very aggressive with its pricing, quite unlike what Apple’s iPhone is charging consumers.

Composite video of the iPhone showing its expected functionality

Ever since Steve Jobs’ keynote at the Macworld Expo in January, we’ve known that the iPhone is being released sometime in June. But we haven’t known exactly when.

Now Cingular is confirming that the release date will be June 11. A customer service manager at Cingular (we called 800-947-5096 and were transferred to sales) gave us that date late Thursday, but, alas, said he didn’t have any additional information beyond that.

That date is no coincidence. It’s the first day of Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference, scheduled to be held in San Francisco from June 11 through June 15. (Incidentally, the agenda includes a focus on Leopard, the next generation of OS X that’s supposed to be released sometime in the second quarter of 2007.)

Rumors have been swirling about the iPhone release date. One blog pointed to a release date of June 15 based on alleged documents filed with the Federal Communications Commission, but those have been shown to be a hoax.

Microsoft appears to be working hard in innovating for mobile technologies lately. Following this week’s announcement of ZenZui, a spinoff company having originated in Microsoft’s Redmond Research Lab, Microsoft showed off a new web browsing technology at this week’s O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference. The technology is called Deepfish, and it attempts to make web browsing on a mobile device more closely resemble the web browsing experience on a computer.

In order to do this, Deepfish takes a different approach to browsing on a mobile phone. Instead of loading specially-developed pages that were designed with a mobile phone in mind—often involving extremely simplistic layouts, minimal visual elements, and lots of vertical text scrolling in order to minimize screen space and bandwidth use—Deepfish displays the full layout of the page on the mobile screen, as a sort of thumbnail. The user can then zoom in and out of parts of the page “in an intuitive way” in order to read the content from that part of the page.

Most full web pages typically require lots of time to load on a mobile phone due to their having been designed for a computer. Deepfish attempts to get around this problem and minimize bandwidth usage. When it loads the overall thumbnail of the page, Deepfish is not loading the entire page, but rather a smaller, more bandwidth-friendly snapshot of it. And when the user zooms in on certain parts of the page to read, Deepfish only renders that part of the page instead of the entire thing.

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Three weeks ago, Palm CEO Ed Colligan described Apple’s iPhone as “a highly developed media player, which happens to include a phone”. But that doesn’t mean he’s being complacent. According to the New York Times, Palm has hired former Apple alumini Paul Mercer to work on a new line of products.

In 2001, Mercer’s Pixo design house was contracted by Apple to help create the first iPod. While Apple never formally acknowledged its role, Pixo contributed the operating system, software layers, and hardware integration. Mercer himself spent years at Apple, contributing to System 7 and the Newton.

Mercer brings two employees with him from his current design house Iventor with him.

Palm hasn’t updated its PDA range since autumn 2005, and its attempt to create a new product category with the hard-drive based LifeDrive failed to set the market alight. But hints and hirings suggest it has intended to return to the market with a more focused device.

Palm founder Jeff Hawkins, has been working on a new software project at his own company Numenta with Donna Dubinsky, which apparently implements a “heirarchical temporal memory component” – based on his own neuroscience work. (more…)

With Microsoft’s ‘Windows Mobile’ Smartphones an undoubted success in a world of Nokia, Sony Ericsson, Motorola and Samsung cell phones, Yahoo! has decided that it’s a market they can’t afford to ignore, and as a result have made their Yahoo! Go 2.0 available for the Windows Mobile platform.

While the original version of Yahoo! Go was derided by some as hard to use, Yahoo! Go 2.0 is a much better version that delivers a truly useful mobile search – and more – experience.

Although already available for other brands of cell phone, there are over 175 Windows Mobile smartphones capable of running the new Yahoo! Go 2.0 software, with over 100 models on sale in stores today.

Marco Boerries, the senior vice president of ‘connected life, Yahoo!’, said that “Consumers have been clamoring for us to bring Yahoo! Go 2.0 to Windows Mobile devices since we launched the service less than two months ago. There are millions of mobile phones on the Windows Mobile platform in the market today and consumers with these devices want to use the most advanced, exciting services available. Our innovative Yahoo! Go 2.0 service finally brings the open Internet to the mobile phone and gives consumers the compelling experience they have been looking for.”

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TiVo has evangelists. People go crazy over their digital video recorder because it changes the way they watch TV.

In the PC category, the Mac elicits a wildly passionate response from its legion of vocal fans.

And among digital music players, everyone knows the iPod rules the world.

Until recently, however, the cell phone category had no such champion of the people.

But today, people are raving about a little phone called the BlackBerry Pearl (www.blackberrypearl.com). Since its launch in September, it has become a hot seller. It’s a half-inch thick and pretty much half screen and half keyboard. In between, there’s an innovative little thumb trackball – that’s the “pearl” – that navigates the screen and, when you push it down, makes a selection.

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Apple and US networking giant Cisco have resolved their battle over the iPhone trademark and the iPod maker will now be able to use the name for its new mobile phone.

Apple’s recently announced plans to enter the mobile phone market quickly ran into trouble with Cisco deciding to sue the company for using the iPhone name, which it believed it had trademarked.

But now the two have issued a joint statement announcing that both companies are free to use the “iPhone” trademark on their products.

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AMD introduced three new media processors that promise to enhance the graphics and video capability of cellphones.The new models extend the existing media processor family that previously was marketed under the ATI brand. The 2294 and 2298 allow users to play and record video in DVD resolution (720×480 pixels). The chips also support digital cameras that deliver images with a resolution of up to 12 megapixels, high-definition audio, TV out and video telephony.

The new Imageon 2192 is aimed at mainstream mobile phones with an image processing capability of up to 3.1 megapixels. The chip also supports TV-Out as well as picture-in-picture support for video telephony applications.

All three new Imageon processors are positioned below the 2300-series, which integrates OpenGL 1.1+ extensions and allows users to play 3D games on their cellphones.

Imageon processors are currently used by Motorola, LG, Fujitsu, Samsung as well as a few other smaller manufacturers of handheld devices. Among the more visible phones with Imageon processors are Motorola’s SLVR, RAZR, MOTORIZR and MOTOKRZR models. (more…)

With Apple’s products garnering so much attention these days, the company’s biggest competitors have been busily designing new gadgets to steal some of that limelight. Microsoft ’s Zune didn’t turn out to be the iPod killer that some had predicted it would be, but Samsung is ready to launch a new smartphone that it hopes will turn out to be an iPhone killer.

On Thursday, Samsung announced a new addition to its Ultra portfolio, offering similar features to Apple’s highly anticipated iPhone, which is scheduled to launch in June through Cingular . Samsung’s Ultra Smart F700 will formally debut at the 3GSM telecommunications event held next week in Barcelona.

In a published statement, Geesung Choi, president of Samsung’s Telecommunications Network Business, said the Ultra Smart F700 is a good example of how mobile phones will evolve in the future. Indeed, the new model does reflect an emerging smartphone trend toward large touch-screen displays. But for those who still want access to phone functions through a more traditional keyboard, the F700 offers a slide-out Qwerty keypad as well.

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Europe’s biggest telecoms groups are aiming to create a mobile phone search engine that could challenge Yahoo! and Google, the US giants.

Vodafone, France Telecom, Telefonica, Deutsche Telekom, Hutchison Whampoa, Telecom Italia and one American network, Cingular, are among the companies that will come together for secret, high-level talks at the mobile industry’s biggest annual trade show in Barcelona next week.

Faced with declining revenues as calls become cheaper, network operators are determined to secure a large slice of the lucrative search advertising market.

In the UK alone, more than 20 per cent of subscribers are expected to have access to mobile internet at broadband speeds by the end of 2007, which should prompt a dramatic increase in the use of search engines via mobile phones.

The initiative will come as a surprise to Google and Yahoo!, which have lost no time in striking deals with mobile operators and handset makers. But the mobile industry believes it can retain a greater share of advertising revenues by developing its own service.

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Internet phone services, already eating at fixed phone line rentals, are now moving threateningly into the mobile phone market.

Engin, a leading Australian “voice over internet protocol” (VoIP) provider, today announced that users of the Nokia N80 Internet Edition handset could now use it to make VoIP calls over the Engin network.

Ilkka Tales, Engin’s chief executive, predicted the price differential between internet phone calls and regular mobile calls could spell trouble for traditional mobile network operators.

“[Engin provides] internet phone calls for 10 cents nationally, whereas that call from a mobile network carrier perspective is usually charged per 30 second lots and averages around 27 cents or 30 cents a minute.”

Provided they are within reach of a wireless hotspot, users of the new service could make 10-cent untimed calls to Australian landlines, and 20-cent untimed overseas calls, Mr Tales said.

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It looks like Apple’s new iPhone has some serious competition…

LG has announced today the launch of the LG KE850 PRADA mobile phone which the company claims to be the first completely touch screen mobile phone.

The same claim was made by Apple last week at MacWorld Expo about the new iPhone and that is not the only similarity. In fact, the new LG KE850 PRADA looks too much like the iPhone to be a coincidence.

The new LG KE850 is the result of the collaboration between LG Electronics and Prada, one of the world’s leading brands in the luxury goods industry and it has been designed to be a truly fashion accessory.

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I love whiz-bang technology. I love it so much that when MP3 players first came out, I bought one as a voice recorder for business interviews when all my reporter counterparts were still buying reel-to-reel mini recorders or digital recorders with a one-tenth the memory and no file-manipulation capabilities. And, I love my cell phone because I can send and receive messages in a meeting, take photos on the fly, shop on it and perform Google searches no matter where I am—and it was free with my cellular service plan. So why would I ever pay $500 for a cell phone? I don’t think I’m alone here.

Market research firm Isuppli Corp. today released a research report stating that the iPhone will generate more than a 50% gross margin for Apple—nothing unusual for them. That basically means that Apple is pocketing $250 for every iPhone it sells. Compare that with the average gross margin of 10% to 20% for handsets and you’ll see where Apple is really relying on fan loyalty to gouge.

In a recent interview, Steve Ballmer chortled when asked about the iPhone. Not that I would normally take anything seriously that a Microsoft executive would say about an Apple product, but in this interview posted on YouTube, he makes two very good points: 1) $500 for a phone is outrageous when you can get the same features on another cell phone for less than $100; 2) The iPhone has no keypad, so it’s not business/text-message friendly.

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