Everything and the Mobile Software Universe…

Ok exit the Motofone F3 here is the Sagem my150x : Today I had briefly this baby in hand from an insider. The screen in monochrome, but with a particular technology that looks like old LED based VCR. Notification icons are “hardware based” like the F3, menus are pretty simple and quite well readable with a good contrast, no T9 for SMS. I was impressed by the sturdy sleek and fashion design, and the really great tactile feeling of the case (really similar to the great smooth Samsung plastics).

But what is really amazing is its BOM: 16$ ! Some “rumors” are telling that it will be sold 29 euros in Carrefour. And it seems that in UK Orange to sell Sagem my150x pay-as-you-go phone for 10!

This is the first phone sporting the Infineon ULC mono chip…and this is great!

For further reading check the following reviews:

TrustedReviews – Sagem my150X and MobileGazette Sagem my150x

Flash 10: Hydra and AIF (Adobe Image Foundation) and Hardware Rendering [ draw.logic ]

Very interesting stuffs those days around UI. Adobe is PUSHING (is it big enough?) , and really trys to begin a direct MS WPF/SilverLight/.NET direct competitor… they even have a server part (for Flex).In this annoucement what I find particularly interesting is the following: From Adobe here is what AIF is:

The Adobe Image Foundation (AIF) Toolkit (…) includes a high-performance graphics programming language (…), codenamed Hydra, and an application to create, compile and preview Hydra filters and effects. (…). It currently ships in After Effects CS3 and will be used in other Adobe products in the future. The next release of Flash Player, codenamed Astro, will leverage Hydra to enable developers to create custom filters, effects and blend modes.

Hydra is a programming language used to implement image processing algorithms in a hardware-independent manner. Some benefits of Hydra include:

• Familiar syntax that is based on GLSL, which is C-based
• Allows the same filter to run efficiently on different GPU and CPU architectures, including multi-core and multiprocessor systems in a future update
• Abstracts out the complexity of executing on heterogeneous hardware
• Supports 3rd party creation and sharing of filters and effects
• Delivers excellent image processing performance in Adobe products

At last usage of hardware! and with the recent annoucement of AMD licensing some ATI hardware IP to Freescale and Qualcomm…. this is coming to mobile phone and perhaps faster than we think.

The only issue for me is … that I don’t see a real use beside video encoding/decoding for now , but it will come.

Thomas

Nokia to acquire Navteq for $8.1 Billion

WOW after TeleAtlas bought by TomTom … there is room for a new mapping actor!

Ok Nokia, you are serious about your “I want to be a service company” but 8 billions for a mapping company?? This industry is crasy

Thomas

Hello all…

Last week I attended the Open Source in Mobile conference in Madrid, at which I could get a demo of the “One-Laptop Per Child” (OLPC) XO device from Jeff Waugh, a prominent figure of the GNOME project.

For those of you not familiar with this project, the “One-Laptop Per Child” foundation wants to bring laptop computers to schoolchildren in developing countries. I will not here dwell on the price or success of the device, but rather focus on its software and really innovative user interface.

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I’m really avid of Flash Lite informations…and it seems that this post at the always exellent VisionMobile fit my bill perfectly:

VisionMobile Forum :: Flash Lite: Facts and Figures

Especially interesting (at least for me ) is the following:

Flash Lite Technology:
1.5MB: size of Flash player for PCs
400K: size of Flash Lite 2 for mobile devices
300K: the target size for Flash Home product, built on Flash Lite (based on the technology acquired from ActImagine)
ARM 9 with 32/32MB ROM/RAM running at 150MHz: lowest-spec phone embedding Flash Lite, according to Adobe.
BREW extensions: the technology Verizon uses to automatically download and install the Flash Lite player on 12 supporting handsets.

VisionMobile Forum :: Flash Lite: Facts and Figures

So it seems that we are still not in the “low to middle” cost phone range of the spectrum…still a little bit high-end, but it is shrinking and it will continue to do so, thanks to the Actimagine acquisition (cococrico!) .

Another good read about Adobe Open-Sourcing startegy:

How Adobe can overcome the issues around open sourcing the Flash Player Posted by Ryan Stewart @ 2:32 am…

…..But the rise of Flash also means that Adobe has less incentive to open the Flash Player, and at this stage, I can’t fault them for keeping it proprietary. I’d love to see them open it, and after talking with Ted, I think they can do it and still keep business as usual, but I wouldn’t expect it any time soon. The path is open though, so we can wait and see.

How Adobe can overcome the issues around open sourcing the Flash Player | The Universal Desktop | ZDNet.com

I get good comments from June on this post about Ultra Low Cost phones, about issues related to text entry for her native Kenyan language (Swahili I assume) : she gave me some great material about the impact and development of the mobile phone uses in Kenya. To write this article I’ve then wandering about the net to get some information about the Kenyan way of cellphoning … surprising.

Mobile Subscriptions Skyrocket: Africa far outpaces the rest of the world in average annual growth of mobile phone subscriptions. According to the International Telecommunication Union, from 1999 through 2004 Africans signed up for cellphones at a far greater rate than Asians and nearly three times as fast as Americans. Most of that growth was in the sub-Saharan region [left].

IEEE Spectrum: Africa Calling

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Found at Khronos.org



this is a big wow!
NVIDIA is joining the game: after all they know how to do clean “numerical” hardware, leaving RF to classical chipset vendors…and the phone part of a cellular is becoming more and more a feature like another. I may have some concerns about power consumption has historically it is not something Nvidia was used to care about

Palm pays $44m for Palm OS source code licence | Reg Hardware

I’ve forgotten to comment on this one …. but we can draw 2 big conclusions here:

1. Palm is not interested by ALP (Access Linux Platform)
2. They pay 44 millions for an OS license …so palm iw willing to make MILLIONS OF TREO WITH PALM OS inside…surprising, so it may also means that they want to do some OS coding of their own.

Ok…difficult to say more for now but the market of mobile OS/framework is a tough one!

After the TomSoft post : TomSoft » Augmented Reality: Total Immersion moving on CellPhone?

I’ve spent a little time digging in YouTubes to get some Augmented Reality Videos…and wow, the status of this technology is now just amazing and Total-Immersion seems to be leading edge (cocorico!). They will expose something new in Barcelona (hey Guilhem!, go and see those guys!).
Possibilities are endless, from marketing, to user manual, tourism, etc…I’m really impressed by the frollowing examples, I’m curious to know the MIPS use of such technology.

Some real use of augmented reality:The future of online shopping

A Game running on the now defunct Gizmondo Portable Game Sytem:




The one from tomSoft…great

Video: Total Immersion – On10

Alien is back!


Amazing how smooth is the tracking:


Space Sport…

C. Enrique Ortiz Mobility Weblog