Technology Info

Nokia Corp. is buying the consortium that makes the software for its phones and making it available for free to other manufacturers, in hopes of blunting the influence of competing software providers.

Nokia said Tuesday that it is offering to buy the 52 per cent of Britain’s Symbian Ltd. that it doesn’t already own for about US$410 million. Symbian’s software is the most widely used on high-end phones.

Nokia will then establish a foundation with handset makers Sony Ericsson and Motorola Inc. and Japanese carrier NTT DoCoMo to make the software available royalty-free. They will combine their three different versions of the Symbian software for advanced, data-enabled phones into one open platform. (link)

Apple is likely to reap significant profits despite slashing the cost of its updated iPhone in half, said analysts. Although details about the phone are still scarce, sources said they believe Infineon and Samsung have continued to snag the top chip designs in the handset.

The raw cost of materials to build the iPhone 3G could be nearly half that of the original model, according to Portelligent Inc. (Austin) that conducted a teardown analysis of the first handset. The first phone had a bill of materials estimated at $170 at launch, but the iPhone 3G could have a BOM as low as $100 when it debuts July 11, said David Carey, president of Portelligent, a division of TechInsights, the publisher of EE Times.

The cost cut is also strategic for a company seeking to extend its toehold in the massive cellular market. Apple has sold 6 million iPhones to date mainly in the U.S. in a market where nearly a billion handsets ship each year worldwide. (link)

A new survey shows that data retention laws influence the actual behavior of citizens in Germany. 11% had already abstained from single telecommunication acts, 52% would not use phone or e-mail for confidential contacts.

The problem with surveillance is not primarily that some bored officer might learn about some embarrassing private detail (although this is a problem as well). The fundamental problem with surveillance is that it changes people. People under surveillance behave differently than people who are not monitored - differently than free people.

Unfortunately, this fundamental problem has just been proven in Germany. Since the beginning of this year, communication providers are required to record who communicated with whom and when (but not the content of the communication). This data is stored for six months and available to law enforcement in cases related to certain forms of crime. (link)

Omnivision is already the the largest supplier of CMOS image sensors in the world, and now its new OmniBSITM chip design promises the world’s first consumer 8 megapixel cellphone camera. The new chip uses a technique that’s been around for a while, called backside illumination, that allows more light to reach each pixel. And that allows the chip to use a small 1.4-micron pixel that’s better than current larger versions.

Normal CMOS sensors use “front side” illumination: incoming light travels through many shallow layers of electronics before hitting the sensor pixels themselves. Backside illumination simply turns all that the other way up, so that incoming photons don’t have to journey through interfering layers before they hit the pixels. That means less get lost along the way, meaning the pixels are more sensitive to light, and can be made smaller for the same responsiveness. (Gizmodo)

Another day, another class-action wireless consumer lawsuit. This one is big, though, naming six mobile-phone carriers and a top mobile virtual network operator as defendants in a complaint filed in Mississippi federal court.

“This action seeks recovery for actual and compensatory damages sustained by plaintiffs and others similarly situated. At this time, plaintiffs are specifically seeking recovery against the defendants for unauthorized charges, wrongful collections and unjust enrichment,” the stated the 12-page suit filed by attorneys with the Graves Law Offices P.L.L.C. in Jackson, Miss.

The allegations, among other things, focus on charges for unsolicited text messages received by subscribers “without offering its customers the opportunity to avoid such charges by opting out of text messaging and refusing to disable its customers’ text messaging service.” (link)

For nearly three in 10 households, don’t even bother trying to call them on a landline phone. They either only have a cell phone or seldom if ever take calls on their traditional phone.

The federal figures, released Wednesday, showed that reliance on cells is continuing to rise at the expense of wired telephones. In the second half of last year, 16 percent of households only had cell phones, while 13 percent also had landlines but got all or nearly all their calls on their cells.

The number of wireless-only households grew by 2 percent since the first half of last year. Underscoring the rapid growth, in early 2004 just 5 percent had only cell phones.

Households with cell phones who rarely if ever use their landlines grew by 1 percent since the first half of last year.

Such families often either have their landline hooked exclusively to a computer or rely so heavily on their cells that they ignore landline calls because they are probably from telephone solicitors, said Stephen Blumberg, senior scientist at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and an author of the report. (Yahoo)

Taiwan’s High Tech Computer Corp. unveiled Tuesday a mobile phone it said was designed make web-browsing as easy as making phone calls, with the device seen as a rival to Apple’s upcoming iPhone2.

On a 2.8-inch display, users of the Touch Diamond receive animated access to text messaging, email, photos, music, weather and more, the company said.

They can also zoom-in and pan websites with one hand and automatically view optimised content specially created to fit the display. Touch Diamond also includes a YouTube application and Google Maps.

“Thanks to our software team, the Touch Diamond will make browsing the web and using web-enabled applications just as practical and easy to use as making phone calls,” the firm’s chief executive officer, Peter Chou, told reporters. (link)

Check out this mod. Probably not useful for most of you but for frequent business travellers this can definitely keep you in contact with your multinational companies.

“DuoSIM is a very cool new conversion kit to upgrade standard mobile phones to dual SIM operation so you can have two SIM cards installed and switch between them at the push of a button. I’ve been looking for something like this for a while to make the best use of different data and call rate plans, but up till now the adapters have all required that you cut your SIM card up first, which is something I didn’t really want to do.” (link)

I could really use this, Spectec SDW-823 microSD wifi card. My phone doesn’t have wifi but this would definitely be a welcome addition.

The life of 20-year-old Emine, and her 24-year-old husband Ramazan Çalçoban was pretty much the normal life of any couple in a separation process. After deciding to split up, the two kept having bitter arguments over the cellphone, sending text messages to each other until one day Ramazan wrote “you change the topic every time you run out of arguments.” That day, the lack of a single dot over a letter—product of a faulty localization of the cellphone’s typing system—caused a chain of events that ended in a violent blood bath.

The surreal mistake happened because the ex-husband’s cellphone didn’t have an specific character from the Turkish alphabet: the letter “ı” or closed i. While “i” is available in all phones in Turkey—where this happened—the closed i apparently doesn’t exist in most of the terminals in that country. (link)