COMPUTER CURRENTS
Mobile phone makers have failed to respond with anything innovative following the iPhone introduction over a year ago
JAMES HEIN
The Panasonic FX-35. |
Has the mobile phone market hit a wall? When the iPhone hit the streets over a year ago it set a new benchmark in intelligent mobile phones. Since then, mobile phone vendors have responded with, well, with nothing at all. O2 is about the only other touch phone; I include Dopod in the O2 category, which has given us a succession of models with same screen size and in at least one case, less power since the Atom came out.
I have been sitting on my O2 Atom waiting for something to replace it and so far there has been nothing of note. I recently added the spb mobile shell which is a very neat product that integrates well with the touch screen. You can check it out at http://www.spbsoftwarehouse.com if you want to spruce up your O2 experience.
It does not replace your O2 shell, which is still lurking a click away if you need it, but it adds a lot of tools at your fingertips. I like the intelligent search function that looks at both first and last names as you type. It has a handy quick call panel that display's photo's and recognises gestures like dragging across the screen, a la iPhone.
Utilities aside, how many new mobile phones come with touch screens? Very few, with even the popular Nokia brand having almost nothing in this category. For some reason every manufacturer seems to believe that a small screen and buttons taking up the rest of the space is still the best option. The Blackberry line is the absurd end of this scale with large hands required and very tiny fingers to press the multitude of small buttons.
How about PCs and notebooks? Is the market saturated? Intel has started to ship its new Atom processor, codenamed "Diamondville". This is another in the range of devices aimed what are called "small, cheap computers," instead of mobile Internet units. Microsoft has also announced the support of XP for small devices after 2010.
The new CPUs have a 1.6GHz base speed with a power managing front-side bus at 533MHz and 512KB of L2 cache. Of the two models, one has lower power consumption so it costs $44 compared to $29 for the other, in bulk of course. So, why are we seeing so many new low-cost CPUs?
I suspect that fewer people are buying computers in developed nations and so the focus is now on the poorer nations. This requires less expensive machines that can be purchased on lower incomes. It also means less expensive software, but that is not something we are seeing from the big manufacturers so these machines often come loaded with open source applications instead. The BSA loves to hang around such places because it can point to people pirating software that they cannot afford and claiming it as an industry "loss".
I may have found the ultimate video converter program. It's called Media Coder, you can find it at mediacoder.sourceforge.net, and it's free. It is only at version 0.6.1 at the moment but so far it has converted a bunch of .RMVB files for me and it handles subtitles. There is still a bit of set up required as far as the selecting of audio and video output, but in many cases you can simple select "as source". So far it has performed a lot better than the pay for versions I have tried to date. I'll keep you informed on this one.
Industry news
Panasonic has a new camera out. Depending on where you live in the world the FX-35 or FX-36 is a point-and-shoot with a 10.2MP CCD. The starting lens aperture is 25mm, which makes it about the widest you can get in this category. The unit has image stabilisation in the lens, multiple face detection and the ability to record HD video at 30fps. You will probably need the 8GB card for this kind of thing but for the price, close to 10,000 baht depending on where you get it from in Asia, this is an impressive point-and-shoot camera. For under $400 you can also get the 40m underwater housing giving you the ability to take high-res shots and video underwater.
It appears that the latest Apple browser, Safari, does not ask before downloading content. This means that your computer can be filled with malware and executed if you go to the wrong site. Microsoft has issued a security warning that people refrain from using the browser until both Apple and MS have checked out the problem.
The really interesting aspect of this story, were the comments about it. Most Apple lovers immediately blamed Microsoft and Windows for the problem. Ironically the warning was also for OS X users but that was glossed over for the most part. They demanded that MS fix the problem immediately but it is Safari that is not doing the asking so MS would have to try and intervene for any download to "fix" the issue.
A very few Apple lovers reluctantly sided with MS on the issue but were obviously uncomfortable to be put in that position. I was glad to see that there were a few clear thinkers in the pack.
Start up the Google home page and look for the Privacy Notice. Missing right? Well it was at the time of writing and that is apparently against some laws in the US. Google says you can find it under their About link but it is supposed to be on the home page. Strange that it took so long for someone to notice.
IBM has always been a centre for invention, and its latest has chips being cooled by water. This might sound commonplace but in this case the water channels are inside the chips. By adding channels the size of a human hair they will be able to cool down the next generation of 3D stacked chips which are estimated to put out about 1kW of power for a 2cm2 surface area. Yes, that is a lot of heat to deal with.
If you want to transfer those old VCR tapes, of say the Kenny Everett Video Show, to digital, and you don't want to use a PC to do it, check out Pinnacle Video Transfer. This is a box that takes RCA or S-Video in at one end and when you press the button encodes to H.264 on a USB device connected to the other end. The bad news is that you have to format the receiving device as FAT32 so nothing bigger than 4GB for output but the max output is NTSC or PAL anyway. It is simple, works at real time but has some scaling issues so consider this a quick and dirty solution rather than a professional one.
Weekly tips
If you have one of those clean-up utilities that goes out and reclaims space then be careful of getting rid of Microsoft .MSI files. These are installation or setup files that get left behind after an install but for some reason there are required, even though they are normally found in the Temp folder.
I recently ran such a utility and the next time I started Word it kept looking for the Visual Studio 2008 installer. Yes, I am also trying to figure out the connection. It does not ask you for an alternative location, i.e. so you can point it to the installation disk, and it takes along time to run through a series of installation processes before passing control back to your Word session. Ah, Microsoft, you've done it again.
Yes, there is a solution, find your installation disk and double click on the .MSI file. It will do some configuring then vanish. After that things should back to normal.
Email: jclhein@gmail.com.
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