Author: atmasphere

Good link I just discovered through MobileWhack… I have not tried it and probably won’t… just passing it on. If you have a bluetooth phone and a Mac you can easily iSync your contact list or a group you create just for the phone. With Vazu, you can email or OTA them…

Christian Gloddy writes:

My friends and I [at Vazu] are trying to solve the long-standing problem of getting contacts on your phone without having to thumb them in or buy some cable or having a rediculously expensive phone.

You can either send them over the air through our website or even email contacts to your phone from your mail client. It’s free while we roll out the service, so give it a shot and let me know what you think. It’s a small group of developers working on this, so we’re looking for feedback and if you find that your Sony Ericsson or Nokia phone doesn’t work, just contact us and we’ll jump right on it.

In the US it currently works with Cingular, AT&T and T-Mobile with most Sony Ericsson and Nokia phones. We have just launched a beta in most of Europe and India and it works with almost all of the providers there. [MobileWhack]

Intel’s president and CEO recently demonstrated that a prototype handheld running a next-generation XScale procesor is capable of playing near-DVD quality video. [Brighthand]

Two publications have recently published interviews with people heavily involved with the development of Palm OS Cobalt. The interviews go into the development processes and history behind the new OS. [PalmInfocenter]

Tomorrow’s digital video recorders will be able to record two live shows and shuttle recorded content to several TVs at once, setting up a battle with PC makers. [CNET News.com – Personal Technology]

Engineers in the consumer electronics lab of hard-drive maker Maxtor, for example, are working on DVR-type devices that can record or broadcast at least six media streams at a time. That compares to three streams in current DVRs, which are hard-drive-based machines that can record video and temporarily pause live broadcasts. Three-stream machines can simultaneously record two live channels while playing a previously recorded program.

DVRs in development not only will be able to serve up video in multiple rooms at the same time, but also handle data from a home video security system, said Jasbir Sidhu, director of engineering for consumer electronics products at Maxtor. The coming DVRs may hit the market sometime in the next 18 months, he said.

I guess taking care of things well in advance of mobile P2P really being too much of a reality is a good way to assure that your products get picked up by device manufacturers.

Qualcomm Inc. will build digital rights management (DRM) technology into its forthcoming chipsets in hopes of enticing content providers to distribute their content wirelessly to smart phones, the company said Tuesday at 3GSM World Congress conference in Cannes, Frances. [InfoWorld: Top News]

Looks like Kaleidescape is finally getting some competition in the hard disk DVD jukebox market from Molino. [Hack the Planet]

These devices are absolutely the future… coming soon to your living room. BTW — Molino has a very TiVOlike logo, don’t you think?

In many cases, the mechanics for the gizmos already exist — mainly wireless sensors, cellphones, broadband access and home computers. What’s been missing, and what researchers now are trying to develop, are ways to harness the hardware to run your entire house with little effort or technological savvy — letting you turn up the heat remotely, anticipating when you want the lights on, or deciding automatically how long your food should cook. [WSJ via E M E R G I C . o r g]