Category: gadgets and technology

Not that they really had much choice in the matter after losing an appeal in Federal court a few weeks ago, but Verizon says it isn’t going to fight the FCC’s mandate for cellphone number portability and that it won’t charge customers any special fees for taking their number with them when they switch to another carrier.
Read [Via PhoneScoop]

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Posted on 6/23/200311/30/-0001

Push to Talk demand may be less than expected…

Courtesy of mixstar a nice compilation of Treo 600 shots…

The software giant teams with the largest U.S. hot spot providers to encourage more people to use Pocket PCs for wireless Net access at coffee shops and other locales. [CNET News.com]

Unwilling to wait for large ISPs to build Wi-Fi access points in smaller cities, the Greater Portsmouth Chamber of Commerce activates a free downtown hotspot. [internetnews.com]

Campbell expects strong interest in the Portmouth hotspot. During the late 1990s, Portsmouth was the hub of the Granite State technology scene with a slew of Web design shops and other startups. While the Nasdaq crash caused several of these firms to fold, there are still many tech-savvy residents in the city.

“This is a huge (Apple) Mac town,” Campbell said. “And iBooks have had antennas (to access the Internet wirelessly) for years.”

TiVo’s planning to have this feature by the end of the year, but it looks like Zenith has the first digital video recorder that’s compatible with high-definition television. The downside to recording HDTV with a DVR is that saving a show requires huge amounts of hard disk space – the HDR230’s 80GB drive can only hold about eight hours of programming at highest quality.
Read

[Gizmodo]

Personally this “limit” would not bother me as my current Series 1 30 Hour TiVO, really only records 9 hours at highest quality which seems to be the only way to want to watch it back anyway. It has never been an issue for us though I guess we don’t really do any long term archiving. It would be great to burn to DVD if that can ever truly be allowed.

Twenty years ago, a group of USC computer scientists automated the domain name system, a key innovation essential to making the modern Internet work. The next step is helping the technology continue to mature. By Kari L. Dean. [Wired News]

at least according to Cambridge Consultants:

“The theoretical cost per minute is eight times lower on UMTS, so what 3G is all about is increasing capacity at low cost,” CCL’s Jim Schoenenberger, “It’s not about multimedia services, it’s about reducing cost.”

“Voice is still the killer application,” explained Schoenenberger, “and the operators’ problem is that they’ve seen a 20% decline in ARPU in the last two years. MMS will not increase ARPU in my view, and GPRS will be sufficient for 90% of new MMS services, while demand for video is very uncertain.” [3G Newsroom,]

Brian Cooley of Cnet interviews Greg Shirai, Director of Product Marketing, Handspring and gives a very nice overview of the new Treo. You can get some solid close-ups on how it looks (amazing!) and see it in action as well.

DVD Recorders Reviewed

Sony has the potential to make this device the be-all for creating DVDs from existing video content, but the standards mess gets in the way.

For example, you may have to “finalize” the disc before playing it on normal DVD players – a one- to 60-minute process in which the deck seals the disc. Then again, you may not. Here’s what the manual says for each format:

“DVD-RW VR: Finalizing is unnecessary when playing a disc on VR format compatible equipment. You may need to finalize the disc depending on the DVD equipment. You can edit or record on the disc even after finalizing. DVD+RW: Finalizing is unnecessary. However, you may need to finalize the disc for certain DVD equipment. You can edit or record on the disc even after finalizing. DVD-RW Video: Finalizing is necessary when playing on equipment other than this recorder. After finalizing, you cannot edit or record on the disc.” And then there’s a note: “Discs may not play even when the discs are finalized.”

If you can make heads or tails of that, there’s a job waiting for you on the United Nations translation team.

Handspring’s latest Treo device has analysts excited and talking. In fact, industry observers say the new Treo 600 was the driving force behind the Palm-Handspring merger two weeks ago. By Elisa Batista. [Wired News]

The Digital Home Working Group, whose members include Microsoft, Sony and Intel, will harmonize efforts on wireless networking of consumer electronics devices, PCs and mobile gadgets in the home. [CNET News.com Personal Technology]

“There is a dearth of connectivity capabilities between consumer electronics and PC products,” said Stephen Baker, an analyst with NPD Techworld. “Getting these companies together to talk to one another and hash out which standards they want to support will certainly help get things moving towards networked products.”

Handspring just sent out an email directing people to the early site for the Treo 600. It is much smaller than I thought it would be and looks absolutely killer!! The small video is not as revealing as you might like but still good stuff to watch.

Ericsson and Verizon are both separately working on cordless phones that work like a regular telephone inside the home, but when taken outside work like a cellphone:

Verizon Communications, the largest U.S. telephone company, this week is expected to announce a new cordless-cellular phone that operates on regular telephone lines in the home and on the mobile networks when outside. Ericsson, the world’s largest maker of wireless equipment, has developed technology called Mobile(at)Home that lets consumers use their cell phone to make calls from home via the Internet instead of using up valuable wireless minutes.

Sounds like the Ericsson phone will use some sort of Voice over WiFi over Internet Protocol system, while it’s a little less clear how the Verizon combination-phone will work. Sprint PCS is also working on something similiar which would let subscribers hook up their regular phone to make calls over the cellular network.
Read [Via TechDirt]

[Gizmodo]

I thought that BT actually rolled a phone like this a few years ago in the UK. It was smart enough to know when you were in your home’s cell to switch over to be a home phone which changed the billing as well. Good stuff.

Motorola partners with TI for 802.11a/b/g in their Wi-Fi/cell phone: Motorola’s phone will handle a/b/g, Voice over IP, 2.5G and 3G data, and GSM or CDMA…. [802.11b Networking News]

Stewart Alsop’s current column in Fortune details his back and forth with broadband access to the home. Although he started as a fan of DSL, he’s moving over to the cable camp.

I have to say I’m not convinced and in fact, think cable creates a bad dynamic for the future development of the Internet. I’m just not a fan of assymetric broadband access. Cable tends to have significantly more downstream (to the home) bandwidth than upstream and performance for most day-to-day applications (i.e., web surfing) certainly is better on cable. But this assymetry creates a dynamic that discourages the development of applications that serve content back to the web — in fact, most cable ISPs prevent their customers from operating web servers on their home networks.

By limiting the back channel, broadband over cable has the potential to push the Internet more and more towards becoming a one way medium. Such a thing happened 80 years ago with radio. While it’s unlikely that history will repeat itself, we need to push for symmetric broadband networks. Only that way can we keep building the Internet into a medium in which every consumer can also be a producer.

[VentureBlog]

Interesting perspective and as always a good column by Stewart Alsop, though I disagree with the in general nature of the perspective here. While I do agree that an asymmetrical connection makes it potentially more difficult to have a two way medium it is far from reality today. Just look at the blog community. Does it get more two-way? Any resourceful consumer can easily (yes easily) set up a server at home for both local and remote use. Almost all home connectivity options are asymmetrical as well… DSL, Cable and Satellite are, though dial-up is not… no perhaps we should all stay with that as our option?? I don’t think so.

I think that the majority of what people do by nature is view and receive information rather than produce it and since we are talking about mass markets (was that not clear) we need to talk about what most people want. Email is two-way, sharing photos is two way…blogging… two-way! all easily done on almost any kind of connection.

For me, Cable is the way to go. It is extremely fast, costs less and is amazingly reliable and very easy to set up. I would love more upstream speed, but even for the limited serving I do (including streaming music to myself remotely) it all works just fine.