Entries Tagged 'Tech News' ↓

Toshiba has halted production of HD DVD players and recorders and is close to making a decision on whether to throw in the towel on the high-definition movie disc format, Japanese public broadcaster NHK reported Saturday evening.

The decision, which NHK said will likely cost the company several tens of billions of dollars, is being made in the face of flagging support by movie studios and major U.S. retailers.

“We are making considerations following the impact on sales of Warner’s announcement but we haven’t made any decision,” said Keisuke Ohmori, a spokesman for Toshiba, when reached on Saturday evening. He was referring to the January decision by Warner Bros to stop issuing movies on HD DVD and go solely with Blu-ray Disc.

Read the whole story here…

There’s been a bit of stir over these two formats lately. Personally, I’ve watched them both and the quality is pretty much the same as far as the eye can tell. The best solution is just to purchase online, download, and view with a media streamer that supports HD. For example, I puchase HD movies online via a content provider, download, and then stream them to my Netgear EVA8000 on demand. What do you guys think?

Google on Monday announced a widely expected open-development platform for mobile devices backed by industry heavyweights like T-Mobile, HTC, Qualcomm and Motorola that could shake the wireless market to its core by simplifying and reducing the cost of developing mobile applications. The platform, called Android, has been developed by Google and others as part of the Open Handset Alliance, which has over 30 partners supporting it. The goal of this ambitious initiative is to spur innovation in the mobile space and accelerate improvements in how people use the Web via cell phones. The open-source platform will have a complete set of components, including an operating system, middleware stack, customizable user interface and applications.
The first Android-based phones should hit the market in the second half of 2008. The platform will be made available under an open-source license that will give a lot of flexibility to those who adopt it to modify its components and design services and products, Google said. Other founding members of the alliance include Broadcom, eBay, China Mobile, Intel, LG Electronics, NTT DoCoMo, Nvidia, Samsung, Sprint Nextel, Telecom Italia, Telefonica, Texas Instruments and Wind River. Noticeably absent from the list is traditional Google ally Apple, whose popular iPhone might see its innovation lead cut sooner than expected thanks to this Google effort. It looks we will see Google products everywhere sooner or later…

Source: PC World, Computerworld

Apple Inc. suddenly dropped the price of its iPhone today, stating that it was seeking to broaden the market for the popular but expensive phone for the Christmas season.

A new iPod model has touch-screen controls and built-in Wi-Fi.

Apple also introduced a new digital music player modeled after its iPhone and struck a wireless music distribution deal with the Starbucks coffee chain. Apple, which rarely drops the prices on its products, cut the price of its 8-gigabyte iPhone by $200, to $399.

Steve Jobs, said in an interview after the announcement that Apple would have been able to hit its publicly declared target of a million iPhones sold in the United States by the end of this month, even without a price cut.

“We’re a high-volume manufacturer, and we’re pretty good at getting costs down,” Mr. Jobs said. “It’s very clear we have a breakthrough product on our hands, but its also clear that many can afford it, some can’t. We’d like to make it affordable to even more folks going into this holiday season.”

I believe we all saw this one coming.

Not that many years ago having the internet was something many people used as a recreation only, but now with the growth of services offered via the web the need for broadband in the home is greater than ever. I can remember the first time I connected to a BBS system with windows 3.11 on a 14.4 kbps modem thinking that being “online” was the future, I could not have imagined back then what the Internet would become. As time went on and the Internet began to grow dial up service seemed blazing fast because WebPages were built so simple without any bandwidth intensive graphics that surfing around was pretty good. But like everything else the Internet evolved and blew up, becoming a huge business avenue and more bandwidth was needed, but then home users caught on to all the potential of the net and began to require higher and higher bandwidth, which was fine for metropolitan areas but not rural areas of the country. Being out in a rural area myself my only options are satellite internet or wireless, both are pretty good but still only offer around 1 meg of service at a much higher price than DSL or Cable internet. I choose the wireless route because I have heard way to many horror stories about satellite access and I managed to come out a little cheaper with wireless anyway. All of this could change really soon because it seems like people are beginning to catch on to the fact that a lot of America is rural and has the same bandwidth needs as in major cities. Right now Microsoft is in talks with the FCC to allow access to unused TV airwaves for broadband access called “White Space Devices” which as TV stations abandon analog signals to move to digital ones theses white space devices could provide access to many rural areas without interrupting TV signals. Another sign that things are moving in the right direction is that DirecTV has struck a deal with Current Group to be able to offer Broadband and VOIP through power lines, with this deal DirecTV will be able to offer bundled services for Internet, Television and Telephone service. I really hope that BPL (Broadband over Power Lines) development will continue because while not everyone has access to DSL or Cable all home users have electricity. I really hope that efforts will continue to be made to increase the availability of broadband services to all areas because with the direction the internet is taking it is only going to require more and more bandwidth. Below is a chart of how the United States ranks in broadband access.

Technorati Tags: Broadband, White Space, Internet, BPL