Earlier this month, SlashGear columnist Michael Gartenberg pondered whether Moore’s Law was still relevant to PCs; obviously NVIDIA chief scientist and vice president Bill Dally has only just got the memo. The engineer has penned a guest column for Forbes on the limitations of current CPU technology, and more specifically the fact that – while processor speed has increased pretty much as Moore predicted – the power scaling part of Moore’s Law has ended. ”As a result, the CPU scaling predicted by Moore’s Law is now dead,” Dally suggests, before suggesting that parallel computing will be our saviour.
“Going forward, the critical need is to build energy-efficient parallel computers, sometimes called throughput computers, in which many processing cores, each optimized for efficiency, not serial speed, work together on the solution of a problem. A fundamental advantage of parallel computers is that they efficiently turn more transistors into more performance. Doubling the number of processors causes many programs to go twice as fast. In contrast, doubling the number of transistors in a serial CPU results in a very modest increase in performance–at a tremendous expense in energy.” Bill Dally, NVIDIA
Of course, what’s the best known parallel computing platform around at the moment: why, it’s NVIDIA’s own CUDA architecture. That’s now found in GeForce, ION, Quadro and Tesla GPUs from the company, and can be turned to not just graphics crunching but general processing.
The problem with multicore processors of the sort that Intel and AMD are producing, Dally says, is that they consume too much energy per instruction; because of that it’s pointless trying to hook up several of them in parallel. To be fair, Dally’s points do make some sense when you consider the generally growing power requirements for high-performance chips; however, we don’t think Intel or AMD will be quite so ready to go along with the NVIDIA VP’s suggestions.
Remember the Pandigital Photo Mail Digital Photo Frame? We mocked its name and wretched press shots back in January, but also lauded its integrated AT&T 3G for wirelessly receiving new images sent to a dedicated email address. Pandigital have just announced that the $179.99 will go on sale within the next couple of weeks, and they’ve also confirmed pricing for their pre-pay photo download packages.
While the sticker price for the frame comes with 300 wirelessly-delivered photos, Pandigital are selling a further 100 for $9.99, 400 for $29.99 or 700 for $49.99. Although we’d love it to be subscription-free, we guess that’s the price you have to pay for avoiding WiFi; this strikes us as the ideal DPF for a grandparent who doesn’t have broadband. There’s also a 6-in-1 media card reader and USB port for side-loading images (with no charge, obviously) to the Photo Mail frame’s 1GB of internal memory, which can then be rotated and resized, and have their brightness and colors tweaked. Finally, it’ll play back AVI videos and MP3 audio.
Pandigital Begins Shipping Photo Mail Digital Photo Frame
Connected to AT&T Nationwide Wireless Network, Photo Sharing is Timely and Convenient
DUBLIN, Calif.—(BUSINESS WIRE)—Pandigital today announced it is now shipping its highly anticipated Pandigital Photo Mail® Digital Photo Frame to several national retailers.
The Pandigital Photo Mail Digital Photo Frame is a next-generation, wirelessly-connected digital photo frame that displays photos emailed directly to its dedicated email address. Customers can share that address with family and friends to allow them to send photos directly to the frame from their own email account – whether it’s from a computer, smart phone or any email-enabled device.
Incredibly easy to use, photos can be viewed on the Pandigital Photo Mail frame very quickly. The frame connects to email wirelessly through AT&T’s nationwide wireless network, so emailed photos are transmitted rapidly and reliably.
“We’re coming up on a fun and busy time of year where families are together often for special occasions like Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, graduations and summer vacations, and the Photo Mail frame is a great way to enjoy and share photos taken at these get-togethers,” said Dean Finnegan, CEO and founder, Pandigital. “With the frame, customers have a convenient, reliable way to view their photos and then share them quickly and easily with their family and friends.”
Pandigital Photo Mail frames are shipping to popular national retailers now and will be available for purchase by customers in the next several weeks. The Pandigital Photo Mail Digital Photo Frame will have a Manufacturer’s Suggested Retail Price of $179.99. The price of the frame includes the ability to receive 300 photos emailed to the frame with no service fee to the customer. Additional photo allotments may be purchased directly from Pandigital: 100 for $9.99, 400 for $29.99 and 700 for $49.99.
“Photo sharing is simple and timely with the Photo Mail frame connected to AT&T’s wireless network,” said Glenn Lurie, president, emerging devices, resale and partnerships, AT&T Mobility. “With this new era of connected frames, photos will no longer be held captive on a camera or a smart phone. Grandparents will have convenient, up to date access to a grandchild’s latest adventure and parents will have the ability to stay in touch visually with their children away at college.”
Customers are alerted by the frame when new photos are emailed to its dedicated email address by friends and family so that they may quickly accept the photos in a single step to then begin enjoying them. Because the frames can receive photos from a smart phone or other email-enabled device, photos can be sent from virtually anywhere, even on-the-go.
Traditional Digital Photo Frame Usage and Extra Features Give it Full Functionality
In addition to having the capability to receive photos via email, the Pandigital Photo Mail Digital Photo Frame can also be loaded with photos via its 6-in-1 media card reader (Compact Flash, SC, XD, MS, MSPro and MMC) or via a direct connection to a computer or digital camera. The frame can also be connected to a Wifi network via an add-on wireless adapter.
The Pandigital Photo Mail Digital Photo Frame has an 8-inch back-lit LED display that displays photos in vibrant color and a picture-enhancing 800×600 resolution. The 4:3 aspect ratio preserves the original format of the photos, ensuring that they are not stretched or cropped. Plus, with a full 1GB of internal memory and Pandigital’s memory optimization mode, consumers can enjoy up to 6400 images on the display. Also, images can be rotated and resized, and brightness and color settings can be changed. The Pandigital Photo Mail Digital Photo Frame also can play back AVI video clips and MP3 music files.
Maintaining the upscale style of the Pandigital line, the new Pandigital Photo Mail Digital Photo Frame features a traditional look with a real wood frame, photo matting and a glass screen cover, so it looks great in the home or office.
Acer’s TimelineX range of notebooks may have had a patchy launch, but the company – or at least their German arm – has finally followed up with some hard release details and pricing. The 13.3-inch Acer Aspire TimelineX 1830T will land in early June for €549 ($731), while the 13.3-inch 3820T will be €699 ($931), and both the 14-inch 4820T and the 15.6-inch 5820T will start from €749 ($997).
Interestingly, while Acer had previously announced that the Aspire TimelineX 1830T would have a choice of Centrino or Core 2 Solo CPUs, according to this new release the ultraportable will get a choice of Core i3 or Core i5-520UM processors. Meanwhile the other models will be offered with various Core i3, i5 or i7 chips.
Specific release windows for the 3820T, 4820T and 5820T are unconfirmed, but we’re guessing they’ll arrive in Europe roughly at around the same time as the 1830T.
Motorola have dropped out of the top five worldwide mobile phone manufacturers ranking, according to analysts IDC, with RIM taking their place. The move – which pegs Nokia in first place, followed by Samsung in second, LG in third and RIM sharing fourth place with Sony Ericsson – is being described as a sign of growing smartphone demand. Motorola, who have been a member of the top five since IDC began tracking worldwide quarterly figures in 2004, shipped 8.5m handsets in the three month period at the start of 2010; in contrast, RIM shipped 10.6m.
Western Europe has shown a strong pick-up in both smartphones and featurephones, while interest in the former was high in both the US and Canada. However, both countries saw decline, with only a renewed interest in messaging-centric featurephones keeping things buoyant. Asia/Pacific, meanwhile, saw strong growth, predominantly due to entry-level smartphone sales in the Chinese market.
However, as for the manufacturers themselves, it’s only when you look at the market share figures themselves that you begin to see the real movement. Nokia are down from 38.4-percent to 36.6-percent year-on-year, despite unit shipments being up by more than 14m, while Samsung have increased their market share to 21.8-percent and shipped almost 50-percent more devices than a year ago.
PMPs should have HDMI ports. It’s a pretty straightforward – and common-sense – idea, but most big-name portable media player manufacturers would far prefer to fit a proprietary socket and then sell you a pricey adapter cable afterwards. Ainol may not be a brand name you’re familiar with, but judging by MP4nation’s review their new V8000HDW certainly should be on your shortlist if you’re keen on HD playback.
That’s because as well as a decent 6-inch 800 x 480 display, the V8000HDW supports more codecs and file containers than you can shake a stick at, together with offering an HDMI 1.3 port for hooking up an HDTV. That means you can play up to 1080p Full HD video – including AVI, MP3, TS and MKV – directly from the Ainol PMP itself.
Onboard storage ranges from 1GB to 32GB (plus there’s a microSD card slot), and the Sochip SC9800 chipset the PMP is based on is apparently swift enough to keep even 1080p playback chugging along nicely. Unfortunately viewing angles aren’t great, so this probably isn’t the media player for communal viewing, but then of course you could always connect up a much larger display if you’d prefer. If you’re tempted, we’ve found the 8GB model available for $159.
Apple and Microsoft might not always agree, but it seems they coincide when it comes to Flash video. After Steve Jobs posted a lengthy critique of Adobe’s technology yesterday – followed by a reasonably swift rebuttal from the company themselves – Microsoft’s Dean Hachamovitch, general manager for IE9, has waded in to throw some support HTML5 and H.264’s way. According to Hachamovitch, “in its HTML5 support, IE9 will support playback of H.264 video only.”
Now, before you conclude that Flash is dead, it’s worth reading on to where he adds “Flash remains an important part of delivering a good consumer experience on today’s web.” However, the technology “does have some issues, particularly around reliability, security, and performance” he insists, and also points to the thorny matter if IP ownership for codecs as being another issue to take into account. This decision to plump for H.264 is more because the W3C – the internet standards body – don’t specify a codec for HTML5-funneled video.
You know what, we’re not gonna make that joke. You can, but we’ll just move right along to the meat of this story — Nokia has listed a telescopic stylus for capacitive screens, the SU-36, which seems to have come out right alongside the N8 to serve as its Symbian^3 assistant. Compatible with the N8, X6, and any other phone with a proper touchscreen on it, this retractable accessory will substitute your fingers when they are either too cold or too imprecise to do the job themselves. It’s not yet been priced or made available, but you’ll be fine using that sausage stylus for another few weeks, won’t ya?
While many grown-up gamers instantly thought back to the Virtual Boy when Nintendo announced the upcoming 3D successor to the DS, it turns out that the company actually had a 3D accessory dating back to the days of the original Famicom in Japan. The Famicom 3D used a pair of LCD shutter glasses connected to the console that would sync to the left eye/right eye images on screen, producing a convincing 3D effect.
There were only a handful of titles ever released that supported the 3D accessory because it never really caught on in Japan, which also meant that Nintendo never bothered to release it in the United States either. Of course the fact that users complained of motion sickness and headaches while using it didn’t help its cause. So hopefully Nintendo doesn’t strike out a 3rd time with whatever the 3DS ends up being.
When we first got our paws on the Dell Aero it was missing Maps, and the Market, and all the other Google-branded apps that make Android as good as it is. Initial fears regarding their absence were assuaged by representatives indicating that all of Google’s goodness would be available in the phone, and now it’s confirmed: the Aero will include all of the Google Mobile Services, including the Market, Maps, Gmail, and search. That contrasts with other AT&T Android offerings, which are still bereft of Google Maps. So sad.
Ah, Courier, we hardly knew you. “We have no plans” Microsoft say “to build such a device at this time.” Now, perhaps it’s my tablet-addled, ever-hopeful mind, but that doesn’t sound quite the same thing as “you won’t see a Courier-style device.” In fact, you could easily interpret it as a carefully worded workaround: we’re not going to build a Microsoft Courier, the company says, but other firms might. After all, they’ve already mention that “its technologies will be evaluated for use in future Microsoft offerings.”
Wishful thinking? You’re probably right, but I’m remembering MSI’s dual-display prototype that’s been wheeled out at a few trade shows now, and recent talk of a Toshiba Tegra 2 based “dual-screen model running Windows.” Both have been anecdotally compared with what we’ve seen of the Courier project.
Of course, that dual-display MSI notebook is facing problems of its own, the biggest being battery life. According to a recent Engadget report, MSI’s Andy Tung has said that “the two screens are a major drain on the battery, and even with a higher density battery and the Menlow CPU we are only getting three hours [of runtime].” The prediction is that the device won’t arrive until Q4 2010 at the earliest.
That’s a similar timescale as attached to the Toshiba tablet, which was fingered for late 2010 with Compal doing OEM duty. Toshiba themselves have confirmed that it’s on the cards, though is set to be more expensive than a single-screen Android version they’re also apparently looking into.
To be honest, such a move – providing a software solution, rather than taking the helm in hardware – would be a better fit with Microsoft’s general approach: giving OEMs the OS and letting them do their own thing with the physical product. That’s certainly the way they’ve played it in the past with the Tablet PC functionality integrated into various iterations of Windows, whether as a standalone version (like Windows XP Tablet Edition) or, as in Windows 7, baked into certain feature builds of the platform. There’s also the much-underrated OneNote digital journal app to consider, software which – while it will work perfectly well on a regular computer – really comes alive when used with pen input, with handwriting recognition, the ability to search through inked notes, OCR from pasted in photos and just the sort of life-recording that Courier seemed to promise.
Microsoft have been pushing pen and touchscreen input more and more with each OS release, and OneNote has been gradually making moves from the distant cousin of Office to an inclusive part of the Office Home and Student package. If it were me in charge, I’d avoid dipping my toe into competitive hardware waters – risking defining the niche to the detriment of manufacturers coming up with their own alternatives – and instead focus on pulling the technology in OneNote into a custom Windows build (multitouch and gestures included), and linking it up with the existing online tools like Windows Live Spaces blogs.
NVIDIA have been telling us for months that their latest Tegra chipsets can deliver not only 1080p HD performance but extreme power frugality, and it’s not unusual to find Tablet PCs with dual-mode displays that can automatically flick between finger-touch and stylus input. Alternatively we’ve seen plenty of rival chipset manufacturers with products capable of driving multiple simultaneous displays.
You’d need to solve three key issues for it to work: price, battery life and market positioning. The first is always going to be tricky, matching not one but two touchscreen panels with wireless-enabled components small enough (and sturdy enough) to make for a pocket- or bag-friendly device. Battery life is, as MSI have discovered, a make-or-break factor; however, when you ditch Intel’s CPUs and look to ARM-based platforms, far more interesting things are possible. Look at the 10+ hours of runtime Apple’s iPad is capable of for evidence of that.
Hardest still, though, is giving would-be buyers a reason to welcome a Courier-style device into their lives. Apple have a head-start in a way, what with the almost devotional levels of appeal the brand has to many people; the iPad was guaranteed a strong debut for that reason alone. For all that the “it’s just a big iPod touch” criticism must have rankled over at Cupertino, in the end it at least drew connections between the iPad and a paradigm consumers were familiar with. The growth of blogging, sharing-focused microblogs like Tumblr and social networking services such as Facebook and Twitter are all strong examples of spontaneous – and personalised – content manipulation and distribution that Microsoft could, if they’re clever, use to illustrate their new idea. Yes, perhaps it’s unlikely, but several months ago we were ready to write off Project Pink over talk of internal collapse, and Microsoft still brought Kin out to play. Time will still tell whether that particular project succeeds, but at least Microsoft showed they were willing to give it a chance.
Earlier this month, SlashGear columnist Michael Gartenberg pondered whether Moore’s Law was still relevant to PCs; obviously NVIDIA chief scientist and vice president Bill Dally has only just got the memo. The engineer has penned a guest column for Forbes on the limitations of current CPU technology, and more specifically the fact that – while processor speed has increased pretty much as Moore predicted – the power scaling part of Moore’s Law has ended. ”As a result, the CPU scaling predicted by Moore’s Law is now dead,” Dally suggests, before suggesting that parallel computing will be our saviour.
Apple and Microsoft might not always agree, but it seems they coincide when it comes to Flash video. After Steve Jobs posted 
