HTC announced yesterday that it was buying S3 Graphics from VIA and its partner in the operation. We speculated at the time that the purchase might be a build up to the company making its own GPUs. If you were like me and hoping that was the case, you will be disappointed. HTC has announced that it purchased S3 simply for the patents. It looks like HTC is set to pull a Microsoft and troll the patent waters.
HTC expects to recoup the investment in S3 in two to three years. It’s interesting that stock in HTC dropped on news of the purchase. HTC’s Winston Yung has admitted as well that the patents will give it more leverage over Apple, who has been found to infringe on two S3 patents, in the ongoing patent battle between the two firms. The purchase netted HTC 235 new patents.
“In patent negotiations, it is difficult if the other company has patents and you don’t. If you have patents too, perhaps you can arrive at a cross-licensing agreement … We’re not talking about five years before we will see financial benefits and returns, we’re talking about using these patents to start generating revenue now” Winston Yung, HTC
HTC will use the patents both “defensively and offensively” and we can likely expect a hoard of new suits to show up eventually connected to the purchase. HTC is planning lots of purchases this year, having already invested in Saffron Digital back in February and holding a big stake in OnLive Inc for cloud gaming.
If you have a notebook that you like that lacks 3G or 4G connectivity inside you don’t need to get a new notebook. What you need is a speedy USB modem to cram inside your rig. AT&T has announced a new USB modem for notebook users that plugs into your USB port and gives you access to the AT&T mobile broadband network.
The USBConnect Force 4G modem will be offered for free on a new two-year data plan starting on July 17. If you don’t want a contract, the modem works on the AT&T pay-as-you go data network as well. With no contract, the modem is $89.99 and the user can choose their data plan via integrated activation procedures.
The modem also includes unlimited WiFi access to AT&T Hotspots with a domestic plan and can roam in more than 200 countries. The modem is built by Huawei and operates on the HSPA/HSPA+ and EDGE/GPRS networks AT&T runs. That means the data speeds aren’t true 4G. This thing will work on Windows and Mac machines.
This update to the Droid 2 Global steps up to a better display, better camera, adds a front-facing camera, and adds a dedicated number row to the keyboard. Other features of this Android phone remain similar, including global 3G roaming, Adobe Flash, video output via HDMI and DLNA, slide-out QWERTY keyboard, 3.5mm audio jack, and up to 48 GB of memory.
Air guitar is the age-old ritual that goes along with your favorite music and happens when a music fan has no musical talent of their own to actually play the song (in my case anyway). Instead, we turn to faking. Air guitar is basically the instrumental versions of lip sync. A very cool new toy called Air Picks has surfaced that make your air guitar actually playable.
The picks are shaped like your typical guitar pick, though they are significantly fatter than the real thing. The Air Picks are form a company called Flair in the UK and will hit stores in the next few weeks. There are several versions and each have three songs inside. I get the feeling that the tunes are the guitar portion only, but that isn’t clear.
They are songs you will know too with tracks from famous artists like the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. The toy will only play the next note in the song if you strum your air guitar. Pulling off that Angus Young kick move as you strum said air guitar is optional. Tracks include Jumping Jack Flash, Satisfaction, Born to be Wild, Smoke on the Water, and Sweet Home Alabama. I wonder if these will launch in the US as well.
Typically, when you say instant camera, we think of the sort like the old Polaroid’s that you shoot the pic, the film comes out the front and in a bit you have a nice color photo to share. A dude named Niklas Roy made his own instant camera. While the photo might take about the same amount of time as that old Polaroid to be ready to share, it’s nowhere near as fast for the subject of the photo. The subject has to stand still for three minutes.
Roy’s instant camera uses an old black and white video camera that is hooked in some way to a thermal receipt printer, as you would see at a store. When the camera is on the receipt printer prints the photos out line by line at a snail’s pace. The catch for the subject is that there is no memory inside the camera so each line is forgotten as soon as it prints.
That means the camera has to go back to the old days of photography and requires the subject to be still for three minutes. That doesn’t sound that long until you actually try and sit or stand motionless and see that a few minutes feels like an eternity. This is a cool DIY project.
It seems that Steve Jobs and his minions in Cupertino are reversing on the long held beliefs that a stylus isn’t required if you get a touchscreen device right. Jobs once quipped on stage during a presentation, “It’s like we said on the iPad, if you see a stylus, they blew it.” If you go by that statement then Apple may have blown it since two more patent apps have surfaced that show Apple looking at stylus tech for potential use in its gear.
The two new patents with the one we found back in February make three this year alone. That would seem to be a strong indication that a stylus is coming. Along with the patents come some crude line art that shows one of the devices having a slot where a stylus would store and charge. The first patent app is called “Stylus for touchscreen devices” and describes a simple stylus with a special tip for capacitive screens. It uses a rechargeable battery according to the patent app and the tip can be heated for better interaction between stylus and screen.
The second patent app is more interesting and is called “Communicating Stylus.” This patent describes a stylus that could be used to shoot whatever you write on another surface over to the iPad or iPhone. That would mean you could write notes in class or in a meeting and the stylus would shoot the writing over to the Apple gadget. Both of the patents are new having been filed in January 2010.
As expected, Verizon has officially announced the DROID 3 by Motorola, which we saw sprout up on the company’s site in recent hours. The keyboard-equipped handset is, Verizon claims, the world’s thinnest QWERTY smartphone, and offers a 4-inch qHD 960 x 540 touchscreen, slide-out 5-row ‘board and 8-megapixel camera with 1080p Full HD video capture.
Inside is a dual-core 1GHz processor, OS is Android 2.3, and there’s mobile hotspot functionality to share the DROID 3′s EVDO Rev.A connection among WiFi-tethered clients. You get World Phone roaming support, too, with an integrated 3G WCDMA modem, though sadly no 4G LTE. The DROID 3 also ushers in Verizon’s new data plans, kicking off from $30 for 2GB of data.
There’s HDMI screen mirroring, together with Citrix GoToMeeting and Receiver for enterprise users wanting to log into online meetings or their work desktop while on the move. Motorola also preloads QuickOffice, and there’s various enterprise-friendly stuff like device and SD card encryption, complex password support and remote data wiping of both the DROID 3 and its SD card.
A front-facing camera, smart dock which allows the DROID 3 to open different apps depending on whether it’s at home, at the office or in the car, and Flash Player 10.3 support round out the key specs. The Verizon DROID 3 by Motorola is available online now and in-store from July 14, priced at $199.99 with a new, two-year agreement.
Apple has announced that the App Store has passed 15 billion downloads, with over 200m iPhone, iPad and iPod touch owners taking their pick from what now amounts to over 425,000 titles. Among the selection are over 100,00 dedicated iPad apps, a milestone the company passed last week, and a stark contrast to the far lower number of specific Android Honeycomb titles on offer.
Apple has already paid developers over $2.5 billion to date, the company claims. “In just three years,” senior VP of worldwide product marketing Philip Schiller says, ”the revolutionary App Store has grown to become the most exciting and successful software marketplace the world has ever seen.”
That marketplace is under attack, however, from rival firms. Earlier this week, Apple failed to win an injunction against Amazon over its rival’s use of “appstore” for its own download store; Apple had argued that the similarity of the names could “confuse and mislead customers.” The fight is now on for Apple to preserve its trademark rather than see “app store” become accepted as a generic term.
Researchers and scientists are working around the globe to find new and novel ways to generate the power needed to operate sensors and devices for all sorts of needs. Researchers at Georgia Tech including professor Manos Tentzeris, Georgia Tech School of Electrical and Computer Engineering professor, have developed a very interesting new way to harvest electromagnetic energy using a wearable sensor printed using common ink jet technology.
Tentzeris says that there is a huge amount of electromagnetic energy all around us, but we can’t currently tap into that power source. Tentzeris and his team have created a wearable energy-scavenging sensor that also includes integrated antennas and is printed onto paper of flexible polymers. The result of the printing process creates a self-powered wireless sensor that could be used for defense and industrial applications as chemical, biological, heat, and stress sensing.
The researchers say that experiments using their sensors and TV bands of electromagnetic energy have created power amounting to hundreds of microwatts. Multiband systems based on the technology will be able to creates a single milliwatt or more. That doesn’t sound like much power, but it would be enough to operate small electronic devices like sensors or microprocessors.
For a long time the general consensus among many geeks was that Apple gear didn’t have the security flaws that some other brands suffered from. As the Apple gear has grown in popularity, especially the iPhone and iPad, more and more exploits and attacks for Apple devices are surfacing. One of the more recent security vulnerabilities in iOS surfaced this week when a German IT security agency warned of a vulnerability in the way PDFs are handled.
The vulnerability was described by the agency as a critical weakness in iOS. When the announcement was made the German Federal Office for Information Security said that clicking on an infected PDF was sufficient to infect the device with malware without the user knowing on several iOS versions. Even the Jailbreakme.com site that will jailbreak your iPhone or iPad warns users to grab a patch on the Cydia store after unlocking their device.
Apple is fessing up to the flaw and has promised a fix for the issue on both the iPhone and the iPad. Apple is apparently working on the fix right now, though an exact date for the fix to land hasn’t been announced. Apple has only said that a fix will be coming in a future software update.
If you have a notebook that you like that lacks 3G or 4G connectivity inside you don’t need to get a new notebook. What you need is a speedy USB modem to cram inside your rig. AT&T has announced a new USB modem for notebook users that plugs into your USB port and gives you access to the AT&T mobile broadband network.
