Sony unveils next-generation mobile camera sensors
Sony Corporation on Monday announced that it is working on a new design for CMOS image sensors that will be used in camera modules for smartphones, tablets, and other mobile applications. This model of sensor includes built-in signal processing functionality, a task which used to be handled by external elements, and that it can handle advanced imaging tasks in an even smaller profile.
The design is what is known as a stacked CMOS sensor, and Sony has turned two major elements of the sensor into independent components. The stack puts the "pixel section" and "circuit section" fully on top of one another rather than fitting them on the same board side-by-side.
RIM's strategy of marketing, Android apps, and low-end devices fails to excite
Canadian smartphone pioneer Research in Motion announced on Sunday that its co-chairmen Mike Lazaridis and Jim Balsillie would be stepping down, and former Siemens CTO Thorsten Heins would be rising from his position of Chief Operating Officer at RIM to the role of Chief Executive.
Heins' formal introduction to the public seems to have done little to change the public's mind about Research in Motion and its prospects as a competitor against Android and Apple smartphones.
Google killing Social Graph API, Picnik, GMC Exchange backup
Friday afternoon, Google announced the future plans for six of its properties: Google Message Continuity (GMC), Sky Map, Needlebase, Picnik, Social Graph API, and Urchin. The company has determined that each of these products is either redundant, underperforming, or incongruent with Google's overall experience.
Like the retirement of Google Labs six months ago, some of these projects will be merged with others, some will be open sourced, and some will simply be wound down for good.
Feds shut down Megaupload, call it an international organized crime ring
As the internet pats itself on the back for protesting SOPA and changing the minds of a handful of U.S. Senators, file-sharing site Megaupload has been brought down in one of the largest copyright infringement cases of all time.
Seven individuals and two international corporations have been charged in the United States with running an international organized crime ring dealing exclusively in piracy of copyrighted material.
Apple reveals education trifecta: iBooks 2, iBooks Author, and iTunes U
At a private event at the Guggenheim Museum in New York City on Thursday, Apple unveiled its multi-pronged approach for cracking the higher education market with iBooks 2, iBooks Author, and iTunes U. The result is an environment for creating, distributing, and consuming learning materials that is entirely contained within the Apple product ecosystem.
There were three main parts to Apple's education announcement on Thursday:
Motorola Xoom tablet gets upgrade to Android 4.0 starting today
Motorola Mobility on Wednesday announced its popular Xoom Wi-Fi tablets will be the first of the company's Android-powered devices to receive the upgrade to Android 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich,) beginning immediately.
Xoom was actually the first major tablet to be released running Android 3.1 (Honeycomb), the somewhat ill-conceived "tablet only" version of Android. With today's rollout of the Ice Cream Sandwich upgrade, it becomes the first Honeycomb tablet to receive the operating system upgrade.
How to control an entire live band with Android
At CES 2012, we took a quick look at Samsung's booth displaying the Galaxy Note as a tool useful to artists and musicians, and I talked about the relatively small number of killer music applications for the Android platform.
Fortunately the band performing in Samsung's booth, Body Language, was willing to show us exactly how they incorporate Android devices into their live music setup, and how we can do the same.
With new CEO in place, Jerry Yang completely divorces from Yahoo
Yahoo co-founder and former CEO Jerry Yang has tendered his resignation from all of his positions at Yahoo, including his spot on the Board of Directors of Yahoo USA and Japan, and his position within Alibaba.
In a letter to the board, Yang said, "My time at Yahoo!, from its founding to the present, has encompassed some of the most exciting and rewarding experiences of my life. However, the time has come for me to pursue other interests outside of Yahoo! As I leave the company I co-founded nearly 17 years ago, I am enthusiastic about the appointment of Scott Thompson as Chief Executive Officer and his ability, along with the entire Yahoo! leadership team, to guide Yahoo! into an exciting and successful future."
Everything you need to know about e-textbooks before Apple gets involved
Apple is holding an education-themed event this week, and the usual gamut of unnamed sources and rumor-mongers have come to the consensus that the event will focus on Apple's plans to enter the e-textbook business, and possibly unveil a new interactive e-book publishing platform.
This rumor springs from the best-selling biography of late Apple CEO Steve Jobs, in which Jobs' biographer Walter Isaacson said textbooks were "the next business [Jobs] wanted to transform," and that the company had already had several series of meetings about making Apple e-textbooks a reality.
Samsung's Bada will merge with Tizen. Just WTF is going on here?
According to a Forbes report, South Korean consumer electronics heavyweight Samsung is integrating the still-new, still-unreleased open source operating system Tizen into its surprisingly popular Bada mobile operating system.
Tizen is the latest incarnation of the seemingly ever-changing mobile Linux distro formerly known as MeeGo; which itself was the combination of Nokia's Maemo and Intel and the Linux Foundation's Moblin projects.
Samsung offers Galaxy Note as a tool for 'creatives'
Apple products are deeply entrenched in the creative world. Both Mac and iOS-based devices are the common tools among graphic designers, artists, music producers and composers, and yes, even journalists. (Especially journalists, don't even get me started.)
At CES 2012 this week, Samsung made a major appeal to "creatives" with the new Galaxy Note mini-tablet. In a large booth in a hallway outside of the show floor, Samsung set up caricature artists with Galaxy Notes, who were drawing passers by as musicians played in the background, using the Galaxy Note and the apps touchOSC and TouchDAW as a part of their performance gear.
Hands-on: Huawei Ascend P1 S, super slim Android phone [video]
Notebook PCs aren't the only thing getting slimmed down to razor-thin profiles in 2012. This year, there will be at least three Android-powered smartphones vying for consumer interest by being as thin as possible. So thin, in fact, that each calls itself the thinnest.
This trend started with the Motorola Droid RAZR in the fourth quarter of 2011, which Motorola Mobility CEO Sanjay Jha said was the thinnest smartphone on the market.
Hands-on: Nokia Lumia 900, THE Windows Phone [video]
At the International Consumer Electronics Show 2012 in Las Vegas this week, Finnish mobile phone leader Nokia debuted the Lumia 900, its first smartphone designed specifically for the United States market. We got to play with it quite a bit, and here's a runthrough of the device's strong points.
The Lumia 900 follows the same design ethic as the N9 and Lumia 800, with a single piece polycarbonate body, gently rounded sides and blunted top and bottom edges. Nokia has equipped the device with all the features that U.S. media and consumers complained were missing in the N9 and 800: 4G LTE connectivity, larger screen size, and a forward-facing camera.
Up Close: Samsung's new Chromebook and Chromebox [video]
While Samsung cut an imposing figure at the International Consumer Electronics Show 2012 with its huge flashy booth, the Korean electronics company managed to quietly display its upcoming second-generation Chrome OS devices without attracting tons of attention.
These new Chrome OS products include an updated Series 5 Chromebook which has 2GB of RAM, a 16GB SSD and a moderately faster CPU. It retains the smooth and ergonomic feel of the first generation Chromebook, but unfortunately also retains that device's somewhat cheap and plasticky feel. Samsung said the price will also remain the same.
Hands-on: LG Viper 4G, Sprint's second LTE smartphone [video]
Sprint's Network Vision upgrade to LTE won't be a top-down change, where only flagship devices will be able to hook up to the high speed network, among the carrier's first LTE devices will be the slightly cheaper, slightly less flashy LG Viper 4G.
The device is light and smallish (at least when compared to Sprint's flagship LTE phone, the Samsung Galaxy Nexus,) and its primary selling points are its high recyclability and low energy footprint. While these qualities rarely prove to be majorly attractive to consumers, it's still nice to have them checked off when looking at new devices.
Tim's Bio
Tim Conneally was born into dumpster tech. His father was an ARPANET research pioneer and equipped his kids with discarded tech gear, second-hand musical instruments, and government issue foreign language instruction tapes. After years of building Frankenstein computers from rubbish and playing raucous music in clubs across the country (and briefly on MTV) Tim grew into an adult with deep, twisted roots and an eye on the future. He most passionately covers mobile technology, user interfaces and applications, the science and policy of the wireless world, and watching different technologies shrink and converge.
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