Random Accesses

The Apple iPhone's sexy touchscreen with its multi-touch commands has been a huge hit with the public, but such screens can only get so small before clunky fingers get in the way. So Microsoft is extending the concept of the touchscreen beyond the edges of the phone itself.

The company's researchers have developed a system called SideSight, which allows you to control a phone placed on a table by wiggling your fingers in the space around it. The technology was unveiled last week at the User Interface in Software and Technology symposium in Monterey, California.

Alex Butler of the Sensors and Devices Group at Microsoft Research Cambridge in the UK lined the long sides of a phone with infrared sensors that can pick up the movement of fingers up to 10 centimetres away.

"The big advantage of our prototype is the finger does not block any of the screen space," says Butler.

Source: http://technology.newscientist.com/article/dn15044-virtual-touchpad-lets-you-scroll-in-thin-air-.html

Jim Mielke's wireless blood-fueled display is a true merging of technology and body art. At the recent Greener Gadgets Design Competition, the engineer demonstrated a subcutaneously implanted touch-screen that operates as a cell phone display, with the potential for 3G video calls that are visible just underneath the skin.

The basis of the 2x4-inch "Digital Tattoo Interface" is a Bluetooth device made of thin, flexible silicon and silicone. It´s inserted through a small incision as a tightly rolled tube, and then it unfurls beneath the skin to align between skin and muscle. Through the same incision, two small tubes on the device are attached to an artery and a vein to allow the blood to flow to a coin-sized blood fuel cell that converts glucose and oxygen to electricity. After blood flows in from the artery to the fuel cell, it flows out again through the vein.

Source: http://www.physorg.com/news122819670.html

Samsung, NXP Semiconductors and T3G Technologies, today (November 9 2007) announced the world's first TD-SCDMA HSDPA/GSM/GPRS/EDGE multi-mode mobile phone, which has also been demoed at the PT/Wireless Exposition in Beijing on October 23rd.

Powered by a software-defined modem capable of achieving data transfer rates of 2.8Mbps, the Samsung SGH-T578H enables about 20 times faster transfers than GPRS, allowing consumers to download several high-quality MP3 files in less than a minute. The phone is based on the T3G7210 system solution featuring the industry's first soft modem empowered by NXP's Embedded Vector Processor (EVP) to achieve high data transfer and multi-mode capability.

TD-SCDMA network deployments have been completed in 10 major cities across China where there are more than 70 million potential subscribers. This network is planned to be upgraded to support Release 5 (HSDPA) of the TD-SCDMA standard during the course of 2008. With the Samsung SGH-T578H mobile phone, users will be able to enjoy the widespread deployment of TD-SCDMA infrastructure to support high-speed streaming of multimedia coverage of the Beijing Olympics 2008.

Source: http://www.physorg.com/news113837743.html

Compression algorithms are not really new, so I’ve looked cautiously at the work of U.S. computer scientists claiming that ‘they have developed technology that doubles the usable memory on cell phones and other embedded systems without any changes to hardware or applications.’

The CRAMES (Compressed RAM for Embedded Systems) technology uses the Linux kernel’s swapping mechanism to determine which pages should be compressed. According to the researchers, cell phones equipped with this technology don’t use more power than regular ones and show a very small performance loss. The first phone to use the CRAMES technology is sold by NEC — but only in Japan right now.

Now, how did the researchers designed their software? “The team’s approach was to divide the memory in the system into two different regions, one regular and one where the data is greatly compressed. A very simple example of data compression is converting a list of 50 individual ‘A’s into the phrase ‘50 As,’ which takes up less space but communicates the same information.

Source: http://blogs.zdnet.com/emergingtech/?p=703

In 2020, whipping out your mobile phone to make a call will be quaintly passé. By then phones will be printed directly on to wrists, or other parts of the body, says Ian Pearson, BT's resident futurologist.

It's all part of what's known as a "pervasive ambient world", where "chips are everywhere".

Mr Pearson does not have a crystal ball. His job is to formulate ideas based on what science and technology are doing now, to guide industries into the future.

Inanimate objects will start to interact with us: we will be surrounded - on streets, in homes, in appliances, on our bodies and possibly in our heads - by things that "think".

Forget local area networks - these will be body area networks.

Source: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/4059011.stm