Apple profits for hardware will drop but software sales and market share will climb
Last year when the first generation iPhone was announced by Apple, the bill of materials for the device was estimated to be in the area of $170. According to recent analysis the new iPhone 3G could be costing Apple significantly less to make than the original iPhone.
According to teardown analysis from Portelligent Inc., the new iPhone 3G could have a bill of materials as low as $100. This reduction in the cost to build the device takes into account the increased prices for the addition of a 3G chipset and a GPS chip.
“Gen2 iPhone pricing is aggressive enough that it made me think Apple's really taking the gloves off on this one," noted Portelligent president David Carey. "They are probably not as worried about iPhone hardware profits as they are about getting a piece of the action on service revenues and getting more Macs in homes and offices all around the globe.”
This aggressive pricing is taking some money out of Apple’s coffers on hardware sales. However, Apple will likely make up the losses on hardware sales in revenues for software sold via the App Store. DailyTech reported that the App Store could be a billion dollar business for Apple by 2009.
Will Strauss from Forward Concepts told EETimes that he believes the iPhone 3G is using an Infineon baseband and RF transceiver along with a Samsung applications processor. Samsung launched a handset with these same parts recently and pointed out that the cost of the Infineon chips were about 20% less than similar chips from Qualcomm.
According to Carey, the addition of the HSPDA chipset adds $15 and the addition of the GPS chip adds another $5. Those additional costs are offset in part by the reduced memory pricing compared to last year. These cost figures, of course, don't take into account development, marketing, and software costs.
6/19/08
Apple iPhone 3G May Only Cost $100 to Make
Palm Expects to Ship 2 Million Centro Smartphones
Palm hopes to keep seeing its Centro smartphones fly off store shelves
Palm Inc. may be stuck in a rut and facing difficult financial times, but it hopes selling 2 million units of the Centro smartphone in 2008 will help turn things around.
At least 1 million units have been shipped so far in the United States since the phone's launch in mid-October. The Centro is Palm's fastest selling smartphone in company history.
Palm's recent announcement that the phone is now available for Verizon Wireless will help the company ship even more units of the phone. Consumers can now purchase and use a Centro on the Verizon Wireless, AT&T and Sprint Nextel phone networks.
Verizon customers can purchase the phone for $99.99 after a $70 MIR and two-year customer agreement or extension with Verizon.
Centro features a QWERTY keyboard, Bluetooth, digital camera, 64MB internal memory, and runs on Palm OS 5.4.9.
The phone is considered a smaller, easier to use Palm Treo smartphone, but it has some drawbacks. While it allows its users to e-mail, browse the internet, text and picture message, there isn't a built-in instant message program available.
The Centro's success can be attributed to new smartphone users, Palm indicated in a press release. The Apple iPhone 3G may have gotten a price cut, but the Centro remains cheap and easy to use, and Palm expects it will continue to draw in new smart phone owners.
Understanding its using an aging operating system and internet browser unlikely to please experienced smart phone owners, Palm is working on a new OS that should be available in 2009. The team of developers will be responsible solely for creating a new interactive platform aimed directly towards higher-end, more experienced phone users.
According to IDC, Palm increased its market share 5 percent, and now controls 13 percent of the global smartphone market.
Microsoft Announces NavReady Embedded Operating System for PNDs
NavReady is Microsoft's first category specific operating system
Microsoft announced a new embedded Windows operating system this week called NavReady. Microsoft says that NavReady is the first category-specific operating system it has released.
Some key features of NavReady are a small footprint that uses a componentized technology that allows the OS to be incorporated into CE 5.0 designs easily. The OS is designed to run on an ARM processor and it supports a 32-bit native real-time unified kernel.
Microsoft says that NavReady will help manufacturers build portable navigation devices (PNDs) with a highly connected design. The OS supports Bluetooth for rich hands-free usage, managed dial-up networking services and other Bluetooth features.
One key component is Live Search for devices that helps perform search quires to find points of interest. Desktop pass-though is also featured and allows the PND to establish connections to online services and the Internet when the device is connected to a Windows-based PC that has ActiveSync/WDMC installed along with an internet connection. PNDs using the NavReady OS can also act as SideShow display for Vista computers.
The internet connectivity of the new OS allows for use of MSN Direct for updates on traffic, gas prices and more. PC World reports that Mio Technology has already announced it will use the Windows Embedded NavReady 2009 operating system in its next line of Mio GPS devices.
XM, Sirius Merger Gets FCC Chairman Kevin Martin's Approval
Final vote on the merger could come at any time
FCC Chairman Kevin Martin has recommended that the merger between Sirius and XM be approved according to the Associated Press. To get Martin’s approval, provisions were added to the merger deal that would turn over a portion of the available bandwidth from the satellite providers to noncommercial and minority programming.
The provisions for turning over portions of the satellite bandwidth require the two companies to donate 8% of their satellite capacity to noncommercial and minority broadcasts. That available bandwidth equates to about 12 channels each from Sirius and XM for a total of 24 channels.
Other provisions from Martin to his approval include an open radio agreement that would promote competition among manufacturers of satellite radios and a three year price freeze on all packages and an a la cart option to be available within three months of the close of the deal.
The AP quotes Martin from a statement, “As I've indicated before, this is an unusual situation. I am recommending that with the voluntary commitments they (the companies) have offered, on balance, this transaction would be in the public interest.”
Despite Martin’s approval the final vote to approve the merger is yet to happen and the other four commissioners could still say no to the merger. There is no clear indication on how the other commissioners feel on the merger at this time.
The approval of the merger has been long sought by Sirius and XM. The merger was approved by the U.S. Justice Department in March. When Sirius and XM first announced they intended to merge their two companies the deal was worth in the area of $13 billion.
The final vote on the merger could come any time after Martin’s recommendation is given to his fellow commissioners.
Phoenix Gets Some Dirt on Mars
After a short sticky situation, Phoenix returns some images to Earth.
After successfully reaching Mars at the end of a nine and a half month jaunt through interplanetary space, the Phoenix Lander landed safely on the surface and began broadcasting data back to Earth. Phoenix's well known mission is to study the Martian surface and air, scanning it for traces of life and help to discover how a planet once thought to be at least partially covered with water became an icy desert.
To examine the rust-colored soil, Phoenix uses a robotic arm which wields a small backhoe type bucket to scoop up soil and bring it to the various instruments aboard the lander. Presently, the probe has gathered at least one sample which has been imaged by its Optical Microscope instrument.
The soil sample surprised Phoenix mission crew, being somewhat more clumpy and sticky than was theorized. However, the particles that were imaged by the microscope were successfully deposited upon a custom silicone substrate. The substrate contains several different strips with different sizes and patterns of pegs and holes machined into them. The various patterns are designed to help capture and hold different sizes of particles for imaging not only by the Optical Microscope, but by Phoenix's onboard Atomic Force Microscope.
The images show various types of particles, most notably large particles of dark glassy appearance, probably volcanic in origin, and smaller particles which are more similar to the dust that swirls endlessly in the Martian atmosphere. Also in the mix are at least four different types of minerals.
No reports of life are flooding in from the Phoenix control center. Though the lander has been on Mars for nearly 20 days, data from the instruments is just starting to be collected and analyzed. It may be weeks or months before a sample of ice, what the mission planners are most enthusiastically seeking, is collected for analysis.
Mars may have an active, though slow climate. It may have once teemed with primordial life in liquid water. With any luck and a little work, thanks to the Phoenix lander, we may soon have answers to these unknowns.
Doctors Test Newly Invented Gestural Interface During Brain Surgery
The new and growing field of gestural computing got a serious field test during brain surgery
Gestural interfaces are a hot new field of computing. Microsoft announced that its upcoming OS -- Windows 7 -- will rely heavily on gestures and touch. In a most basic sense, a gestural interface is controlled by movements of the hands or arms, allowing users to gesture to literally scroll around images on screen. Sometimes this is coupled with touch in devices such as the iPhone, where a pinching gesture can shrink or expand items.
Continuing the progress in the field of gestural computing, researchers at Israel's Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (BGU) developed a new gestural computer system specially designed for medical use. In the past, doctors used touch screens or mice to navigate about images during surgeries. However, by touching the screen, they risk compromising sterility and introducing infection into the surgery site.
The new system is purely gestural and requires no touch. It allows doctors to scroll around images by moving their hands in front of the screen.
The system received an impressive field test at a Washington D.C. hospital and the results are detailed in the June article “A Gesture-based Tool for Sterile Browsing of Radiology Images" in the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association.
Juan P. Wachs, a recent Ph.D. recipient from the Department of Industrial Engineering and Management at BGU lead the research, which he describes stating, "A sterile human-machine interface is of supreme importance because it is the means by which the surgeon controls medical information, avoiding patient contamination, the operating room (OR) and the other surgeons. This could replace touch screens now used in many hospital operating rooms which must be sealed to prevent accumulation or spreading of contaminants and requires smooth surfaces that must be thoroughly cleaned after each procedure – but sometimes aren't. With infection rates at U.S. hospitals now at unacceptably high rates, our system offers a possible alternative."
The new system, known as Gestix, eliminates the need for complex and largely ineffective sterilization procedures on today's OR touch screens. When surgeons first start with the system, they train it and learn to use it by learning to move their hand in one of eight directions away from a neutral area, fast. This movement scrolls the image. They also learn to zoom in and out by rotating their hand clockwise or counterclockwise. To avoid misleading signals, when the doctor is done, they drop their hand which triggers a sleep mode.
The hand motions are captured using a Canon VC-C4 camera and they are processed by an Intel Pentium processor and a Matrox Standard II Video Capture device. The system was tested to much success at the Washington Hospital Center in Washington, D.C during two "in vivo" neurosurgical brain biopsies. This may be the first time such a system was used with an "in vivo" procedure, according to the researchers.
Wachs worked with colleagues Professors Helman Stern and Yael Edan on the project and with a variety of M.S. students, who theses pertained to the topic. Ongoing research is focusing to expand the gestural interface for use in tele-robotic and tele-operated systems. By adding voice recognition, researchers hope to create a system with many control modes (multimodal).
Other additional research on the imaging side is being developed by Prof. Helman Stern and Dr. Tal Oren of the Dept. of Industrial Engineering and Management and Dr. Amir Shapiro of the Dept. of Mechanical Engineering. They aim to help the vision impaired navigate better through use of this system and a tactile body display.
BGU's staff has not announced the current commercialization plans for the technology, but it seems likely that it will soon be finding its way into hospitals.
AP Uses DCMA Takedown on News Site; Riles Bloggers, Online News Community
Blogger remains defiant against AP, explores legal options
The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) provided a valuable tool for copyright owners such as artists and writers to defend their property online. However, in the ever evolving online community, the DMCA notices, as they are commonly known, are being used more and more often, at times threatening seemingly legitimate sites.
Some argue that the DMCA powers are being used to infringe upon users' online freedoms -- and frequently. The latest and perhaps most thought provoking DMCA battle is building between the Associate Press (AP) and The Drudge Retort, a social news/blog owned by Rogers Cadenhead, over the reposting of AP article snippets.
Interestingly, the AP is attacking both the owner for his news posts that occasionally contain small excerpts of AP text linked to the original story, and his users who similarly post snippets from various web stories on the internet in the contents. In both cases, the AP says this makes these pages in question DMCA takedown fodder.
Pursuit of action against the first alleged type of offense -- site-run reprints -- could threaten many news distribution sites such as Digg, Reddit, and Mixx, which bring news to millions of users a day. The second purported illegal offense -- users reposting comments is even more far-reaching as users on major news sites frequently have users post snippets from AP articles.
The second allegation in particular is raising a provocative question -- should commenters' actions result in punishment of a site? If so, this would mean news sites must scour every user post and try to determine if it contained copyrighted content. While The Drudge Retort is a relatively small fish, the questions raised by the AP's attack are salient to most of the online industry, from news sites, to the multitude of forums that see similar posts.
While it’s possible that major outlets like AP will only target minor, relatively weak targets like The Drudge Retort, some fear that they may begin to target multiple sites, similar to the RIAA's campaign against filesharers. In the AP lawyers' letter to Cadenhead, they state their belief that "The Drudge Retort users' use of AP content does not fall within the parameters of fair use."
They continue, "AP considers taking the headline and lead of a story without a proper license to be an infringement of its copyrights, and additionally constitutes 'hot news' misappropriation."
Seven takedown notices were filed in total against the site.
The AP is a wire service, both online and offline which writes news stories that are reprinted for heavy fees by member outlets. The service does not have its own "inbound links" or "search-juice", contrary a misconception held by some bloggers. Only its members do, which is why they are willing to pay a premium for it. The AP's stance, while a bit draconian does make sense from one perspective -- if writers could get the content for free, why would they pay AP so much for it?
The attack on the site is part of a growing campaign of legal actions from the AP. In October they targeted the news site Moreover owned by Verisign, which has similar type of service, but in its case charges users for it and a variety of other content. However the Moreover case was slightly more blatant as the site was allegedly reposting entire articles without paying.
The AP debate highlights the questions surrounding the rather ambiguous legal concept of "fair use" which is decided on a case by case basis on many determinates. Among these are whether the use is part of a commercial effort or if it’s for nonprofit. Other factors include the nature of the work and the size of the excerpted text in relation to the size of the full original text. Also considered is the effect on the owner of the copyright.
While Moreover is obviously violating fair use by the above definition, it’s harder to tell with The Drudge Retort. Its owner obviously sees his site and its commenters' use as fair use, while the AP disagrees.
While the AP has yet to wage full scale online war to similar occurrences which litter the web and online news, this latest case illustrates a more aggressive shift on its stance on fair use. The ramifications of the case and those that follow may be extremely significant to the future of the online world.
New Dielectric Material Promises Radiation Resistant Transistors, Flexible Computers
Roll-up, transparent computers and displays are just one of the neat sci-fi gadgets a new material from Northwestern University may lead to.
DailyTech has in the past covered research into the effects of long term exposure to space bound radiation on humans. Though mankind has spent many years in space, the effects of prolonged exposure, even under ideal circumstances, are as of yet unknown. Though the human part of space travel is the most important part of the equation for manned flight, radiation poses a series threat to other participants – especially electronics.
The effects of radiation on over-the-counter electronics are, in contrast, fairly well known. One of the most important parts of any electronic appliance, the transistor, is one of the most susceptible components to radiation. The problem comes from the absorptive properties of the silicon dioxide dielectrics that insulate a transistor's gate from its semiconductor components. Silicon dioxide captures radiation, which in turn creates electrons and holes. This process eventually builds up enough of a charge to short circuit the transistor, destroying it.
Not only do the human parts of a manned space odyssey need to be protected from the harsh environs of space, the fragile machinery that carries them will have to be as well. To address this concern, scientists at Northwestern University have delivered a new type of transistor to use in the International Space Station for testing. The prototype transistors were placed outside the space station where they will gain unprotected exposure to space radiation for the period of one year.
The transistors are based on a new material, dubbed SANDs for self-assembling nanodielectrics, and are the product of research into creating new types of dielectrics for future technology. The Northwestern group's goal was to create a dielectric material that was not only robust, but printable; something that could be used in transparent displays or flexible electronics. Ultimately they accomplished this by utilizing a dipping process to create thin films of self-assembled molecules.
Tobin Marks, Vladimir N. Ipatieff Research Professor of Chemistry at the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences and Professor of Materials Science and Engineering at the McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Sciences explains, “It’s not just that these transistors are only good for outer space -- that’s an illustration of just how tough they are. There is one technology on Earth, and only one, that will create as many features per unit time as a chip plant, and that’s a modern newspaper printing plant, since the paper flies at hundreds of feet per second. Every time Intel wants to make a new chip, it costs billions of dollars and takes years to do. And yet every day they print a new New York Times. So we thought, could you use printing to create electronic circuits?”
Preliminary tests with nuclear reactors show promising results for the SANDs. They appear to be highly resistant to radiation exposure, so NASA has taken a keen interest. Should the ISS tests return favorable results, the new material could revolutionize space electronics in terms of endurance and lifespan.
Aside from the obvious benefits in being radiation resistant, the group hopes to see the new material find use in many other fields -- wherever flexible, hardy and printable circuitry could find itself utilized. Some examples they cite range from solar panels to cell phones to flat-panel displays. One goal is to create inexpensive RFID tags to compliment or replace bar codes in stores. Cashiers could more easily interact with the tags, scanning an entire cart's contents at once along with alerting her if an item has reached its expiration date or informing her and the computer if the item is low on stock levels.
While the Northwestern group has already succeeded in making printed circuitry using their new material, they continue to research transistor materials that can be used as inks. The combination of a printable transistor with a highly durable dielectric substrate will likely lead to some very nifty electronics in the future.
Production Honda FCX Fuel Cell Cars Hit American Streets
The next generation fuel cell from Honda is trickling into the hands of a lucky few
Honda is among the automotive giants leading the charge to explore hydrogen technologies. The culmination of its efforts to date is the Honda FCX Clarity. The Clarity features a slick and curvy design, a 100 kW V Flow fuel cell stack that has shrunk 65 percent since Honda's initial design, 171-liter, 5,000-psi hydrogen fuel tank, a lithium ion battery pack, and a 95 kW (127 HP) electric motor. At 68 MPG and a range of 270 miles, the Clarity is very competitive with other sedans.
This week, the first mass-produced units of the hot new zero-emissions car rolled off a Japanese assembly line in Takanezawa, Japan. However, they're not going to stay in the land of the rising sun for long; they're headed for the U.S. The units are going primarily to Southern California, where a lucky few will receive them. Among these are movie stars and starlets, who will help give the car, and Honda's hybrid efforts, a high profile.
Among these VIPs are actress Jamie Lee Curtis and filmmaker husband Christopher Guest, actress Laura Harris, film producer Ron Yerxa, as well as businessmen Jon Spallino and Jim Salomon. The group was flown to a special ceremony where they were presented with the cars. Harris, who played villainess Marie Warner on the hit TV show "24" loves the car. She states, "It's so smooth. It's like a future machine, but it's not."
The new fuel cell vehicle is certainly promising. Its two times more energy efficient than a gas-electric hybrid and three times as efficient as a traditional gas engine, brags Honda.
Honda is deploying a "few dozen" units this year to kick off production. By the end of 3 years, this number will have jumped to 200. The cars will be available to lease for $600 a month, which includes maintenance and collision coverage. The actors and others receiving the early shipments will be able to drive home their vehicles starting in July.
In California alone, Honda received 50,000 applications for the cars. Anyone living in the state could apply on the company's website. The vast majority of these people were rejected as they did not live close enough to the three hydrogen stations in Torrance, Santa Monica and Irvine.
The enthusiasm from Honda was infectious. John Mendel, a senior vice president at America Honda Motor Co. cheered at the ceremony, "This is indeed a historic day for both Honda and American Honda - a new chapter in our nearly fifty-year history in America. It's an especially significant day for American Honda as we plant firm footsteps toward the mainstreaming of fuel cell cars."
Major obstacles remain, however, for fuel cell cars. First and foremost, there's a lack of hydrogen fuel stations and an infrastructure to pipe fuel around the country. Second are the issues surrounding the stack: high price and less than desirable lifetime. While advances have helped alleviate these problems slightly, they still exist.
To Honda, its fuel cell efforts are a new chance to win over its rivals. While Honda broke ground by releasing the first gas-electric hybrid in the States in 1999, Toyota quickly outpaced it with Toyota's Prius. Toyota recently announced the sale of its millionth hybrid Prius, while Honda ended up struggling, discontinuing two of its hybrids -- the Honda Insight, and the Accord hybrid.
Honda will be releasing the Clarity in Japan this fall, and it will also be going hybrid crazy, trying to battle back against Toyota. It will release a new gas-electric hybrid-only model and will be releasing hybrid editions of the slick CR-Z and Fit subcompact.
