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.
6/19/08
Palm Expects to Ship 2 Million Centro Smartphones
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.
