A year later, two new Android devices show how far the platform has come, especially in the hands of hardware manufacturers who are building innovative interfaces on top of the operating system.

HTC's Hero on the Sprint network and Motorola's Cliq running on T-Mobile don't quite match the cool, elegance and ease of use of the iPhone, but the customization efforts by their makers create experiences that in some respects surpass what the iPhone can offer.
It goes back to one of Android's central promises: Its open source platform can evolve quickly and dynamically in the hands of software developers and manufacturers, turning an already robust OS into something more.

The HTC Hero and Motorola Cliq make good on the promise by building proprietary experiences: HTC calls its interface Sense while Motorola has a new service called Motoblur.
Both add a very sophisticated layer on top of Android, attempting to speed information to users in an intuitive and social way, anticipating how they want to encounter and interact with their data across applications. It's something the iPhone doesn't do.

Here's a look at each phone's version of Android and what they offer:

HTC Hero (released on Oct. 11 for $179 with two-year contract) - HTC's Sense works throughout the Hero, making it a joy for people whose lives are spread over social networks and multiple e-mail accounts.

From your contacts list, you can populate friends' entries with information pulled from their e-mail accounts or social-network entries.

From there, you can see what text messages, e-mails and calls you've exchanged with those people and see their social network status updates and posted pictures.

Sense extends to things like the photo album, allowing you to view your own photos or friends' photos on Facebook or Flickr. In the e-mail app, you can organize e-mails by subject headings or by attachments and flags.

The search button on the Hero pulls up Google search information in general but narrows the focus when you're in a specific application.

You can also customize your home screen and create multiple profiles, called Scenes. So during the day you can operate under a work Scene, with your calendar and Exchange e-mail out front while a weekend Scene can be populated with shortcuts to fun apps.

There's also a feature called Footprints that allows you to take pictures of restaurants, shopping places or other favorite spots that you've visited and tag them with their GPS locations.

Cliq coming Monday

Cliq (available Monday for $199 with two-year contract) - Motoblur offers users an instant way to access Web information right from your home screen through a set of Motoblur widgets. The home screen offers a status update widget at the top, allowing you to broadcast your status across all social networks or just one in particular.

There is also a Happenings widget that allows you to see unread updates from friends. Similarly, a Messaging widget lets you see unread messages from all your accounts.
In theory, the widgets are a good idea, but if you have a large network of friends or you're inundated by e-mail, legitimate and spam, the widgets can overwhelm you.

Motoblur's take on contacts is similar to HTC's in that it allows you to see the history of communications with specific people or their updates.

Both the Hero and the Cliq allow you to create special contacts groups, which become vital when you're juggling entries drawn from a number of sources.

From your Cliq picture gallery, you're also able to share images via e-mail or text message but also upload it directly to Picasa, MySpace Facebook or the Motoblur Photo Sharing service.

That brings us to a unique facet about Motoblur. It's not just an interface but an actual service.
Motorola is hosting all of your information on its servers and it's constantly polling all your e-mail and social networks for updates before pushing them out to you.
How they compare
What that means is that Motoblur can not only back up all your information from your phone and also deliver updates more efficiently, it can also do some nifty tricks like finding your phone when it's lost and remotely wiping it if it's stolen.
In the end, Sense is the more elegant and far-reaching of the pair, while Motoblur offers a slightly more frenetic experience, but with the added benefit of having all your information backed up.

Android by itself may not be able to catch the iPhone, but when you combine it with what partners like HTC and Motorola are doing, the gap closes quickly.

Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/10/16/BUNJ1A6SHP.DTL&type=business#ixzz0UB8iM1Q6

ETH Zurich researchers have successfully created an optical transistor from a single molecule. This has brought them one step closer to an optical computer.


An artist vies of a photonic circuit with molecular building blocks. A single-molecule optical transistor is depicted using a standard symbol for an electronic transistor.

Internet connections and computers need to be ever faster and more powerful nowadays. However, conventional central processing units (CPUs) limit the performance of computers, for example because they produce an enormous amount of heat. The millions of transistors that switch and amplify the electronic signals in the CPUs are responsible for this. One square centimeter of CPU can emit up to 125 watts of heat, which is more than ten times as much as a square centimeter of an electric hotplate.

Photons instead of electrons

This is why scientists have been trying for some time to find ways to produce integrated circuits that operate on the basis of photons instead of electrons. The reason is that photons do not only generate much less heat than electrons, but they also enable considerably higher data transfer rates.

Although a large part of telecommunications engineering nowadays is based on optical signal transmission, the necessary encoding of the information is generated using electronically controlled switches. A compact optical transistor is still a long way off. Vahid Sandoghdar, Professor at the Laboratory of Physical Chemistry of ETH Zurich, explains that, “Comparing the current state of this technology with that of electronics, we are somewhat closer to the vacuum tube amplifiers that were around in the fifties than we are to today’s integrated circuits.”

However, his research group has now achieved a decisive breakthrough by successfully creating an optical transistor with a single molecule. For this, they have made use of the fact that a molecule’s energy is quantized: when laser light strikes a molecule that is in its ground state, the light is absorbed. As a result, the laser beam is quenched. Conversely, it is possible to release the absorbed energy again in a targeted way with a second light beam. This occurs because the beam changes the molecule’s quantum state, with the result that the light beam is amplified. This so-called stimulated emission, which Albert Einstein described over 90 years ago, also forms the basis for the principle of the laser.

Focusing on a nano scale

Jaesuk Hwang, first author of the study and a scientific member of Sandoghdar’s nano-optics group, explains that, “Amplification in a conventional laser is achieved by an enormous number of molecules.” By focusing a laser beam on only a single tiny molecule, the ETH Zurich scientists have now been able to generate stimulated emission using just one molecule. They were helped in this by the fact that, at low temperatures, molecules seem to increase their apparent surface area for interaction with light . The researchers therefore needed to cool the molecule down to minus 272 degrees Celsius (minus 457.6 degrees Fahrenheit), i.e. one degree above absolute zero. In this case, the enlarged surface area corresponded approximately to the diameter of the focused laser beam.

Switching light with light

By using one laser beam to prepare the quantum state of a single molecule in a controlled fashion, scientists could significantly attenuate or amplify a second laser beam. This mode of operation is identical to that of a conventional transistor, in which electrical potential can be used to modulate a second signal.

Thus component parts such as the new single molecule transistor may also pave the way for a quantum computer. Sandoghdar says, “Many more years of research will still be needed before photons replace electrons in transistors. In the meantime, scientists will learn to manipulate and control quantum systems in a targeted way, moving them closer to the dream of a quantum computer.”

For a long time, batteries were bulky and heavy. Now, a new cutting-edge battery is revolutionizing the field. It is thinner than a millimeter, lighter than a gram, and can be produced cost-effectively through a printing process.

In the past, it was necessary to race to the bank for every money transfer and every bank statement. Today, bank transactions can be easily carried out at home. Now where is that piece of paper again with the TAN numbers? In the future you can spare yourself the search for the number. Simply touch your EC card and a small integrated display shows the TAN number to be used. Just type in the number and off you go. This is made possible by a printable battery that can be produced cost-effectively on a large scale.

It was developed by a research team led by Prof. Dr. Reinhard Baumann of the Fraunhofer Research Institution for Electronic Nano Systems ENAS in Chemnitz together with colleagues from TU Chemnitz and Menippos GmbH. “Our goal is to be able to mass produce the batteries at a price of single digit cent range each,” states Dr. Andreas Willert, group manager at ENAS.

The characteristics of the battery differ significantly from those of conventional batteries. The printable version weighs less than one gram on the scales, is not even one millimeter thick and can therefore be integrated into bank cards, for example. The battery contains no mercury and is in this respect environmentally friendly. Its voltage is 1.5 V, which lies within the normal range. By placing several batteries in a row, voltages of 3 V, 4.5 V and 6 V can also be achieved. The new type of battery is composed of different layers: a zinc anode and a manganese cathode, among others. Zinc and manganese react with one another and produce electricity. However, the anode and the cathode layer dissipate gradually during this chemical process. Therefore, the battery is suitable for applications which have a limited life span or a limited power requirement, for instance greeting cards.

The batteries are printed using a silk-screen printing method similar to that used for t-shirts and signs. A kind of rubber lip presses the printing paste through a screen onto the substrate. A template covers the areas that are not to be printed on. Through this process it is possible to apply comparatively large quantities of printing paste, and the individual layers are slightly thicker than a hair. The researchers have already produced the batteries on a laboratory scale. At the end of this year, the first products could possibly be finished.

TSMC’s Q2 sales were 88% up on Q1 at around $2bn, with June being TSMC’s best month for sales for the last eight months.

June sales of $781m may have been the best for eight months but they were still 9.6% down in June 2008. However June sales were 5% up on the May sales figure.

TSMC said it was planning diversification into the solar business and seeking to increase its business in power management ICs.

At UMC, which said earlier this week it was booked out on 65nm capacity, June was its highest sales month for the past 11 months.

UMC’s June sales of $250m were 9.6% up on May sales. UMC’s Q2 sales of $670m sales were 10% down on Q208 but double those of Q1.

Both companies are due to report full Q2 results later on this month.

Cambridge-based fabless microcontroller firm Cyan has developed a 16-bit core delivering 0.71DMIPS/MHz at 50MHz from a 0.18µm process.

Specific power consumption is 0.65mW/MHz and deep sleep leakage is 4.5µA.

“We were able to start from a clean sheet of paper with all the knowledge of the latest CPU designs without any of the baggage,” designer Paul Hoayun told EW. “Our existing XAP2 core delivers roughly 0.3DMIPS/MHz, so the new CyCore is better than twice as good, and it has about the same number of gates.”

Not only is the core faster, but Cyan will not have to pay royalties to Cambridge Consultants, original designer of the XAP2.

CyCore has a Harvard load-store architecture with a prefetch-execute pipeline and mostly single-cycle execution. Cache cuts power consumption by reducing flash access.

“We wanted to get this out on a short time scale and keep it simple,” said Hoayun, “future versions may be pipelined to a greater depth.”

Future versions may also get more instructions.

“We hope this will be a family of devices and have been looking at instructions to add various functionalities: instructions to accelerate encryption and instructions for error correction are highly relevant to RF-type applications,” said Hoayun - Cyan has a tie-up with Micrel for RF reference designs and the firm’s original chips have found a market in low-power RF networks.

See: Cyan and Micrel to develop wireless metering systems

The instruction set has been designed to use less memory than XAP2. One consequence is that CyCore is not at all bit-level compatible with XAP2.

“We never considered making the core code compatible, it has a completely different register set,” said Cyan CTO Ken Wallace, “Migration for customers is not too difficult. Re-targeting C with our development tools is almost an invisible process.”

eCOG16E01 is the first silicon available with CyCore.

It is similar to the firm’s existing XAP-based eCOG1X, but through customer consultation the peripheral set has been cut down.

Now, there is one rather than two ADCs, no DACs, no USB interface and no Ethernet interface.

The PWMs are still there for motor switching - white goods controllers is another target application.

Cambridge chip firm wins $1m worth of MCU orders

The RIM BlackBerry Tour 9630 has received positive reviews from around the tech world, though there's been one universal complaint: the lack of Wi-Fi. However, Sprint is hoping to right this wrong by releasing a Wi-Fi-enabled BlackBerry Tour next year and said it will require all of its future smartphones to have Wi-Fi.

"It is now a requirement for all our PDA equipment suppliers to include Wi-Fi," said Sprint's director of business product marketing, Jeff Clemow, in an interview with Fierce Wireless. He did not, however, specify a deadline for when manufacturers will have to adhere to this requirement.

Clemow added that the carrier decided to release the current version of the Tour to bring its lineup up to date and that "speed to market...outweighed the desire to wait for Wi-Fi."

Verizon Wireless, which, like Sprint, will offer the BlackBerry Tour starting July 12 for $199.99, would not comment on whether it would offer a Wi-Fi version of the smartphone, but did say it is working with RIM to bring more Wi-Fi-enabled BlackBerrys to its customers.

Obviously, this is great news for customers of the CDMA carriers, but it certainly puts Sprint subscribers in a predicament, having to decided whether to buy the Tour now or wait till the Wi-Fi version comes out. Sprint didn't provide a specific availability date but said the device would be out sometime after the first of the year. Will you wait or buy now?

Imagination Technologies has added to its PowerVR graphics portfolio a semiconductor IP core for motion compensated, 240Hz frame rate conversion.

The VFRC270 IP core converts a sequence of pictures from one frame rate to a higher frame rate by inserting extra frames using full motion compensated interpolation.

According to the company, the intention with the core has been to address the issues of motion judder, motion blur, and low frame rates for high definition flat panel displays.

Film material is typically recorded at 24 frames per second but most modern displays require a frame rate of 50 frames per second or higher.

The traditional method for this 24-to-60 frames per second telecine conversion employs a method known as 3:2 pull-down, where film frames are alternately repeated 3 times, then 2 times. This can result in a stepped and jerky motion which is unappealing to the viewer.

With motion compensated interpolation, the FRC270 is designed to recreate the intermediate frames without frame repetition thus avoiding the jerky motion associated with traditional methods while retaining the original 'cinematic feel' to the material.

The core is capable of converting both SD and HD material up to frame rates of 240Hz, generating 1080p 240fps material to be displayed on the latest panels to support full HD at 240Hz.

The core utilises a single memory interface for source and destination frames which is efficient for the latest DDR3 memory, as well as older generations of DDR.

The algorithms used in FRC270 automatically adjust to the input format, to optimise the algorithm for SD and HD source material. A sophisticated edge detection algorithm is also used, to refine the output minimizing the 'halo effects' that plague traditional systems.

More information: www.imgtec.com