Wednesday, September 10, 2008

The 'Flip Video' is for sharing....

Have you heard of the buzz surrounding the "Flip Video" from Pure Digital Technologies based in San Francisco? Apparently Jennifer Aniston, Oprah Winfrey and Steven Spielberg are all flipping over their new Flip camcorders!
It is about the size of a candybar cellphone but about 1.25inches thick with a single red record button on the back. It has only solid state memory (1 or 2GB models available)
The design center focuses on exactly the way Gen-Y are using camcorders today: take a short clip and then share it with your friends on youtube or facebook. Builtin software dispenses with the need to install software.
Jonathan Kaplan, CEO of Flip Video says it is so easy "when you want to share the video, all you have to do is flip the USB and plug in the video to share on youtube!"
But the question this blogger wants to know is what happens if you want to share
with someone in the taxi home the video of Johnny Depp that you caught in the nightclub?

Tuesday, September 9, 2008

Printing from your phone?

So how do you print that email message from your smartphone if you really needed to? Perhaps it is a set of driving directions or a coupon?
Sharp Japan has just introduced a fax machine (UX-D90CL or 'fappy') that allows you to also beam your message via infrared for p
rinting using IrDA's IrSimple standard. Sharp's marketing has decided to call it "cordless digital fappy". I suppose if you desperately want a copy of your driving directions from your phone printed out or faxed, you just point and shoot it to the 'fappy'. Note the infrared window below the numeric pad.
Sharp UX-D90CL



















Other smaller printers, mostly portable and thermal, are also announced recently with IrSimple.
Seiko DPU-S445 and Extech S5400
Three photo printers from Canon has already been available with IrSimple:
Canon
SELPH CP770, Canon ES1 and Canon iP90

I anticipate there are more products out there in with IrSimple that we have not heard about. Watch this space!


Gigabit handheld speeds. Now THAT's blazing fast!!

Looks like the folks at IrDA can no longer be accused of being asleep at the wheel for the past few years. At Wireless Japan 2008, one of the members of the Infrared Data Association demonstrated "Giga-IR", a whopping 1 Gbps data transmission on a handheld prototype.


At that speed, peer-to-peer beaming of any sort of files from your handheld phone/camera/pda/mp3/videocamera/etc becomes a reality. Today, the closest technology you can consider is Bluetooth but with its 3Mbps data rate, will severely restrict what file sizes you can beam. Single songs may be OK but longer videos may be tedious. RF technologies typically get harder to design and significantly more expensive as the data rates increase.

KDDI, who developed the "Giga-IR" expects beaming 20-30 songs using this new technology will take only 1-2 seconds. Now, that's impressive! Now applications are no longer limited by speed.

See video below.


IrDA has initiated a working group to complete the standard for "Giga-IR" which is expected to be complete by March 2009. Now, that too, is fast!
I believe the Giga-IR module prices will be significantly lower than their RF counterparts and they will be able to persuade more device companies to implement this new technology.

Well done IrDA & KDDI!