motion

The new TV remote: Your bare hand?

The TV remote control of the future isn't an expensive device with an LCD screen and blinking lights. It's your hand.

The classic TV remote control most of us have grown up with has been around in essentially the same incarnation for half a century. It's been tweaked over the years, but now one company is looking at ditching the remote altogether and using a camera mounted below a TV screen that senses hand motions instead of button pushes. The result is something that seems right out of Minority Report.

But the high-tech user interface Tom Cruise coolly manipulates onscreen isn't even all that far-fetched now, thanks to incremental improvements. Until now, the most innovative new input for entertainment in the living room has been the Wii-mote, the motion-sensing remote control/wand that has made Nintendo's game console a cultural phenomenon. Swing it like a tennis racket and you can pretend you're playing tennis, point it at the screen and use it like a mouse to navigate menus.

Televisions have progressed as well, with better picture quality and capability. Now TVs can record TV shows, stream Netflix movies, check the weather, read news headlines, and skim RSS feeds. The menus on those TVs appear more and more like what we see on our computer screens, so a new interface that operates more like a mouse seems almost inevitable.

The once and future app store

LAS VEGAS--It seems there are going to be as many ways to run a mobile application store as there are stores themselves.

One of the big topics this week at CTIA 2009 has been mobile applications, as Research in Motion unveiled BlackBerry App World and Microsoft talked about its forthcoming Windows Marketplace for Mobile. The dam has truly broken with mobile applications; for years, most consumers seemed indifferent to third-party applications, but now they are viewed as an essential part of any smartphone, just like they are on a PC or Mac.

Most of the credit for that trend has … Read more

RIM posts strong quarter, beats estimates

Update at 2:09 p.m. PDT, with additional information from earnings report.

Research In Motion on Thursday posted a stronger-than-expected fiscal fourth quarter, with revenue climbing 84 percent over the same period a year ago.

RIM, the maker of the popular BlackBerry smartphones, reported revenue of $3.46 billion, up from $1.88 billion a year ago. Wall Street had expected the company to report $3.4 billion in revenue, according to Thomson Financial.

Net income jumped nearly 26 percent to $518.3 million, or 90 cents a share, for the fiscal fourth quarter, compared with $412.5 million, … Read more

TV coming to the BlackBerry

LAS VEGAS--Full-length TV shows are coming to BlackBerry devices as QuickPlay Media has announced it will offer a new TV download service for the smartphones via the just new Research In Motion applications store.

QuickPlay is one of the first companies to offer an application through RIM's BlackBerry App World virtual store. RIM announced the new applications store Wednesday morning. And co-CEO Mike Lazaridis is expected to show off the new storefront during his keynote speech Wednesday here at the CTIA Wireless 2009 trade show.

The QuickPlay video service called Primetime2Go will cost $7.99 a month. It will … Read more

Apps to dominate CTIA Wireless 2009

We've barely unpacked our bags from GSMA Mobile World Congress in Barcelona in February, and we're on the road again to Las Vegas for CTIA Wireless, the U.S. trade show and conference held every spring where the biggest and most influential players in the U.S. mobile market gather.

While there will be some cell phones announced at this year's show, most of the excitement will center on software applications and the virtual storefronts that are popping up to distribute these new applications. Since the success of Apple's App Store, which provides easy access to third-party applications for iPhones, other companies have jumped on the bandwagon announcing their own application stores.

Everyone from Google to Microsoft to Nokia to Research In Motion has announced plans for a new application store. And at this year's CTIA, some of these new app stores will come to life. RIM is expected to announce that its BlackBerry AppWorld is open for business, and Microsoft will start showing off its Marketplace for the first time.

But application markets aren't the only thing that will be talked about. Carriers like Verizon and Clearwire will also be touting faster broadband wireless networks that will help make these applications a reality. And of course handset makers will be showing off new products, some of which have already been announced, such as the Palm Pre.

But this year's spring CTIA Wireless show will likely be smaller than in years past. The economic downturn has taken its toll on the mobile market. Even Nokia, the world's largest and strongest maker of cell phones, has slashed expectations for 2009. And the company has already begun laying off employees and closing facilities to cut costs.… Read more

Report: BlackBerry maker to launch video service

Research In Motion, maker of the popular BlackBerry smartphones, reportedly is preparing to announce a new video download service for its BlackBerry phones at the CTIA trade show next week in Las Vegas.

The blog NewTeeVee, which reported the news earlier this week, said that the service will be offered as an unlimited monthly subscription service. And it adds that RIM has already signed several broadcast and cable partners to offer up content. But instead of streaming the video over the 3G wireless network, RIM is planning a service that will allow the videos to be downloaded using Wi-Fi connections, … Read more

Report: BlackBerry app store to launch next week

Research In Motion's new mobile application store is set to launch on April 1 at the CTIA Wireless trade show in Las Vegas, BusinessWeek reported this week.

Mike Lazaridis, co-CEO of RIM, which makes the popular BlackBerry devices, is slated to give a keynote address on the opening day of the trade show and conference. And the company is expected to announce the new application store there.

The BlackBerry application store, which will be called BlackBerry App World, was announced in October 2008. And it is one of several application stores that have been announced to take on Apple's App Store for the iPhone. … Read more

Motion control for the Xbox 360: Gametrak Freedom

Whether or not you think the Xbox 360 could use a motion controller, Performance Designed Products (or PDP) will be releasing such a device for the console this fall called the Gametrak Freedom. While the Freedom will use several accelerometers for mapping pitch, roll, and yaw, the controller differs from the Wii remote because of something called ultrasonic 3D positioning.

Unlike the Wii remote, which uses an infrared (IR) lamp for operation, the Freedom will come with two sensors that will be placed on both sides of your display. This setup will enable a more accurate dimensional detection along with … Read more

New video-editing software gets multiframe tech

MotionDSP, the company that offered a novel approach to improving photos and video through its now-discontinued FixMyMovie Web site, plans to release a promised version of its software for personal computers.

The $49.99 software program, called vReveal, analyzes a video's adjacent frames and combines the data to create a higher-quality version. This can bring out details in dim areas, correct camera shake, and remove noise and blocky compression artifacts, the company said. The software also can rotate videos, increase video resolution, and extract still images.

In addition, the company said the software can employ the CUDA (Compute Unified Device Architecture) technology … Read more

RIM changes tune on employee calls

BlackBerry maker Research In Motion has sought to clarify what it claims is confusion over whether the company records all employee telephone conversations in the interest of maintaining control over intellectual property.

During a visit to Sydney in early March, RIM Chief Information Officer Robin Bienfait said that all actions carried out on RIM's internal network were logged, meaning some employees may want their own private handset if they wanted to have personal conversations. "Everything. I record everything," she said.

But a RIM spokesperson, in a follow-up statement, said Bienfait's comments had been misunderstood.

"Robin … Read more