Headworx

QuickLogic has been mentioned here a number of times. It was brought to me by Paul McWilliams, the editor of Next Inning , a technology investment newsletter. QuickLogic is a very smart company, and I like it a lot. With smart chips, referred to as CSSP's (Customer Specific Standard Products), QuickLogic helps to speed time to market delivery of new gadgets. It essentially fills the feature gaps, which are left open by long design times of the integrated circuits: processors and SoC's (Systems on Chip). Yesterday, by courtesy of Brian Coleman, the brain behind the Domino Analytics , I got a confirmation that QuickLogic won a slot in the latest Nokia CS-18 HSPA USB modem , called the Nokia Internet Stick. The CS-18 is built around the Icera soft modem processor and is able to deliver HSPA speeds of up to 21Mbps downstream / 5.76Mbps upstream. Today's feature trend with USB wireless modems is they offer flash memory storage along with their primary function - wireless conn...

D o you want to double your money this year? Do you like to gamble? If yes, then keep on reading, I have an interesting call for you. We live in a world full of gadgets. Smartphones, iPods, laptops, game consoles, PDAs... what do they have in common? They are portable. What does that mean? Well... at least they have to run on batteries. And what do we want from them? More features of course. Remember the original iPod? Black and white screen and 5 hours battery live. Look at the current iPod: color screen and 20 hours battery live. And it plays videos. That means it's processor must be more powerful... so more power - hungry of course. The trend seems to defy the laws of physics - we keep on getting more features and more computing power with less power consumption. At least this is what we want the trend to be. But doing that is not easy. And if somebody finds a breakthrough way to continue that trend, they are going to be rewarded. L ook at the first iPod again. Once it was relea...

Dynamic range has been a problem ever since any attempt to record a piece of reality was done. What we see and hear live is still beyond what most capturing methods are capable of. I remember the years of analog compact cassette tape and my old analog tape recorder being able to achieve signal to noise ratio of 53 decibels. When I adjusted the recording level to reach maximum with the loudest parts of a song, the silent passages were disappearing in random noise. There was a circuitry called DNS, or dynamic noise reduction system, essentially compressing the input signal to fit in the 50-something decibels range. Then came CDs with digital audio delivering dynamic range of 90 decibels. While great on paper specs and fantastic to listen in an isolated quiet room, 90 decibels is very difficult to replay when riding a train in a headset or watching a movie at home. Many recent audio systems offer dynamic range compression, so the silent parts are amplified and the louder parts are attenua...

The avalanche of posts mentioning the Gingerbread (aka Android 3.0) is running at a full speed now. The most intriguing news however point to Sony working on a PlayStation Phone . It will run the Android 3.0 on a Qualcomm's Snapdragon processor. Finally. It has taken them five years since my October 2005 call . Better late then never... Anyway the PSP platform is holding pretty well... Six years on the market... The UMD micro optical drives are gone and replaced by silicon, but the platform still sells well. As Mr Jfieb points out on our Domino Research Forum , the Sony / Android news can be paired with the recent Qualcomm's announcement of shipping the long awaited QSD8672 dual core 1.5 GHz Snapdragons. Most importantly, as I posted a week ago, during their last conference call QuickLogic mentioned Qualcomm about to ship 3000 reference design kits to OEMs Worldwide. There should be no doubt the kits are promoting the full capabilities of the latest Qualcomm processors. It is a...

So the Apple Tablet (iPad?) announcement is scheduled in four weeks. It probably won't hit the stores for another five months, as it was the case with the iPhone. As any wireless device it has to pass FCC tests, so there will not be a point to keep it secret anymore by Apple. The world is waiting. Joining the speculating crowd, let me try to share my thoughts of what it will be like. Looking back, especially at the iPhone announcement, we may be certain Apple is trying to address everything we do not like or do not feel comfortable with when using portable Internet devices. Size. We may be sure it will be as thin as possible. I would say the thickness will be similar to the iPod Touch (thinner than iPhone). Hight / width probably twice the iPhone. And the screen will fill the entire surface. Display. Everyone agrees OLED is very probable. The iPad does not have to compete on price. And OLED is the cutting edge today. The screen resolution is probably 720p (1280x720) and I think it ...

Last week has brought us a number of news on the foldable displays. First, and probably the most important is the US patent application 20100064244 , submitted by Qualcomm. A multi-fold mobile device with a configurable interface is disclosed. In a particular embodiment, a method includes detecting a hardware configuration change from a first configuration to a second configuration at an electronic device that includes at least a first panel having a first display surface and a second panel having a second display surface. The hardware configuration change includes a change in a relative orientation of the first display panel to the second display panel. The method also includes automatically modifying a graphical user interface displayed at the first display surface and the second display surface at least partially based on the second configuration. In parallel there was the very interesting quarterly conference call by QuickLogic . During the Q&A session, there was an interesting...

What do you think is one of the problems we will not solve for good before 2020? It is power consumption (yes, I have said this a number of times already...). Thirty years ago when I was starting my lifetime adventure with computers, nobody cared about power consumption. The problem number one was speed. And today? Theoretically we can have almost as much speed as we want, provided we have enough power to supply to a computer and are able to dissipate the heat it converts to. Things are not that bad as long as our machines are plugged to a power plant. But get orders of magnitude more complicated once we want to cut the power cords and be mobile. Today all mobile devices have one problem in common. Battery life. From mobile phones to portable game consoles, to music players and portable computers, their batteries last too short. And even if they in some rare occasions last long enough, it is because we limit the battery life cutting down on speed or because we install excessively big b...

The 2010 GSMA MWC show was smaller than it used to be in the previous years. And there were not many surprises either. Shows are no longer calendar marking events for vendors, rather get-together places to meet and discuss. With two exceptions, most of the already present trends continue to evolve. Let me expand the most important ones a little. There seems to be no more money and innovation in voice. People use voice to talk and want to do everything else mobile using the data channel. Yes, Orange + Ericsson were running live HD Voice - a business class service based on wideband AMR-WB codec. But MNOs generally do not want this service. First it consumes more resources on their networks oversubscribed with data packets. And second - their marketing departments have no clue how to sell this service as most of them claim to have the best call quality already... So they are afraid of competitors pointing fingers at them "you see - to have a quality conversation you have to pay more...

I keep investigating the power drain experienced on my Blackberry Priv phone. And actually I'm getting some consistent results. The screenshots are taken at the end of days that were very similar from the phone usage perspective. And the one on the right has 50% more juice left. The first option that helps running longer is disabling 4G/ LTE in the Cellular networks menu. Clearly when switch to HSPA+/UMTS/GSM helps while still giving very decent mobile data performance. The second option, with results illustrated by the attached screenshots, is one I have almost entirely forgotten about. It is the Physical Web in Google Chrome. It is off by default so most people are not affected. I turned it on months ago and then simply forgot about its existence. It does very little but means a lot to the beacon industry, as it is meant to resolve signals from Bluetooth beacons into useful content links. It runs in a background continuously scanning for Bluetooth advertising packets. I am ...

We are nearing October 2008 that will mark full three years of my blogging. I posted a lot on gadgets and devices and I have to admit not all of them proved long term as good as initially expected. To be honest: most of them failed and I either sold them on an Internet auction or they found the way to the big box I keep in my basement... So the winners are: Sony PSP . I love the console, the speed of the games. And the latest version even has VoIP (as predicted). HTC SP5M . I lost it. And it was not 3G. But it would make it to the winners lounge. Non-touch Windows Mobile is really a good piece of an operating system. Google storage . I use it everyday. My Gmail is less than 20% full. And my Picasa holds my entire photo collection. Microsoft DirectPush . Love it. Even the 3G iPhone has it. HSDPA Internet on the go. Everybody is using it. Pandora . Fantastic. Shame the labels are killing it. Squeezeboxes . Have four of them, in use every day. Google Browser Sync . The only reason I sti...

Very, very mixed feelings related to the second generation iPhone. It is dubbed "3G" but in fact this is the 2nd generation device. 3G means it can use WCDMA/UMTS/HSDPA networks in 850MHz(US)/1900MHz(US)/2100MHz(EU) bands. 3G has been a hype for a long time... essentially since 1999 when the first deployments took place and Qualcomm (the pioneer of the underlying CDMA technology went "over the rainbow" after the World realized everybody is going to license Qualcomm's technology). Now, as we have some perspective of almost ten years, we may try to evaluate some pros and cons of 3G (technology and networks) in context of the 2G (meaning second generation) iPhone: 3G delivers fast mobile data transmission. This is what we have been all waiting for. With HSDPA (High Speed Downlink Packet Access) and HSUPA (Uplink) the current real world speeds come close to the speed of 802.11b WiFi. Most operators advertise 7,2Mb downlink speed, but this is usually true only for t...