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GE's Chairman and CEO Jeff Immelt unveiled the new Vscan an ultra-small ultrasound. According to GE, "For critical care clinicians, Vscan can offer an immediate look beyond patient vital signs with the potential to identify critical issues, like fluid around the heart, which could be a sign of congestive heart failure. And for cardiologists, Vscan provides a dependable visual evaluation of how well the heart is pumping at a glance, so they can treat patients more efficiently."

It's certainly small enough to be portable - about the size of a mobile phone and could even have some home-use potential - assuming the costs are low.

I can see it now...

Man: "Hey honey, forget about going for an ultrasound and paying a $30 copay, the wasted time and gas money, etc. I can give you an ultrasound right here in the comfort of our house! Let me slap some gel on and give this a whirl!"

Pregnant woman: "Yeah. Right...  Good luck with that."

Check out the video demo given by Mike Barber, Vice President of healthymagination, provides a closer look at the new Vscan technology:

TerreStar Corporation (NASDAQ: TSTR) announced that TerreStar-1, the world's largest, most advanced commercial communications satellite, has been successfully placed into its assigned orbital slot in the geosynchronous arc and has successfully deployed its 18 meter 2GHz S Band reflector, the largest commercial satellite antenna ever deployed. TerreStar remarked "TerreStar-1 is now poised to deliver the voice, data and video services over TerreStar's all IP next-generation mobile broadband network that combines the power of TerreStar-1, an all-IP core network, and the latest in smartphone technology."

One of the first advanced smartphones the satellite is designed to handle is a new Windows Mobile designed with their partner Elektrobit (EB). The mobile device can handle all of the major wireless specs, including: Dual-band WCDMA (850 and 1900), TerreStar WCDMA HSDPA 2.2 GHz, and Quad-band GSM/EGPRS (850, 900, 1800 and 1900). What this means is that this is a worldwide phone -- and if their isn't a cellular tower in the vicinity, you can switch to a satellite connection.

Smartphones, netbooks, smartbooks, and Mobile Internet Devices (MIDs) while very similar feature-wise, each has their own distinct advantages. Smartphones such as the iPhone have been widely successful, while the MID market has been a bit slow to take off. Elektrobit Corporation (EB), based in Oulu, Finland aims to change that with their new MID reference design that combines the "pocketability" of smartphones with the power of PCs/netbooks since it can run desktop Linux applications. Picture an iPhone that can actually run full version Linux applications such as Firefox, Opera, OpenOffice, Thunderbird, SSH client, and more. That's exactly what you'll get with Elektrobit's (EB) new MID reference design. EB's sleek, media-centric MID reference device takes the power of the PC and makes it pocket-able so you don't have to compromise on mobile capabilities.

I spoke with EB's Vesa Kiviranta Vice President, Mobile Internet Device Solutions, Wireless Solutions BU about their new reference design. Vesa explained that it's based on Intel's next generation Moores­town platform. The reference design includes touch-screen support with multi-touch (cool!) support. It uses the latest 3D and high resolution capacitive sensing touch screen (3.97") powered by EB Touch & Feel technology. Because the screen measures nearly 4 inches (3.97"), it fits into the MID category, while smartphones have screens smaller than 3.9 inches and netbooks have screens larger than 5 inches.The reference design relies on a Linux-based OS with EB's MID UI & Application framework based on QT. It also features EB Navigation Suite with integrated GPS.

It supports two cameras (front & back of phone) so not only can you snap photos, it can also easily support videoconferencing/videochat. I asked EB about support for Skype video chat  and they told me it will indeed be supported in their MID design. In fact, they tested it using the Linux Skype application in their labs. As far as I know, this marks the first time a pocketable mobile phone can perform Skype videoconferencing! Cool stuff! I know many iPhone fans were very disappointed the new iPhone 3GS didn't add a front-facing camera (myself included), which would allow for videochat capabilities. Of course, the current Skype for iPhone client doesn't support video, but my sources tell me it's in the works. It will be very hard to have a videoconference if you have to turn the iPhone around so the camera is facing you, but not the iPhone screen. Basically, they'll be able to see you, but you won't be able to see them - unless you spin the iPhone back around.

TechCrunch has a prototype of their tablet PC featuring a touchscreen, Wi-Fi, an accelerometer, a camera and a four cell battery running on a stripped down version of Linux. Well, actually they're running the prototype on full-fledged Linux, but they promise better performance once they strip out all the extra stuff.

According to TechCrunch:

The device has a 12-inch touchscreen with a 4:3 aspect ratio (which is ideal for web browsing in my opinion). It is powered with a Via Nano processor, which has performed at par with the Intel Atom in our testing. 1 GB of ram (its more than we need) and a 4 GB flash drive to store the OS and browser and any cache. Resolution is 1024×768, which means the vast majority of websites are viewed in full width without scrolling.

So what's missing from this Techcrunch tablet gadget? Well, how bout a PCMCIA slot for inserting an EVDO/3G/4G card. Forget Wi-Fi - that's so 2005. We need to be able to roam and happily surf the web when outside earshot of a Wi-Fi access point. Although it does have a USB port, so maybe it will support USB-based EVDO/3G/4G dongles. PCMCIA is pretty large come to think of it, taking up a lot of internal space. A touch screen tablet optimized for web surfing needs to be as thin and as light as possible.

It should also support Skype, including Skype videoconferencing using the embedded camera. Maybe it will and maybe it won't, but surprisingly no mention of Skype in the article. It should also support some SIP softphone client for those that like to BYOVA (Bring Your Own VoIP Access).

What else would you like to see?

According to Techcrunch, we can soon expect to see a 7" or 9" iPod touch, which would make it more akin to a tablet PC than a portable music & video player with app support. The app support is a key point here. One of the problems with the iPod touch and similarly the iPhone is the relatively small screen. Sure, it's bigger than most portable devices, but it's still not quite large enough for optimal productivity.

By stepping up the screen size, not only will it improve productivity, you may even see users actually "work" within business apps such as Excel on the iPod touch. Try working in Excel on the iPod touch or iPhone on such a small screen is nearly impossible. In fact, I should point out that natively the iPhone and iPod touch don't support Excel. There is a workaround however.

Toshiba announced that it will showcase a 512GB solid-state drive (SSD) at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) next month, with shipments of this large SSD in the second quarter of 2009. These NAND-flash-based solid state drives (SSD) will be the industry's first 2.5-inch 512-gigabyte SSD and features fast read/write times and reliable performance for laptops/notebooks, and other equipment.

In addition to the 2.5-inch, 512GB drive, the 43nm NAND SSD family also includes capacities of 64GB, 128GB, and 256GB, offered in 1.8-inch or 2.5-inch drive enclosures or as SSD Flash Modules. The drives feature a maximum sequential read speed of 240MB per second (MBps) and maximum sequential write speed of 200MBps. This should definitely result in faster boot and application loading times. The drives also offer AES data encryption to prevent unauthorized data access.

512GB soon... next stop 1TB (1 terabyte)!

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It appears it just might be a Merry Christmas even with the doom & gloom surrounding the economy. I guess President-elect Barack Obama must be the Messiah, since he's already creating miracles and he hasn't even been sworn in yet. Or it could just be that credit card loving Americans just don't know when to quit spending & charging.

Check this out:

NRF Survey Finds Black Friday Gets Holiday Season Off to Energetic Start
-- Great Bargains, Pent-Up Demand Drove Shoppers to Stores, Web

Though the holiday season is far from over, retailers across the country are breathing a collective sigh of relief after shoppers headed to stores and websites in droves over the weekend. According to the National Retail Federation's 2008 Black Friday Weekend survey, conducted by BIGresearch, more than 172 million shoppers visited stores and websites over Black Friday weekend, up from 147 million shoppers last year.*

Shoppers spent an average of $372.57 this weekend*, up 7.2 percent over last year's $347.55. Total spending reached an estimated $41.0 billion.

"Pent-up demand on electronics and clothing, plus unparalleled bargains on this season's hottest items helped drive shopping all weekend," said NRF President and CEO Tracy Mullin. "Holiday sales are not expected to continue at this brisk pace, but it is encouraging that Americans seem excited to go shopping again."

Friday was clearly the busiest day of the weekend with 73.6 million people hitting stores and websites for doorbuster sales. Though traffic did subside after Friday, retailers were also buoyed by two-day sales as 56.9 million people shopped on Saturday, up from 48.3 million last year, while another 26.2 million people planned to shop on Sunday. Thanksgiving Day also continues to increase in importance as the number of people who shopped on Thursday was up 48 percent over last year (16.2 million people vs. 10.9 million people).

Those who shopped on Friday lived by the adage that the early bird catches the worm. The survey found that 23.3 percent of shoppers were at stores by 5 a.m. while more than half (57.6%) were at stores by 9 a.m. Bargains appeared to be so good that people have more of a jumpstart on shopping.

According to the findings, Americans have completed slightly more shopping than they had one year ago (39.3% vs. 36.4%), indicating that traffic and sales over the next several weeks will moderate.

"Though retailers should be encouraged by strong traffic and sales over the weekend, consumers are still being cautious," said Phil Rist, Executive Vice President, Strategic Initiatives, BIGresearch. "Weekend shoppers indicated that they are still sticking to a budget and thinking carefully before making any holiday purchases."

Though retailers in all categories were featuring big bargains, a majority of shoppers visited discount stores for holiday deals. According to the survey, more than half (54.7%) of this weekend's shoppers visited discount stores. Nearly half (43.0%) shopped at a traditional department store, up 11.1 percent from 38.7 percent last year. About one-third of shoppers visited specialty stores like clothing or electronics stores (36.0%) and shopped online (34.0%).

As expected, many shoppers (50.9%) purchased clothing and accessories over the weekend while 39.0 percent bought books, DVDs, CDs and video games and 35.9 percent purchased consumer electronics. Toys were also big sellers, as 28.5 percent of shoppers bought a toy. Gift card purchasing dropped ten percent with 18.7 percent of shoppers purchasing a gift card over the weekend, down from 21.0 percent last year.

NRF continues to project that holiday sales will rise 2.2 percent this year to $470.4 billion.

About the Survey

The NRF 2008 Black Friday Weekend survey was designed to gauge consumer behavior and shopping trends related to the winter holidays. NRF defines the weekend as sales from Thursday, November 27 to Sunday, November 30. The survey, which polled 3,370 consumers, was conducted for NRF by BIGresearch from November 27-29, 2008. The consumer poll has a margin of error of plus or minus 1.7 percent.

BIGresearch is a consumer market intelligence firm that provides unique consumer insights that are gathered online utilizing very large sample sizes. BIGresearch's syndicated Consumer Intentions and Actions survey monitors the pulse of more than 8,000 consumers each month to empower its clients with unique insights for identifying opportunities in a fragmented and changing marketplace.

The National Retail Federation is the world's largest retail trade association, with membership that comprises all retail formats and channels of distribution including department, specialty, discount, catalog, Internet, independent stores, chain restaurants, drug stores and grocery stores as well as the industry's key trading partners of retail goods and services. NRF represents an industry with more than 1.6 million U.S. retail establishments, more than 24 million employees - about one in five American workers - and 2007 sales of $4.5 trillion. As the industry umbrella group, NRF also represents more than 100 state, national and international retail associations. www.nrf.com

Via NRF

At a moment in time when smart phones are one of the few hot tech products, Palm, the industry's pioneer, appears to be dying.

This morning, Global Crown Capital analyst Pablo Perez-Fernandez cut his rating on the company to Underweight from Neutral, setting a $1.50 price target, well below the current level.

Perez-Fernandez provides a damaging list of factors now facing the company and the stock, all of which add up to a deteriorating position in a market where competition is heating up considerably.

In the debate over whether to buy an Apple iPhone or a Research in Motion BlackBerry Storm or Bold, does Palm's name even come up in conversation? Alas, no. 

And that makes me sad as a long time Palm user -- back when the Palm Pilot was as hot as the iPhone ...

Read more of this sad story about an industry pioneer at Barron's.

Mojo Mobility Inc, a Silicon Valley-based venture firm, has developed a technology to simultaneously charge multiple mobile devices simply using a flat surface that doesn't even to touch the charging circuitry of  mobile phones, iPods, iPhones, and other gadgetry.

While NFP (Near Field Power) is not a new concept, the non-contact charging system leverages an electromagnetic induction method. The system is composed of two coils, one for transmitting and the other for receiving electric power.

Mojo Mobility has developed a prototype sheet-type charger equipped with multiple transmitting coils. On this sheet to the right, up to four devices charged at the same time with the ability to produce 2.5W to 4W of power ..

Read

Opera Mini 4.2 beta just launched today. Opera Mini is one of my favorite mobile phone Internet browsers. It's a tough call between Opera Mini and Skyfire. Skyfire supports Flash and video, so it's better at multimedia, however, I find Opera Mini better suited to regular web pages with just graphics and text. Opera Mini is much faster at loading web pages and scrolling than Skyfire. Still, I use both on my Windows Mobile.

That said, today Opera Mini is trying to add video streaming support. Ironically, yesterday I was trying to figure out how to copy/paste my Orb TV streaming links from Opera Mini 4.1 to Pocket IE so I could stream live TV. I prefer browsing via Opera Mini, but I have to use Pocket IE to stream video/audio. I could use the popular MortScript to add copy/paste functionality, but unfortunately, it only allows pasting into Opera Mini and not from Opera Mini. In any event, in 4.2 when you are browsing video content, such as Youtube, Opera Mini will launch your regular Windows mobile browser (Pocket IE) with a prompt that says "Open URL? Yes / No" with a link similar to this - http://server4.operamini.com/hr02-14/5oxerx.../2/196. I figured out that this is like Opera Mini's version of tinyURL to point directly to the Youtube video. If you click 'Yes', it then launches Pocket Internet Explorer with a single URL on the web page "Start Stream". When I clicked this link it then said "Running a system command on this item might be unsafe. Do you wish to continue? Yes / No" with no option to save my preference for the future. (Pocket IE's fault not Opera Mini).  My default media player launched and then I got "An unknown error 0X8007274D has occurred." I looked at the URL it was trying to open and it looked similar to this:
rtsp://prug.rtsp-youtube.I.google.com/CkcLENy73wIaPgn43DiE8... (bunch more letters and numbers)

I'm guessing Windows Media Player couldn't handle the long string. It probably has a character limit.

Even if it did work, it's a bit of kludge, though I'm glad they're finally working on video support. I toggle to Skyfire when I need video. Opera said, "We are working to make video content available on more phones through Opera Mini. If you have a new Sony Ericsson or Nokia phone, the chance is high that you can take Opera Mini for a spin on m.youtube.com". So I guess Ericsson and Nokia users might have better luck than me.

Some other benefits of Opera Mini 4.2 over 4.1:
- Opera Mini 4.2 can use their newly established server park in the U.S. for faster performance.

- Sync your notes. The handy Notes functionality from the Opera Desktop Web browser just got more portable through Opera Link. All of your notes are available in Opera Mini directly from the Bookmarks menu.

- Personalize Opera Mini by choosing a new colorful skin. They reintroduced the popular skinning feature from Opera Mini 3.

Overall, I like the new version, especially the speed bump. No need for my Opera Mini browser to connect to Opera's servers in Norway and then back across the Atlantic. Still, I wish they allowed me to copy/paste links for cases when I need to use my alternate browser.

more info here.