January 2009 Archives

Imitation, as they say, is the best form of praise. So it's no surprise that following on the heels of Apple's iPhone triumph, other computer makers are eying the handset to boost their bottom lines. The buzz is that Acer and Dell are working on high-end smartphones, according to Juniper Research's Analyst Xpress blog today. 

The Wall Street Journal has a story on Dell, as well, saying that "people familiar with the matter" indicate that Dell may launch a smartphone "as early as next month."
I say, the more the merrier. Computer makers bring a different POV to the table, as we saw with the iPhone. And that can only be a good thing. 

In his Fierce VoIP post on Monday, Doug Mohney reports that one of his takeaways from last week's CES is that your TV is morphing into a phone. Maybe so, but another - and potentially bigger - story at CES is how your phone is turning into a TV set.

The Open Mobile Video Coalition (OMVC) debuted the new ATSC candidate standard for broadcast - free-to-air - mobile TV rolling toward final approval later this year. At CES, the OMVC was showing live broadcasts on prototype handsets, mobile video players, PCs, and in-vehicle video players.

This just could be more important even than making a videophone call via your 54-inch HD TV. It might even be - dare I say it? - even more important than Skype's announcement last month about the VoIP's demise; a discovery, let me add, that is hardly original - Jajah co-founder Roman Scharf famously tried this attention-attracting gimmick back in 2006.

Why is the OMVC's announcement important? Because it's a potential game-changer.

Long, long ago, in a galaxy far, far way...in 1927, to be exact, American Telephone & Telegraph and Bell Laboratories demo-ed what the New York Times called "the first practical demonstration of television," in which live picture and sound were transmitted from Washington, D.C. Continue Reading...