Circuit Breaker

A Netbook/ultramobile hybrid from Sharp

CHIBA, Japan--The Sharp NetWalker comes off like a computer with an identity crisis.

It's part Asus Eee PC Netbook and part Samsung Q1 ultramobile PC.

And it's a little bit puzzling.

The NetWalker is dressed up like a super-petite Netbook, weighing less than a pound, with a five-inch touchscreen and a measly 512MB of memory and wireless LAN.

It's got a pretty robust battery life--up to 10 hours, according to Sharp--and runs Ubuntu. There's a Firefox browser, Thunderbird for e-mail, a Twitter app, and some open-source programs for word processing and reviewing spreadsheets, so you can more

Sony Vaio, Walkman, Reader get OLED treatment

CHIBA, Japan--Perhaps to distract from the fact that it has no organic light-emitting diode TV on display here at Ceatec 2009, Sony is instead showing off conceptual uses for its flexible OLED technology.

Mind you, these are just prototypes, nothing even close to a real product, like the XEL-1 TV that Sony actually sells but is notably absent from its booth here. But the ways the company is thinking of perhaps using its flexible display tech are certainly cool.

Take the dual OLED screen Vaio notebook. It features the 0.2 mm OLED on both the screen and keyboard area. more

Fujitsu's futuristic phones

CHIBA, Japan--Out of 2,000 design concepts for mobile phones of the future, the winning entry in Fujitsu's Mobile Phone Design competition was not the flashiest or most forward-thinking. Instead, the grand prize was awarded to one that featured the most intuitive interface for users. What a concept.

Jin-Gwon Go, a South Korean college student studying design won the equivalent of about $20,000 for his mobile phone concept titled "Gesture." Of all the finalists, Go's design was probably the one that took the form of what most people would expect of a mobile phone. Fujitsu said his more

Green tech, robots to take over Tokyo

In Japan, for one week a year the spotlight of this gadget-obsessed country is shifted from the urban neon oasis of Tokyo's Akihabara neighborhood and trained on an expansive convention hall an hour's commute outside of the city.

On Tuesday the purveyors of TVs thinner than a credit card, cell phones pressed with 3D screens, humanoid robots, and the latest in electric car technology descend, along with media, analysts, retail buyers, and industry executives for the opening of the Combined Exhibition of Advanced Technologies, known by the acronym Ceatec.

It's the Japanese equivalent of Las Vegas' CES and Berlin's IFA, and like those two shows earlier this year, attendance is expected to be good, if slightly contracted as companies have cut back on expenses in light of the current economy.

At Ceatec 2008, 804 exhibitors and 196,630 attendees flooded the floor of the Makuhari Messe, a dip from the 895 exhibitors and 206,000 attendees in 2007. The tenor of this year's show should be a bit less gloomy than last year's--which took place the same week banks were failing right and left and Wall Street seemed on the brink of collapse. We'll keep our fingers crossed for less economic drama during this year's show.

Things we are hoping for: more cute robots! Ceatec is unlikely to disappoint in this respect. Last year's expo saw the debut of automatons that did everything from perform front-office reception tasks to helping the elderly. But based on the crowds she drew, the star was undoubtedly Murata Girl, a unicycle-riding robot. This year, we hear she'll be back with even more tricks up her sleeve.

Like those robots, there's also an amazing array of stuff shown at Ceatec we'll never see in stores on this side of the Pacific--see our gallery of cool concept cell phones. But while Ceatec offers a glimpse into the future of gadgetry, the convention hall is also packed to the skylights with practical products.

Last year was the first time Ceatec established a separate pavilion for green technology, and it's back this year. Nissan, which takes its electric cars very seriously, will be there, as will Toshiba. Though not thought of traditionally as a car company, it believes its Supercharge ion battery (SCiB) is perfectly suited for electric cars and scooters. Besides green car technology, we'll also see electronic parts that make ordinary gadgets like TVs and digital signs greener.

OLED TV makers look to shift out of neutral

SAN FRANCISCO--Though LG's eye-popping OLED (organic light-emitting diode) display wowed audiences in Berlin last month, it's best not to get too excited. There's not going to be more where that came from, at least for a while.

The industry is still at least three years away from churning out standard-size televisions of 32 inches or larger at something approaching acceptable prices. And though Sony grabbed all the attention in early 2008 with its $2,500 11-inch OLED, it's faded into the background when it comes to nudging the technology forward. Initially promising to follow up with 21-inch and 27-inch models, Sony's deferred those plans while battling bigger problems with its TV business.

With Sony on the sidelines, it seemed like we were witnessing yet another false start for a technology that's been intent on challenging existing TV standards like LCD and plasma for almost half a decade now.

Beset by the standard issues that come with bringing a new technology into the mainstream, like the exorbitantly high cost of development, OLED TVs might be on the verge of shifting out of neutral as new standard bearers for the technology emerge. The ones to watch now are Samsung and LG Electronics, which have each signaled that they're ready to make larger investments in OLED technology for TVs.

How will an Apple tablet stack up?

More "details" have emerged about the supposed upcoming Apple tablet. iLounge says a trusted source has provided 10 bits of info about the device, including a notably specific announcement date: Tuesday, January 19, with the product shipping in May or June.

This potential product has been discussed ad nauseum. But Apple isn't the only one pondering this market. As more companies start offering their own versions of tablets in anticipation of Apple jumping in later, and as more tidbits leak out about what Apple might be cooking up, it's useful to look at how it would stack up more

Dell brings wireless recharging to laptops

That Dell is releasing a new laptop for business customers is the opposite of surprising. But the fact that it contains notable features not seen in any other laptops certainly is.

Most everything about the new Latitude Z is expected: It's yet another very thin notebook (a metric which PC manufacturers keep using to try to one-up each other), with a different kind of exterior finish (soft-touch, in this case), and comes in a black cherry. It measures 16 inches across, and is 14 millimeters thin at its most narrow point.

But you probably wouldn't guess that the Latitude Z charges wirelessly. And as far as we can tell, it's the first laptop to do so. Surprised that this is coming from Dell? You're not alone.

The wireless charging is handled elegantly enough. An inductive pad that's built into a laptop stand can accomplish a full recharge in "about the same amount of time" as a standard-issue cabled charger, according to Dell. While smartphone maker Palm has a similar (albeit smaller) wireless charging system for the Pre, and companies like Visteon and Wild Charge have debuted wireless charging accessories for phones, no PC maker has incorporated the idea until now.

Is HP changing its Voodoo tune?

Hewlett-Packard is sending mixed signals on what exactly it plans to do with the Voodoo PC brand it acquired three years ago.

After purchasing the gaming and PC enthusiast brand in 2006, HP in 2008 began using the Voodoo name beyond powerful gaming PCs. It painted the name Voodoo and VoodooDNA on high-end HP notebooks and desktops, and talked up their premium engineering and design. They used the analogy that if the HP brand were a Smart Car and Compaq were a Chrysler, Voodoo would be their Maybach.

But a year later, HP's consumer PC lineup contains little trace of the Voodoo branding. HP had introduced the HP Blackbird with VoodooDNA and more recently HP Firebird with Voodoo DNA. Both are nowhere to be found on HP.com. In a more recent example, a new notebook, called the HP Envy was released last week. A year ago it was called the HP Voodoo Envy 133. Though the updated model takes some Voodoo ideas like the thin profile, quick booting, the power adapter, and packaging, you'd have to be a Voodoo fanboy to know Voodoo had any sort of influence at all on it.

So what gives? It seems the Voodoo team didn't have much to do with the Envy, despite its sharing the same name with older products.

"The reason there's no 'Voodoo DNA' on the (most recent) product has to do with the overall design language, the target market, and the fact that we weren't directly involved in the design," Rahul Sood, the founder of VoodooPC and the chief technology officer of gaming PCs for HP, wrote on his personal blog.

In the same post, Sood that Voodoo is "transitioning from 'desktop and notebook' manufacturing to something beyond." While it's unclear what "something beyond" means, he hints that besides HP taking some design and engineering cues from Voodoo that the company he founded didn't quite fit into HP the way Sood had initially expected.

Accounting rule change approved by FASB

After a preliminary agreement last week the Financial Accounting Standards Board made it official Wednesday, accepting proposed changes to how companies recognize revenue.

The change will be of particular interest to companies like Apple, which has stuck to a rather bewildering accounting practice of recognizing revenue from sales of the iPhone and Apple TV over a period of two years, or eight financial quarters. The practice was put in place on those two products to avoid charging a fee for every product upgrade--something Apple was told it would need to satisfy accounting regulations that require companies to establish a value more

Gartner: PC sales to make slight recovery by year's end

Despite earlier, more dire predictions, PC sales are now estimated to fall off just 2 percent from 2008 totals, according to a report released Wednesday.

The latest forecast issued from market research firm Gartner says PC shipments should reach 285 million units by the end of 2009. That's just slightly off last year's shipments of 291 million. The forecast is markedly improved over June's estimates from Gartner, which forecast a 6 percent decline for the year.

The better-than-anticipated demand is being driven mostly by notebook and Netbooks in China and the U.S., according to Gartner research more