fields

Get ready for camera 3.0. Because next year, you might have to decide whether an 11-megaray sensor is enough for your new light-field camera.

Lytro, a Silicon Valley startup, today unveiled its radical new camera--also called the Lytro. With it, the company hopes to rewrite the rules with a technology called light-field photography, but the scale of the company's ambition is matched by the scale of its challenge.

On the outside, the Lytro looks different--a smooth, two-tone elongated box 4.4 inches long and 1.6 inches square. At one end is the lens and at the other … Read more

While many of the iPhone 4 cases fit the 4S, case manufacturers are seeing the arrival of the 4S as a good opportunity to introduce new designs.

WaterField Designs, which is known for its high-quality sleeves for laptops and iPads, has just released a leather wallet that also does double-duty as an iPhone case. It's simply called the iPhone Wallet ($39) and it has a window (and sound port) that allows you to "see and hear your iPhone."

If you want something a little trimmer, WaterField's also serving up the iPhone Hint ($25), which the company … Read more

The owner of the Qwikster Twitter handle is banking on selling it to Netflix, Verizon unveils a $99 4G LTE capable smartphone, and Google Wallet finally launches with support only on Sprint's Nexus S 4G phone so far.

Links from Tuesday's episode of Loaded:

Despite a globe-spanning, bruising legal battle with Samsung, Apple has little choice but to keep getting key parts for its iPhone from the electronics maker, according to sources and a news report.

Those key parts include the iPhone 5's expected main processor, the A5, as well as system memory and flash memory--components that together make up the electronic core.

Sources who track the chip industry say that Apple must stick with Samsung for the time being. Some rumors had claimed that Apple would switch to Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) for a so-called "shrink" (smaller version) of the A5 for the iPhone 5.

That's simply not doable, sources tell CNET. TSMC has not perfected the advanced manufacturing processes needed to make an A5 for the iPhone and, maybe more importantly, it's prohibitively difficult to jump to a different manufacturer for the same chip design. … Read more

Nokia is jumping even further onto the NFC bandwagon with plans to support the mobile payments technology in its latest Symbian phones and all future phones.

The Finish phone maker's current C7 handset and its new 700, 701, and 600 phones already include the NFC hardware and will fully support it by the first half of 2012, according to NFC World and other sources.

The company also plans to outfit all upcoming Symbian phones with the NFC chips as part of its aggressive move into the mobile payments market.

"From now on, all of our products will have … Read more

Visa is planning to roll out dual-mode chips in its infrastructure in an effort to step up mobile payment adoption. Meanwhile, it's deploying a mix of carrots and sticks to get merchants on board.

Specifically, Visa is aiming to prepare payment infrastructure for NFC (near-field communication) mobile payments. Google has pushed NFC payments, and other mobile phone players are aiming to turn your smartphone into a wallet. Visa will support EMV and NFC. EMV, which stands for Europay, MasterCard, and Visa, is a global standard for credit and debit payment cards. EMV has been popular abroad, but lags in … Read more

The number of consumers paying for items via their mobile devices will shoot past 141 million this year, says new data out today from Gartner.

That figure is a 38.2 percent increase over 2010, when mobile-payment users hit 102.1 million. The amount of money generated via mobile payments is expected to reach $86.1 billion this year, up almost 76 percent from the $48.9 million seen last year.

The surge in mobile payments will come despite the slow adoption of mobile-payment technologies.

The mobile, retail, and financial industries have been rushing to roll out near-field communication (NFC) … Read more

WaterField Designs makes all kinds of cases, bags, and gear pouches for all kinds of portable products. Now, with more people allegedly taking their Apple TVs on the road with them, it's offering up some protection with its $45 Apple TV Pouch.

As you can see from the picture, the case, which comes in tangerine and a carbonlike "flash" color, is significantly large than the Apple TV itself. But that's because it has four interior pockets to accommodate the unit, an HDMI cable, the power cord, and the remote.

We've tested several WaterField cases and … Read more

A start-up called Lytro hopes to revolutionize photography by selling a camera later this year that lets people focus their images after the fact.

The technique used is called light-field photography, and it's been an active area of research for years in the optics realm. With it, lens and image sensor technology doesn't focus on a particular subject, but instead gathers light information from different directions; processing after the fact means different aspects of the scene can be recreated.

Lytro has been working on the technology for years--I interviewed Chief Executive Ren Ng three years ago when his … Read more