Wireless high dev hits the streets
Amimon, an Israeli company that's been touting a version of wireless HDMI, has come out with its first chips, a prelude to the wireless war that will waged at the Consumer Electronics Show this year.
The company, which landed an investment with Motorola, says its chips can pass uncompressed 720p, 1080i or 1080p streams around the house from one device to another. Thus, you don't have to clutter up the room with ornate coils of cable.
Amimon can send signals through walls up to 100 feet with a latency of less than a millisecond.
Loewe and Funai will show off demo equipment with Amimon's chips inside.
Over the last two years, a number of start-ups have shown off chips for sending video and music around the house wirelessly. Samsung this year even released a plasma TV that gets signals from a 802.11(n) unit. A lot of these transmission systems, however, have suffered from being expensive, or not fast enough, or not robust enough to work in a home. If anyone moved past the TV, the signal faded, with some systems.
Lately, the two biggest contenders seem to be Amimon and SiBeam. The two technologies are different and use different portions of the radio spectrum. But the main thing that matters is what manufacturers adopt. SiBeam has already said that you'll see some demos of its equipment at CES.
