Intel have just announced their brand new 310 Series of Solid State Drives (SSDs), and they’re happy to show off the ridiculously small size. Best of all, though, is that the company managed to pack in all of the same features and power of the x25-class of SSDs that these are meant to replace.

As Intel puts it, the new 310 Series of SSDs are able to deliver Intel x25-based performance, all in a package that comes in at one eighth the size of its predecessor. The ultra-compact design makes it possible for the SSD to have accelerated performance with higher-capacity hard drives in dual-drive notebooks. And Intel is quick to point out that the new SSDs are perfect for tablets, as well as military-grade or low-power, rugged, embedded apps. Not surprisingly, Intel is already showcasing the SSDs to potential buyers, pricing the 40GB model at $99, and $179 for the 80GB version. Check out the full press release below for more information. And check out the video below to see what Lenovo thinks of the new 310 Series.

Hybrid Batteries Last Twice as Long, Charge in Seconds

Some new batteries have been created by a company called ioxus that are capable of running a gadget for twice as long as a regular battery on a single charge. To add to that, the batteries have a charge time of just 90 seconds allowing you to easily charge them minutes before you need to go out somewhere.

If you charge the batteries for 20 seconds you get a partial charge when compared to the full 90 seconds.
It is expected that when launched, these particular batteries could power household gadgets such as kids toys, drills and other items around the house that use smaller types of batteries.

There is a trade-off though as the batteries last around 20,000 cycles which is a lot less than the "millions" of cycles possible with rechargeable batteries. But, with this being a different step in how batteries work, we are confident the company will up the number of cycles over the coming years.

Nokia Terminal Mode Demoed by Volkswagen [Video]

Volkswagen, the car maker released a video demo earlier today, showing how simple Nokia's Terminal Mode is to use.
With a vehicle supporting the technology, simply connect your Nokia device to your in-dash terminal, and navigate your phones screen, and menus via your car's inbuilt monitor. Enjoy!

Intel Working on Black Box for Your Car

At a series of press events last month, Intel demonstrated some of its auto-oriented technologies, including an event recorder, or so-called black box, which Congress is pushing as part of a piece of auto safety legislation inspired by the Toyota unintended acceleration issue. Intel sees such a black box as a natural part of its Connected Car research.


To show off how it works, Intel outfitted a Smart Fortwo with WiMax, the 4G wireless system that can provide high-speed data and Internet connections to anything that moves. As part of the system, Intel’s event recorder would be able to record basic telemetry of the vehicle and information like whether the seat belts were being used at the time of an accident, and a whole lot more.

“With new vehicles, there will very likely be video cameras inside and outside,” said Intel’s chief technology office, Justin Rattner, in an interview. “It’s not particularly new or stunning, but when you combine the cameras with GPS, you’re geo-tagging the video.” Essentially, the Intel event recorder would record 30 seconds or more of video and know exactly where and when an accident occurred.

While Mr. Rattner doesn’t expect the videos to be sent directly to insurance companies, they do make it easier for the police and insurance investigators to reconcile discrepancies in eyewitness accounts.

The event recorder would also be tied directly into a car’s existing computer control modules, so that investigators would know when or if the brakes were applied, for example, or if there was some mechanical malfunction. With sophisticated computer vision systems, the event recorder would also be possible to see what a traffic signal indicated at the time of impact or whether the driver ignored an important road sign, like driving the wrong way on an exit ramp.

Other applications could also be tied to the connected car, including remote start, the ability to report the position of potholes to local road crews and the ability to send a video of a car thief directly to the owner’s cellphone.

But just how much would such a fancy black box cost? Mr. Rattner said reports of such a device increasing a car’s cost by thousands of dollars were unrealistic, even though car event recorders could potentially be more sophisticated than airplane black boxes (which do not record video, for example).

“Most of the hardware costs will already be in these vehicles,” said Mr. Rattner, pointing out that drowsy driver warning systems and parking assist packages in luxury cars already deploy several video cameras. Within a few years these are likely to be standard features, with lower costs.

“Even in the aftermarket, I would be surprised if it cost more than a decent security system or navigation system in a few years,” he said. And we all know what’s happened to the price of navigation systems.

Mouseless – An Invisible Mouse

The computer mouse has advanced over the years by trimming down a little, becoming optical, becoming more responsive and becoming wireless to name a few advances. The next step is to get rid of the mouse altogether and have an invisible mouse, also known as Mouseless.

The concept was created by Pranav Mistry along with Patti Maes and Liyan Chang and basically gets rid of the mouse completely.

By using an IR sensor with some custom software, the movements of a hand on a desk can be interpreted in to mouse and finger movement allowing users to simple glide their hand on a desk and tap the desk with their finger.

The IR sensor sits on the back of a laptop and detects movement to the side of the laptop. By skimming the IR beam across the desk the software can pick up where the signal is cut off and calculate where your hand is and move the mouse pointer appropriately.

The system costs just $20 to build which is interesting and would allow laptop users to more comfortably work as well as carry less around when out and about.

The video below shows a demonstration of how the software works and how accurate it is. It's fairly impressive stuff and would be good for companies to adopt in the future.

LEDs are far more better than incandescents

LEDs are by far more efficient than incandescents and even CFLs while being used as a light source, but what about over their entire life cycle? Until a recent study, there had been doubts that the technology could claim the title of "most efficient" once you factored in production.

A new study conducted by Siemens Corporate Technology Centre for Eco Innovations and released by lighting company Osram claims to put those doubts to rest. The study compared the life cycle energy use of one 25,000-hour LED lamp to that of 2.5 10,000-hour CFLs and 25 1,000-hour incandescents.

The report states that the energy needed to make, ship, install, use and then recycle LEDs was about equal to CFLs and much less than incandescents. While the report didn't go into the technical details of the study or release specific numbers, Osram says it will release all of that information in the fall with support by three independent analysts.

Are flying cars soon to become reality?

Sir Clive Sinclair who gave the world the Spectrum computer and the C5 electric car has told BBC Radio 4 that soon it would be “economically and technically possible” to create flying cars.

As well as saying they were technically possible, he also said that they would have to be automatically controlled because “we can’t all learn how to fly” (try stopping me!)

But since he also added that these cars would have to be electrically powered instead of petrol powered, you can tell right away who will resist the building of them. Yep, that’s right - the oil companies! So that pretty much dooms the project from the get-go.

Plus I’m pretty sure the bird union will have something to say about it too. How’s a self-respecting sparrow supposed to do its flying about and dropping its waste on people’s heads when there’s flying cars whizzing past left, right and center? Come on!

WowWee's New Robots

From in-home surveillance robots to flying battle bots, WowWee is showing more than 20 new robots at the Consumer Electronics Show this week in Las Vegas. Here's a sneak peek at the company's 2008 robot lineup.

Rovio, the Home Survellance Robot

The $300 Rovio has a video camera, microphone, and Wi-Fi capabilities on board. The three-wheeled omnidirectional robot can stream video from its camera to remote locations with a broadband-connected Windows PC or smartphone. The robot is WowWee's first foray into remote home surveillance and "telepresence."

Rovio Recharging

Rovio can maneuver on its own; it doesn't have to be supervised continuously by remote control. The robot stores information about the location of furniture and various objects in the home to avoid collisions, and can cruise around on its own when prompted. It will even retreat to its docking station (pictured here) when it needs to recharge its battery. Rovio is slated to hit stores this fall.

FemiSapien: The Female of the Species

WowWee is also targeting some new robots at women and girls. FemiSapien is a female humanoid robot that dances to music it "hears" via its onboard microphone, and can control other robots in WowWee's lineup. The $100 robot reacts to voice commands and even human touch. It is scheduled for release in late summer.

Tri-Bot Tells Jokes

WowWee's popular Robosapien line moves to the next generation with Tri-Bot, a three-wheeled omnidirectional robot, also scheduled for release in the summer. Tri-Bot boasts animated eyebrows to go along with its joke-telling skills. The $100 robot also has a motion-sensitive remote control that allows the user to steer it simply by tilting the remote.

FlyTech BladeStar Soars (Indoors)

The FlyTech BladeStar is a helicopter-like flying robot that can either be controlled via remote or set to autopilot. Its onboard sensors prevent it from colliding with other objects. Its "Dogfight" accessory allows two BladeStar owners to engage in aerial combat. BladeStar, priced at $50, will be available exclusively at Target starting in February.

Mr. Personality -- Your Robotic Buddy

Boasting a color LCD screen for a face, WowWee's Mr. Personality robot is designed for laughs. It tells jokes, plays games, and you can even update or revamp its personality traits by downloading your selection and loading the changes into Mr. Personality with a USB connection. Priced at $250, Mr. Personality is scheduled to be available this summer.

Citizen VIRT - First Bluetooth Wristwatch

Citizen VIRT

The Citizen VIRT Bluetooth watch (W700) communicates with your mobile phone and displays incoming calls. With vibration and light flashing you get notified that a call comes in.

A small organic EL display is used to display name of the caller if the phone has an entry for it.
Another very useful feature of the Bluetooth watch is that it notifies you if you leave your phone behind.

The design of the world’s first commercially available Bluetooth watch is a bit too industrial for my taste. The display is way too small and it is too thick with close to 15mm.

The Citizen VIRT is charged with a contact-less charging station similar to the ones the SPOT watches are using. The battery life of the Citizen Bluetooth watch is about 5 days.
Measurements of the watch are 40.0mmx42.4mmx14.6mm and the weight is 55g.
Citizen will offer a black and a silver model starting July 7th. Citizen talks about a limited release of 5,000 pieces and the price is still open.

Iqua 603 SUN - Bluetooth headset

You will not have to charge your Bluetooth headset again!! Well, the Iqua 603 SUN is a earbud-style headset, complete with a world first - a solar panel to keep it juiced up, as long as the sun's shining that is. It'll stay working for 200 hours without the sun or will let you talk for up to nine hours. The headset comes with a one button control call function such as:

• answering
• ending
• redialing a call
• the voice dialing function which switches a call between the phone and the headset.

The Gateway XHD3000

With a stunning ultra-high-resolution 1600P wide screen image, the 30-inch Extreme HD Display has an integrated Silicon Optix Realta® HQV® video processor that takes video to an entirely new level of detail and clarity. The display also provides world-class convenience and usability as it can be easily connected to virtually any video device via its range of inputs including HDMI, dual-link and single-link DVI-D, VGA, component, s-video and composite interfaces, with1600P upsampling of all video sources.

The video processing chip set powers the Gateway XHD3000 with amazing 1600p HD video for optimal clarity, smoothness and accuracy with 16.7 million colors. The video processor performs one trillion operations per second for enhanced image quality. Support for up to six simultaneous video inputs, such as desktop and notebook computers, Xbox 360™, Sony PlayStation® 3, Nintendo® Wii™, Blu-Ray®, TiVo®, DirecTV®, HD-DVD and more.

Some other features:

• Advanced 3D sound
• 8 high-performance speakers
• Remote IR control capability
• 2 headphone outputs

Lg's home technology

Convert your house into a whole new dream house by using the LG's home technology which is out with its HomNet system. It helps in packing sensors into every room and internet connections into every device. Here are a few amazing things the HomNet can do for you:

• close the curtains
• control your heating
• lights
• air conditioning
• Unlock the front door

All this can be done using touch-screens around the house, a web browser on any PC or Mac, or your mobile phone

Renegade Gaming Chair

The Renegade Gaming Chair is not just a gaming chair for the kids, but it comes with lots of other features which makes this model available to people of all age groups. Here are some of the features of the Renegade Gaming Chair:

• Game synced with vibration motors
• 3D speakers on the headrest
• Lighting effects
• Massaging chair

The chair is USB compatible with Xbox 360, PS3, Wii, PS2, PC and iPod.

Charge mobiles with body heat

Researchers at the Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits in Erlangen, Germany, have developed new circuits that can harness electricity from body heat that would otherwise be dissipated into the air. The scientists say the advance could lead to battery-less cell phones and medical monitors that draw energy from their users.

“The idea behind it is that you can replace the batteries or at least you can enlarge the operation times of batteries,” said Peter Spies, electrical engineer and group manager at the institute.

Spies and his team improved upon semiconductors called thermoelectric generators that produce electrical energy in the face of temperature differences.

Normally, a difference of several tens of degrees is required in order to generate enough power, but the difference between the body’s surface temperature and that of its environment is only a few degrees. This produces about 250 millivolts, while electronic devices require at least one or two volts.

As part of their research, Spies and his team incorporated a component into the circuit called a charge pump. The pump temporarily stores the incoming millivolts until they reach 1.8 volts. At that threshold, an internal transistor turns on and delivers the higher voltage to a component that can transfer the electricity to a device.

Matthias Ueltzen, an application engineer at Freiburg, Germany-based Micropelt, a developer and manufacturer of thermoelectrics, said, while the “idea of generating some electric power from the heat of the body is a great idea,” there are certain difficulties, which lie in the low temperature differences between the skin and the outside air.

“Only a very small part of the thermal heat flow can be converted into electrical power, and for that reason, the technology may only work for applications that don’t require a lot of energy,” said Ueltzen.

Tags: Charge mobiles with body heat

Scene Completion Using Millions of Photographs

Taking advantage of the millions, perhaps billions of photographs posted on the World Wide Web, James Hayes and Alexei A. Efros of Carnegie Mellon University have developed a search and replace algorithm which examines a photograph for missing pieces and then goes out on the internet to find similar photographs to fill in the blanks.

The algorithm examines a photograph for missing sections, bad lighting, even gaps taken out from editing the photograph and then completes the image with a choice of photographs found to match lighting and sharpness. And the coolest part is, it’s all automatic. The only thing the user need do is choose the matching piece of the puzzle they like best.

Then the algorithm patches the holes in a fashion that in seamless and invisible.

This development can help victims of such disasters as Hurricane Katrina try and put their ruined photographs back together, give historians another tool to peek back into the past of a given area they are studying photographically or allow heartbroken sweethearts to remove the source of their pain and still keep the memory of an experience.

Here’s hoping some nefarious shadow government isn’t using it to fudge some photographic evidence.

Tags: Scene, Completion, Millions, Photographs

128GB RAM!!!

Guess what, I was happy to have bought my computer a 1GB RAM card last week and what do I see now?? This monster which is built by Xenon Systems for the Monash Cluster Computing group. Yep, it’s the 128 GB ram which looks like shown in the picture.

SETUP

The setup runs on 8 x 2.8GHz dual-core AMD Opterons, which are tucked away somewhere underneath all the seemingly endless rows of RAMs.

NEGATIVE

This system is supposedly extremely loud when running. That’s something you will not want while you are on your computer in your bedroom.

Three ways to adjust your HDTV

Good calibration still seems to be the domain of professionals

High-definition TV sets are big sellers these days, and no wonder, since the picture can be amazing.

But a lot of people seem to care more about how cool the flat panels look on the wall than what the picture looks like: It's common to see the image stretched horizontally to fill the screen, giving even the most attractive anchor a bloated look, or the color is off, giving everyone the reddish skin tone of the recently boiled.

The fact is picture quality varies quite a bit among HDTV sets, and calibration is often necessary to make the image look the way it should.
I tried three different ways of doing this: two do-it-yourself methods, and one professional calibration.

Sadly, the DIY options were hit-and-miss. They helped a few sets, and screwed up others. A good calibration still seems to be the domain of professionals — a surprising situation in our age of smart machines.

The "HDTV Calibration Wizard" DVD, from Monster Cable Products Inc. and Imaging Science Foundation, was the cheapest option, listing at $30. It's also the least thorough. It's simply a DVD that shows video loops with voiceover narration that tells you how to adjust your set's image using the basic controls accessed with the remote.

For example, it shows a man in a white shirt, and tells you to adjust the contrast so that you can make out the buttons and folds of the shirt. This got me into trouble with a plasma flat-panel set I tried it on. I couldn't get the details to show using the contrast setting, so I went into a more advanced menu and changed the "Input Level." That made the shirt look great, but when I later played a regular DVD, it was obvious that I'd reduced the contrast so much that everything looked gray and dull.

The DVD does get points for including scenes and instructions that help you adjust the image's sharpness, size and the ratio between length and width.

The SpyderTV color meter from Datacolor, which lists for $229, is a kit that comes with a light sensor that attaches to the TV screen. It's connected by a cable to your computer. The cable is short, so a laptop is recommended. An accompanying DVD shows test patterns, which are measured by the sensor and recorded by software on the computer.

This is a considerably more technical method than the "HDTV Calibration Wizard," and it's tricky. My results were mixed. It improved the image on one LCD set, but didn't take away an unpleasant greenish tinge to dark areas.

On another LCD set, it correctly identified weak colors, but exaggerated the correction, giving everyone a sunburned look (I can't rule out an error on my part here — the calibration is quite complicated). When I pulled back the color saturation a bit, that still left the image much improved. In one scene in "The Holiday," what I previously saw as just colorless overcast sky was now clearly a sunset with pastel hues of peach and blue.

"I feel bad that I watched all those movies that way!" exclaimed my wife, when she saw the difference. (In my defense, let me say that the most recent movie I watched on that set was "Downfall," about the last days of Hitler, and it was quite reasonable for me to expect a bunkerfull of Nazis to look pale.)

The SpyderTV sensor doesn't correct problems with sharpness or the shape of the image, but there are images on the DVD that can be used for the purpose.

To really get the job done, you may want to call in a professional calibrator, like Lee Richman of New York-based Nu Sound Concepts. Richman charges $275 and up for calibration, depending on the type of set (plasmas and LCDs are the simplest) and the complexity of the entertainment center.

I had Richman tackle a plasma set that the SpyderTV left looking quite yellow and low in contrast. His calibration also left it with a warm image, but a more natural-looking one, with cleaner colors. It wasn't a dramatic improvement over the default settings, but it was noticeable.

Richman said most sets are sold with the picture too blue and too bright, a setting known as "torch mode." It looks great in the store, because we perceive a blue image as being sharper and punchier.

Plasma screens in particular benefit from having the brightness turned down, because it extends their lifespan and cuts power consumption.

The professional calibrator has a number of advantages over amateurs. One is access to hidden menu settings for fine-tuning on some sets. Another is a signal generator that allows calibration for inputs other than a DVD, like a broadcast signal.

Does Higher Bit-Rate Music Sound Better?

When you rip music from CD, you're asked to make many choices: compressed audio format and the bit-rate of the compressed file being the chief among them. This latter choice is a biggie: Do you want, as iTunes would have you believe, "good quality" at 128kbps, "high quality" at 160kbps, or "higher quality" at 192kbps? Or something even higher? Or do you want wholly uncompressed files, which keep every bit of data on the original recording?

This selection isn't just critical because it can affect the quality of the audio you ultimately hear. It's also a big determining factor in the size of the file. A four-minute song encoded at 128kbps will consume about 3.7MB of space. That same song at 192kbps will eat up 5.6MB and a whopping 10.5MB at 360kbps. On a 20GB iPod, that means you can store about 5,000 128kbps songs but only 1,750 360kbps songs.

So, the big question... what does bumping up the quality of a music rip get you? Maximum PC took a bunch of non-techies, outfitted them with headphones, and ripped their own music at 160kbps, 320kbps, and a lossless format. The editors then asked each tester to blindly listen and rate the tracks as good/better/best... the idea being that the lossless track should sound much better than the lowly 160kbps track.

How do you think they did?

Not very well. Each of the testers got some right and some wrong: But most testers were simply unable to tell the different between a 160kbps track and an uncompressed one at all. Whether that's because encoding works better than we all think or because our ears are universally busted, even lower-grade digital music is still good enough for most eardrums.

One takeaway from the Max PC piece: variable bit rate recording makes a huge difference. You can turn this on in iTunes by using a "custom" encoding setting and checking the "Use Variable Bit Rate Encoding (VBR)" box.

Try the experiment for yourself sometime and see what you think. In my experience, the quality of your headphones is much more important than the way the music was encoded.

Coming soon: Bluetooth 2.1

At the recent CTIA event the Bluetooth Special Interest Group (SIG) announced that the core specifcation for Bluetooth 2.1 will soon be made available to vendors. Devices using the new specification are already being demoed and commercial availability will follow shortly. Bluetooth 2.1 allows for easier pairing of devices (including a provision to use NFC), uses less power and is more secure.

The easier pairing take the form of automatic pairing (as already achieved by some phone when operating with same brand accessories). Users will be able to choose, for example, Add New Headset from a menu and the pairing will automatically take place.

Bluetooth 2.1 is backwards compatible with earlier specifications.

Currently 12 million new Bluetooth devices ship every week and there is an installed user base of more than 1 billion Bluetooth devices.

Do smartphones need to be anything more than a browser and a phone?

When internet-connected PCs began to spread into people's homes, they were most commonly used for web surfing, email, Usenet (message boards), IRC (internet chat), word processing and gaming. All these functions were separate from each other, they were handled by dedicated programs stored on the user's computer. Need to write an essay? Load up Microsoft Word. Need to surf the web? Load up Netscape Navigator. Need to check your email? Load up Outlook Express.

By the end of the 1990s however, this situation began to change. Web-based email services such as Rocketmail and Hotmail allowed people to do their email entirely online through a web browser, and these services became extremely popular. They separated email from the PC, and allowed users to do their mail on any internet-connected computer in the world. Multi-gigabyte accounts from providers such as Gmail then made it completely practical for someone to store all their email and all their attachments in one online account. Many people stopped using separate email clients completely.

Other separate internet applications also began to get edged out by the web fairly quickly: IRC clients gave way to Java-based web chat rooms, Usenet news readers gave way to web-based message boards, and even some simple games began to be available in Java or Flash form.

Many people, particularly businesses and hardcore PC users, still use separate offline software as it is almost always more reliable, more secure and more feature packed. But for many other people, perhaps most people, webmail is good enough to replace their computer-based email client, and the convenience of not being tied to one machine outweighs the reliability of a standalone offline application.

As web-based applications in general become popular, people might come to regard their PC just as a box that runs the browser, rather than as a computer in its own right. The type of operating system the PC runs would be irrelevant.

Could this happen to smartphones too? Is the smartphone's browser the only app we will really need in the future?

Will the browser eat the operating system?

The idea of the browser supplanting the computer's own operating system isn't a new one. When web-based Java applications first appeared in the 1990s, many predicted they could be the biggest threat to Microsoft's Windows monopoly by sidestepping the PC's OS completely.

It seems that the Java evangelists were being a bit too optimistic, as the mass migration of apps from Windows to the web just hasn't happened yet.

However, recent developments such as the widespread availability of always-on high speed broadband connections and the rise of things like AJAX have changed things, and put the idea of an irrelevant computer OS back on the table.

AJAX is a technique which combines various web technologies such as Javascript and XML to make a web site look and behave like a standalone PC application. Google's slickest web services such as Gmail, Google Maps and Google Documents and Spreadsheets have made this technique familiar to a wider audience, and while web apps like these will never be as feature-packed or as reliable as standalone applications, for most people in most situations they're good enough. They're also accessible through any internet-connected AJAX-compatible device, and will probably spawn a thousand similar rivals. Even Microsoft is planning to offer an online word processing and spreadsheets service, despite being the largest maker of offline word processors and spreadsheet software.

One of the driving forces behind the original takeup of webmail were students, who loved the way they could browse their email on any faceless university computer, and then continue using exactly the same account in exactly the same way on their home PC during the holidays. It's not hard to see how web-based word processors could become similarly widely used, as they allow work on documents (including wiki-like collaborations between many different users) on any compatible internet-connected computer.

If most people end up doing their email, word processing and spreadsheets through their web browser, why not other services? Why should people have to use any application offline if they would prefer to use it online?

The Mobile Dimension

So far this exodus of applications from the desktop to the web browser has been largely restricted to PCs, but smartphones are on the verge of being able to join in. Many portable computing devices such as the Nokia N800 are already compatible with AJAX web services such as Gmail, and can display such sites exactly as a PC does (Google Maps, Gmail). It can't be long before this compatibility spreads to smartphones.

Once that happens, the web service providers will probably offer a wider range of interface options to suit the different screens that smartphones tend to have, and then web-based apps will start to become a serious alternative to smartphone-based apps.

Converging the computing world

Separating smartphone hardware from its applications by using web-based apps could bring an incredible amount of choice to consumers. They could use as many different devices as they wanted without having to ever sync their files. They could use the same web applications on any smartphone model, from any manufacturer, running any operating system. As long as the smartphones all contain a browser compatible with the required web applications, they would become completely interchangeable, and not just with each other but also with desktop computers and everything in-between such as laptops and UMPCs.

Users would also be able to mix and match applications as they see fit, instead of waiting for them to be ported to their particular device (if they ever are ported), and they wouldn't be tied to the bundle of apps that manufacturers include with smartphones.

The currently separate application ecosystems of different OSes could merge into one completely open web-based ecosystem, where the only significant task of a computing device such as a PC or smartphone is to render web sites correctly. As far as end users would be concerned, the web browser and computer would become the same thing, just as a television tuner and a television set are regarded as the same thing.

From a consumer point of view, there wouldn't be any PCs or smartphones any more, just browsing devices of various shapes and sizes, from desktop to laptop to pocket-size.

Is this how we will access our smartphone apps in the future?

A Renaissance For Smartphones & Smartphone Apps

Because a move to browser-based apps would end the "format war" between rival software platforms, people would be able to buy a portable computing device with confidence and smartphone sales could benefit from this, the way that sales of DVD players benefited from DVD being a unified format.

Use of add-on applications could also increase considerably: web based services can be used without any sort of technical knowledge or installation procedure, you just need to know and enter the relevant web address. It would be incredibly easy to try web apps and tell others about them, and if a web service works the same way on a smartphone and PC, PC users will be far more tempted to get a smartphone as they'd just see it as a portable version of something they already use.

It's a sad fact that most smartphone owners never use a third party piece of software, partly because they're unaware such things exist, partly because they're not sure whether they have a compatible model and partly because it's so fiddly to actually find, download and install an application. If apps were web based, the whole process of finding and using them would be seamless, and all that developers would have to worry about is getting their web address as widely advertised as possible. The device's browser would become the only meaningful application actually on the phone, and as browsers would all be designed to render to the same standards, there wouldn't be much to choose between them.

Web-based Smartphone Gaming

Perhaps the greatest technical challenge for web-based applications is gaming. Cutting edge games use more computing power than any other consumer computer applications, and they also take up the most storage space, which makes them least suited to being used through a browser.

But what kind of games do people actually use on the move? Most of the time they're simpler titles than on a desktop PC, and many successful handheld console games such as the Nintendo DS's Zoo Keeper are actually just re-releases of web-based Flash games. Even some original console-only handheld titles such as the hugely popular Warioware for the GBA could easily be done as web-based Flash games.

While road testing the Nokia N800 I was able to play Flash and Java games using the web browser, and they loaded and worked just as they do on a PC web browser. Web-based Flash is a good enough platform for most 2D games, and most S60 smartphone games could probably be remade for the web in some form.

Of course titles with cutting edge graphics will always be too challenging for a web-based release, and gaming could split along the same lines as users of other types of applications: the hardcore people who use these services heavily will stick to a separate offline client, while the more casual majority go for the convenience of web-based software.

But there's a catch...

The fundamental catch with web services is that your device has to be connected to the internet in order for them to work. You can't read or write an email offline on webmail, you can't edit a document offline on Google Documents, you can't watch a video offline on YouTube.

However, these objections against web apps on PCs were strongest in the days of unreliable and expensive metered dial-up connections. When you were paying a per-minute price for a connection which also tied up your phone line, it seemed ridiculous to stay connected to the internet while writing an email. But that problem was solved as widespread flat rate and always-on broadband connections became available, where it made no difference whether you wrote an email online or offline. Broadband does still break down sometimes, but this is relatively rare nowadays, and most users seem to feel it's a price worth paying for the sake of the convenience that web services bring.

Connectivity doesn't have to be perfect for people to want to use web apps, it just has to be good enough. If people can almost always access their webmail, most of them won't care if it's inaccessible a handful of times a year.

It's also worth remembering that PCs themselves aren't 100% reliable. When PCs break down, you can't just use another computer because all your files are on the broken one. Web-based apps store all their files online, usually on servers that are regularly backed up, and they let you seamlessly move from one computer to another whenever you like. In terms of protection against hardware problems, web-based apps are actually more reliable than offline apps.

...and mobile web apps have even more catches too

Web-based apps obviously have huge potential to become very popular with the average consumer, and on the desktop PC they may well become the norm for most people over the next decade or so. But with mobile devices the challenges for web-based apps are much greater, for several significant reasons:

Lack of Compatible Handsets - Manufacturers have to start making a majority of their smartphones compatible with the most commonly used web app technologies. At the moment, smartphones can handle HTML and javascript with no problems, but usually run into problems with Flash, AJAX and other advanced techniques. The Nokia N800 shows it's now possible to make a light, portable and relatively cheap device (well, cheaper than the E90!) which can handle consumer web apps just like a PC. The latest S60 browser will apparently have AJAX compatibility (although I still haven't seen the full version of Gmail running on an S60 device yet). We will almost certainly see PC-like web app compatibility in future smartphones, but we have to wait for it to happen.

Operator Sabotage - Phone network operators have a habit of standing in the way of progress in the mobile world. Web-based apps might not fit in with their game plan, and they could try to put all kinds of spanners in the works to stop web apps working, as they've tried to do with Bluetooth and Wi-fi in the past. It may be taken out of their hands however, as more and more devices become compatible with non-operator wireless standards such as Wi-fi and Wimax. Operators could be forced to open up to web apps in the same way they were forced to abandon their "walled garden" internet services and provide direct access to all web sites.

High Mobile Internet Costs - The cost of mobile internet access still has to drop significantly worldwide. This is already starting to happen in most countries, and many networks now allow you to buy unlimited uncapped 3G mobile internet access for a (still quite high) flat monthly fee. Phone models with Wi-fi also allow people to get high speed unmetered internet access at home or in hotspots.

Lack Of High Speed Wireless - 3G and even faster services are far more widely available now than a few years ago, but there's still a long way to go. Many countries including, bizarrely, the United States have very poor coverage even for 2G services, with enormous gaps where there's no wireless coverage of any kind. For web-based apps to replace phone-based apps, these gaps have to be closed.

Unoptimised Web Apps - Web app providers have to adapt their offerings for mobile devices. Once AJAX compatibility arrives in phone browsers, it will be up to Google to make an AJAX version of Gmail which is as usable as possible on a smaller screen. At the moment AJAX Gmail still assumes you have access to a full size keyboard and full size horizontal screen, which would make it awkward to use on an AJAX-compatible phone.

All these are significant problems, and at the moment it might seem almost unthinkable that we would ever come to depend on something as unpredictable as mobile wireless networks for access to our mobile applications. But that's how it seemed in the days when PC internet connections were similarly patchy. Mobile networks aren't going to remain unreliable forever, they're developing so quickly and becoming so cheap to roll out that even the poorest countries in the world now have significant amounts of mobile phone coverage. More and more households are also supplementing cellular networks with their own Wi-fi networks, so people often have free high speed wireless internet access whenever they're at home.

It seems inevitable that wireless coverage (cellular, Wi-fi, Wimax and others) will improve in every country in the world and, when availability reaches a certain point, as it did with desktop PC broadband access, a lot of people will start using web apps on their phones just like they do on computers. In many countries and regions, cellular coverage is already close to 100%, and these are the places where we might get our first taste of the browser-centric smartphone.