THE WINDOWSFORDEVICES.COM WEEKLY NEWSLETTER WindowsForDevices.com Newsletter -- December 11, 2002 


Wednesday, December 11, 2002

By Alexander Wolfe, executive editor
 

ONLINE HTML VERSION AT:
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***************************TOP STORIES******************************


1)INTEL, IBM, AT&T TAKING WI-FI TO THE MASSES

We believe the embedded story of the week, though little heralded 
in the rest of the online press, was the news that AT&T, Intel and 
IBM have formed a joint Wi-Fi venture called Cometa Networks. 
Interestingly, the operation will be one step removed from the end 
user. In other words, it appears aimed less at selling Wi-Fi access
directly to end users than to supplying the telecom industry with a
wireless infrastructure. That adds weight to the obvious assumption
that Cometa was formed not so AT&T, Intel, and IBM can make a 
killing selling Wi-Fi access--they won't--but to kick start wider 
deployment of the technology. This will enable Intel to sell more 
Wi-Fi chip sets, AT&T to sell more switches, and IBM to sell more 
back-office computing.

One possible future problem might be lack of user demand (aka 
overcapacity), the telecom bugaboo hammered home by the burst of 
the dot.com bubble. That's a real danger. However, this is unlikely
to occur in Wi-Fi anytime in the immediate future. That's because 
only two carriers--Boingo Wireless Inc. and T-Mobile--have 
aggressively targeted Wi-Fi to date. The highest profile deployment
has been T-Mobile's "HotSpot" service, which is currently 
installing service in domestic Starbucks.

Personally, I love the idea of being able to work out of Starbucks.
(I'd like it even more if Starbucks had tea, and if someone other 
than myself paid my wireless access charges.) So clearly we have 
another technology that's going to be winner with the early 
adopters. How long it will take to catch on in a broader way is 
the big unknown.

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2)SAMSUNG PREVIEWS POCKET PC PROTOTYPE

Reports have surfaced out of Hong Kong that Samsung is going to 
ratchet up the competition in the PocketPC market. Company 
engineers have been showing off a prototype that  got features up 
the wazoo--including a television tuner. Equipped with a 400 MHz 
XScale, it measures only 5.2 x 2.8 x .7 inches, and weighs a non-
pocket-busting 7.1 ounces.

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3)MICROSOFT MIGHT MOVE TO END-USER BASED LICENSING

End users who dislike buying separate applications licenses for 
multiple devices might finally be getting a break. Starting with 
Windows .Net Server 2003, which is slated for release in April, 
businesses will have the option of purchasing client-based licenses
(CALs) per user, rather than just per machine. With the rise of 
open-source, Microsoft has been under increasing market pressure to
ease up on its licensing terms. The new licenses would likely be 
priced on usage. They seem to eliminate the need for overlapping 
licenses and would likely allow end users to run the same app on 
multiple machines. 

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4)ICs, THEN DISPLAYS, ARE COMING ON GLASS SUBSTRATES

Glass-substrate integrated circuits could be the next big thing. 
Sharp and Semiconductor Energy Laboratory have successfully 
integrated an 8-bit Z80 microcontroller onto a liquid-crystal-
display glass substrate. They did it using the two companies' 
jointly developed continuous grain silicon. In CG, electrons travel
approximately 600 times faster than through conventional amorphous 
silicon and approximately three times faster than through 
low-temperature polysilicon.

Sharp says this is a big milestone toward their plan to fabricate 
complete "system on a panel" TVs and computers. More likely, for 
the near future, we're talking displays. The first of the glass 
Z80s should hit the market within a year.

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5) CHINA'S 1.3-BILLION UNIT MOBILE MARKET UP FOR GRABS

Beijing -- Mobile phone designers are gearing up to enter the huge 
Chinese market. Some 400 telecomm houses showed off their wares at 
a government-sponsored show here last month, enticed by a current 
base 190 million mobile phone users. Though that's a lot of people,
it's still less than 14 percent of the country's total population 
of 1.3 billion. And 5 million new customers are signing up every 
month. Handset makers at the show included Nokia, NEC, Matsushita, 
Sanyo, Kyocera, Toshiba, LG Electronics, and Samsung.

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6) THIN FILM PUTS BRIGHTER TOUCH PANEL IN PICTURE

Fujitsu Labs researchers have developed a brighter, compact touch-
panel display that, once commercialized, could be ideal for compact
form-factor mobile devices such as PDAs and smart phones. The panel
uses a surface acoustic wave (SAW) generated by a piezoelectric 
thin-film transducer. Because it's constructed on a single glass 
substrate, it achieves 98 percent light transparency--supposedly a 
16 percent improvement over prior modes. The display has a frame 
width of 1.4mm (approximately half that of the conventional models)
and a thickness of 0.7mm. Although it has been long recognized that
the SAW method could be applied to make a smaller touch panel, 
until now it hasn't been practical.

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7) RINGTONES IS A $1.5-BILLION BUSINESS

Who knew? Those annoying cellphone ringtones that are apparently a 
golden business. A recent market study found that consumer 
downloading of ringtones is currently a $1.5 billion annual 
business in Europe and $300 million per year in Japan. 

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8) INTEL UPDATES ITANIUM COMPILERS

On the developer software front, Intel has updated its C++ and 
Fortran compilers, with new version 7.0 releases for both Windows 
and Linux. Intel's big selling point here is that the compilers can
generate multi-threaded applications and take advantage of Intel's 
much (self) vaunted "Hyper-Threading" technology. Hyperthreading is
Intel's name for its implementation of traditional multithreading, 
under which a single Itanium processor run multiple logical 
processes at the same time.

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