The chef’s secret recipe this time seemed to be ‘convergence’ — in ways neither consumers nor corporates might have quite imagined. ‘Touch’ was the technology whose time had come: A procession of personal devices offered tactile experiences and touch-based controls in new and innovative ways. Only weeks after Apple unveiled the second, 3G avatar of its runaway success, the iPhone, the Korean handset leader Samsung decided that Hall 4 of the Singapore Expo was to be the chosen arena to take on the American challenge with an unwritten agenda. It was seemingly drawn from that archetypal American musical, “Annie, Get your gun!”, where the heroine sings: “Anything you can do, I can do better!”.

Samsung’s SGH-i900 ‘Omnia’ matched the iPhone, specification for specification: the same keyless, ‘touching’ interface; the same brilliant colour screen, with additional support for movie formats such as DivX (so useful if you download from the Web, as Samsung suspects most of us do); generous internal memory (16 GB); a 5 megapixel camera; GPS capability, ultra slim metal body…. There were a dozen units chained down to the long table in the Samsung stand – and one was hard put to find one free to try.

LG had its own touch phone — the KF 750 was part of the stylish Black Label series of which the Chocolate was the earlier cult model. Again a 5 MP camera, with a standard keyboard discreetly tucked in (The model is codenamed ‘Secret’), but LG clearly believes beauty shouldn’t be skin deep: the KF 750 is encased in a composite mixture of glass and carbon fibre, you know, the stuff that goes to make the nose cones and casings of missiles.

Those of us who chose to attend Nokia’s pre-CommunicAsia bash in an air-cooled nylon tent on Singapore’s equivalent of the cricket ‘maidan’, were disappointed that the world’s mobile handset leader chose not to flourish its own iPhone challenger. Maybe such instant reflex actions are not what emerge from the cooler thinking in the Arctic reaches of Finland: What we were offered, after an energetic Singaporean drum dance, was a pair of sleek but sturdy enterprise phones (hence the ‘E’ in their prosaic model numbers), E 66 and E71.

But looks can be deceptive. Both are packed with the type of productive features your hotshot peripatetic corporate honcho loves: zippy speeds well up to 3.5 G or what is known as High Speed Packet Access. A full slate of office utilities — and GPS to figure out where one is headed, and to ‘geotag’ every thing that one snaps with the 3.2 MB camera. The E 71 also comes with a full qwerty keyboard — and one final trick: the ability to shut off the look and feel of ‘work’ with a click — and change the phone into a fun thing: e-mails shut off (unless personal), music and movies upfront.

Nokia has also gone (pardon the pun) tooth and nail for Bluetooth. The ability to untether the user from the handset and enable hand-free operation now extends not just to a Bluetooth headset but also a full car kit, complete with a dashboard-mountable colour display which morphs into a GPS driven route finder — and voice-driven interfaces.

There were other converged mobile phone launches at CommunicAsia, mixing — and matching voice calls with geographic information — but one startling example seemed to be a case of the navigation tail wagging the communication dog: Garmin, a leader in the stand-alone and car-mounted GPS navigation device under the brand nuvi, used the event to unveil its own mobile phone, the nuvifone, a breakthrough product, all touchscreen, that combines a 3.5 G phone with browser, personal messaging and cutting edge navigation. Is it a phone with navigation features or a navigator with phone functionality thrown in? Hard to tell: the Bluetooth, 3 MP camera, WiFi finder and MP3 player made the nuvifone a new generation converged device with a triple mantra: connect, communicate, navigate.

Behind the tangible products of navigation, such as map packages and photo tagging software, lies a complex and logistically challenging science.

TeleAtlas, the German leader in the business of digital geographic information systems, chose to share with the public the technology that it uses to create its respected map data bases used around the world. It drove into its stand, a car-based mobile mapping system, with four roof mounted cameras; an odometer on the rear wheel to measure distance travelled, accurate to a centimetre; laser scanners that log the distance to landmarks such as ATMs and petrol bunks… and a computer with 250 GB of video processing software to compute the road maps in real time and match it with satellite map data.

While TeleAtlas showcased how its numerous partners translated these into route finder tools that fit on a thumb drive or a memory card, satellite technology players had their own achievements to share: Inmarsat launched its IsatPhone handset last year. Now the company offers what it calls BGAN: Broadband Global Area Network, yet another buzzword that speaks for another convergence between satellite-based services and terrestrial broadband technologies for land, maritime and aerospace markets.

The ‘other’ satellite player, Hughes, is better known in India for its very small aperture satellite (VSAT) based solutions for education, enterprise and banking,

Its expertise lies in new-generation Internet Protocol over Satellite (IPOS) — it was the first to be certified for IP services via satellite — as well as products for the emerging DVB-S2 or Digital Video Broadcast through satellite, explained K Krishna, Chief Technology Officer, Hughes Communications India.

Sony and Panasonic, both a regular presence in the BroadcastAsia halls of the Expo, had new models in their range of products for broadcasters making the final transition from analogue to all-digital studio work.

But Panasonic used the occasion to unveil what it called the world’s first write-able high definition Blu-ray disk(BD-R) with 6x writing speeds — that is 216 mbps or about 20 per cent faster than current 16 x DVD write speeds. The disks in 25 GB and 50 GB capacity will be available, in Japan to start with, by July, with the 6x drives coming by year end.

It might seem premature to talk of burning Blu-ray disks even before high definition products are widely available; but long queues in an adjacent hall reminded delegates that technology stops for no one… sometimes it pops up in a sneak preview that could be a decade ahead of commercial availability.

In what was, for many, the technology highlight of the Singapore show this month, the Japanese broadcaster NHK set up a small auditorium to let visitors experience its work-in-progress: ultra high definition TV.

The specifications alone are mind boggling: Consider high definition or HDTV that is yet to come to India (it is the standard that Blu-ray will meet): 1920 by 1080 pixels. NHK’s Ultra High Definition TV or UHDTV1 is 3840 by 2160 or four times as dense. It also increases the viewing angle from 30 degrees to 60 degrees. What was being shown, however, was another generation beyond this.... what NHK calls UHDTV2 or Super Hi-Vision: at 7680 by 4320 pixels it is 16 times sharper than HDTV today.

The 18-minute demo film included sports footage and crowd scenes that made for a stunning audio visual experience… crowds of 10,000 spectators in a stadium, with every single person in sharp focus. Don’t all rush, said NHK engineers: Commercial rollout is at least a decade away. But it made HDTV seem passé even before we experience it.

In another age, Canada-born media guru Marshall McLuhan said, “If it works, it’s obsolete”.

Rewrite that initial ‘it’ as ‘IT’ — and you have the state of Information Technology today, as showcased in Singapore …. transforming and morphing before our very eyes.

More Stories on : Convergence | Hardware | Events

Article E-Mail :: Comment :: Syndication :: Printer Friendly Page