LG Goes Self-Healing

LG is upping the ante in smartphone technology with a new handset that has a curved touchscreen, along with a special “self healing” technology that the company claims can prevent scratches on the phone’s casing.

The South Korean electronics vendor unveiled the new phone on Monday, calling it the LG G Flex. Digital renderings of the handset were leaked earlier this month. But in its Monday announcement the company offered further details on the phone, showing that it contains a few new technologies, along with its curved display.

The G Flex is the second phone to feature a curved display, the first coming from Samsung Electronics with its Galaxy Round handset. The top and bottom of the G Flex’s 6-inch screen are curved towards the user, while on the Samsung phone it is the sides that are curved towards the viewer.

This makes LG’s handset closer to the curve of a traditional fixed-line phone handset, a design choice LG said is optimized for the contours of a face. Users can more comfortably hold the phone to their mouth and ear, improving its voice and sound quality, according to LG.

The company also touted the design by stating that the phone offers an easier grip, and holds better in a person’s back pocket. In addition, LG said the curved screen gives an “IMAX-like” experience when viewing videos, allowing for a greater field of view.

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Will Skype 3RD Party API’s End?

Angry Developers, a breed not unlike Angry Birds but without the desire to fling themselves at naughty pigs, have started a petition asking Microsoft to withdraw its plan to switch off the desktop API for Skype.

The news follows Microsoft’s announcement that support for third party applications will end in December. The change.org petition explains, “The decision to discontinue Skype’s Desktop API impacts our ability to use Skype within my normal Skype calling activities.” It goes on to request that, “Skype/Microsoft provide continued support for third party Skype utilities that have become mission critical to Skype’s users.”

The API runs a range of services, including call recording clients, and in some cases third party hardware including certain headsets. Its discontinuation will most likely see problems for third party instant messaging (IM) services that rely on the API to aggregate IM services, as Skype does not use the Jabber protocol.

Microsoft’s explanation of this was fairly straightforward. It said, “The Desktop API was created in 2004 and it doesn’t support mobile application development. We have, therefore, decided to retire the Desktop API in December 2013.”

However, many developers who receive income from their products using the Skype API are unsatisfied with this.

Although Skype has had a mobile client dating back as far as Windows Mobile 5, it has never had parity with the desktop version and there remains some bewilderment as to why Microsoft has made this decision.

At the time of writing shortly after launch on Friday, the petition had 540 signatures and rising, showing that there is a groundswell of support for the initiative.

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Is Lenovo Eyeing Blackberry?

Lenovo reportedly has joined the list of possible Blackberry buyers, with the firm reportedly having approached the struggling Canadian phone maker.

The Wall Street Journal reported that Lenovo, despite previously denying that it was mulling a Blackberry buy (paywalled), has been given the thumbs up to cast an eye over the Canadian company’s books before making it a possible offer.

If reports are to be believed, Lenovo has joined a list of possible buyers that includes Intel, Cisco, SAP, Google, Samsung and LG.

Specific details of Lenovo’s possible acquisition are yet to be revealed, but as a newcomer to the smartphone market Lenovo recently admitted that it is selling more smartphones than tablets and PCs in China, despite being one of the only PC makers to continue showing sales growth.

However, Lenovo’s smartphone portfolio is yet to appear the UK, and the firm hasn’t seen much success outside China. However, picking up Blackberry could help Lenovo enter the global smartphone market, and the firm could be looking to take over from Blackberry as a phone maker focused on business professionals.

Lenovo might have a hard time closing a buyout deal for Blackberry, though. Rumours about a takeover have already led to speculation that such a buyout would struggle to get approval from the US and Canada, due to the company’s Chinese ownership and the fact that Blackberry does business with sensitive parts of both governments.

Blackberry didn’t comment on a possible Lenovo buyout, but instead put out its usual vague statement. A company spokesperson said, “The special committee, with the assistance of Blackberry’s independent financial and legal advisors, is conducting a robust and thorough review of strategic alternatives.”

Lenovo declined to comment on the report.

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Amazon Debuts Cloud-based Transcoding Service

Amazon Web Services has rolled out the option to use its Elastic Transcoder for audio-only conversions.

Amazon Elastic Transcoder was developed to offer an easy and low-cost way to convert media files from their source format into versions that will play on devices like smartphones, tablets and PCs.

The new feature lets anyone use Amazon Elastic Transcoder to convert audio-only content like music or podcasts from one format to another. Users can also strip out the audio tracks from video files and create audio-only streams. An option that, for example, can be used to create podcasts from video originals that are compatible with iOS applications that require an audio-only HTTP Live Streaming (HLS) file set, Amazon said.

The output from Elastic Transcoder is two-channel AAC, MP3 or Vorbis. Metadata like track name, artist, genre and album art is included in the output file and users can also specify replacement or additional album art.

Users of the service pay for the length of their converted content. For audio-only transcoding, prices start at $0.0045 per minute. That compares to the video version, which costs from $0.015 per minute for standard definition content and $0.03 per minute for high-definition clips, according to Amazon’s website.

For users who want to try out the service, the AWS Free Tier offers up to 20 minutes of free audio output per month. The service was announced for video in January and is still tagged as a beta.

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Stanford Develops Carbon Nanotubes

Researchers at Stanford University have demonstrated the first functional computer constructed using only carbon nanotube transistors.

Scientists have been experimenting with transistors based on carbon nanotubes, or CNTs, as substitutes for silicon transistors, which may soon hit their physical limits.

The rudimentary CNT computer is said to run a simple operating system capable of multitasking, according to a synopsis of an article published in the journal Nature.

Made of 178 transistors, each containing between 10 and 200 carbon nanotubes, the computer can do four tasks summarized as instruction fetch, data fetch, arithmetic operation and write-back, and run two different programs concurrently.

The research team was led by Stanford professors Subhasish Mitra and H.S. Philip Wong.

“People have been talking about a new era of carbon nanotube electronics moving beyond silicon,” Mitra said in a statement. “But there have been few demonstrations of complete digital systems using [the] technology. Here is the proof.”

IBM last October said its scientists had placed more than 10,000 transistors made of nano-size tubes of carbon on a single chip. Previous efforts had yielded chips with just a few hundred carbon nanotubes.

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Sharp Shows MEMs

Sharp on Monday unveiled its latest prototypes of a new kind of display screen that it says brings several advantages over today’s liquid crystal display (LCD) screens.

The screens, called microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) displays for the tiny moving parts they contain, are being developed by the Japanese company in partnership with Qualcomm and were on show at the Ceatec electronics show just outside of Tokyo.

Behind each pixel in a MEMS display is a backlight that flashes red, green and blue in fast succession, and in front of it is a tiny shutter can be opened to let light through.

Synchronized to the backlight, the shutter can control the amount of each color of light allowed through. The eye perceives these flashes as the desired hue.

In contrast, today’s LCD screens create colored pixels using three filters. The filters swallow about two thirds of the brightness of the backlight before it leaves the display, said Akira Imai, deputy general manager of Sharp’s new business development center.

The MEMS display can allow all the light through, so the intensity of the backlight can be reduced using less power for the display, said Imai.

In a portable gadget, the screen often consumes more power than any other component, so reducing its demands can have a big impact on battery life.

The screens on show at Ceatec were 7-inch models with 800 pixel by 1,280 pixel resolution. The colors were bright and the screen image was sharp, although people viewing the screens did tend to see a brief flash of red, green and blue pixel each time they turned their eyes away from the display. That’s something Sharp is working on, said Imai.

Sharp also showed a version of the screen working in several low power modes.

The development work with Qualcomm began earlier this year when the U.S. company said it would invest $120 million into Sharp. The money, which was invested in two parts, was accompanied by Qualcomm’s MEMS expertise. Sharp has a long history in flat-panel display technology, especially LCD, and has recently been working on a new type of display called IGZO, on which the MEMS display is partly based.

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More OEM’s Seeking nVidia

As expected and announced, Zotac has now “joined the mobile gaming revolution” with the new Tegra Note 7 tablet and will be one of a handful of Nvidia partners that will sell it in both Europe and Asia-Pacific region for US $199.

In case you missed it yesterday when it was officially unveiled by Nvidia, the Nvidia Tegra Note 7 is based around a 7-inch 1280×800 IPS display and powered by Nvidia’s own Tegra 4 SoC with quad-core Cortex-A15 CPU and 72-core Geforce GPU paired up with 1GB of memory. It also packs some neat features exclusive to Nvidia, including a stylus with Nvidia DirectStylus technology as well as the 5-megapixel rear main camera backed by Chimera computational photography architecture revealed earlier by Nvidia. The camera will have support for both HDR as well as slow-motion video.

Unfortunately, Zotac did not announce the precise launch date so we are still stuck with Nvidia’s October time-frame and we are still to see the price of the new Tegra Note 7 in Europe.

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Apple Hacked

A group of German hackers claimed to have successfully breached the iPhone fingerprint scanner on Sunday, just two days after Apple Inc debuted the technology that it promises will better protect devices from criminals and snoopers seeking access.

If the claim is verified, it will be embarrassing for Apple which is betting on the scanner to set its smartphone apart from new models of Samsung Electronics Co Ltd and others running the Android operating system of Google Inc.

Two prominent iPhone security experts told Reuters that they believed the German group, known as the Chaos Computing Club, or CCC, had succeeded in defeating Apple’s Touch ID, though they had not personally replicated the work.

One of them, Charlie Miller, co-author of the iOS Hacker’s Handbook, described the work as “a complete break” of Touch ID security. “It certainly opens up a new possibility for attackers.”

Apple representatives did not respond to requests for comment.

CCC, one the world’s largest and most respected hacking groups, posted a video on its website that appeared to show somebody accessing an iPhone 5S with a fabricated print. The site described how members of its biometrics team had cracked the new fingerprint reader, one of the few major high-tech features added to the latest version of the iPhone.

The group said they targeted Touch ID to knock down reports about its “marvels,” which suggested it would be difficult to crack.

“Fingerprints should not be used to secure anything. You leave them everywhere, and it is far too easy to make fake fingers out of lifted prints,” a hacker named Starbug was quoted as saying on the CCC’s site.

The group said it defeated Touch ID by photographing the fingerprint of an iPhone’s user, then printing it on to a transparent sheet, which it used to create a mold for a “fake finger.”

CCC said similar processes have been used to crack “the vast majority” of fingerprint sensors on the market.

“I think it’s legit,” said Dino Dai Zovi,” another co-author of the iOS Hacker’s Handbook. “The CCC doesn’t fool around or over-hype, especially when they are trying to make a political point.”

Touch ID, which was only introduced on the top-of-the-line iPhone 5S, lets users unlock their devices or make purchases on iTunes by simply pressing their finger on the home button. It uses a sapphire crystal sensor embedded in the button.

Data used for verification is encrypted and stored in a secure enclave of the phone’s A7 processor chip.

Two security experts who sponsored an impromptu competition offering cash and other prizes to the first hackers who cracked the iPhone said they had reviewed the information posted on the CCC website, but wanted more documentation.

“We are simply awaiting a full video documentation and walk through of the process that they have claimed,” said mobile security researcher Nick DePetrillo, who started the contest with another security expert, Robert Graham. “When they deliver that video we will review it.”

The two of them each put up $100 toward a prize for the contest winner, then set up a website inviting others to contribute. While the booty now includes more than $13,000 in cash, it was not clear that the CCC would receive the full payout, even if DePetrillo and Graham declared them winners.

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Inventor Predicts Future Of 3D

Pablos Holman predicts that in the not too distant future our diets will be tailored to our metabolisms, adding a few bits of broccoli, a smattering of beets and some meat — all extruded from a 3D printer in an appetizing form to please our palates.

Holman is a futurist and inventor at the Intellectual Ventures Laboratory in Bellevue, Wash., where he and others work on futuristic projects like printable food. He was not alone in speaking on the topic at the Inside 3D Printing Conference last week.

Avi Reichentall, CEO of 3D Systems, one of the largest consumer printer companies, has already been able to configure his machines to create a variety of sugary goods, including cakes and candy. The sweets were on display with ornate designs.

Reichentall said consumers can expect his company to build a machine that will take a place next to the coffee maker on a kitchen counter, but instead of a caffeine shot, it will offer a sugar rush.

“We are working on a chocolate printer. I want a chocolate printer in my kitchen. I want it to be as cool as a Keurig coffee maker,” Reichentall said. “We now have 3D printed sugar. We’re going to bring to pastry chefs and confectionaries and bakers a whole range of new sugar printing capabilities.

“This is coming to a marketplace near you very soon,” he said.

While Reichentall focuses on desserts, Holman is busy with main courses, creating machines that can take freeze-dried food and hydrate it as it is being extruded through nozzles to create an eye-pleasing meal.

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HTC Cutting US Jobs

In another sign of trouble at HTC, the Taiwan-based mobile device maker began downsizing its U.S. operations on Friday, eliminating an undisclosed number of staff.

The move is meant to “streamline and optimize” the company’s U.S. organization “after several years of aggressive growth,” HTC said in a Monday email. A company spokeswoman declined to specify how many employees would be affected.

“However, to achieve our long-term goals as a business and return maximum value to our shareholders, this is a necessary step to drive ongoing innovation,” the company said.

HTC has been facing a difficult year on weak earnings that have sent its stock price tumbling. In the second quarter, its net profit plummeted 83 percent year-over-year, despite strong reviews for its flagship smartphone, the HTC One.

The weak financials are major change from only a couple years ago when HTC was riding high selling Android smartphones in the U.S. But starting in late 2011, the company’s net profit has sagged on increased competition from Samsung and Apple.

To recover, HTC has focused on building up its “One” smartphone brand. In addition, the company has expanded its China presence, and in August launched a new marketing campaign that’s enlisted Hollywood actor Robert Downey Jr.

While the company has largely focused selling high-end handsets, in July HTC said it was planning on selling more mid-tier and entry level phones to regain market share. The new phones will launch at end of the third quarter or early fourth quarter.

But the company’s troubles go beyond issues with smartphone sales and marketing. In September, Taiwanese authorities arrested three HTC employees for allegedly stealing company secrets. One of the employees arrested was Thomas Chien, HTC’s vice president of product design.

HTC has declined to offer further details on the case.

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