The ST-Ericsson partnership between STMicroelectronics and Ericsson may only be young – the two firms founded the wireless semiconductor development project in February 2009 – but they’re already showing off some interesting wares. The ST-Ericsson U8500 uses an ARM Cortex-A9 MPCore SMP dual-core processor paired with the ARM Mali-400 OpenGL ES2.0 and OpenVG1.1 GPU; together, they’re capable of outputting 1080p HD video in a smartphone form-factor.
Video demo after the cut
The wisdom of designing gadgets that look like spiders when so many people find the many-legged bugs creepy is arguably lacking, but that hasn’t stopped Ericsson. The company’s latest concept is the so-called Ericsson Spider Computer, a tripod design that will incorporate a full PC, pico-projector, laser keyboard and integrated 3G, and offer the people of 2020 an easily transported computing setup.
Video demo after the cut
Ericsson has a few tricks up their sleeves yet, it seems! They will be demonstrating 56Mbps HSPA data speeds at the CTIA Wireless convention, which could set a record if all goes according to plan.
Headlines this week were a tussle between Apple’s iPhone OS 3.0 announcement and the launch of the Dell Adamo luxury ultraportable. We were pleased to see SlashGear readers in their thousands join us for our Apple liveblog and, while there may have been no new hardware, the features hitting the iPhone over the Summer – MMS, A2DP Bluetooth, copy & paste, and Spotlight, to name but a few – could keep the smartphone well ahead of the competition. That’s not what Palm wanted to hear; we ran through the key differences between the iPhone OS 3.0 and Palm Pre at our sibling-site My Pre.
According to a German report, Ericsson is looking to sell Sony its share in their joint Sony Ericsson cellphone business. Sources familiar with the current situation claim that Sony has expressed an interest in taking sole control of the company, but that their own precarious financial position has left them negotiating with banks in order to clinch the deal.
We kicked off the week with our review of the Sony VAIO P, the company’s “don’t call it a netbook” companion ultraportable. It’s interesting to contrast it with Acer’s just-confirmed 10-inch Aspire One, which will likely offer greater performance at less than half the price. Elsewhere, Sanyo took the wraps off of their 2009 Xacti camcorder range, including a very tempting 1080p 60fps model, and HTC announced the Touch Cruise smartphone with an integrated GPS-tagged memory app. In other smartphone news, everyone got surprisingly agitated about President Obama’s super-secret messaging phone.
Tech job cuts continue to spread throughout the industry, with both Ericsson and Bose today announcing significant staff losses. Ericsson has revealed plans to axe 5,000 jobs, despite making a stronger-than-expected profit of $1.1 billion in the last quarter, excluding restructuring costs, and has worried investors by withholding any business outlook for the new financial year. Meanwhile Bose is cutting 10-percent of its workforce, amounting to 1,000 jobs, claiming to have been “staffed for a growing economy, not a global recession”.
Ericsson announced on Thursday that they will be working alongside Intel to equip mobile broadband notebooks with secure anti-theft solutions. This solution is meant to protect data with encryption software and make notebooks a less attractive target for thieves.
The Open Handset Alliance (OHA) has announced fourteen new members, including ASUS, Sony Ericsson and Garmin, together with carrier Vodafone. While the specific intent of the new members is unknown, they will all either “deploy compatible Android devices, contribute significant code to the Android Open Source Project, or support the ecosystem through products and services that will accelerate the availability of Android-based devices.”
Nothing like ambition to get the mouth watering, and Ericsson have create a whole lot of leaky orifices today after a presentation slide suggests that they envisage mobile devices with cameras capable of HD-quality video and 20-megapixel images by 2012. In addition, the company believes we’ll be using 1Gbps LTE Advanced mobile networks by the following year.
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