From the VentureBeat review:

The paperback-sized device is aimed at 55 million people in the U.S. who have eyesight problems and don’t want to be dependent on others for the pleasure of reading a novel, looking at a restaurant menu, or reading web site pages. It comes with a 5-megapixel digital camera that can be used to snap pictures of book pages. Foss said he was able to scan a 262-page book in a half hour and listen to the first chapter of the book while he was doing it. The device can read text in the DAISY format, plain text, as well as MP3 music files.

Can the Kindle or Nook help a vision-impaired individual order from the menu at a restaurant? I think not. The ability to scan and read custom text makes the Intel Reader something very different from the current offerings of e-book readers. This is clearly a multi-purpose device designed to enrich the life of its user, not just be a portal to selling electronic books. The Reader can speak the menus aloud to the user, and the instruction manual comes as an audio CD, making this extremely friendly to visually impaired individuals.

An optional book scanning system, the Intel Portable Capture Station, can be purchased, to allow home users to digitize books with ease. A lot of time and effort has gone into researching the ergonomics of the Reader and its accessories, since the target audience isn’t your normal fully-abled young-to-middle aged person.

The Intel Reader boasts some custom made parts, but is otherwise fairly run-of-the-mill in terms of capacity and performance:

The device has an Intel Atom microprocessor and two gigabytes of flash memory storage. It runs Linux software and some third-party software for scanning and reading aloud. With a fully charged battery, the device can read aloud for four hours. It can last for days on standby power. It can store about 500,000 pages of text or 600 pages of scanned book pages.

Here’s a video of the Intel Reader in action:

I think this is a terrific use of technology, and it demonstrates an impressive commitment from Intel in terms of research spending. I think this will create a lot of opportunities for the people who can afford to purchase it, and Intel deserves a lot of praise for cooking this thing up.

But I think that we, the general Internet population, can do a lot more. Listening to books read aloud by crappy digitized computer voices doesn’t really do justice to a lot of printed materials — especially novels. When I read a book, I hear in my mind’s ear distinct voices for each character. I read faster during tense or exciting scenes. I experience the story in a way that the monotonous drone of a computer voice can never reproduce.

Something like Project LibriVox can breathe real life into stories. We, the general Internet population, can donate a couple of hours of our leisure time to read a chapter — or a complete work — of a book so that others can enjoy the story in the dramatic manner in which it was intended. It’s a lot of work, I know: I recorded Thuvia, Maid of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs. But it’s also a lot of fun, and a very rewarding experience.

Fudzilla is reporting that Intel’s new Atom N450 chipset – codenamed Pine Trail (see previous coverage here) — will officially launch on January 3rd.

Previous reports suggested that the chipset will be made available to manufacturers sometime this month, to which I speculated that we’d see Pine Trail-equipped netbooks around the holidays. If Fudzilla’s report is true, though — and the site makes no reference to any sources, so take the information with a grain of salt — then it appears these new netbooks would make an appearance just in time for CES.

Whatever the case, the 1.66GHz CPU will apparently sell for around $64, which is $20 more expensive than current N270 package. The Pine Trail platform shifts the system from a 3-chip architecture down to a 2-chip architecture in order to save physical space and, theoretically, reduces power consumption and improves performance.

New Atom N450 for netbook launch is January [Fudzilla via SlashGear]

That NVIDIA and Intel haven’t been getting along lately isn’t big news but it looks like NVIDIA has finally gotten up from the dinner table and left the restaurant in a huff. The epicenter of the problem appears to be NVIDIA’s Ion chipset, which provides some much needed oomph to netbook and nettop platforms. Intel wants to keep a distinct separation between its low-power, low-cost Atom chips and its more-capable Pentium chips. When NVIDIA’s Ion is added to an Atom platform, the extra power makes Intel’s higher-end (and higher-cost) CPU offerings a tougher sell.

You’ll recall earlier this year that Intel announced its new “PineTrail” Atom platform, which shifts system boards from a 3-chip architecture down to a 2-chip architecture. Apparently Intel’s decided not to license the platform to NVIDIA, which means the graphics company won’t be able to integrate its Ion chipset into the new PineTrail offerings.

Naturally, NVIDIA took issue with that. According to DigiTimes:

Nvidia said in a statement “…because of Intel’s improper claims to customers and the market that we aren’t licensed to the new DMI bus, and its unfair business tactics, it is effectively impossible for us to market chipsets for future CPUs. So, until we resolve this matter in court next year, we’ll postpone further chipset investments for Intel DMI CPUs.”

It should be noted that this isn’t the first time that Intel and NVIDIA have been involved in licensing disagreements. Earlier this year, the two companies scuffled over whether NVIDIA was licensed to create chipsets based on Intel’s Nehalem-based products.

So that leaves AMD and VIA as possible partners, right? Well, not AMD actually, seeing as how AMD owns ATI now — NVIDIA is “halting development on AMD chipsets since the market is no longer economically viable.” VIA and NVIDIA already have a partnership in place for Ion-based systems and it’s likely that the two companies will continue the partnership for NVIDIA’s upcoming Ion 2 platform.

[DigiTimes]

The worldwide recession looks to have taken a bite out of sales of Intel’s Classmate PC, a computer that was supposed to bring the power of, um, computers to the developing world. Since governments have been devoting resources (read: money) to fighting the recession, they have less money to buy “superfluous” items like computers for kids.

Not that it really matters to the Classmate PC’s producers. Orders and margins were already on the low side, so if governments decide not to buy ‘em in bulk anymore, meh, no big deal. Business-wise, at least.

Of course, as Bobby Kennedy once said, you can’t only measure a country’s wealth in raw dollars and cents: what about the quality of children’s “education, or their quality of play”? Spend a few dollars on some computers today, then in a few years you’ve got a better educated citizenry to deal with. That’s the goal, at least.

The idea of a single connector for your display, network adaptor, hard drive, and mouse seems crazy, but that’s only because we’re so used to the jungle of I/Os on the back of our machines. At 10Gbps, the optical Light Peak interface is faster than the latest SATA, and has the potential to go much faster. Hopefully it’s powered; there’s nothing on that at Intel’s site, but it’d be easy enough to adapt the consumer interface to include a power cable running parallel, I think.

In any case, Apple’s been pushing on Intel to make this happen, probably because they want to be the first to put it into use. They’ve collaborated for a while; Engadget has more of the history if you’re interested. I’m excited to see more of this technology.

Update: Just kidding! Looks like Engadget got it wrong, the poor dears.

They can be treated as a single screen (e.g. “full-screen” video on one) or as one continuous surface (the “albums” in the video spill across multiple screens). To be honest, I’m not convinced of the utility of this particular model, but it’s mainly a proof of concept. They wanted to show that they’re working on integrating this kind of display matrix into their laptops, but not necessarily in this extreme manner.

What do you guys think of the dual-screen thing? The W700DS seems a little extreme, and the SpaceBook seems a lot extreme. If you really need that much display space, don’t you need the power of a desktop?

[via Crave and OLED-Display.net]

The X58 chipsets which dominate enthusiast rigs these days will slowly be going the way of the dodo as P55 matures, but the first crop seems to be getting pretty positive reviews. PC Perspective has a nice little review roundup if you want to skim the conclusions and specs.

[image credit: Motherboards.org]

There is exactly one 800-pound gorilla in the CPU arena, and that’s Intel. But the company, which controls about 80% of the global CPU market, is soon getting some serious competition from Japan. A pool of Japanese companies has decided to team up and produce a made-in-Japan CPU that’s supposed to rival Intel’s products.

The CPU will be jointly developed by Fujitsu, Renesas, NEC, Canon, Panasonic, Hitachi and other companies from Japan. It will be used in a range of consumer electronics, servers, robots and cars and it’s “green”. The CPU adopts itself dynamically to the amount of data being processed, resulting in energy savings of up to 30% when compared to the power consumed at normal times.

Initially, each company is supposed to contribute a CPU on its own, aiming at a final model that’s supposed to run on solar cells. The new CPU and the corresponding software are supposed to constitute a industry-wide standard that will be positioned against Intel.

The Japanese companies expect the new format to be in place by the end of fiscal 2012. Japan’s Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry is ready to help with $33-43 million in financial support.

Via Nikkei [registration required, paid subscription]

A veritable cornucopia of ultra-thin laptops is expected from the likes of Asus, Acer, and MSI in the near future. The computers will use Intel’s forthcoming low and ultra-low voltage Penryn CPUs, the Celeron 743 and the SU2300.

The low voltage, 45nm Celeron 743 will have a 1.2GHz clock speed with 1MB of L2 cache, and 800MHz frontside bus, a 6x multiplier, and will use up to 10 watts of power. The ultra-low voltage SU2300 will feature the same specs, except it’ll only use up to 5 watts. For comparison, the Atom chips found in many netbooks use no more than 2.5 watts of power but they have a slower frontside bus and only 512K of cache.

DigiTimes reports that Asus will be first out of the gate on September 7th with two ultra-thin notebooks, one using the Celeron chip and one using the SU2300. Those models will initially be available in Taiwan, China, and Europe, but I’d guess that something similar would eventually make its way to the US.

Acer and MSI are expected to push out similar models in the near future, although details are still pretty sparse at the moment.

According to sources affiliated with DigiTimes:

“Intel is expected to completely stop the supply of Atom Z processors to the netbook market before the end of 2009 as it looks to clearly define the boundary between solutions targeting netbooks and those for MIDs. However, the company will still fulfill orders already placed by Acer, Asustek Computer and Micro-Star International (MSI), the sources noted.”

This makes sense, I suppose, as the Z-series (Silverthorne) has been around the longest and Intel’s announced that its upcoming Pine Trail platform will be available in Q4 of this year. That, and it’s apparently relaxed the screen resolution rules for Sony’s upcoming VAIO W netbook, which uses the ubiquitous N-series Atom CPU.

UPDATE: False alarm. See the below comment from an Intel PR rep, as well as this post by Reg Hardware.

Hot damn, netbooks are about to get a bit more useful. Apparently Intel has backed off on the whole low-resolution netbook screen thing. Previously, computers containing N-series Intel processors (Atom N270, N280, etc.) could only have screen resolutions up to 1024×600.

Then came the introduction of Sony’s VAIO W netbook last week. It contained all the standard 10-inch netbook features, except for a nice 1366×768 display versus the dumpy 1024×600 mainstay that’s been plaguing netbooks since their inception.

Perhaps it’s the looming competition from AMD and VIA or the fact that the netbook/notebook line continues to blur more and more. Whatever the case, consumers win.

[via Register Hardware]

Even though Nokia and Intel were both relatively tight-lipped yesterday about the actual hardware products that’ll spring forth from their new joint-venture, rumors are already circulating that Nokia has placed orders with Quanta and Compal, Taiwan’s number one and two netbook/smartbook manufacturers, respectively.

Quanta has churned out a whole bunch of netbooks for most of the major computer companies but it’s Compal that’s especially interesting as it’s been delivering the Qualcomm-powered Snapdragon smartbooks.

So we may expect to see Nokia-flavored netbooks and smartbooks, a rumor that seems in line with the “connected everywhere” agenda that Nokia and Intel alluded to yesterday. Apparently this news came from Taiwan-based newspaper Commercial Times, so it seems pretty legit. As always, though, take all this info with a grain of salt.

[Fudzilla via Ubergizmo]

Here are some notes from Intel’s “breaking news” conference call with Anand Chandrasekher, Intel senior vice president and general manager, Ultra Mobility Group and Kai Öistämö, Executive Vice President, Devices, Nokia.

• Intel and Nokia have formed a long-term strategic partnership to create an open standard for a new mobile computing platform built upon Linux-based operating systems.
• Intel will acquire a Nokia HSPA/3G modem IP license for use in future products — will complement Intel’s Wi-Fi and WiMax offerings.

So is it a new Nokia phone with an Intel chipset? Is it a new Nokia netbook?

No. Not yet, at least. They’re not ready to talk about products today. The two companies basically announced that they’ll be teaming up to work on future mobile computing devices — not quite as exciting as it seemed earlier today, at least not from a hardware/gadget angle.

In short: “[B]oth companies are expanding their longstanding relationship to define a new mobile platform beyond today’s smartphones, notebooks and netbooks, enabling the development of a variety of innovative hardware, software and mobile Internet services.”

No details on any of the actual devices, though.

Here’s the full press release:

Intel and Nokia Announce Strategic Relationship to Shape Next Era of Mobile Computing Innovation

SANTA CLARA, CALIF., and ESPOO, FINLAND, June 23, 2009 – Further uniting the Internet with mobile phones and computers, Intel Corporation and Nokia today announced a long-term relationship to develop a new class of Intel® Architecture-based mobile computing device and chipset architectures which will combine the performance of powerful computers with high-bandwidth mobile broadband communications and ubiquitous Internet connectivity.

To realize this shared vision, both companies are expanding their longstanding relationship to define a new mobile platform beyond today’s smartphones, notebooks and netbooks, enabling the development of a variety of innovative hardware, software and mobile Internet services.

Taking advantage of each company’s expertise as leaders in their respective fields, these future standards-based devices will marry the best features and capabilities of the computing and communications worlds and will transform the user experience, bringing incredible mobile applications and always on, always connected wireless Internet access in a user-friendly pocketable form factor.

The Intel and Nokia effort includes collaboration in several open source mobile Linux software projects. Intel will also acquire a Nokia HSPA/3G modem IP license for use in future products.

The companies expect many innovations to result from this collaboration over time.

“This Intel and Nokia collaboration unites and focuses many of the brightest computing and communications minds in the world, and will ultimately deliver open and standards-based technologies, which history shows drive rapid innovation, adoption and consumer choice,” said Anand Chandrasekher, Intel Corporation senior vice president and general manager, Ultra Mobility Group. “With the convergence of the Internet and mobility as the team’s only barrier, I can only imagine the innovation that will come out of our unique relationship with Nokia. The possibilities are endless.”

“Today’s announcement represents a significant commitment to work together on the future of mobile computing, and we plan to turn our joint research into action,” said Kai Öistämö, Executive Vice President, Devices, Nokia. “We will explore new ideas in designs, materials and displays that will go far beyond devices and services on the market today. This collaboration will be compelling not only for our companies, but also for our industries, our partners and, of course, for consumers.”

Open Source Software Collaboration
The effort also includes technology development and cooperation in several open source software initiatives in order to develop common technologies for use in the Moblin and Maemo platform projects, which will deliver Linux-based operating systems for these future mobile computing devices.

The companies are coordinating their Open Source technology selection and development investments, including alignment on a range of key Open Source technologies for Mobile Computing such as: oFono*, ConnMan*, Mozilla*, X.Org*, BlueZ*, D-BUS*, Tracker*, GStreamer*, PulseAudio*. Collectively, these technologies will provide an open source standards-based means to deliver a wealth of mobile Internet and communication experiences, with rich graphics and multimedia capabilities.

Hosted by the Linux Foundation, Moblin is an optimized open source Linux operating system project that delivers visually rich Internet media experiences on Intel® Atom™ processor-based devices including MIDs, netbooks, nettops, in-vehicle infotainment (IVI), and embedded systems. For more information see www.moblin.org.

Maemo is a Linux operating system, mostly based on open source code and powers mobile computers such as the Nokia N810 Internet Tablet. The Maemo platform has been developed by Nokia in collaboration with many open source projects. For more information see www.maemo.org.

Enabling common technologies across the Moblin and Maemo software environments will help foster the development of compatible applications for these devices – building on the huge number of off-the-shelf PC compatible applications. The open source projects will be governed using the best practices of the open source development model.

Intel to License Nokia’s HSPA/3G Modem Technologies
Building on today’s announcement, Intel and Nokia have signed an agreement that will enable Intel to license Nokia’s HSPA/3G modem technologies with the aim of developing advanced mobile computing solutions that deliver a powerful and flexible computing experience – combining the best-in-class 3GPP modem technology with the high performance and low power consumption of future Intel Architecture-based platforms.

Intel supports multiple mobile broadband standards on its platforms to address the needs of service providers worldwide, and to provide people with an always-connected experience.

The Nokia modem license complements Intel’s broadband wireless technologies and will enable the company to extend chipset solutions incorporating Nokia’s modem technologies across its mobility offerings in the future.

Nokia is continuing to develop its leading modem technology, which includes protocol software and related digital design for the full suite of 3GPP standards through WCDMA/GSM and its evolution, and then licenses the technology to chipset manufacturers to develop and produce chipsets for device manufacturers.

Nokia’s licensable modem technology is the trusted connectivity choice, providing credible and reliable options for the industry based on Nokia wireless modems’ embedded history and experience. The Intel license of Nokia’s modem technologies is another step in executing Nokia’s chipset strategy to create multiple, competitive chipset choices to the industry.

Looks like Intel is about to break into the mobile phone arena in a big way. According to Bloomberg, Intel and Nokia have struck a deal to include Intel CPUs in future Nokia handsets.

Details on the matter are sparse at best as Intel’s not been commenting publicly yet, but the company is holding an impromptu conference call this morning at 11:30AM eastern to go over everything so I’ll listen in and report back.

If I were a betting man, which I’m not (or am I?) I’d guess that this platform would be similar to Qualcomm’s Snapdragon effort: super long battery life, strong graphics, HD video, gaming, etc. It’s a logical move for Intel if the company wants to grab a share of the next-generation smartphone market away from Qualcomm and NVIDIA’s Tegra platform.

UPDATE: See this post for more info.

So the key here is there will be a range of features and capabilities within the Intel Core family – our flagship brand representing the highest performance and the latest technology – but simplified into entry-level (Intel Core i3), mid-level (Intel Core i5), and high-level (Intel Core i7). We will still have Celeron for entry-level computing at affordable price points, Pentium for basic computing, and of course the Intel® Atom™ processor for all these new devices ranging from netbooks to smartphones. For PC purchasing, think in terms of good-better-best with Celeron being good, Pentium better, and the Intel Core family representing the best we have to offer.

So instead of having Core, Core 2, Core 2 Duo, Core 2 Quad, and whatever else, Intel’s going to have Core i3, Core i5, Core i7, plus Pentium, Celeron, Atom, and Xeon.

Yeah, that helps. Way to go, Intel!

The N450 is codenamed “Pine Trail” — see previous coverage here — and represents a shift from a 3-chip to a 2-chip platform architecture, with the graphics chipset and memory controller moving in with the processor on the “north” complex, with the I/O being in the “south” complex.

The system board will move from six to four layers, too. All of this will result in smaller designs that are more efficient from a power and cooling standpoint.

So basically by the holidays we’ll see slimmer, smaller, cooler netbook-type devices with longer battery life. Hooray.

Whoops, not so fast. The platform won’t be ready until next year.

This is a serious problem for AMD. Intel’s been cleaning up in the netbook space for over a year now and AMD is nowhere to be found. Well, that’s not totally true. It does have its Neo platform in HP’s dv2, but that’s about it. With Intel purposely hamstringing the graphics setups on the Atom platform and VIA still in the early stages of trying to gain market share, AMD could have and should have had a potent CPU + ATi GPU setup on the market months ago.

Instead “samples are expected to be delivered to partners in 2010,” which means that even if they’re delivered in January, we won’t see them in consumer products for a few months after that. Meyer noted that the line between netbooks and notebooks will continue to blur and that the term “netbook” will eventually fade away, so this new platform will be a notebook platform, not a netbook platform. So basically, by the time nobody says “netbook” any more, AMD will have its Atom killer ready.

AMD CEO reveals Atom-beater expected for 2010 [DigiTimes]

Psion initially sent out cease and decist letters to various websites in the UK, demanding that references to “netbook” or “netbooks” be removed, and then later got into a legal scuffle with Dell, Intel, and others who had been using the term “netbook” in marketing literature.

It looks like this whole situation may finally be behind us now, as an “amicable agreement” has been reached between Psion and Intel:

Psion PLC announces that Psion and Intel Corporation have settled the trade mark cancellation and infringement litigation brought in the Northern District of California relating to the ‘Netbook’ trademark registration.

The litigation has been settled through an amicable agreement under which Psion will voluntarily withdraw all of its trademark registrations for ‘Netbook’. Neither party accepted any liability. In light of this amicable agreement, Psion has agreed to waive all its rights against third parties in respect of past, current or future use of the ‘Netbook’ term.

There’s no telling what’s behind Psion’s relatively abrupt about-face but I’d guess it has to do with money. Either Psion’s running out of it trying to pay legal costs or Intel gave Psion a bunch of it to go away. Either way, we can finally all sleep at night knowing this is over. Or just keep sleeping normally since nobody really cared all that much in the first place.

[via SlashGear]

It’s happened again. As we reported in January, Intel and Microsoft have been limiting the size and software on netbooks for fear of cannibalizing their current larger laptop markets as well as showing poor performance due to battery and processor size. We wrote:

Intel offers “guidelines” on how big a netbook can be and still run an Atom chip. The maximum seems to be 10 inches, small enough to look like a netbook. Because these low-powered chips disappoint so many buyers – think MacBook Air – putting them into anything that resembles a real laptop is tantamount to admitting that the chip isn’t powerful enough to handle regular work. Hence the moniker “netbook” and the consistently diminutive names like “nano” and “atom.”

Well, the same holds true for Win7. Digitimes is reporting that MS and Intel have reduced the upper screen-size limit for netbooks to 10.2 inches, doing two things: forcing Atom hardware to run on machines that “seem” less powerful due to their size and increasing the price of Win7 licenses for the lucrative 11-13 inch netbook market.

Digitimes notes that this puts VIA in a pickle. As makers of 11+ inch netbooks, they would now have to pay the full Win7 license on what used to be considered to fall to the lower-priced licensing rate.