Nokia Phones Offering Free GPS for 74 Countries

Nokia on Thursday introduced free driving and walking directions for 74 countries on a range of their mobile phones, in a direct challenge to Google and the entire GPS navigation industry.
The new version of Ovi Maps, available today on 10 phones with more existing models to be added in the next several weeks, will offer voice-guided driving and walking directions featuring text-to-speech, lane assistance, live traffic and road works information, and detailed content from partners including Lonely Planet and Time Out, all for free. Maps will cover 180 countries; navigation will be available in 74, including the U.S. and Canada. By March, all new Nokia GPS-enabled smartphones will include the software.
"I expect that this will be globally available, including in the United States," said Nokia executive vice president for services Tero Ojanpera.
Not surprisingly, shares of GPS makers Tomtom and Garmin fell sharply on the news.
Google received plenty of press when it recently introduced free voice-guided navigation with the Motorola Droid. But the Droid and its GSM doppelganger, the Milestone, are available in relatively few countries, while Nokia's smartphones are best-sellers across a huge swathe of the world. The 5800, for instance, which is almost unknown in the U.S., sold more than 3 million units in its first six months on the market in Europe and Asia, according to Nokia.
Nokia has offered Ovi Maps navigation for a while, and bundled the service with a Nokia 5800 phone and a car kit to create a "navigation edition" which we reviewed recently. But for almost all of their phones up until now, voice-guided navigation carried a monthly fee and content such as Lonely Planet guides added an additional fee. All of those fees are now gone.
Ojanpera wouldn't explain how partners such as Lonely Planet, Michelin Guides, WCities and Time Out are making money now that Nokia is offering their formerly-for-pay products for free; he also wouldn't confirm or deny that including free navigation would cause smartphone prices to rise. Rather, improved location-based services will enable better mobile advertising and location-based applications, he said.
"It's not about increased prices; it's about having something consumers want," he said.
Nokia's new navigation move comes naturally from their 2008 acquisition of map provider NAVTEQ, which was part of a larger strategy to put location-based services at the forefront, Ojanpera said.
"This is a worldwide map database second to none, which actually enables us to do things that nobody else can do," he said.
Nokia's mapping technology offers several advantages over Google's, Ojanpera said. Ovi Maps can live on your phone's memory card rather than being continually downloaded to your phone, greatly reducing data traffic and letting navigation work even when the phone has no signal. (The maps for the U.S. and Canada take up about 1.6 gigabytes, he said.) The maps also use vector graphics rather than bitmaps, which means they use much less bandwidth when they're streaming to your phone over the network – one-tenth the data traffic of Google maps, Ojanpera said. The low data traffic will appeal to wireless operators, he said.

Nokia's product also has unusually good pedestrian directions, Ojanpera said, including footpaths, one-way streets and other pedestrian-only routes that don't appear on automotive maps. The software includes weather forecasts, 3D renderings of some landmarks, and the ability to post your location to Facebook updates.
Nokia's announcement could have a huge effect on the dedicated GPS navigation industry, especially in countries such as India where Nokia dominates the smartphone market. According to a Nokia press release, there are already about as many Nokia smartphone owners capable of using Ovi Maps as there are dedicated GPS owners in the world.
Ovi Maps is available today for the Nokia N97 Mini, 5800, E52, E55, E72, 5230, 6710, 6730 and X6 phones. Not a single one of those phones is currently available from a U.S. carrier, though some of them are sold unlocked here in the US. We're hoping the software will be available on U.S. carrier-supported phones such as the Nokia E71x soon.

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Microsoft to patch hole in Internet Explorer

Microsoft will patch a hole in its Internet Explorer browser that may have allowed Chinese hackers access to human rights activists' e-mail accounts.
The firm normally issues patches at a set time each month but said that the attention the problem had received forced it to move more quickly.
It follows the French and German governments decision to advise citizens to use other browsers.
The bad publicity has allowed rivals such as Firefox to gain market share.
According to web analytics company StatCounter Firefox is now a close second to Internet Explorer (IE) in Europe, with 40% of the market compared to Microsoft's 45% share.
In some markets, including Germany and Austria, Firefox has overtaken IE, the firm said.
Microsoft said it had now decided to act on the security hole.
"Given the significant level of attention this issue has generated, confusion about what customers can do to protect themselves and the escalating threat environment Microsoft will release a security update out-of-band for this vulnerability," said Microsoft's general manager of Microsoft's trustworthy computing security group George Stathakopoulos.
"We take the decision to go out-of-band very seriously given the impact to customers, but we believe releasing an update is the right decision at this time," he said.
He said that the only successful attacks "to date" were against IE 6.
"We continue to recommend customers update to Internet Explorer 8 to benefit from the improved security protection it offers," he said in a security advisory.
Following the high profile attacks on Google, Microsoft admitted that IE was a "weak link" in the attacks.
It said that the vulnerability could allow hackers to remotely run programs on infected machines.
The recent spate of attacks were alleged to have hit more than 30 companies including Google and Adobe.
Google threatened to withdraw from the Chinese market following the attacks.

BBC News

10 cool new toys from CES

By John D. Sutter and Brandon Griggs, CNN
Las Vegas, Nevada (CNN) -- Three-dimensional televisions, Internet-enabled TVs, touch-screen "tablet" computers, e-book readers and other fun new gadgets were scattered all over the enormous Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Nevada.
CES, which ended on Sunday, is regarded as one of the best trade shows for spotting new technologies before they take off. DVDs, CD players and Blu-ray all were introduced at previous shows. It is the largest event of its kind in the world.
As we hunted through thousands of tech displays at the show this year, these 10 products particularly grabbed our attention. It's hard to say which, if any, of the new technologies shown at CES this year will become a hit with consumers.
But these 10 new toys proved to be useful, unique or just plain strange.
So, here they are, in no particular order. Please let us know what you think.

Toshiba CELL TV with gesture technology

Toshiba unveiled a prototype of a television that doesn't require a remote control -- TV watchers simply wave their hands in the air to control the menu, fast-forward movies and turn the volume up or down. Many TV makers are working on "gesture" technology for TVs, and it hasn't been perfected, but Toshiba is among the first to show it off publicly.
In a demo at CES, a woman put her palm out in a "halt" position to select items from a 3-D, spherical menu on the TV screen. She looked like she was swimming the breaststroke when she commanded the TV to zoom in on an image. The TV uses infrared technology to sense a viewer's movements in a particular zone of the room, which a demonstrator referred to as the "couch-potato zone."
Price: Unannounced
Available: 2011 or 2012

What's cool: The idea of technology that reads human gestures has the potential to revolutionize the way we interact with computers and TVs.

TCL 3-D TV, sans glasses
One of the big problems with 3-D TV is that most systems, when they debut later this year, will require viewers to wear 3-D glasses. They're goofy, expensive and, some testers complain, cause headaches and nausea.
But TCL Corporation, the Chinese company that's a parent of RCA, showed off 3-D TV technology that doesn't require glasses. A company representative said the technology, which adds a layer of rippled lenses to the front of the TV screen to produce the three-dimensional effect, could be used in the home as well as on billboards.
"Basically, we put the glasses that you'd be wearing on the TV," a TCL spokeswoman said.
Price: Unannounced
Available: 2011 for commercial clients
What's cool: No irritating glasses.
Blio e-reader

Amid a crowd of promising new electronic readers at CES, this one stood out. This software application, built in part by futurist-inventor Ray Kurzweil, turns almost any laptop, netbook or smartphone into an image-rich, full-color electronic reader. Blio uses publishers' original PDF files to preserve the exact format of books and magazines while supporting interactive multimedia, including video and Web links. It will launch with an online store featuring more than 1.2 million titles. Best of all: It's free.
Price: Did we mention it's free?
Available: Late February

Why it's cool: Blio also has a read-aloud feature and will translate to or from English. It looked impressive in a demo at CES. Tivit mobile TV add-on for phones
The Tivit, a cute, credit-card-sized device, catches live television signals -- like local weather and news -- and brings them to smartphones such as the iPhone, Blackberry and Droid.
The gadget is an intermediary step for people waiting for mobile-TV-enabled phones, and for those who don't want to purchase a new phone just to get TV on it. Tivit, from a company called Valups, uses an antennae to pick up mobile free digital TV signals from local television stations, and transmits them to phones via Wi-Fi, which it also creates, meaning you don't have to find someone else's Internet hot-spot to get a connection.
Price: About $100
Available: Spring 2010
Why it's cool: Upgrade to mobile TV without getting a new phone. Plus it's sleek.
Samsung TV remote with a TV screen on it

How meta. Samsung unveiled at CES a television remote with its own television screen. The "All-in-One-Premium" remote, which also plays its own audio, can be tuned to different TV channels than the TV it controls. It will come with Samsung's upcoming C9000 high-definition TV, and will be sold separately, said spokesman Jermain Anderson.

So, why would a person want such a thing? A Samsung spokesman said the TV-playing remote has as few functions. Say you're watching a sitcom while your roommate wants to watch a basketball game. One of you can watch on the remote, he said. The remote-watcher can put headphones on so you can both hear the audio.
Chalk this one up to another big trend at CES: Digital screens are ending up everywhere.
Price: Unannounced
Available: 2010
Why it's cool: It's so over-the-top unnecessary that it's a little bit interesting.

Lenovo IdeaPad U1 tablet-laptop

Tablet computers created quite a stir at CES. These mid-sized devices fall somewhere between mobile phones and laptops in the computer continuum.
Among the standout tablets at CES was Lenovo's U1 hybrid. It looks like a laptop, but its touch-sensitive screen pops off to become its own tablet. Independent from the keyboard, the screen looks like a big iPhone, and is said to be ideal for reading digital books, sorting through and resizing photos and surfing the Web.
The tablet is not without issues, though. One short-circuited in a demo for CNN.
Price: Less than $1,000
Available: Summer 2010
Why it's cool: It's got the best of both worlds -- a take-with-you tablet for consuming media, and a keyboard for content creation.
Intel Infoscape

It's not a consumer product yet that we know of, but this multitouch-screen display at Intel's CES booth fascinated us and just about everyone else who saw it. Two seven-by-seven-foot HD screens showed an ever-shifting array of 576 cubes, each representing a photo, video or other piece of Internet content pulled from 20,000 sources and more than 20 live feeds. Touch a cube, and it expanded the content in real time.
Available: Now?
Price: Unknown
Why it's cool: Can you imagine your digital life arrayed like this in your home or office? Plus it just looked neat.
Palm Pre Plus

This newly announced smartphone, along with its thinner cousin the Pixi Plus, wouldn't be a huge upgrade over the current Pre except for one novel feature: The capability to create a 3G mobile hotspot for up to five laptops or other devices. The function comes in a downloadable app that lets Pre users create a personal Wi-Fi cloud on Verizon's 3G network.
Price: Unannounced
Available: January 25
Why it's cool: Wi-Fi everywhere you go, without paying Starbucks fees or buying a wireless card, sounds pretty sweet.
Intel Reader

OK, so it's an expensive niche product. And we've already given some love to Intel in this article. But this handheld device that scans printed text, converts it to voice and reads it aloud seems too groundbreaking to ignore. Hold the it over a page of a book, snap a high-res image of the text and the thing will read it aloud to you almost immediately. It also can play documents you transfer from a computer.
Price: About $1,500
Available: Now

Why it's cool: Yes, it's pricey, but this gadget could be a life-changing tool for the dyslexic or vision-impaired.

Parrot AR.Drone


It's a remote-controlled helicopter. And a gaming device. And yet another use for your iPhone. This flying toy is about the size of a pizza and can hover almost motionlessly, propelled by four rotors and an on-board computer. Users steer the Drones with iPhones, which act as remote controllers. A camera mounted on the AR.Drone sends a live video feed to the iPhone, meaning that you see what the Drone sees. Parrot is creating augmented-reality video games for the open-source device.
Price: less than $500
Available: Summer 2010
Why it's cool: It's fun, it's different and it can hang suspended in the air like the spaceship in "District 9."

CNN

Television Begins a Push Into the 3rd Dimension

It was more than half a century ago, in a 1955 episode of “The Honeymooners,” that Kramden, the parsimonious bus driver played by Jackie Gleason, told his wife, Alice, that he had not yet bought a new television because “I’m waiting for 3-D.”
The wait will soon be over. A full-fledged 3-D television turf war is brewing in the United States, as manufacturers unveil sets capable of 3-D and cable programmers rush to create new channels for them.
Many people are skeptical that consumers will suddenly pull their LCD and plasma televisions off the wall. Beginning at around $2,000, the 3-D sets will, at first, cost more than even the current crop of high-end flat-screens, and buyers will need special glasses — techie goggles, really — to watch in 3-D.
But programmers and technology companies are betting that consumers are almost ready to fall in love with television in the third dimension. In part, it could be the “Avatar” effect: with 3-D films gaining traction at the box office — James Cameron’s “Avatar” surpassed the staggering $1 billion mark last weekend — companies are now determined to bring an equivalent experience to the living room.
Anticipating this coming wave, ESPN said Tuesday that it would show World Cup soccer matches and N.B.A. games in 3-D on a new network starting in June, and Discovery, Imax and Sony said they would jointly create a 3-D entertainment channel next year. The satellite service DirecTV is expected to announce its own 3-D channels at the International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, where every major television manufacturer is planning to announce 3-D televisions and compatible Blu-ray DVD players on Wednesday.
“The stars are aligning to make 2010 the launch year of 3-D,” said John Taylor, a vice president for LG Electronics USA. “It’s still just in its infancy, but when there is a sufficient amount of content available — and lots of people are working on this — there will be a true tipping point for consumers.”
At that point, the question becomes whether consumers — many of whom have only recently upgraded to costly new high-definition sets — will want to watch in three dimensions enough to pay for the privilege. “I think 90 percent of the males in this country would be dying to watch the Super Bowl and be immersed in it,” said Riddhi Patel, an analyst at the research firm iSuppli.
But will the experience translate to other entertainment? Ms. Patel said, “You don’t necessarily want the ladies of ‘The View’ sitting around you when you watch them.”
For most consumers, 3-D is still far in the distance. With the announcement this week, the media companies are trying to place themselves at the forefront of an emerging technology, much as they did for HDTV a decade ago.
 It took high-definition television about a decade to catch on — to the point where it has become part of the entertainment mainstream, with an adequate stock of HD programming and the sets now cheap enough to entice middle-class buyers. Analysts expect 3-D television to go through the same curve, initially attracting first adopters for whom price is little or no object and gradually moving out to other affluent and then middle-class homes as sets become cheaper and programmers create enough 3-D fare.
Or, of course, the technology could be a total flop.
For decades 3-D was a gimmick for B-movies and occasionally on television (in bad quality with flimsy paper glasses), but newer technology has largely erased those memories. Peter M. Fannon, a vice president at Panasonic, called the new sets “totally different than what one had seen over the last 20 to 30 years.”
In 3-D, television makers see an opportunity to persuade households that have already bought HDTVs to return to the electronics store. Though television sales jumped 17 percent in 2009, the industry needs new innovations to keep the cash register ringing.
“Three-D is an effort by the industry to come up with something that will motivate consumers to trade up,” said Van Baker, an analyst at Gartner Research.
Jeffrey Katzenberg, chief of Dreamworks Animation, said producers were preparing “an enormous surge in 3-D content, with images that are truly beautiful on these new monitors.”
Leading the charge to television, the pioneering sports network ESPN said it would show at least 85 live events on a 3-D channel starting in June. “The sports genre is probably the best suited to exploit this technology,” said Sean Bratches, an executive vice president at ESPN. The company has held preliminary talks with Comcast and other operators about gaining distribution; the 3-D channel could come at an added cost to subscribers. It will go dark when not showing live events.
The joint venture among Discovery Communications, Sony Pictures Entertainment and the Imax Corporation will be a full-time channel featuring natural history, movies, sports, music and other programming.
New 3-D televisions, like the 3-D screens in theaters, work by dividing picture images into two sets, one for each eye. A viewer must wear special glasses, so each eye captures a different image, creating the illusion of depth. Filming entails two connected cameras, one for the left-eye image and the other for the right.
Manufacturers have developed two technologies for 3-D glasses in the home. In so-called polarized glasses, which can cost under a dollar, each lens blocks a set of images transmitted in certain types of light. “Active” glasses, which are better suited for LCD screens in particular, have battery-powered shutters that open and close rapidly, so each eye sees different views of each frame. These glasses can cost up to $100, but television makers are expected to package at least two pairs with each monitor.
On the horizon is technology that allows people to watch 3-D without glasses, but that has severe limitations, like forcing viewers to sit at a certain distance.
Mike Vorhaus, the managing director of new media for Frank N. Magid Associates, a media consulting firm, said 3-D was many years away from widespread adoption. For now, he said, it is “one more appetizer” for consumers who “already have a lot to digest.”
Indeed, a number of hurdles remain, including a lack of production equipment and dueling 3-D transmission standards. But backers like David Zaslav, the chief executive of Discovery Communications, say 3-D is bound to gain attention because consumers and producers are always striving for what looks “closest to real life.”

By BRIAN STELTER and BRAD STONE
The original article -->NYTimes

NASA telescope detects 5 sizzling exoplanets

NASA's new space telescope Kepler has discovered five odd fiery-hot planets in its epochal search for life-sustaining planets in the depths of the Milky Way, scientists reported Monday.

"One of the planets is amazingly light - like Styrofoam," said William J. Borucki, the astronomer from NASA's Ames Research Center in Mountain View who conceived the Kepler mission 25 years ago and now leads it.

Picture- National Geographic

"And all five simply glow," he said, "they're like looking into a blast furnace - but that's simply no place to look for life."
The five exoplanets, as they are known, are the first that scientists have detected from Kepler's signals, and they are evidence of the strange solar systems that may exist far beyond our own, the scientists say.

The newfound planets are far larger than Earth. The smallest is the size of Neptune, four times Earth's size, and the three biggest are much larger than Jupiter, which is 10 times the size of Earth.
Hot, hot planets

Two planets are hotter than molten lava at about 1,800 degrees Fahrenheit, and the largest one, at nearly 3,600 degrees Fahrenheit, is hotter than molten iron.
NASA scientists described Kepler's findings Monday during a meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Washington and briefed reporters by telephone. A detailed report on the findings will be published Thursday in the journal Science.
A network of nine major ground-based telescopes, from Hawaii to the Canary Islands, and including the Lick Observatory above San Jose, confirmed Kepler's discoveries.
Geoffrey Marcy of UC Berkeley, a member of the Kepler team, noted in an e-mail that the five new planets Borucki announced have all been measured with "exquisite detail about their sizes, masses and orbits."
He said he's enthusiastic about what scientists will learn by the time the Kepler mission is over.
"We are measuring the brightnesses of 100,000 stars with a precision of 20 parts per million, and this unprecedented accuracy will allow us to detect the dimming of any Earth-sized planet crossing in front of any of those 100,000 stars," Marcy wrote. "It's a rare moment in science when an historic discovery looms so tantalizingly close to our outstretched fingertips."
In its search for planets, Kepler is examining 150,000 stars, most of which are inactive and quiet. Natalie Batalha, a San Jose State University astronomer who studies the fierce energy variations among stars, predicted that Kepler's data "will revolutionize stellar seismology."
Early excitement

At Kepler's mission control center at Ames Research Center in Mountain View, planetary astronomer Jack Lissauer was also excited about the mission's early results.
"We're achieving the kind of precision we really need to detect true Earth analogues," Lissauer said in an interview. "And seeing that so many of those suns out there are so quiet will enable us to learn much more about the interior of the stars themselves."
Among the surprising Kepler findings since it was launched in March, he said, was the detection of areas in the far-distant sky where small stars - not planets - fly swiftly in orbit around much larger stars. The Kepler specialists have discovered that at least one of those small orbiting stars is far hotter than the larger star it orbits - an entirely unknown phenomenon.
"We've never seen such things before," Lissauer said.
The Kepler mission is scheduled to continue at least for the next three years, hunting for signs of Earth-size rocky planets in so-called habitable zones where life itself is possible.

 David Perlman ,Chronicle Science Editor

Four Bright Ideas at the 2010 CES

LAS VEGAS (TheStreet) -- Every January, the annual migration that defines the gadget biz begins in the high Las Vegas desert: There Microsoft(MSFT Quote), Sony(SNE Quote), Google(GOOG Quote), Dell(DELL Quote) -- every electronic somebody except Apple(AAPL Quote) -- flocks to the Consumer Electronics Show to get a glimpse of what's hot for the coming year.

That begins an 11-1/2 month cycle of sniping, clobbering, discounting and otherwise trying to sell as much of this gear as possible by Dec. 24. Don't let all the Femtocells, Wi-Fi, 3-D screens fool you. This business is exactly that simple

Once again, it's January -- how did that happen? -- so here's what's hot for this year's CES and for 2010. The CES, the largest consumer-technology trade show, with 2,700 vendors, runs from Jan. 7 to 10.

1. The Google Nexus One (probably about $550): In case you haven't heard, Google's got a phone. Though Google spokeswoman Carolyn Penner flatly told me the company has not shared one single public detail of this unit, that has not stopped the collective tech press from reporting literally hundreds of stories on a $500-ish Android 2.1, touch-enabled Google phone to be released in the first week in January at an event at Google headquarters in Mountain View, Calif. Though I expect this unit to be of limited actual use (the Google everything-should-be-free thing has magically disappeared here -- $550 for a phone!), the unit will almost certainly dominate CES coverage.

2. 3-D displays. (Price varies.): Sony, Panasonic, Samsung, Sanyo and other mega-display makers are facing a make-or-break year. Cheap upstarts like Vizio are killing them in most TV categories. So the industry is going all-in on pricey displays that create the illusion of depth. Expect a mind-boggling array of 3-D-imaging devices for games, TV and point-of-sale. Two to look for: Technicolor's demo of a low-end 3-D system that could jumpstart deployment for cheaper TVs. And a Tokyo-based research project called Aerial 3-D Display Project. In other words, a display that looks something like R2D2 projecting Princess Leia saying, "Help me, Obi-Wan." That boils down to a TV without the actual TV. Not bad.

3. The desktop photo studio -- Ortery Technologies Photosimile 5000. (Price TBA.): Small-business owners listen up: Irvine, Calif.-based Ortery Technologies has a cool idea: a desktop product-imaging device called the Photosimile 5000. Basically, it's a white background about the size of a large microwave married to a high-quality digital camera. Simply stick any item (up to a size of a decent handbag), click a few buttons on a PC and the unit coughs up a high-quality 2- and 3-D image. Have some stinky old merchandise you can't move? This gadget gets it up on eBay(EBAY Quote) fast.

4. The connected car: Here is this year's big idea: the car as gadget. None other than Ford Chief Executive Officer Alan Mulally will be in Vegas hyping his new riff on a smart-car technology dubbed Sync. The 2010 model year will offer what amounts to a mobile hotspot that allows for easier cell and data integration as you drive. And though Ford, GM(MTLQQ Quote) and Toyota(TM Quote) deserve credit for raising auto IQ, with tools like this, the smarter car is going to be a tough slog. Remember, all cars run on the dumbest thing ever invented: rubber tires. There is not much a little Wi-Fi and data connectivity can do for that.