Cell phone video cams start to have ‘reel’ feel

Among the features of the new iPhone, expected to be announced next week, may be a video camera and if so, it joins a growing pack of mobiles to include video-recording capabilities.

Plenty of BlackBerrys — the iPhone's main competitor — can shoot video, including the BlackBerry Storm, Curve 8900 and the Bold 9000. The long-awaited Palm Pre, due to go on sale Saturday, will not include a video cam, according to a company spokeswoman.

The ability to take, not only watch, videos on cell phones is becoming more important as a YouTube generation uses their mobiles to either send short video clips as a multimedia message, or to post them the popular video-sharing site।

Nokia

Nokia's N96 has one of the best video cams in a cell phone, with digital video stabilization and an "easy resume" feature। The phone was listed recently for $579 at Nokia's online store.

"You always have a cell phone on you, and even a Flip (camcorder) is a bit too bulky to carry in your pocket at all times; it generally goes into a bag of some kind," said Avi Greengart, consumer devices research director for Current Analysis.

"The other advantage a cell phone has is built-in connectivity. While a Flip makes sharing or uploading a movie a simple process, you still need to wait until you can dock it with a PC. With a cell phone and a data plan, you can share or upload immediately."

Still, you won't find the kind of image resolution and quality, frames-per-second rate and optical zoom on phone video cameras that you will on dedicated camcorders.

"High-end (video) camera phones top out around 640-by-480 (pixels) at 30 frames per second, but even that is still quite rare, and none have optical zoom or high-quality glass lenses," he said. "At the other extreme, high-end camcorders can take high-definition digital video good enough for a low budget Hollywood film."

In general, a guide to resolution numbers, according to Greengart: "320-by-240 is roughly VHS resolution, 640-by-480 starts to approach DVD resolution and 720-by-480 — often called “high definition” for video-recording purposes — is equivalent to widescreen DVD," with true high-definition TV being either 1280-by-720 or 1920-by-1080.

"If you’re recording for YouTube, 320-by-240 is fuzzy but quite common, and 640-by-480 is more than sufficient," he said. "If you’re recording for playback on an HDTV, anything less than 720-by-480 will look blocky or blotchy."

Storage, too, is another issue, with video files taking up lots of room, which can become a precious commodity on a mobile phone.

"On a phone you might want to use a chunk of that memory card for music, photos, contacts, or applications, while the camcorder is used mostly just for video," Greengart said.

"And then there’s battery life: at the end of the day, if your camcorder battery runs out in the middle of nowhere, you can still use your phone to call a cab. If your video recording session drains the battery on your cell phone, you’re stuck without a phone."

But for those who want to leave the full-featured camcorder, or even the Flip, at home, there are some phones that can do the job when it comes to video, as long as you don't mind compromises.

Here's a look at some of them:

Nokia N96. This may be one of the premier cell phones for video recording, and perhaps one of the most expensive, at $579, as priced recently at Nokia's Web site. (The phone is sold by Nokia in the United States as "unlocked," without a wireless carrier contract and without a subsidy on the phone's cost.)

One of Lenovo's new netbooks, the IdeaPad S12, has a 12-inch screen, a full-size keyboard and starts at $449। Most netbooks top out at screen sizes of 10.1 inches, but Lenovo said this model will be for those who want a portable and affordable device with a "familiar computing experience."
When I saw Lenovo's recent announcement about its new, 12-inch netbook, the IdeaPad S12, I did a doubletake. Netbook? 12-inch screen? That's what my Mac PowerBook, circa 2004, had, and I remember carrying it everywhere.

It was called a "laptop," but that was virtually eons before netbooks launched, the economy crashed and the appetite for mobile computing gobbled up the landscape. If you don't have a BlackBerry or an iPhone now, maybe you've got an Acer Aspire One or Asus Eee.

No question, we like to take our e-mail and Internet with us everywhere we go। Helping to feed that appetite, despite a lousy economy, has been a slew of $200 (more or less) smartphones, as well as netbooks, little laptops of 2 to 3 pounds, that start in the mid-$200 price range.

And on their way: computing form factors in between the smartphone and netbook that will sate the need to be able to continuously connect. The 12-inch screen size seems to be a new sweet spot for netbooks, laptops or whatever name you want to give to these portable computers.

Most netbooks now have a maximum screen size of about 10 inches. One of the first to take off in late 2007 was the $299 Asus Eee PC which had a 7-inch screen — "toy-like," notes Phil McKinney, HP's vice president and chief technology officer for the personal systems group.

Toy-like, but clearly distinguishable from bigger brother and sister laptops, which started at 12 inches in screen size but typically did well in the 14- to 17-inch screen category.

Similar pricing
Lenovo's calls its 3-pound IdeaPad S12 with a 12.1-inch screen a netbook, and pricing will start at $449. Dell has its Mini 12, which it dubs "laptop/netbook" (giving users the choice of deciding what it is). The Mini 12 weighs under 3 pounds, with prices starting at $399.

Shown in a recent Best Buy advertising insert was a 15.4-inch widescreen Toshiba laptop with a 160-gigabyte hard drive for $349.99, and a Dell 15.6-inch widescreen laptop, also with a 160-gigabyte hard drive, for $449.99.

That's the kind pricing similarity that worries PC manufacturers, with PC shipments worldwide down 13 percent from the first quarter of 2008 compared to the first quarter of 2009. Netbooks have been a bright spot, but some question at what cost.

"There is concern about the cannibalization issue," said Stephen Baker, vice president of industry analysis for The NPD Group research firm. "I don't want someone who was going to spend $499 to spend $349; I want people who wouldn't have bought anything to spend $329. That's a win."

As far as what defines a netbook versus any other type of laptop, "the lines are blurring," Baker said. "The lines were sort of artificial to begin with. The way we've put these products out into the market right now, it's still hard for the consumer to know what we're trying to offer them."

The netbook market has come a long way, he said, in offering consumers improved devices with bigger screens, keyboards and battery life. "You're hard-pressed now to find any of the original products that set up the netbook market," he said.

Dell Dell's Mini 12 laptop/netbook has a 12-inch screen, is about an inch thick and weighs less than 3 pounds. Prices start at $399.

Still, "they all look pretty similar: the 10-inch screen, a gigabyte of RAM, a 120-GB hard drive, two or three USB ports, Intel's Atom processor and Windows XP operating system." (Msnbc.com is a joint venture of Microsoft and NBC Universal.)

"There's some color differences, and that helps a little bit, but from a feature perspective, the manufacturers are having difficulty separating from each other because of the platform and just the limits of what you can do in something that size," Baker said.

Hence, laptops in the 12-inch screen range. Lenovo boasts of a full-size keyboard in its IdeaPad S12. Most netbook keyboards are about 92 percent of the size of a full-size keyboard, and sometimes smaller. Toshiba just announced its "mini NB205," a 10.1-inch netbook with a "full-size QWERTY raised-tile keyboard and a generous laptop-sized touchpad." Pricing starts at $349.

Netbooks vs. thin-and-lights
What makes a netbook? The answer, most manufacturers say, is in the processor, most commonly the low-voltage, low-cost Intel Atom processor, with Intel's development of it having partly created netbooks. AMD has its Athlon Neo processor, and just announced its dual-core Athlon Neo to serve larger but lighter laptops.

HP HP's dv2, with a 12.1-inch screen, and prices starting at $699, is in the company's "ultrathin" category, about one inch thick and weighing about 4 pounds.

The Athlon Neo is used in HP's Dv2 which has a 12-inch screen, but is not considered a netbook by the company. The $699 computer, weighing just under 4 pounds, is described as an "ultrathin."

"The Dv2, in our thin and light category, has a full-powered AMD processor, full capabilities just as you would have with any traditional notebook, but it's in that 12- to 13-inch category, vs. our Mini Notes, which go up to a 10.2-inch screen," said McKinney.

"We see the Mini Note, in many cases, as being viewed as kind of a step up from the smartphone," he said.

"We find the 10.2-inch screen is that perfect tradeoff between getting to be too big, too heavy that I'm not going to carry it all the time, yet not too small to where the screen becomes hard to read and isn't usable."

Acer, which makes the popular Aspire One netbooks, this week unveiled its "Timeline thin and light notebook family." The smallest member of that family weighs 3.5 pounds and has a 13.3-inch display; the largest weighs 5.3 pounds and has a 15.6-inch screen. The laptop with the largest screen is the least expensive at $598; the smallest, the most expensive at $899.

David Daoud, research manager in IDC's personal computing, PC Tracker and Green IT programs, said netbook buyers are divided into a few different groups. Among them are, as would be expected, travelers, but travelers who are "used to using a product like the BlackBerry or iPhone, and therefore are somewhat comfortable with the screen size and the keyboard size limitations."

IDC also is finding that a "substantial number" of people are buying netbooks as a "primary device," he said. "The way they're designed, the price points, the small, light size of the product makes it pretty compelling for many people."

David Wood of the Symbian Foundation at its office in Foster City, Calif.

(Credit: Mats Lewan/CNET)

June 3, 2009 10:04 AM PDT

Smartphone king Symbian ready to strike back

by Mats Lewan

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David Wood of the Symbian Foundation at its office in Foster City, Calif.

(Credit: Mats Lewan/CNET)

Just about everyone knows the iPhone--and perhaps also that it runs on Apple's operating system--though the phone only has about 10 percent market share among smartphones. Far fewer know the name of the most widely used mobile operating system, which holds nearly 50 percent of the market: Symbian.

As recently as 2007, Symbian had 70 percent share. Market share has been lost mainly because of the iPhone with its Mac OS X, and to BlackBerry devices running on RIM's Blackberry operating system.

To find out how Symbian plans to strike back, CNET News met last week with David Wood, "catalyst and futurist" at the Symbian Foundation।

He revealed that the company has no plans for its own app store, but explained how Symbian plans to make it easier for developers to negotiate with several stores, like the Nokia Ovi Store, which got off to a bumpy start last week. On Tuesday, a developer's Web site for the new open-source Symbian went public.

He also explained the influence Nokia is likely to have on the Symbian OS.

But first he made it clear that the U.K.-based company now is growing aggressively, with the expansion happening largely at its Foster City, Calif., office.

"We have 72 employees today and intend to grow to a bit less than 200," he said. "Many will be in the Silicon Valley, in part to tap into the skills here."

The Symbian Foundation was founded in October as a base for a new open-source strategy aimed at making the Symbian OS stronger amid completely new market realities, including the success of Apple and RIM, and Google's launch of Android, a license-free, open-source operating system for mobile phones. And the Palm Pre, with its new Web OS, will only add to the competition when it goes on sale this weekend.

Symbian was founded in the U.K. in 1998 by Psion, Nokia, Ericsson, Matsushita, and Motorola, basically as the mobile industry's defense against Microsoft.

David Wood has been at the company from the start. Before that, he spent 10 years at Psion, whose operating system Epoc was the base for Symbian OS.

Until now, global mobile phone leader Nokia has been Symbian's main proponent. But Nokia hasn't quite figured out how to make the masses download applications, as Apple did.

"I admire Apple for their advertising," Wood said। "They're actually teaching people about applications. Apple has done a tremendous job."

The figures prove this. In September 2008, Apple reached 100 million downloads from its App Store within two months and recently hit the 1 billion mark. But Nokia only reached 90 million downloads from its much less well-known Web site, Nokia Download, in two years.

Back in November 2007, when Google first unveiled Android, adding to the competition from Apple, RIM, and Windows Mobile, it was already obvious the smartphone market was getting much tougher. Symbian and Nokia clearly had to do something.

So last year Nokia acquired the whole company. It buried interfaces used by Motorola, Sony Ericsson, and NTT Docomo in favor of its own S60; restructured the code; and handed it over to the new, not-for-profit Symbian Foundation in April of this year, declaring that Symbian OS should go open-source and be license free.

Interestingly, Nokia simultaneously became the last major phone manufacturer to launch a modern touch-screen phone, adding touch-screen features to its Symbian-based S60 user interface.

Have all these moves come too late?

"I think it couldn't have happened much earlier, because the industry was still uncomfortable with open-source ideas," Wood said.

Comparable to Windows XP
The Symbian source code is huge: 40 million lines of code in 450,000 files, comparable to Windows XP. The open-source transition has just started, and Wood expects it to be finished by mid-2010. The developer site for the open-source project just went public at Developer.symbian.org, where users now can register and find many other resources, such as forums, bug tracking, and reference documentation.

Meanwhile, foundation members already have access to the whole source code. The membership fee is now $1,500, whereas it used to cost $30,000 to gain access to the Symbian source code.

"We will have no software engineers doing programming here, just integration, validation, and verification," Wood said.

So the OS will be developed by contributions from outside. And as Nokia acquired all Symbian employees and has in-house expertise in the S60 user interface, the bulk of contributions currently comes from Nokia.

"Probably the largest contribution will still come from Nokia for the foreseeable future," Wood said. "But we hope that by maybe three years' time, maybe 50 percent of contributions will come from outside Nokia. That's why we're going the open-source route--no matter how many smart software engineers there are in Nokia, there are many more smart software engineers outside."

He also underscores that Nokia only has one voice on the Symbian Foundation board, where decisions on road maps, architecture, and user interface matters are made.

And yes, the current user interface--Nokia's S60 that was recently adapted for touch-screen use in a way that didn't really impress everyone--will be replaced.

"It's called Direct UI and has already been designed. It's available in labs and will be shipped in phones with Symbian release 4 at the end of next year," Wood said. He mentions new features, such as the capability to control the phone by hovering above the screen but not touching it.

So what about an application store? Will Symbian rely on the Nokia Ovi Store that was finally launched last week, garnering a number of negative comments?

No single app store
"We won't create a store," Wood said. "There won't be a single store for all kinds of devices that run Symbian software, because some operators and some manufacturers want to have their own store."

"The worst drawback is for developers who must negotiate with many different stores. So we're going to provide a single publishing route so that an application that meets certain criteria will automatically be available from any of these app stores."

Another headache for Symbian developers has been the issue of tool development. Whereas the tools for iPhone and Android have achieved great success among developers, many developers consider the Symbian development environment to be complicated. Wood admits this and says tools will be an important focus for the Symbian Foundation.

"The largest group of Symbian Foundation employees is the support team, which includes responsibility for improving the development tools," he said.

Two new levels of programming will be released--an easy one for widgets based on Web standards and another, more advanced, called Qt ("cute") and based on open-source code from Trolltech, a company that Nokia acquired in 2008.

Making developers happy is key, as they are often considered the lifeblood of an operating system. But competitors are accomplishing that task well. What will make Symbian stronger? According to Wood, it's about four things.

• Openness, not only the open-source code but also in what he calls open governance--for example, publishing details of the road map early, which Symbian has already done.

• Expertise in coping with multiple form factors while keeping the platform unified.

• Understanding compatibility well, meaning bringing out new phones without making existing software obsolete.

• Skills in maintaining high quality amid rapid change.

Brand awareness a possible issue
Will that be enough? If so, one issue could still be brand awareness, particularly in the U.S. where Symbian is little known because of Nokia's weak position.

AT&T's presence on the board of the Symbian Foundation could help, and so could new phone manufacturers that are choosing Symbian, in addition to companies such as Samsung , Motorola, and Sony Ericsson. According to Wood, Chinese phone makers Huawei and ZTE now want to make Symbian smartphones for the U.S. market.

But even if the Symbian Foundation manages to get a highly modern and effective OS into lots of smartphones from various phone makers, with a slick and nice-looking user interface that appeals to the masses, will end users know it's Symbian?

"I want end consumers to realize that Symbian delivers particularly slick performance," Wood said. "We would like phones that pass Symbian's compatibility test suite to have a little mark somewhere, like this heart mark (Symbian Foundation's new logo). It might appear at least on the box."