The boundaries between consumer electronics and wireless are blurring rapidly, and nowhere is that more apparent than at the giant Consumer Electronics Show (CES), being held in Las Vegas this week. Of course, the handset makers ‘ traditional and upstart ‘ are duking it out to draw the maximum attention to their media phones, while other key wireless themes include personal area networks, and ever more ways of getting television and even advanced radio signals to mobile devices.
Sony, and its handset joint venture Sony Ericsson, made an early splash, with CEO Howard Stringer showing off the US’ first Organic LED television; a Bravia Wireless Link module to connect high definition audiovisual equipment to Sony televisions; a ne UWB-based platform (see separate story); and an upgraded Mylo personal communicator, now sporting a 3.5-inch touchscreen and Adobe flash video. From Sony Ericsson came the W760, the first 3G Walkman music phone, which also features controls that enable users to play games just by tilting the phone, and is a personal navigator; and the W350, a flip design that allows music controls to work when the handset is closed, like a regular MP3 player. There was also the EDGE Z555, the first to support the Gesture Control feature for managing call functions, such as muting, with the wave of a hand.
Rival Nokia is using CES to promote its reinvention as a mobile internet, rather than just a handset, company. However, amid all its talk of software and services, the handsets themselves still stole the show. The Finnish giant introduced a US version of the 8Gb N95 flagship, and showed off the new N810 Internet Tablet and a range of music phones.
Motorola disappointed those hoping for a ‘new RAZR’ or, preferably, a strong ‘post-RAZR’ platform, but did launch its Mobile TV DH01 device, a DVB-H media player that allows consumers to access live, on-demand and recorded programs saved on a DVR. It comes with a 4.3-inch wide QVGA screen that uses up to 16m colors, a five-minute memory buffer for pausing programs during live viewing, and a four-hour battery. The company also unveiled two featurephones, the Z10 ‘mobile film studio’ and the latest ROKR musicphone, as well as two new models in the low cost W range. The Z10 is a ‘kick slider’ format, optimized for capturing video and allowing users to to edit clips together and create transitions, particularly geared to social networking.
The ROKR E8 includes ‘ModeShift’ technology that allows the user to switch from talk to music with one button. New features include tactile feedback for virtual keys, ‘FastScroll’ navigation and improved voice quality.
This was not enough for most observers, with Motorola still badly needing to boost investor and customer confidence in its ability to turn around its handset division. ‘Motorola is sorely in need of a big phone feature leap – Koreans have zoomed ahead in display technology,’ wrote analyst Tero Kuittinen of Avian Securities in a comment typical of many pundits. ‘The company needs a major product transition.’
Another handset major, LG, unveiled its contribution to low cost mobile TV, MPH (Mobile Pedestrian Handheld). This allows mobile devices to receive existing digital TV signals with the addition of chips to the transmitters and handsets ‘ which LG says are far cheaper than dedicated mobile TV options like DVB-H. The technology is based on the digital TV transmission standard devised in the US in the mid-1990s by a group led by Zenith Electronics, but which gained little acceptance because reception was poor in moving vehicles. LG has been working on this issue since it acquired Zenith in 1995 and claims improved DSPs have enabled it to make the platform viable. It is working with TV transmitter giant Harris to refine the technology, which was first demonstrated last April, and the first handsets with MPH were demoed at CES.
Fellow Korean vendor Samsung was showing off its own would-be mobile TV standard, A-VSB, which allows a local television station to create a separate digital stream for mobile devices, and which was originally unveiled at last year’s CES. It showed prototypes of A-VSB enabled cellphones, MP3 players, portable media players, UMPCs and notebooks and said it had worked on improving the standard ready for commercial deployment next year along with the US transition to digital TV.
LG and Samsung both hope that their chosen platforms will be adopted as standards by the US Advanced Television Systems Committee (ATSC), and Thomson, working with Micronas, will submit a third proposal before the deadline in March, based on an offshoot of DVB-H. All three are geared to enabling TV stations to use their existing digital spectrum and towers to deliver video and data services, in competition with dedicated mobile TV systems like DVB-H or MediaFLO, and 3G networks. The goal is to go live with services in February 2009, about the same time as the US transition to digital TV.
As many as 10 initial proposals to the ATSC have been whittled down to three major submissions, said committee chair Mark Aitken, also director of advanced technology at Sinclair Broadcast Group. The first decision, which should be made in time for the National Association of Broadcasters meeting in mid-April, will be to define a physical layer based on one of the technologies, or a mixture.
LG and Harris have conducted MPH field trials in Chicago and Washington DC, while A-VSB has been in field trials for a year and is backed by Nokia Siemens Networks and Rohde & Schwarz. A priority for Samsung is to reduce power consumption (about 500mW average, compared to 400mW for MPH), and says it could get this down to 100mW by year end. However, Thomson has not yet shown working chips and the specifications and costs of its planned system remain vague. By comparison DVB-H chips run a around 190mW when active, but average out at closed to 40mW, because of the burst nature of DVB-H.
Also announced at the show was the fact that the Open Mobile Video Coalition (OMVC), an alliance of US broadcasters will work with SES Americaom’s IP-PRIME IPTV satellite delivery service to test both MPH and the A-VSB platform. The trials are both technical, but also will test how consumers interact with devices.
The tests will go ahead in a number of OMVC markets. A sample of consumers and given a device which can receive the signal, either a cell phone, personal media player or laptop. It is hoped by the end of the trial OMVC will be able to predict consumer usage patterns and system performance to support the launch of mobile digital television services targeted for 2009.
In MPH trial markets, Harris Corporation will provide MPH in-band digital television transmission equipment, and LG Electronics the receivers, while in the A-VSB trials Rohde & Schwarz will provide transmission equipment and Samsung the consumer devices. MobiTV and Nokia Siemens Networks, will also help out.
Harris said at CES that it estimates it will cost an average TV station about $125,000 to install a two-channel MPH service, while Samsung says it could cost less than $100,000 to install an A-VSB system delivering more than six channels.
All sides use vestigial sideband coding and H.264 compression, part of the US digital TV standard. “They all have their points of differentiation, but until they get proven in the lab or in the field we won’t know which ones are the best,” Aiken said in an interview. The countries that embraced the US digital TV standard are Canada, Mexico, Puerto Rico and South Korea (which has created its own variation).
Digital radio is also a hot topic this year, with the merger of the two US satellite radio providers, Sirius and XM, looming, but with a host of alternatives evolving. Most of these are internet-based, but there is also HD Radio, and its creator, iBiquity, is drumming up support for its free over-the-air terrestrial digital radio broadcast systems at CES. HD Radio allows radio stations to simulcast compressed digital audio and traditional analog audio without shifting to new frequency bands. Latest features include ‘iTunes tagging’, to make it easier to purchase music. iBiquity unveiled chips and reference designs developed to put HD Radio in mobile devices as well as car radios. Samsung is offering an HD Radio chipset, consisting of an RF-IF peripheral processor and a baseband processor; and fabless chipmaker SiPort demonstrated a single-chip HD Radio solution.
The proliferation of rich media devices in the home is driving interest in high capacity wireless home networks, and in the personal area standards that underpin them. Vendors are pushing solutions for the emerging UltraWideBand short wave platforms, while some are also working on standards for an emerging high performance wireless option, 60GHz PANs, and for bringing the HDMI high definition TV interface into the mobile world.
Among the UWB specialists at CES was Radiient Technologies, which has created the first HD audio system using UWB technology in the unlicensed PAN bands between 3.1GHz and 10.6GHz. “We have developed wireless surround sound on top of ultrawideband with absolutely no audio drop-out,” claimed Radiient president Jano Banks. The prototype of its Roomcaster platform broadcasts very low power UWB pulse codes that are virtually immune to multipath interference over short ranges. It claims it will support data rates up to 675Mbps within one room and transmit all five channels in a surround sound system at very low power levels.
“UWB gives us virtually unlimited channels to choose from. We are using channels hundreds of MHz wide in the 3-10GHz band, compared to 20MHz-wide channels in the 2.4GHz band,” said Banks. “With our peer-to-peer architecture, the more channels you add, the better your performance, because there are more routes available for communications.’ The Roomcaster prototype is based on an ARM-9 processor core and uses a UWB radio made by an unspecified chipmaker.
Over in 60GHz, where UWB or other technologies can run at very high speeds in unlicensed and largely unoccupied spectrum, various groups are jostling to devise standards, including the body behind the main UWB platform, WiMedia. Another consortium, WirelessHD, mainly consisting of large consumer electronics vendors, has finished its initial specification, which defines a link of up to 4Gbps at distances up to 10 meters. Despite being the driving force behind WiMedia ‘ which recently hinted that it might position a 60GHz version of its technology for high speed applications, following disappointing trial results of its current standard ‘ Intel recently also joined WirelessHD. This group includes giants such as LG, Panasonic, NEC, Samsung, Sony and Toshiba, and uses technology largely taken from start-up chip designer SiBeam.
WirelessHD 1.0 uses the existing Digital Transmission Content Protection technology but has created its own method of device discovery and control, called AVC, rather than use Universal Plug and Play, whose industry body is fronted by Microsoft. AVC is optimized for directional beamforming wireless technology. Also providing updates at CES was the working group behind the IEEE 802.15.3c future standard for a 60GHz physical layer.
Meanwhile, Sigma Designs and Fujitsu Microelectronics America are collaborating on a UWB variant called Wireless HDAV to carry high definition video, using Sigma’s video processor and WiMedia UWB chipset, and Fujitsu’s H.264 video codec chip.
And Westinghouse Digital Electronics is launching a wireless LCD-based HDTV incorporating Pulse~LINK’s UWB technology ‘ a challenger to WiMedia’s ubiquity – with an HDMI interface (see separate story).
One of the key issues at CES is whether the HDMI standard for digital television interconnect can extend its dominance to the mobile world and take on Wi-Fi, UWB and 60GHz technologies in linking digital TVs to portable gadgets in the home media network. Various start-ups are applying wireless and wired HDMI to small devices, one of them being Silicon Image, which used CES to launch a version of its high end HDMI chips for cellphones and portable consumer electronics gear.
Silicon Image will start sampling silicon for its Mobile High Definition Link next month. MHL pares down the three TMDS channels in a standard HDMI connection to just one to create a transmitter for embedding in the, mobile device and a full HDMI bridge chip is put in a separate wired cradle, enabling a 2.25Gbps link consuming 60 mW of power on the mobile device. It will support video encrypted with HDMI’s High Bandwidth Digital Content Protection technology. The company says total costs for the system will be about the same as a full HDMI link on a TV.
Silicon Image had previously tried to submit a similar approach for using HDMI in PCs, called UDI, but this was rejected by PC makers in favour of the DisplayPort specification from the Video Electronics Standards Association ‘ and many analysts believe the cost of HDMI will mean it suffers a similar fate in mobile devices, at the hands of wireless USB (based on WiMedia) or even fast Wi-Fi. Silicon Image also sells low power versions of its HDMI chips into high resolution video cameras.