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TechOn!: Imagine a chip that waits in Off mode for an input, that instantly turns on the power for processing when an input is detected, and then turns itself off again.

An integrated circuit (IC) technology that might make possible this type of “normally-off” equipment will enter practical use in 2009: zero-standby-dissipation chips, achieved by making the entire chip, including logic, nonvolatile.

As environment-friendly equipment becomes ever more important, this may be the trump card in slashing power consumption.

The industry is switching into high gear in pursuit of zero-standby-dissipation IC technology. Rohm Co Ltd of Japan, at the forefront of developments, prototyped a microprocessor in 2008 and is now designing custom chips for a number of equipment manufacturers.

With its volume production line in Kyoto completed in May/June 2009, Rohm will begin shipping custom ICs in the second half of the year.

“Equipment using the new chips may appear before the end 2009,” according to a source at the company. NEC Corp of Japan, hot on Rohm’s heels, has developed a technology that runs chips even faster, and completed verification of a test chip in 2008.

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The Washington Post: The world’s top cell phone maker Nokia cut its profitability and market share forecasts due to tough competition, sending its shares sharply lower on Thursday.

Nokia, whose rivals include Apple , Samsung and RIM , now sees second-half underlying operating profit margin at its key phone unit at the first-half level of 11.3 percent, compared with analysts’ consensus expectations of 17.4 percent in a Reuters poll.

Nokia also cut its forecast for 2009 market share at its phone business, seeing it now on a par with last year, compared with an earlier forecast for a rise.

Analysts said a sharp fall in Nokia’s average sales price, and the cut in outlook implies increasingly aggressive pricing.

“Handset makers are being really, really aggressive,” said Gartner analyst Carolina Milanesi. “A lot of companies cannot really afford it: Sony Ericsson, Motorola, to some extent LG.”

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AkihabaraNews: Here’s another 2.1Ch speaker that happens to also offer an iPod dock. With 5Wx2ch, it can be used with a wide variety of other DAPs and even PCs. It will be sold in Japan in August for 19,800 Yen (€149).

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NaviGadget: Check out Alpine’s newest GPS navigation product: the NVE-M300 GPS navigation drive.

This is a compact, hideaway module that adds premium navigation features such as the OnPoint Advanced GPS Positioning (which combines three vehicle positioning technologies), turn-by-turn, voice guided directions – to two of Alpine’s audio/video head units, the iXA-W404 and IVA-W505.

NVE-M300 GPS Navigation Drive is available for $450 (€319), the iXA-W404 for $550 (€390) SRI, and the IVA-W505 for $1,100 (€781).

ALPINE ELECTRONICS DELIVERS NEW IN-DASH NAVIGATION SOLUTIONS

 TORRANCE, Calif., July 14, 2009 – Alpine Electronics of America, Inc., the industry-leading manufacturer of audio and navigation solutions, today introduced the new NVE-M300 GPS Navigation Drive.

This high-performance black box navigation module makes it easy to add turn-by-turn navigation functionality to Alpine’s iXA-W404 and IVA-W505 Audio/Video (AV) head units. Adding the NVE-M300 to these products results in two unique Audio/Video/Navigation (AVN) solutions.

Consumers can have a $1,000 digital media solution combining the NVE-M300 and the iXA-W404 with its 4.3-inch touch screen that is optimized for iPod/iPhone playback. Alternatively, they can create a $1,550 premium system based on the IVA-W505 with its 7-inch touch screen and DVD capability.

The NVE-M300 is a compact, external navigation drive. Measuring only 4 3/8 in. x 4 1/8 in. x 1 in., it is designed to be professionally installed and mounted in a hide-away location, such as behind the dash. Once connected, the NVE-M300 adds a fully integrated navigation experience to Alpine’s two top selling AV head units.

The NVE-M300 features Alpine’s innovative OnPoint™ Advanced GPS Positioning to deliver a better navigation experience. OnPoint ensures that vehicle’s icon stays accurately positioned on the map, even in areas where it’s difficult to receive GPS reception, such as in a tunnel, around tall buildings or under heavy foliage. OnPoint simultaneously uses three technologies – satellite-linked GPS data, solid-state gyro sensor technology (to determine the vehicle’s direction) and accelerometer technology (to gauge the vehicle’s speed) – to deliver improved performance.

A simple and intuitive graphical user interface (GUI) combined with voice guided driving directions make the NVE-M300 easy to use. Big, bright icons and large buttons provide easy identification of commands or maneuvers.

Assistive mapping visuals display essential driving information such as One-Way Street icons for clear notification of one-way streets, and Highway Junction View for maneuvering complex interchanges.

Text-to-speech technology is used to announce the turn-by-turn driving instructions, including street names, freeway numbers and freeway exit names. All the voice guided driving instructions are delivered through the vehicle’s sound system.

The NVE-M300’s map data is provided from preloaded NAVTEQ® maps of the United States and Canada, including Alaska, Hawaii, Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands. As well, the module comes with 6 million unique Points of Interest (POIs), which include restaurants, hotels, gas stations, movie theaters and grocery stores.

The NVE-M300 can be customized to match the user’s preference. Color schemes can be chosen from a palette of four map colors and eight menu colors. English, Spanish or French can be chosen as the preferred language.

The Dashboard feature can be set up to display trip information such as driving time and average speed. “With the NVE-M300, we are delivering an improved GPS navigation experience at a lower cost,” said Stephen Witt, vice president, marketing, Alpine Electronics. “The NVE-M300 drive gives customers the opportunity to easily add GPS navigation to their iXA-W404 of IVA-W505 AV head units.”

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AkihabaraNews: Here’s Yamaha’s latest stereo speaker and cradle for both iPod and iPhone 3G, the PDX-30.

Nothing very special here, besides a quite elegant and colorful design (four colors available). It has a 2x15W will be available in Japan around August for around €151.

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CNet: How much difference can a single screw make? If you ask the golden-eared engineers at Air Studios, they’ll tell you a fascinating story about one in particular. The component in question is to be found on the back of Pioneer’s new SACD player, the PD-D9MK2, and its replacement was crucial in the D9MK2 getting its Air Studios certification.

The Pioneer-Air connection originally came about because Pioneer part-owned Air for several years — it sold it to another studio a few years ago, but the strong relationship remains — and used this connection to improve its audio equipment.

The two companies collaborated on making audio equipment that sounded great and was tweaked to perfection by the golden ears of Air’s engineers. This relationship involves Pioneer sending over every piece of hardware it wants to have the Air logo on, and having it potentially torn to bits in the quest for even better sound.

Even tiny things can make a difference, according to Air’s technical manager Tim Vine-Lott. Each new piece of hardware that comes in is tested thoroughly, and if anything sounds slightly off it gets taken to pieces to find out why.

In the past, bits of twisted cable have thrown the sound out of whack and had to be yanked out. In fact, talking to the audiophiles at Air can make you very self-conscious about your own audio equipment. After all, most hi-fi equipment seems to be made out of insubstantial scraps of metal and fairly unimpressive screws.

The single problem screw on the D9MK2 sat near the power supply and was apparently making the whole thing sound ‘wrong’. The solution? Take the screw out and replace it with one that had a serrated washer.

It might sound reasonably simple, but almost certainly wouldn’t occur to most of us — that’s if we even had ears good enough to hear the problem in the first place. Discovering the wrong screw was being used isn’t something that comes cheap.

Studio time at Air is pricey, and factoring in the time of Pioneer’s engineers, their flights over to the UK and all the other little extras, you can see how replacing one screw becomes a seriously expensive process. There is one obvious problem though. If the type of screw matters so much, what happens if one works its way loose over time, or if you take it in for repair and the screw gets swapped for a different one? Well, all anyone could advise was that you’re very careful about who fixes your Air-tuned kit, and that you check all the screws once you get your SACD player back.

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DigiTimes: In order to improve its TV business, Philips plans to take a restructuring charge of 40 million euros in the third quarter of 2009, according to the company.

The company has been reorganizing its TV business over the last year, divesting itself from the North American market and seeing its TV related sales drop 54.57% on year to 587 million euros in the second quarter of 2009.

As part of its makeover in the display market, the branding licensing agreement between Philips and TPV for monitors came into effect on June 1, 2009.

Overall, Philips’ second quarter sales of 5.23 billion euros were down 19% on year. Net income totaled 45 million euro in the second quarter, down 93.88% from 735 million euros for the first quarter.

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Wired: Avatar bank tellers, e-wallpaper for your home and an electronic Memory Shrine that keeps the sounds, images and memories that are important to you are among the devices that Ericsson believes we could be using in the next decade.

Ericsson, the company that, with Sony, gave birth to Sony Ericsson in 2001, has unveiled its Life in 2020 project, which involved 450 experts from inside and outside the company coming together to predict how technology will be used in the future.

Erik Kruse, from Ericsson, headed up the project. His team included people from the consultancy firm McKinsey, as well as the Institute for the Future in California and the Copenhagen Institute for Future Studies. They were asked to draw together information on socio-economic trends, consumer buying patterns and the sustainability of certain technologies to determine how life will have changed in the next decade.

This included whether social attitudes towards green products will have changed, what new industries may be providing employment, and whether issues like a growing elderly population may have been addressed.

The team then created 15 personas from 2020, including a 37-year old space engineer from New Zealand, a Brazilian farmer and a 22-year old computer specialist from Indonesia. On the 2020 website, you can see each of these people and then click on them to explore what technology, including specific gadgets, they use in their daily lives. There are a total of 70 hypothetical mobile devices and services for these characters, delivered by 22 hypothetical companies.

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Engadget: While our greasy, monkey-knuckled sisters over at Autoblog are getting themselves into a twist over Jaguar’s recent resurgence, our eyes remain firmly focused on the cockpit of Coventry’s new 2010 XJ.

At the center of the console is an 8-inch dual-view touchscreen that allows you, the driver, to monitor the on-board navigation maps while your passenger simultaneously watches a TV or a DVD — in silence, if they choose, with the aid of headphones.

There’s also a large driver-side virtual instrument cluster that, for better or worse, replaces the physical speedometer, rev counter, and fuel and temperature gauges.

As a 12.3-inch “high-definition” display it dynamically morphs into warning messages, menus, and colors (red for fast!) that provide the driver with the most relevant information required at the time.

The XJ also packs a Bowers & Wilkins 1200W audio system with 20 B&W speakers pumped through 15 channels of audio processing. The XJ is also the first automotive application of Dolby Pro Logic IIx tech with choice of DTS Neo:6 to enjoy 7.1 surround sound with your films. When you’re in park of course.

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Electronista: Japan’s Sanyo recently announced it would bring a DVR device to market that relies on slot-in hard drives that comply with the iVR (Information Versatile Disk) standard shared with Hitachi.

The Repoch will include an integrated tuner for receiving digital terrestrial TV broadcasts to enable viewing recordings on analog broadcast-compatible TVs.

This will allow users to keep their outdated analog TVs even though these broadcasts have been discontinued.

Connections on the Repoch include an Ethernet connection, HDMI output, component audio and video inputs as well as two antenna posts. The Repoch, bundled with a 160GB iVR disk, will cost the equivalent of $668 (€477) when it launches in Japan on September 1st. Pricing of additional iVRs, also available in 320GB capacities, is unknown.

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Electronista: One of the pioneers of digital photography, Fujifilm will reportedly release the first 3D consumer digital camera later this year.

First announced last summer, the camera uses two lenses, spaced out like human eyes, to capture two simultaneous images of the same scene from slightly different angles.

A system called FinePix Real 3D will then combine the two images into one, with output options that will include a 3D digital picture frame or special 3D prints. The frame will sport an 8-inch LCD screen that directs the images to the viewer’s left and right eyes for a three dimensional effect.

An online photo developing service is also planned, with the 3D images including a clear plastic overlay that performs the function of a 3D lens. The 10-megapixel 3D camera will first appear in Japan sometime this summer, while Europe and the US will get it during September.

Pricing will be set at around $600 (€428), with the photo frame costing a few hundred dollars as well.

Prices haven’t been set yet for prints, though Fujifilm doesn’t anticipate customers accepting high prices. A wide adoption of the new technology would be important to Fujifilm, as the company holds many patents related to 3D image technology.

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TWICE: The global CE market won’t achieve annual revenue growth this year, according to a new iSuppli report. Although the global consumer electronics market returned to sequential revenue growth in the second quarter, the industry this year will not achieve an annual expansion that would signal a true recovery, the research firm said.

Global CE equipment revenue rose to $71.1 billion in the second quarter, up 4.2 percent from $68.3 billion in the first quarter, based on a preliminary iSuppli estimate. This represents a major improvement from the first quarter, when revenue fell by 25.8 percent compared with the fourth quarter of 2008.

While consumer electronics revenue typically declines on a sequential basis in the first quarter following the fourth-quarter holiday selling season, this represented a particularly sharp decline.

“Following the dismal first quarter, conditions are starting to improve in the consumer electronics business,” said Sheri Greenspan, consumer electronics senior analyst for iSuppli.

“Revenue will continue increasing on a sequential basis in the third and fourth quarters, rising by 12.5 percent and 10.2 percent. While this growth is encouraging, 2009 will still be a down year for the industry.”

iSuppli predicted global consumer electronics equipment revenue will decline to $307.6 billion in 2009, down 8.2 percent from $335.2 billion in 2008, due to the impact of the worldwide economic downturn as well as sharply declining prices for key products.

(more…)

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