Design Stuff

Japan is investigating a possible defect in Apple Inc.’s iPod after one of the popular digital music players reportedly shot out sparks while recharging, a government official said Wednesday.

An official at the trade and economy ministry, which oversees product problems, said a defect is suspected in the lithium-ion battery in the iPod Nano, model number MA099J/A. He spoke on customary condition of anonymity, saying he is reiterating a ministry position.

The problem surfaced in January in Kanagawa Prefecture southwest of Tokyo, and Apple reported the problem to the ministry in March. No one was injured, the official said. Other details weren’t available.

Apple Japan did not contest the ministry statement but declined further comment. Nano players are sold all over the world, and it was still unclear where else besides Japan the suspected model was sold, said Masayoshi Suzuki, an Apple spokesman in Tokyo.

The ministry has instructed Apple Japan to find out the cause of what it is categorizing as a fire and report back to the government.

The iPod was assembled in China, but it was unclear who made the lithium-ion battery, the ministry official said.

Lithium-ion batteries have been blamed for a series of blazes in laptops recently that have resulted in massive global recalls.

The ministry said Apple has shipped about 425,000 iPods of the same suspected model were shipped into Japan. It was unknown how many have been sold and how many might still be in stores.

Shipments of the model began in September 2005 and were discontinued after September 2006, the ministry said.

The iPod has been the symbol in recent years of the successful fashionable image of Apple. But its sales momentum may be gradually running out of steam.

Apple sold 22.1 million iPods during the holiday quarter ended Dec. 31, fewer than the 25 million iPods analysts had expected it to sell. That’s raising fears that the company, based in Cupertino, Calif., may suffer as it tries to convince consumers to buy higher-end iPods — a key part of its strategy.

The batteries in Apple products have had some problems in the past, largely about wearing out, not about being prone to fires.

In 2006, Japanese electronics and entertainment maker Sony Corp. apologized for the troubles it had caused consumers through defective lithium-ion batteries that had equipped Sony laptops and products by Dell Inc., Apple, Lenovo and other major manufacturers.

The Tokyo-based company recalled about 10 million batteries following reports of some computers using Sony power packs overheating and bursting into flames.

The lithium-ion battery is considered an overall good technology because of its ability to furnish power in relatively small sizes, although its suspected tendency to catch fire is a major reason Toyota Motor Corp. and other automakers are being cautious about using it in ecological cars.

Toyota’s Prius gas-electric hybrid uses a different kind of battery, and the switch in future green models to the lithium-ion battery will be seen as a considerable breakthrough.

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More : Yahoo 

For Blu-ray, the format war has turned into one of those epic quests you see in badly dubbed martial arts movies.

Sure, its kung fu was too good for rival HD DVD to overcome. But hold on to those nunchaku — Blu-ray still has to overcome an army’s worth of fierce competition before it can officially crown itself the master of the global homevid village.

And that next battle starts with the entrenched format Blu-ray is trying to usurp, good-old 480p-resolution DVD, which may not be the "it" product it was back in the early days of the Bush administration, but overwhelmingly remains the go-to platform for delivering recorded movies and TV shows into the home.

"You will now see more of a comparison towards standard DVDs and less about the difference between Blu-ray and HD DVD," says Sony Pictures Home Entertainment topper David Bishop, summing up Blu-ray’s next major marketing push.

Buoyed by obvious advantages, including a better, nondegradable picture, menu-driven nonlinear playback, not to mention sheer product-design elegance — and, best of all, unanimous studio adoption from the very start — DVD quickly caught big-box-store fire and was able to usurp the once-very-established VHS format and make gobs of money for almost everyone involved with it.

Now that HD DVD is going away and the DVD biz is undeniably in recession — despite a boffo summer theatrical season, North American homevid sales declined 3.1% in 2007, according to Variety sister publicationVideo Business — the studios would love it if Blu-ray became even half as trendy as DVD was just a few years ago.

And there is at least some wind at their backs on this. For one, the federal government is mandating that all over-the-air TV broadcasts go digital next February. In the practical sense, this won’t actually affect that many people, since so many Americans get their TV through a cable or satellite box that will automatically convert digital TV signals for their old analog cathode ray tube-based sets.

But emotionally, having a stodgy government body like the FCC think they’re technologically uncool might be enough to convince many of the 50 million or so American households without high-definition sets that it’s time to take the bewildering plunge into the digital world this coming fourth quarter.

For Blu-ray, that amounts to go time.

In explaining the rationale behind the decision that ultimately doomed HD DVD — that is, homevid market share leader Warner Bros.’ choice in early January to forge exclusive ties with Blu-ray — Warner officials agreed that the long-awaited mass adoption of a high-definition TV was nearly at hand, and that now would be a good time for the industry to cut out this confusing dual-format stuff.

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Read More : Variety.com 

Scare stories about mobile phones cooking our brains come and go as regularly as the seasons. Irrational and unexplained results are periodically hailed by the media as the death knell for the mobile industry.

Schools, colleges and universities advise against - or even ban - the use of wi-fi, and services are closed down as a potential health risk.

There are many protest groups actively campaigning against wireless in any form because of some unknown and unquantified potential risk to health. These groups include those preventing base station towers being erected close to their schools or in the middle of their communities.

Unfortunately their lack of understanding actually has an inverse reality impact. If they understood the basic physics involved they would be asking for more towers and not fewer. Living really close to a mobile phone base station tower is the safest place to be.

Here is what is happening. The mobile phone pressed close to your ear adjusts its transmit power according to the distance from the base station.

That means the further from the tower the lower the power received by a mobile and the higher the power transmitted back as a result.

So if you get really close to a base station your mobile sees lots of signal and therefore transmits back a minimal amount in turn. Interesting, isn’t it? That is the inverse perception of the protestors.

The detailed physics is also interesting. Near-field emissions - those that are mainly magnetic field coupling - fall away at a rate of 1/d^6 while the far-field radiation - that is, electro-magnetic waves - die at the slower rate of 1/d^2 where d is the distance from a transmitter.

These inverse distance laws lead to the situation whereby the power entering the human head from a tower is generally less than 1,000 times smaller than that produced by a mobile.

Hence, to reduce the exposure to radiation to a minimum it is always better to be really close to the base station to ensure the mobile is emitting a minimum energy.

And what of wi-fi and WiMax? Various emission limits and active control systems, plus deployment methods generally render these systems less power aggressive than mobile networks. And of course the same inverse distance/power laws apply.

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Read more : silicon.com

For many parents-to-be the excitement and nervousness is often difficult to contain. For Kyle Piechucki, the wait was decidedly boring.

Piechucki, now a father of two who lives in Oyster Bay, N.Y., is no deadbeat he was ecstatic over the births of each of his children but simply grew tired of interminable waits at doctors’ offices. The boredom led Piechucki, 35, to develop a computer for those trapped in the purgatory of the waiting room.

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Source : abcnews 

Are plastic music CDs destined to join vinyl records as obsolete? Perhaps they already have.

Market researchers at the NPD Group report U.S. consumers spent 10 percent less on music in 2007 compared to the previous year thanks to declining CD sales and an up-tick in a la carte digital sold online at services like iTunes Music Store.

But a decline in CD sales isn’t just be traced back to the fact more individual music tracks are being sold online. NPD says the use of peer-to-peer networks to illegally swap music tracks continues to rob the industry of music sales. The percent of the Internet population in the U.S. who engaged in peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing reached a plateau of 19 percent last year, according to NPD. The bad news is the number of files each user downloaded increased and P2P music sharing continued to grow aggressively among teens.

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More : pcworld 

No more worries in using iPod in your bathroom. TearDrop is a water resistant speakers that you can use to enjoy your iPod anywhere !

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Source : TearDrop iPod Speakers 

Morph, a joint nanotechnology concept, developed by Nokia Research Center (NRC) and the University of Cambridge (UK) - was launched today alongside the "Design and the Elastic Mind" exhibition, on view from February 24 to May 12, 2008, at The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York. Morph features in both the exhibition catalog and on MoMA’s official website.

Morph is a concept that demonstrates how future mobile devices might be stretchable and flexible, allowing the user to transform their mobile device into radically different shapes. It demonstrates the ultimate functionality that nanotechnology might be capable of delivering: flexible materials, transparent electronics and self-cleaning surfaces.

Source : Nokia Morph Concept Phone 

We all know there are way too many flash memory card formats out there. At last I count I believe there are at least 9 of them. Normally I try to stick with SD or Micro SD cards but sometimes that’s not possible so what’s one to do when transporting all those easily lost cards? Get a memory card holder.

Designer Tom Kenworthy envisages a sustainable 3 tier sliding holder made from recycled vending cups. It only takes 7 plastic cups to make one holder. It’s lightweight, small, and can be colored to your heart’s desire. You might not need to carry your memory cards everywhere but at the very least this is a great way to keep them all in one place.

See more pictures :  Stylish Flash Memory Card Holder

Mobile phones with camera, mp3 player, mobile TV station, and GPS receiver can be found nowadays, all features mentioned also available in Sony Ericsson cell phone. What about mobile gaming ? Sony Ericsson is recently filling patent about Sony Ericsson PSP Phone concept. After all, who’s better positioned to create a perfect mobile gaming platform than Sony ?

Source : Sony Ericsson PSP Phone Concept 

Before you get all excited: There’s no such gadget. This is a concept device. The images are artists’ rendering. Now that we’ve convinced you to not email us about where to purchase this, let’s talk about Traveller. Traveller was designed by Nikita Golovlev, an industrial design student in the UK. The idea is a satellite navigation “book” coupled with an e-paper to replace a tourist map. Since concept devices have no limits, Nikita also threw in memory card reader, USB port, Wi-Fi, bluetooth, ability to sync your pics with the location they were taken, and open source platform to allow for other applications to be used.

Source : E-Paper with GPS