IBLOG SPACE

A mass exodus of Nokia R&D engineers in 1997 led to the company paying $200m in what amounted to retainer bribes, newly released documents in Finland confirm today, with the company held to ransom by a surprise staff walkout. The paperwork reveals that product developer Jyrki Hallikainen persuaded 44 of his R&D peers to ditch Nokia and set up a new company with the help of Philips, Helsingen Sanomat reports, forcing then mobile phone chief Pekka Ala-Pietilä to open the company checkbook and sign off roughly $4.5m apiece in order to convince them not to leave. Hallikainen insisted on striking out, setting up cellphone ODM Microcell. Eventually, though, the lure of Nokia’s cash drew ex-employees back to the firm, Philips withdrew its support, and Microcell was sold to Flextronics in 2003 for $80m (as well as taking on the company’s $120m in debt). The incident, it’s claimed, left Nokia execs deeply concerned about corporate espionage and secrecy, including accusing staff who had

If you are a fan of gadgets, you have used things that require rare earths in their construction. There are deposits of rare earths spread around the world, but the vast majority of the world’s supply of rare earths are in China. China has a very tight grip on rare earths exports allowing them to control the prices of the material and keep the price up. China’s dominance may not last long though with a new discovery by Japanese researchers. Japan has found “vast” deposits of rare earths on the floor of the Pacific ocean. The caveat at this point is that we don’t know if the retrieval of the rare earths deposits will be economically viable. More study is going on right now. The minerals were found in vast mud despots in 78 different locations around the country. The deposits are 11,500 to 20,000 feet below the ocean’s surface. The deposits are in international waters. The rare earths are estimated to be in the 80 to 100 billion ton range. The estimated global supply of rare earths today

For most of the time that Android has been on the market people have thought of Android as free. Google doesn’t charge for the OS so the thought was all the maker needed to do was get the hardware and sell the device. Microsoft started pointing out a few months back that Android isn’t free, there are patent licensing fees that go along with it. Naturally, Microsoft owns a number of those patents that need to be licensed. Some scoffed at the idea of licensing patents from Microsoft to build Android devices, until major firms started signing up. The last company to sign up for patent agreements was Onkyo. Microsoft also counts major players like HTC among its licensees as well. Microsoft announced today that another major company has licensed the patents it holds for Microsoft. Wistron is the company that has now signed a license agreement. The agreement covers Wistron to build Android devices for smartphones, tablets, eReaders and other gadgets. The terms of the agreement are undisclose

Netflix streaming at full HD 1080p resolution on Android mobile devices could be with us imminently, with the news that Texas Instruments‘ OMAP4 platform has become the first to be Netflix HD certified. OMAP4′s combination of 1080p-capable dual ARM Cortex-A9 cores and the M-Shield security technology were apparently enough to convince Netflix that not only was the platform good enough to deliver Full HD, but in a way that would stop nefarious users from ripping the high-def clips and sharing them illegally. Netflix already offers an Android app, but it’s only officially available for a select number of devices. The streaming media company has previously said that it’s an issue of security, with Android lacking a generic content protection system that will salve the concerns of license holders: “The hurdle has been the lack of a generic and complete platform security and content protection mechanism available for Android. The same security issues that have led to piracy concerns on the

Back when I bought my first iPhone, I asked the AT&T lackey about insurance. You would have thought I asked for free data or something. I knew better than to ask on the next two iPhones I bought, thought they always asked me to buy the Apple Care policy. I never purchased that coverage though. If you have wished for insurance on your iPhone from AT&T rather than Apple, that wish will be made true soon. AT&T has sent out an update to customers according to MacRumors telling them that as of July 17 they will be able to buy insurance from AT&T on their iPhone with some enrollment restrictions. The mobile insurance will offer the phone against loss, theft, accidental damage, liquid damage, and mechanical or electrical failure. The insurance for the iPhone is through an external partner company and is $11.99 monthly with a $199 deductible. That is basically paying for the phone again. It’s also worth noting that Apple has in the past replaced damaged iPhones with new ones fo

I took my kids to see the flick Transformers 3 yesterday. I know some people hate the new film, but I thought it was good enough. I watched the film and didn’t notice the scene that Bay sampled from one of his previous films called The Island mostly because I have never heard of that flick. I guess Bay decided to cut some costs and reused a scene from a bridge in Transformers. You can see in the photo above that the scene is identical and the only difference is the Transformer arm thing crunching the car rather than the spike in The Island. People are making a ruckus about the sampling. Personally, I don’t care if he samples himself as long as the sample fits in with the movie. You can see the films played side by side on YouTube below. One things that I did notice that was odd was the opening scenes of the flick bothered my eyes. The 3D effects had my eyes trying to decide where to focus. I have never had a 3D movie do that to me before and I watch every movie that comes out in the 3D

I will admit that cables are ugly; they are even uglier when I install something because I just don’t care what the cables running on and behind my desk look like. If you are the sort that gets a panic attack each time you see a cable showing you might want the Florafil to hide them. These are covers that you can put over just about any cable. They were designs by Tania da Cruz and are concept devices at this point. The part that hides the cable is a half-round section with green branches and leaf shapes running off it. The cool part is that there are different shaped sections so you can create your own wall-mounted wire hiding tree with curves and such. There are sections that split off as well for hiding cables that run two directions. These things remind me of corn stalks for some reason. The Florafil covers are made from rubber. These are pretty cool, but I think that a green tree on your wall is about as bad as the cables. Since this is a concept product, there is no pricing infor

The Toshiba Thrive is a small 7-inch Android tablet that some fans of Android have been looking forward to getting their hands on for a long time. The tablet hit pre-order on Amazon starting at $430 last month. We also learned last month that the Android 3.1 version was postponed. The Thrive has been expected to land on July 10. The tablet has landed early in at least one Best Buy location in Austin, Texas. An administrator from Thrive Forums was in a Best Buy store in North Austin and saw the Thrive tablet sitting on a stand in the corner. He spent some time playing with the Thrive and asked the sales person if the tablet was available. According to the sales person the Thrive was in store and couple be purchased right then. The catch was that the 16GB Thrive was marked at $479.99 making it about $50 more expensive than the pre-order version elsewhere. I am sure there are some folks that will gladly pay the extra money to get the tablet early. Apparently, other stores are offering the

We’ve been tracking the Qbo open-source robot for over a year now, as creator TheCorpora aims to turn it into the Ford Model T of experimental robotics. Now there’s a new video of the Qbo in action, with the endearing ‘botreacting autonomously to users by virtue of its computer vision algorithms, rather than using simple proximity sensors like, say, a robot vacuum cleaner. The demo was designed to show the company eventually responsible for mass-production of Qbo exactly what the robot was capable of, though it actually ended up teaching TheCorpora more about naturalistic interactions. The log file storing the ‘bot’s activity recorded various occasions where bright sunlight distracted its vision, as well as a tendency to position itself further back from taller people than from shorter. Rather than making a bad impression, however, the glitchy Qbo was perceived as more human in its behaviors. Just as people can be dazzled by bright light, or generally increase inter-personal distance w

iRiver has been around for a long time making some interesting PMPs and other devices for music and video fans to take with them wherever they go. One of the last items that we talked about from iRiver was the small T9 MP3 player back in May. The new product that has surfaced from iRiver is much more interesting than the low-end T9. The P8 has a big 5-inch touchscreen and a very slick interface with widgets and more that looks like it came from Cupertino. The interface is very polished and does look a lot like Mac OS to my eyes. It has big icons for major functions like music, video, and the integrated FM tuner. The screen has a resolution of 800 x 480. It also supports HD resolution video when connected to your TV or computer via an HDMI input. The P8 supports all the file formats that you expect with AVI, WMV, MKV, and XviD. The P8 also supports a number of audio files with MP3, WAV, WMA, OGG, FLAC, and APE. The P8 can also view photos and has eBook capability along with voice memo r

ARM is the dominant player in the mobile realm for processor and graphics processors that are able to provide the performance that consumers want in small handheld devices and still squeeze all the runtime possible out of the battery onboard. ARM is working on new designs for future products and is teasing with the power it has in store for its future hardware. ARM claims that within 18 months its Mali GPU will allow a mobile phone to be as powerful as the PS3 or Xbox 360. ARM has noted that in order to allow for the next generation of gaming and user interfaces on mobile devices that it needs more than just a GPU and must take advantage of the CPU and GPU for the power needed. ARM also notes that it can’t meet this goal by simply using more hardware. ARM believes that other techniques are needed to provide the experience users and developers want on mobile devices. The other techniques are required to provide the needed performance and still get the battery life needed. These other te

The TouchPad from HP only went live in the last few days. We posted up our review of the TouchPad already and found the hardware lacking, but WebOS was pretty good. I guess HP is already set to refresh that TouchPad hardware, if the leaked roadmap can be believed. According go the roadmap an updated TouchPad is set to land this summer. Specifically the new 64GB TouchPad and a 4G version will land in August. The leak claims that the new TouchPad will come in white glossy and black colors. The processor inside the new TouchPad also gets an update and rumors point to a 1.5GHz Snapdragon. The 4G tablet will apparently be for AT&T and hopefully it will be the LTE sort of 4G not the faux 4G that is more like a beefed up 3G AT&T pedals right now in many areas. The leaked roadmap also shows several other cool products that are supposed to be coming. The roadmap also shows the Pre3 and Opal are set to launch in the fall. The Opal is the 7-inch WebOS tablet that little detail is known ab

If you are one of the geeks that were able to get an early invite to Google+ from us or someone else and have found that the service is very addictive you aren’t alone. I would bet that a number of the people that find Google+ so appealing are also using the iPhone and wishing there was an app for Google+ already. Googler Erica Joy posted to her own Google+ account yesterday that an official app had been submitted to Apple for approval. Exactly when the app was submitted is unknown. Joy did state that the app wasn’t sent in for approval yesterday and said it was submitted “sometime prior to today.” The app is apparently waiting for approval. Anything approval with Apple is far from guaranteed. The censors at Apple could find that Google+ conflicts with one of its own apps so we will only know when it gets approved once we get word from Google. The app will work for the iPhone and iPad. There have been several comments in the original post thread asking about an Windows Phone version an

If you are one of the geeks that were able to get an early invite to Google+ from us or someone else and have found that the service is very addictive you aren’t alone. I would bet that a number of the people that find Google+ so appealing are also using the iPhone and wishing there was an app for Google+ already. Googler Erica Joy posted to her own Google+ account yesterday that an official app had been submitted to Apple for approval. Exactly when the app was submitted is unknown. Joy did state that the app wasn’t sent in for approval yesterday and said it was submitted “sometime prior to today.” The app is apparently waiting for approval. Anything approval with Apple is far from guaranteed. The censors at Apple could find that Google+ conflicts with one of its own apps so we will only know when it gets approved once we get word from Google. The app will work for the iPhone and iPad. There have been several comments in the original post thread asking about an Windows Phone version an

Remember that ad we showed you from Sony that hit YouTube a while back from Sony for its S1 and S2 Android tablets? The ad with the balls, and trains and stuff that rolled around and activated different actions as the video progressed. I think that was one of the coolest ads that Sony has ever made. At the end of that original ad, Sony noted it was to be continued. That second part has now turned up on YouTube and it’s just as cool as the first ad. I would love to see the how to on these ads to watch how the people that made it actually set the whole thing up. I really like the marbles bouncing off the white square into the bucket at the start. They did almost lose me in the middle when the big blue ball was rolling, for a few seconds I thought nothing was happening. At the end of the ad, the ping-pong balls fly up the little tracks telling us the ad is to be continued. I wonder when we will see the next part. It’s been roughly two weeks since the first part of the ad surfaced so perha

Facebook has already hinted at an “awesome” launch this week to drag the attention back from Google+, but in the meantime it looks like the social network is experimenting with ways to make exporting Facebook friends to the new rival more difficult. Facebook Friend Exporter, a Chrome extension many had been using to extract emails of those you’re linked with on the service, making adding them to Google+ more straightforward, has been blocked, seemingly under a freshly-enforced section of Facebook’s TOS that bans automated data harvesting. The tool was developed by Mohamed Mansour, who spotted that Facebook had begun to remove friends’ email addresses from users’ profiles so that the exporter extension would no longer work. “Facebook is trying so hard to not allow you to export your friends” he announced, “they started to remove emails of your friends from your profile by today July 5th 2011. It will no longer work for many people.” An updated build of the tool is apparently on the way,

S’mores is some good eatin’. My kids love s’mores, but I can never get the marshmallow just right over a campfire. They always end up too burnt so it’s like eating a charcoal and chocolate sandwich. Cook them a little less and you end up with a nicely toasted outside and a solid inside that won’t properly squish between the graham crackers. S’mores making is partly science and partly mess avoidance for me. I have taken to making s’mores in the microwave, but it turns out that microwaved marshmallows and shaving cream have something in common. Shaving cream continues to grow and grown so what starts out as a little ends up being enough to shave a horse’s butt. A nuked marshmallow tends to grow in the same manner; I believe this is how the Stay Puffed marshmallow man came to be. What I need is this dedicated S’mores maker to get the perfect blend of slightly brown and properly mushy marshmallow. You can cram up to 12 marshmallows onto the sticks it comes with. Once they are properly cook

I am not a fan of alarm clocks. The shrill alarm is very annoying and my wife never ceases to jump and freak out when the alarm starts beeping all the sudden. Waking to the radio is a bit better, but it never ceases to lose the signal and wake me to white noise that is easy to sleep though. Mostly I wake to one of the tones on my iPhone and that works well enough. If you are the sort that needs an alternative means of waking from your clock what you need is the Alternative alarm clock. This is a design concept from designer Ki Hyun Kim. This clock looks like a plain old clock on the front, but has two of those strange looking Euro AC outlets on the top. The outlets allow the clock to act like an extension cord and they will turn on whatever you plug into them when the alarm goes off. This allows you to wake to whatever it is that gets you going in the morning. You can wake to a lamp, coffee maker, or whatever you want. It’s an interesting design, but I wouldn’t want to have to look at

Toshiba’s clever new 3D laptop, the Qosmio F750 3D, only got official this morning , but SlashGear stopped by for some early playtime to see just how well the glasses-free display worked. Built around a Core i7 processor, 6GB of DDR3 memory and NVIDIA GeForce 540 GT graphics, the F750 3D is no slouch in terms of performance, but it’s the display – capable of simultaneously showing 2D and 3D pictures, tailored to where you’re sitting in front of the notebook – that’s the star of the show. Check out our hands-on impressions after the cut. Toshiba was showing pre-production samples, so we can’t take too much away from the build quality, but the glossy casings were typical for the company’s laptop range. Styling is sober, with some red touches going a little way to brightening things up, but within seconds the F750 3D was a mess of fingerprints and smears. Still, the full-sized keyboard – complete with separate numerical keypad – was spacious, and the trackpad decently scaled. The glasses-

Toshiba has outed its latest 3D laptop, the Qosmio F750 3D, the first to offer glasses-free 3D. Pairing a lenticular display – which splits the image between the left and right eyes – with a 15.6-inch Full HD LCD panel and clever eye-tracking technology to preserve the 3D effect even as you move your head around, the Toshiba Qosmio F750 3D has a 2.0GHz Core i7 processor, NVIDIA GeForce GT 540M graphics, 6GB of DDR3 memory and a Blu-ray XL recordable drive. That Blu-ray drive is capable of burning the new, super-capacious 128GB disks, as well as playing 2D or 3D Blu-ray movies and upscaling 2D DVDs into 3D. There’s also a 640GB 5,400rpm hard-drive, Harman Kardon speakers, HDMI port, WiFi b/g/n, Bluetooth 3.0+HS and a memory card reader, while ports include three USB 2.0 and a USB 3.0. Toshiba’s eye-tracking system uses the HD-resolution webcam to identify the user’s face and then tweak the positioning of the left/right-eye pixels behind the lenticular film, twisting the 3D image to sui

Apple’s iPhone 5 fabricator, Pegatron, has reportedly landed a 15m-strong order for the fifth-gen smartphone, with shipping expected to begin in September. That’s according to the latest leaks to drain their way down theDigiTimes plughole, with component supplier sources claiming that – contrary to expectations of a significantly more advanced handset – the iPhone 5 “does not seem to have any major update” from its predecessor. That could suggest a single device, or that Apple has split manufacturing responsibilities for a two-strong next-gen iPhone line-up between suppliers. The new leak echos talk from Friday, though that suggested Foxconn had clinched the next-gen iPhone production contract. Until now, Pegatron has been responsible for CDMA iPhone 4 production, the handsets used on Verizon and other carriers outside the US, though previous leaks have suggested the iPhone 5 will be aso-called World Phone offering both GSM and CDMA compatibility in a single device. If that’s the case,

Apple could be planning another flash memory speed boost in the upcoming MacBook Air refresh, according to new reports, with the company tipped to be using 19nm “Toggle DDR 2.0″ storage for the slender ultraportable. The high-speed NAND, Macotokara‘s component source suggests, is capable of 400Mbps transfer rates, using new, smaller chips that Apple would supposedly solder directly to the base circuit of the updated Airs. It’s not the first time Apple has experimented with faster flash. Back in April, the company quietly switched from Toshiba’s storage to Samsung’s, boosting potential read rates by around 50MB/s to 261MB/s, and write rates by around 35MB/s to 210MB/s. The newer memory would allow for even quicker resuming from sleep mode – where Apple saves the current system state to the NAND flash rather than to the MacBook Air’s RAM, thus preserving battery life – as well as more impressive performance in-use. According to the latest batch of rumors, Apple is preparing the tweaked A

Samsung is tipped to be readying a Windows Phone version of its best-selling Galaxy S II Android smartphone, with the Samsung SGH-i937 showing up at the Bluetooth SIG. Details on the smartphone are scant, but itsWP7.1 Mango flavor is apparently confirmed thanks to it making an appearance on Occasional Gamer‘s list of supported Windows Phone devices. It also has exactly the same Bluetooth profile as Mango does, lending further weight to the argument. The GSII comparison comes from the distinct similarity between the two handset’s model numbers: SGH-i937 for the new Windows Phone, and SGH-i927 for the Galaxy S II. Given the recently announced sales success of the GSII – 3m devices in 55 days – it would be little surprise if Samsung decided to repurpose some of the hardware design and specification for a version with a Microsoft flavor. What remains to be seen is how, exactly, those specifications will evolve to suit Windows Phone: for a start, Microsoft has mandated Qualcomm processors,

While truly it should be par for the course that a big label artist like Kanye West would release information about a new album via Twitter, Facebook, and the like, it should come as an ominous surprise that a release would be done via a project still in beta mode: that being the brand new social networking site Google+. It appears that amongst the few other places that were pre-tipped with album information including MTV and DefJam (the label that’ll carry the album,) Kanye’s updated his Twitter page, Jay-Z’s Twitter is up, and of course there’sKanyeWest.com – right alongside Google+. It’s interesting to note furthermore that Kanye’s MySpace remained un-updated for hours after the initial announcements on every other major social networking site. Justin, what do you think of that? Kanye West isn’t the only celebrity that appears to have popped up on the brand new social networking site. Google+ now plays host to Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban, the ever-present Ashton Kutcher, singe

Backup devices are generally at the “less glamorous” end of the gadget scale, but ironically some of the most important. Not having the very latest smartphone or gaming device may be frustrating, but not as much as discovering the hard-drive in your computer has crashed and taken with it all your files, multimedia and other content. LaCie is hoping its CloudBox will prevent some of those headaches, a local/cloud double-act that pairs a simple network drive with a companion web backup service. Setup is, so the promise goes, simple; problem is, you pay for that convenience. Is the CloudBox heaven-sent or an unwelcome stormfront? Check out the full SlashGear review after the cut. Backup Basics Generally speaking, there’s local backup and remote backup. Local, as the word suggests, is on-site: anything from burning a DVD of important files and keeping it in your desk drawer, to a USB (or eSATA, or FireWire, or some other connection) hard-drive you plug in directly, or a network-attached st

Shuttle has been around for years and years with some really cool small form factor computers that allow users to save space on their desktop and still use the normal monitor they already have. The latest computer in the SFF series from Shuttle is called the H3 6700P and this machine is aimed at professional users. The H3 6700P uses the Intel H67 Express Chipset and second-generation Core i7 or i5 processors. The machine supports up to 16GB of RAM and offers HD audio as well. The little board inside the computer has 7.1 channel HD audio and gigabit Ethernet to round out the main features of the computer. The machine supports up to 500GB of storage in drive bay one and has an additional drive bay supporting another 500GB HDD if needed. The machine also has space for a single optical drive. Graphics for the computer are AMD FirePro or optional NVIDIA GeForce graphics. The SFF rig has eSATA, USB 3.0, mic in, headphone in, and various buttons on the front panel. It has a single PCI x1 v2.0

Apple always has a few irons in the patent suit fire. It’s battling Samsung right now over alleged trademark and patent infringement for instance. Samsung has recently said it’s not copying, but competing with Apple in that ongoing case. Apple also apparently had a legal action going on with S3 Graphics over patents that Apple allegedly infringed on. The US ITC ruled recently that Apple is in fact infringing on two patents held by S3 Graphics. The two patents are U.S. Patent No. 6,683,978 that has to do with image data formats and U.S. Patent No. 6,658,146. That latter patent has to do with directed systems and methods for compressing images. Apparently, the S3 Texture Compression is a commonly licensed patent in the tech world. The patent is already licensed by Microsoft, Sony, Nintendo, and others. “S3 Graphics is pleased to win this portion of the ITC investigation,” said Dr. Ken Weng, CEO of S3 Graphics. “S3 Graphics has a long history of designing graphics processor chips and tech

The computer market is very competitive with so many of the machines having the same or very similar features many consumers look at notebooks as a commodity today. The effort to grow business and market share at times comes down to how cheap computers can be sold. One key for makers to sell cheaper is to buy components cheaper, which means larger quantity purchases are needed. NEC and Lenovo have announced a joint venture in Japan that will make the NEC Lenovo Japan Group the largest PC provider in Japan. The figures show that the new venture will have 25% of the Japanese computer market. The venture will also have a very strong corporate and business sales volume. The transaction landed NEC $175 million through an issue of shares in Lenovo. The joint venture is owned 51% by Lenovo and 49% by NEC. Lenovo’s Roderick Lappin is Executive Chairman with Lenovo’s Hideyo Takasu is the president and CEO. The companies both promise improved support for users in Japan and lots more thanks to th

The 3D TV market is hardly booming today with the sets not selling as well as TV makers had expected. This is due to a number of reasons including the lack of 3D content and the fact that the tech is more expensive than most consumers are willing to pay today. That will change and 3D TV will become more and more common as the tech matures and gets cheaper and better. The market may not be as strong as TV makers had hoped, but Samsung has over 60% of what market for the sets there is. Samsung claims that its unit and dollar share for the 3D TV market in the May 22 to June 18 period was 61%. That percentage includes both LED and Plasma 3D TVs. NPD has Samsung at 50% of the unit and dollar market share for April to May 2011. One of the things that will help Samsung continue to grow its market share is that its 3D glasses had a significant price cut in May to $49.99. That is still $200 more for a family of four to get 3D glasses, but much cheaper than some other 3D glasses, that can cost $

Hasbro is the toy company that was behind some of the toys that shaped my youth. Specifically, I had all the Transformers that my parents would let me have. I often broke them trying to transform them from robot to vehicle or whatever and they were a lot of fun. I also had loads of LEGO as a kid and spent more than a few days grounded thanks to the little blocks and my tendency to leave them laying around for my parents to step on. When you combine LEGO-style building blocks with Transformers you really get my geek lust stoked and that is exactly what the first KRE-O building sets are offering. The construction sets are now in stores and the first series are Transformer sets that are tie-ins with the flick that hit theaters last week. There are a number of sets with prices running from $7.99 to $59.99 depending on the set. Some are simple minifigs while others are larger and more complex Transformer bots. The sets are available in 16 different characters and styles and are for ages 6 a