Nokia Smart Phones Getting Microsoft Silverlight

Microsoft's Flash competitor, Silverlight, will be appearing on Nokia Series 40 and 60 smart phones.

In its quest to make its Silverlight technology as ubiquitous as its competitor Flash, Microsoft is moving full speed ahead to promote adoption of the technology through some strategic moves and partnerships it will highlight at its annual MIX 08 conference, including a deal with Nokia to put the technology on mobile devices.

Through a deal it will reveal Tuesday, Microsoft is working with mobile handset provider Nokia to put Silverlight on wireless devices for the first time, said Tom Honeybone, senior director in Microsoft's developer division. Silverlight is a cross-platform plug-in that lets developers create multimedia and rich Internet applications (RIAs) and then run them from the browser.

At MIX, Nokia plans to reveal a beta program for its runtime for Silverlight on its Series 60 and Series 40 handsets, as well as demonstrate Silverlight applications running on the handsets, he said. By the end of the year, Nokia plans to ship handsets with the runtime embedded that can run Silverlight applications, beginning first with the high-end Series 60 smartphones, Honeybone said. Silverlight on Series 40 phones and on Nokia's tablet devices will be available thereafter.

Microsoft eventually plans to include a runtime for Silverlight in its Windows Mobile platform, but it chose Nokia as the first company to bring Silverlight to handsets because of that company's prominent position in the mobile handset market, Honeybone said. "Series 60 is the clear leader, " he said. Nokia is not currently one of Microsoft's Windows Mobile handset partners, though there have been rumors that the company eventually will sign on to build Windows Mobile devices alongside competitors such as Sony Ericsson and HTC.

Microsoft will be developing a portability kit so Nokia can port Silverlight from the desktop to its mobile platform; that kit eventually will be available to other handset providers as well, Honeybone said.

Microsoft released Silverlight 1.0 in September 2007 as a plug-in for browsers that could work on Windows, Linux and the Mac platform. Microsoft developed the technology to displace Adobe's Flash, which currently has about 97 percent to 99 percent penetration on the Web as a technology for delivering multimedia content and RIAs.

Flash also is available on wireless devices as Flash Lite; the technology is available on more than 450 million phones, according to Adobe.

Microsoft recently renamed its forthcoming 1.1 version to Silverlight 2, saying it's more stable and fully baked than merely an incremental release. The company has said Silverlight 2 will be available in beta form in the first quarter of the year. It's not unlikely that release will be made available this week at MIX, though Microsoft has not said this and would not comment Monday.

As Microsoft prepares to make Silverlight more ubiquitous, the company is using its own reach on the Web to promote its use. The company has been using Silverlight on some of its own Web sites, confirmed Brian Goldfarb, group product manager, developer platform, at Microsoft.

Silverlight is not a required download to view the sites and users can opt out when prompted to download Silverlight, "but they will miss out on some great rich media content," he said.

Microsoft also has been using Silverlight as the delivery mechanism for some company-generated video, and its use was indeed required in at least one of those instances. Last week, a participant had to download Silverlight to view CEO Steve Ballmer's keynote Webcast live from the Microsoft's Windows Server launch event in Los Angeles.

Goldfarb said Microsoft will continue to use Silverlight more and more as part of its Web content delivery strategy, including Webcasts and other video presentations on the Web.

Microsoft also is leveraging partners to promote Silverlight adoption. One of the first partners to develop on Silverlight and use it as a delivery mechanism, MLB.com, now requires the use of Silverlight for baseball enthusiasts to view games, audio and video. And at MIX, AOL is expected to demonstrate a free Web mail product built on Silverlight 2, according to AOL.

NEXT GENERATION IN MEMORY

SAMSUNG is the first hard drive manufacturer to ship a 500GB 2.5-inch drive. Samsung announced its drive was shipping in volume to OEMs and PC makers today.

The 500GB drive marks a significant milestone in portable storage: On notebooks that support dual-hard drive configurations, a 500GB drive means you can have a whopping 1TB of storage in a laptop computer.

Competition to Market

Hitachi was the first company to announce a 500GB 2.5-inch hard drive, before the start of the 2008 International Consumer Electronics Show. Samsung was the second to announce, also at the show; Fujitsu also recently announced its intention to offer a 500GB drive.

However, both Hitachi and Fujitsu are taking a different approach to 500GB than Samsung. All three drive makers use three disk platters, but Hitachi and Fujitsu reach 500GB by expanding the height of the drive from 9.5mm--the common standard for most notebooks--to 12.5mm, a height that's increasingly accommodated on larger, desktop-replacement laptop designs, but not necessarily on more general-use laptops.

Samsung's Spinpoint M6 drive spins at 5,400 rpm (revolutions per minute). Hitachi's drive carries the same rating, but Fujitsu slowed its drive to 4200 rpm.

Hitachi's drive was supposed to ship in February, but is now expected to ship later this month. Fujitsu says its drive will ship in May.

1TB in a Laptop

Since the Spinpoint M6 fits into the chassis of commercial and multimedia notebooks, said Andy Higginbotham, director of hard drive sales at Samsung Semiconductor. Two drives can be combined for 1TB of storage, he said.

Priced at $299, the hard drive is shipping now to OEMs and PC makers, and will be in retail stores later this month. A company spokeswoman declined to comment on which PC makers will be using the drive; nor would a spokeswoman say when we might see a notebook using the drive.

At the Consumer Electronics Show earlier this year, Asus announced the M70S laptop, which combined two 500GB drives from Hitachi.

Samsung also announced the Spinpoint MP2 hard drive, a 2.5-inch drive with 250GB of storage. Aimed at desktop replacement notebooks, workstations and blade servers, it provides quicker read and write speeds than the M6. The hard drive spins at 7,200 rpm.

With the MP2, the company also provides an optional chip that protects a hard drive from vibrations caused by other hardware components.

The Spinpoint MP2 is priced at $299 and will be available through retailers. An 80GB version of the hard drive is also available, according to the company.

Both drives come with a free-fall sensor that OEMs can opt for; the sensor can park the head and turns the hard drive off in the event of a fall, protecting the data on it.

BLUE RAY DISC

The name Blu-ray Disc is derived from the blue-violet laser used to read and write this type of disc. Because of its shorter wavelength (405 nm), substantially more data can be stored on a Blu-ray Disc than on the DVD format, which uses a red (650 nm) laser. A single layer Blu-ray Disc can store 25 gigabytes (GB), over five times the size of a single layer DVD at 4.7 GB. A dual layer Blu-ray Disc can store 50 GB, almost 6 times the size of a dual layer DVD at 8.5 GBThe name Blu-ray Disc is derived from the blue-violet laser used to read and write this type of disc. Because of its shorter wavelength (405 nm), substantially more data can be stored on a Blu-ray Disc than on the DVD format. A single layer Blu-ray Disc can store 25 gigabytes (GB). A dual layer Blu-ray Disc can store 50 GB.

Media type:	High-density optical disc
Encoding:	MPEG-2, MPEG-4 AVC (H.264), and VC-1
Capacity:	25 GB (single layer), 50 GB (dual layer)
Read mechanism:	1x@36 Mbit/s & 2x@72 Mbit/s
Developed by:	Blu-ray Disc Association
Usage:	Data storage, High-definition video and PlayStation 3 Games

Blu-ray Disc is a next-generation, optical disc format that enables the ultimate high-def entertainment experience. Blu-ray Disc provides these key features and advantages:

• Maximum picture resolution
• Largest capacity available anywhere (25 GB single layer/50 GB dual layer)
• Best audio possible
• Enhanced interactivity
• Disc robustness.

Disc structure

Laser and optics

Like its rival format HD, DVD, Blu-ray uses a "blue" (technically violet) laser operating at a wavelength of 405 nm to read and write data. Conventional DVDs and CDs use red and near infrared lasers at 650 nm and 780 nm respectively.

The blue-violet laser's shorter wavelength makes it possible to store more information on a 12 cm CD/DVD sized disc. The minimum "spot size" on which a laser can be focused is limited by diffraction, and depends on the wavelength of the light and the numerical aperture of the lens used to focus it. By decreasing the wavelength, increasing the numerical aperture from 0.60 to 0.85 and making the cover layer thinner to avoid unwanted optical effects, the laser beam can be focused to a smaller spot. This allows more information to be stored in the same area. In addition to the optical improvements, Blu-ray Discs feature improvements in data encoding that further increase the capacity.

Hard-coating technology

Since the Blu-ray data layer is closer to the surface of the disk, compared to the DVD standard, it was at first more vulnerable to scratches. The first discs were housed in cartridges for protection. Advances in polymer technology eventually made the cartridges unnecessary.

TDK was the first company to develop a working scratch protection coating for Blu-ray discs. It was named Durabis. In addition, both Sony and Panasonic's replication methods include proprietary hard-coat technologies. Sony's rewritable media are sprayed with a scratch-resistant and antistatic coating. Verbatim recordable and rewritable Blu-ray Disc discs use their own proprietary hard-coat technology called ScratchGuard.