qualcomm

BARCELONA, Spain--H.264 is today's leader when it comes to mainstream video encoding technologies, but it will have to share the stage in 2013 with a successor called H.265 that can squeeze a video into nearly half the file size.

H.264, also known as the Advanced Video Codec (AVC), defines how a video can be compressed for reduced storage requirements and--very importantly given the online video explosion--for streaming across networks. H.265, also called High Efficiency Video Codec (HEVC), uses new techniques to compress video even more.

Qualcomm, a San Diego-based chipmaker that's on the international standards group developing H.265, … Read more

BARCELONA, Spain--Telefonica today showed off B2G, the Mozilla browser-based operating system for mobile phones, saying it's good enough to sell to today's feature-phone customers later this year.

You may or may not agree. To help you judge, here's a video of Carlos Domingo, Telefonica Digital's director of product development and innovation, demonstrating a prototype phone at a press conference today at the Mobile World Congress show here. At the event, Telefonica announced its mobile OS pact with Mozilla.

Having watched the demo myself, the phone looked workable but awfully pokey. And touch input-- specially the keyboard--was … Read more

BARCELONA--Half of Telefonica's customers are in Latin America, where smartphones are scarcer than in wealthier parts of the world. But the mobile network operator hopes Mozilla's new browser-based operating system, B2G, will change that.

"What we're selling the most in these countries is feature phones, which is ridiculous, said Carlos Domingo, Telefonica Digital's director of product development and innovation, in an interview at the Mobile World Congress show here in Barcelona, Spain. "We think we can bring smartphones to the masses in developing countries with this approach."

How affordable, exactly? The B2G phone … Read more

BARCELONA, Spain--Mozilla took a big first step in making something real out of B2G, its browser-based mobile operating system, by signing on mobile network operator Telefonica as a partner.

In addition, the Firefox maker discussed another step, a close relationship with mobile processor maker Qualcomm to create the hardware for the first phones, expected to launch later in 2012.

Those are two very important steps. But they're only one of dozens that it must take to create an operating system competitive with Apple's iOS and Google's Android, much less one that fulfills Mozilla's grander ambition. The … Read more

Hewlett-Packard has Windows 8 tablets and hybrid devices in the works, sources told CNET. This follows comments this week by CEO Meg Whitman, who signaled that HP is readying a bevy of Windows 8 products for the fourth quarter.

Those tablets, which are either being considered or being readied for commercial release, include two designs based on Intel's next-generation Atom processor and one using a Qualcomm ARM processor, said an industry source familiar with the designs.

HP's enthusiasm around Windows 8 products is no secret. CEO Meg Whitman made it amply clear this week during the company's … Read more

As predicted at CES 2012, the new and much faster wireless networking standard, 802.11ac, is really going to arrive this year.

Following Broadcom, Qualcomm Atheros today launched its own 802.11ac Wi-Fi ecosystem that covers all aspects of wireless networking--mobile devices, computers, and other electronics--scaling from home to enterprise applications.

Sharing the common 802.11ac standard, Qualcomm's new chips offer up to the top speed of 1.3Gbps (three-stream), 900Mbps (dual-stream), and 450Mbps (single-stream). Basically, the new Wi-Fi standard will offer comparable performance to Gigabit Ethernet, and even faster in some instances, so wireless networking will no longer be a compromise.… Read more

Qualcomm's Snapdragon S4 chip is racking up benchmark numbers that make the Samsung Galaxy S II's performance seem so last-year while turning Ice Cream Sandwich into a dreamy experience, said a chip review site.

"Occasionally we'll see performance numbers that just make us laugh at their absurdity," said Anandtech. "[Snapdragon S4's] Linpack performance is no exception. The performance advantage here is insane. The MSM8960 is able to deliver more than twice the performance of any currently shipping SoC (system-on-a-chip)."

And what about that Adreno graphics processing unit? "From a compute standpoint … Read more

Will Apple's next iPad reach performance nirvana with a monster quad-core chip? Nirvana, maybe, but not necessarily via quad-core.

But let's put aside whether Apple's latest chip will be quad-core for a minute and look at what others are doing. (See a post at The Verge on this topic too.)

One of the leading lights among ARM processor suppliers is Texas Instruments. They've made it clear that they're not going quad-core this year and not even next year (necessarily) with their first next-gen OMAP5 chips.

In a CES demo, TI showed off the next-gen OMAP5 … Read more

With patent lawsuits all the rage nowadays, one term is popping up more frequently: "frand."

Frand--also known as "rand" in the U.S.--is an obscure legal acronym that stands for "fair, reasonable, and nondiscriminatory," and is based on the principle that fair licensing of intellectual property is often needed because sometimes certain ideas and patents just need to be shared for everything to work together properly. It's a fairly simple idea, but one that's been rocking the tech industry in recent years.

Apple loves frand, as it's become one of … Read more