With Apple TV not really selling well and now facing new competition from Google TV (which, incidentally, Sony is one of the loudest supported of, and has released the first HDTV with Google TV built-in), buying Sony would give the company an instant leg-up in the home entertainment market.

It would also mean Apple could integrate the iPhone with the PSP (something that Sony Ericsson are rumoured to be doing with their next Android phone) and turn Sony’s entire Hi-Fi line directly towards the iPod and iTunes.

Although Apple have obviously denied any of this, the rumours have sent Sony’s shares up by 3%. Apple are sitting on a $51 billion pile of cash, and Steve Jobs has been quoted as saying “…we do feel that there are one or more strategic opportunities in the future,” with Sony, Adobe and Disney all being identified as potential targets.

Of the three, Sony makes the most sense. There can be no love lost between Apple and Adobe, with Jobs laying into Adobe’s Flash and refusing to support it on either the iPhone or the iPad, and no real need for the company to buy it. Disney would move Apple into a distinctly different market, although with Pixar under the Disney banner, there’s an obvious affinity and history there. But it’s with Sony that any deal makes the most sense, simply because its brand, its range of home entertainment gadgets, and the brains of its staff, would all perfectly align with Apple.

[Source: Reuters]

“It’s a foregone conclusion that the personal computer of the future is this size,” said Huang, holding up his smartphone. “You could add wireless HDMI to it someday, and it could also be your set-top box.”

That day may not be too far away. With DLNA-equipped smartphones already able to control DLNA-equipped HDTVs, and with 4G technology maturing nicely, 1080o HD video streams will soon be able to be streamed directly onto your smartphone in a couple of years’ time.

All you’ll need then is for the phone to route the stream through to your TV, and you have the vision that Huang predicts.

Nvidia’s vision for the future

That wasn’t all Huang foresaw at his company’s annual conference, though. Recognizing the impact of the smartphone, he tipped ARM (the company ultimately responsible for nearly all the chips in current smartphones) to replace Intel as the “…most important CPU architecture of the future…”

I don’t think this is idle speculation, either, even though Nvidia in currently in a patent dispute with Intel. Think of all the different media devices we blog about here on MediaMentalism, and nearly all of them are getting mobile. Indeed, if you look at Samsung’s latest cameras, with their touchscreens, GPS and WiFi, and it’s hard to tell them apart from of their mobile phones!

As these gadgets adopt more and more of the same features and components as mobile phones, they’ll soon start using beefy CPUs – and most mobile CPUs use ARM’s architecture, not Intel’s.

So an increasingly mobile phones, driven ultimately by ARM not Intel. The world’s changing as ever, but the scale of this change could be huge!

[Source: EETimes]

This is awful news. I know the world-wide recession is hitting companies hard, but for Pioneer to pull out of the Plasma TV business, things must be bad.

Pioneer had been losing money with its Plasma TVs for some years, and so decided to outsource the business to Panasonic. However, Panasonic have themselves been having trouble lately, and so announced a six-month delaying the opening of a new plasma TV factory. This in turn reduced Panasonic’s plasma output, meaning it only had the capacity to produce Plasmas for itself or Pioneer – not both.

Obviously, Pioneer’s plasmas would be the ones to lose out, and so the company was left with the choice of pulling out now, or stopping production until Panasonic’s new factory opened up in 2010. The latter option was a non-starter,though, and so Pioneer have bit the bullet, and pulled out of the plasma TV business altogether.

It should be noted that Pioneer themselves have yet to confirm this, and have said only that:

“As a matter of policy, we cannot comment on rumors or speculation. As you know, we have publicly announced that we are actively evaluating our business. We started announcing changes in March, 2008 to increase efficiencies of our business operations. We are still in that process but do not have any further announcements at this time.”

All indications point to the ending of the plasma business, though, which is sad news indeed, as Pioneer make superb TVs.

The news also took the salesmen at John Lewis by surprise. My friend’s looking for a plasma TV, and a salesman overheard me telling him about Pioneer’s decision to pull out of the plasma TV business. “They can’t pull out,” he spluttered. “They signed a contract with Panasonic.”

Well, they might have, but faced with a six month gap where you can sell no TVs at all as there’s no factory to build them, what do you do?! He remained unconvinced. I should have told him to read tech blogs more if he wanted to stay more up to date, but he seemed even more upset about the news than I was, so I just left, feeling very unsettled about the state of the entire consumer electronics sector!

With Sony, NEC, Hitachi and dozens of other blue-chip consumer electronics companies shedding jobs in their tens of thousands, plus electronics distributors such as Empire Direct going to the wall, this is going to be a rough year for gadget manufacturers.

[Source: HDGuru, via Gizmodo]

Instead, you play a flat rate subscription that gives you unlimited downloads for a year, after which you get to keep the tracks you’ve downloaded, but not download any new tracks unless you take out another subscription.

Seems like a reasonably deal. Unfortunately, as with all things digital music, there’s catch – the tunes you download contain DRM that locks them into the mobile phone or PC you register with the service. In other words, you can keep your tunes for as long as you like, but you can’t transfer them to other devices.

Until now…!

Yes, after just a few months of the service going live, a new application has emerged called TuneBite that extracts all of the DRM from any tunes you’ve downloaded from Nokia’s stores. It works in a similar way to ye olde tape recording of the last century, in which you used something called cassette tapes to record the tunes you or your friends had on vinyl.

TuneBite plays the tune silently in the background (at speeds up to 54x the original) on your PC and re-records the resultant signal to any format you need – without DRM.

So, combining TuneBite with Nokia’s Comes With Music lets you download any tune you want – legally – for a year, and the you can use TuneBite to strip it of its DRM – legally! You’re then free to keep the resultant track forever, and transfer it to any other device you want to listen to it on – legally!

Very nice. The only thing you can’t do, of course, is upload it to a file sharing app, but that goes without saying.

The sooner DRM dies the better, and TuneBite is just one more nail in its coffin!

[Source: TechDigest]

I’m a big fan of ex-Blue Peter presenter Konnie Huq, and I’m also quite fond of Blu Ray, too. Luckily for me, someone at CNet obviously shares my interests, as they’ve just released a video of Konnie explaining the delights of Blu-Ray to a sceptical audience.

According to Konnie, all you need to get your Blu-Ray discs running on your TV is some sticky-backed plastic and single-sided tape (neither of which I was ever able to find as a kid, but that’s another story!)

Now if only I could find a way of getting a Blu-Ray player and Konnie in my stocking this Christmas…!

[Source: Crave]

Intel are looking into all manner of different ways of harnessing the energy from the environment. Body heat, the movement of a phone’s trackball, power from a mobile phone basestation, and the sun, are all areas of interest by the company in its quest to completely unshackle the world of gadgets from their dependence on bulky, expensive and annoying batteries.

Solar-powered PMP player anyone?

Which, incidentally, leads me briefly to another story: the Shiro SQ-S Personal Media Player (above), which is entirely solar powered. Apparently it takes six hours to completely charged, but if you don’t have that long, you can always recharge it via a USB port.

Seems that batteries may very soon go the way of the external mobile phone antenna (remember those?!), and good riddance too!

[Source: SlashGear, MobileTopSoft]

With gadgets such as a USB Podcast kit, a Freeview DVD tablet, travel speakers for your iPod, a USB speaker hub, waterproof iPod Nano speakers, and loads more gadgets, all on offer at silly prices, you’d be mad not to take advantage of their amazing pre-Christmas Christmas sale!

Better get a move on, though, the offers are only available until 28th October.

CNet’s Nate Lanxon thinks the move is a good idea. “Apple has really gone to town with the iTunes Store, ” he said. “…Why would it sit back while movie fans go out and buy some generic HDTV to connect up to their PC to watch this content?”

The move into the TV market would see Apple further completing its transition into a home entertainment manufacturer, after the success of the iPod and iPhone have effectively turned the computer company into the world’s most-loved gadget manufacturer.

With the success of the iPhone, Apple must have looked around to see what other gadget it could produce, with TVs being the next logical step, given the video content that’s distributable on iTunes.

Indeed, iTunes has become possibly the most valuable asset Apple has, as all of its recent releases hang off it, with music, videos and more recently, iPhone apps all being sold through the store and helping to drive sales of its gadgets.

iTunes, then, in combination with the adoration of millions of Apple fanboys, are what Apple is banking on to give them the competitive edge over the likes of Sony in the notoriously cut-throat world of consumer TVs.

They might just succeed, too. As a blogger of all things home entertainmenty, the one thing I’ve noticed about HDTVs is how commoditized the market is. There isn’t a single iconic HDTV that anyone can actually name. They all have product names that are just seemingly randomly arranged sequences of letters and numbers. If Apple were to burst onto the scene with an instantly recognizable brand name the same way it did with the mobile phone market, the TV manufacturers might have a huge struggle on their hands to compete.

[Source: ElectricPig]

There is, however, one small problem. TVs are generally situated in a lounge, which might get a fair amount of sun, but enough to power an entire HDTV day and night?

Maybe I’m being, like the British weather, unnecessarily gloomy here. It’s not October, we haven’t seen sun in any meaningful measure since June, and won’t see it again until next May. Solar-powered anythings aren’t exactly workable solutions in the UK, and a solar powered HDTV is no exception!

Still, if you’ve been bitten by the green bug and feel the need to assuage your carbon guilt by throwing vast chunks of money at slightly ridiculous “solutions” – and you happen to live in California or some other over-sunny place – then maybe the Sharp solar-powered HDTVs are for you!

[Source: Aving.net]