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HTC’s laying its cards down with a phone called “Smart” for Europe and Asia, which runs on Qualcomm’s BREW platform. As BREW is cheap for the manufacturer, I’m willing to bet the Smart will be cheap for the consumer too.

Running on BREW, it’s actually been painted with HTC’s Sense interface which as you know, was last seen on the HD2. Processor speed is just 300MHz—pretty slow—and RAM is a fairly average 256MB. Internal memory is 256MB, but that’s expandable by microSD. The touchscreen QVGA is 2.8-inches, and connectivity is HSDPA internet, and Bluetooth, with no GPS or Wi-Fi mentioned. The camera is 3.0-megapixel with flash. So yes, it’s a budgetphone, but at least it’ll be cheap, right? [HTC]

Google offers what it says will be a final carrot to shareholders at On2, a video compression company it wants to buy: It’s adding $26.5 million to its original offer of $106.5 million for the company.

That’s a 20 percent premium over the price Google (GOOG) originally announced it was paying for On2 in August, and Google says that’s the best it can do. Each On2 shareholder will get $0.15 in cash for each one of their shares, in addition to the $0.60 worth of Google Class A offered in the original deal.

Will that appease On2’s dissident investors, who think the company should be worth closer to $6 a share? We’ll know by February 17, when they put the deal to a vote.

Google, of course, could easily pay much more to get the angry On2 contingent to shut up. And at this point you have to wonder if the headaches associated with the deal are worth it — Google, remember, is worth $192 billion.

But Google is in the midst of a lengthy shopping spree. And it certainly doesn’t want to revisit the price of each purchase it makes. Presumably that’s why it’s playing hardball, or close to it, on this one.

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The content industry is fighting tooth and nail to protect its precious revenue stream while doing everything it can to stop anyone coming up with newer models. Netflix, one of the big exponents of a new way of getting content to people, has agreed to delay rentals of Warner Brothers new releases 28 days to help the studio “maximize the sales potential of those titles,” which translates into ‘squeeze every penny from movie fans’ by, essentially, creating artificial barriers.

Netflix doesn’t walk empty handed out of the deal, but it still doesn’t look like it had too much choice in the matter. The DVD mail rental service gets cheaper prices after the waiting period and it also gets more titles for its online streaming service. No financial details have been revealed and it’s not clear how substantial the said savings will be for Netflix.

“We’ve been discussing new approaches with Warner Bros. for some time now and believe we’ve come up with a creative solution that is a ‘win-win’ all around,” said Ted Sarandos, chief content officer for Netflix.

“We’re able to help an important business partner meet its objectives while improving service levels for our members by acquiring substantially more units than in the past after a relat… (read more)

Motorola’s (MOT) added another SUPERPHONE to its Android portfolio, the Backflip. Unveiled at a press event at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, the device is similar to Verizon’s Droid in that it features both a touch-screen and keypad, but with one interesting twist: a reverse QWERTY flip keypad that folds out from behind the display. Most people are used to a forward flipping keyboard or an upward slider,” Motorola’s Paul Nicholson explained. “The Backflip’s keyboard opens up in the reverse direction.”

Otherwise, the BackFlip is similar to its predecessors. It’s got a 3.1-inch display with a 480×320 resolution (HVGA) touchscreen, a 528MHz Qualcomm processor, 32 GB of expandable memory, and a 5-megapixel camera with autofocus and an LED flash. It runs Android 1.5 and, like the Cliq before it, offers Motorola’s customized MOTOBLUR social networking service. Overall, a slick little device, though far more evolutionary than revolutionary.

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Taking advantage of the unveiling of a new three-axle travel coach during the New Delhi Auto Show, German manufacturer Daimler announced it will focus more on its bus business in India in the years to come, as its partnership with Sutlej Motors strengthens.

India is a very important future market for us, Hartmut Schick, Head of Daimler Buses said in a release. "Cooperation with Sutlej is an important component of our growth strategy."

"From the very… (read more)

Back in 2005, NASA’s Deep Impact probe slammed a hunk of copper into the comet Tempel 1 to determine what was under its surface, as well as to see what happens in a hypervelocity collision.

The copper block vaporized in the high-energy impact, but the spacecraft lived on. It’s now on an extended mission called EPOXI, and one part of that is EPOCh: Extrasolar Planet Observations and Characterization, designed to look back at the Earth and see what a habitable and inhabited planet looks like from a distance. The idea is to see what we can observe about our own world that can be used to look at worlds orbiting other stars.

One hope was that the spacecraft would see sun glints; flashes of light from standing water on Earth (much like Cassini did with Titan). And see them it did! Check out the video below. It’s short, so you can watch it a few times; there are several glints, and I labeled the region of Earth where they occur.

That video was put together by Don Lindler (my old boss back in the STIS/Hubble days) using images from Deep Impact. It shows a full rotation of the Earth as seen above the north pole, taken when Deep Impact was still 18 million kilometers (11 million miles) from home (that’s 75 times the distance to the Moon!). Another video, from a different part of Deep Impact’s travels, shows the view as seen from the south. Due to the geometry of the Sun, Earth, and spacecraft, the glints all appear on the same place on the Earth’s face, though the location on the Earth’s surface changes as it rotates.

These images were taken in the infrared, where the contrast between land and water is highest. There may come a day when our spacecraft observe other planets orbiting other stars, and glints like these may be the tell-tale signs of liquid on their surface. In those cases, the planet may not be more than an unresolved dot, but the sudden increase in brightness may be the giveaway we’re looking for.

There’s been speculation lately that some extrasolar planets may be water worlds. We can’t know for sure just yet, but EPOXI may be showing us one way we might be able to find out.

Related post: HOLY FRAK! Moon transits Earth!

During a protest action Wednesday, a Japanese ship crashed into the high-tech speedboat Ady Gil, critically damaging it. Both crews blame the other side for the collision, 3News reports. The crash is thought to have taken place either in or near Australian waters.

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• Pirates Seize Ship Carrying 2,300 Hyundai’s
• Oil Tanker Lays The Smack Down On Somali Pirates
• Will Piracy Fears Lead To An Offshore Oil Worker Shortage?

HTC has proven its desire to be a multi-platform phone maker, and it’s announced a new phone that brings the Sense interface to the Qualcomm Brew Mobile Platform. Brew is the platform used on millions of feature phones, and integrating it with the HTC Sense interface further blurs the distinction between feature phone and smartphone.

The HTC Smart is a touch phone that looks like many HTC devices on the market. It uses touch widgets to customize the user experience. I guess you could say that the Smart brings the Brew platform into the smartphone age. Brew makes it possible to produce cheap feature phones due to the low cost of the platform, and this brings Sense technology to a much cheaper class of products.

Further details about the Smart will be forthcoming during the CES.

Filed under: Hybrid, Performance, Porsche, Electric

Go to any major city worldwide and you’re likely to see a Porsche 911 roll by. It’s far more common than seeing one making the cornstalks blur in the middle of farm country, anyway. Porsche CEO Michael Macht disagrees that his sports cars frequent metro areas. “They’re not driven in the city,” Macht told the UK’s Autocar when discussing hybrid 987s and 997s. Of course, city driving is where hybrid powertrains rack up fuel economy credits, which Macht acknowledges before dismissing by saying, “It’s technically possible but it’s not part of the plan.”

Despite the verbot on hybrid 911s, Boxsters and Caymans, technology will be thrown at the sports cars to improve efficiency. “We want brake regeneration and stop-start for our sports cars, but not hybrid,” explains Macht. Just because there’s no hybrids other than the Cayenne doesn’t mean Porsche isn’t playing with electrons. “There are some efforts to make a pure electric supercar,” Macht notes, though such a vehicle would have to be capable of running as hard for as long as the petro-fueled Porsche cars – no 30-mile ranges here.

[Source: Autocar]

Porsche CEO reportedly says ‘no hybrid sports cars’ originally appeared on Autoblog on Thu, 07 Jan 2010 09:31:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Paul O’Brien (Founder of MoDaCo) announced today a new and exiting way to get the MoDaCo Custom ROM. The Hero Kitchen will let you select what you want or not want in your ROM. For example, if you don’t use HTC Footprints, why letting it use space in your memory. In the past, it was possible to remove elements from your ROM, but was through access via command line to your device, operation that could seen as a daunting task for some users.

For now, it would be only for GSM HTC Hero but soon will be available to all the modified ROMs Paul has (or will have) made available to us.

However, there are two conditions require to be able to access this ROM Kitchen. You will need to be a Paid Member of MoDaCo (starting from a bargain price of £9.90 for a year) and have a rooted device.

I have been using Paul’s ROM on my HTC Hero for a while now and I can confirm that the update process is getting easier with added features (like WaveSecure in ROM) and visible performance improvements.

Survival improves but prognostication tool sorely outdated

Setting out to determine the survival of patients with pulmonary arterial hypertension (PAH), researchers at the University of Chicago Medical Center and their colleagues also discovered that an equation used for more than 20 years to predict survival is outdated.

Accordingly, they developed and recently published a new survival prediction equation that will impact clinical practice and the drug development process.

In PAH, the pulmonary arteries, which carry blood from the heart to the lungs to pick up oxygen, become restricted, forcing the lower right chamber of the heart to pump harder.

This leads to shortness of breath, limited exercise capacity, fatigue, heart failure and death.

Often the condition goes undetected until it is advanced. Untreated, patients with PAH have a very poor prognosis.

That prognosis is determined using an equation developed by a landmark National Institutes of Health study published in 1987, well before there were any Food and Drug Administration approved therapies for PAH.

The first such therapy was approved in 1995; today there are seven.

“Since 1987, great progress has been made in understanding and treating PAH, so a few years ago we decided that it was time to study contemporary survival,” said Mardi Gomberg-Maitland, MD, MSc, Associate Professor of Medicine and Director of Pulmonary Hypertension at the University of Chicago Medical Center.

“Our results show that survival is vastly improved today. That led us to rework the NIH equation, which has been a standard measuring stick for more than 22 years.”

Gomberg and her colleagues at the Medical Center and Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine studied the survival of 576 PAH patients in their registry.

Of these patients, 282 had idiopathic, familial, and anorexigen-associated PAH, which matches the conditions of the 187 patients in the pioneering NIH study.

Using the NIH equation, these 282 patients would have been expected to have one-, three- and five-year survival rates of 65 percent, 43 percent and 32 percent, respectively. In fact, their survival rates were much higher: 92 percent, 75 percent and 66 percent, respectively.

“This new formula is important for patients who want to know what, on average, to expect from their disease and for doctors who want to give accurate advice,” said Stephen L. Archer, MD, Harold Hines Jr. Professor and Chief of Cardiology at the University of Chicago Medical Center and co-author of the study.

“We hope others will test our work. If it is validated by others it could be a very useful tool.”

Patients survive longer

The researchers were not able to determine why PAH patients survive longer today than in the 1980s, even though they measured the survival impact of many factors, including pulmonary function, demographics, medications, exercise treadmill, laboratory markers, echocardiography, and hemodynamics as well as the cause of the disease, which includes heart and lung disease, genetics, blood clots, connective tissue disease and other conditions.

None of these factors or causes had a significant impact on survival in multivariate analysis (when tested together statistically) — except hemodynamics. This explains why the new equation only incorporates hemodynamic parameters.

“Based on this result, physicians should stop drifting away from cardiac catheterization, which is the gold standard test to determine exact hemodynamics,” Gomberg said.

“Providers have been using more echocardiography and less cardiac catheterization but we need to reverse that trend because until you know the hemodynamics you can’t accurately predict survival and or cure the disease.

“You can estimate hemodynamics with echocardiography but not accurately enough,” she added.

Many clinical trials in PAH used the NIH equation to suggest improvement in survival by comparing observed survival rates on a study drug versus survival rates predicted by the NIH equation, the study says.

Since the NIH equation understates contemporary survival, it has led to more favorable comparisons of clinical trials testing new drugs to treat PAH, according to Gomberg.

“Our research suggests a reason that the drugs currently approved to treat PAH do not always work as well as we hope — because they were not held to a higher contemporary standard during their development and post-approval,” Gomberg said.

“The new equation should ameliorate this bias.

“Although some of these drugs dramatically improve the condition of some patients, none of them improves hemodynamics to normal levels,” she added.

“Therefore, we, as a medical community, have to acknowledge the fact that we have not yet cured PAH.”

“This research would not have been possible without the collaboration of the entire PAH team at the University of Chicago and the tireless efforts of two young physician scientists, Thenappan Thenappan, MD, Cardiology fellow at The University of Chicago, and Sanjiv Shah, MD, a former Cardiology fellow at The University of Chicago and current faculty member at Northwestern,” Archer said.

Both are co-authors of the study, along with Gomberg, Archer, Stuart Rich, MD (Cardiology at The University of Chicago), and Lu Tian, ScD, (Preventive Medicine at Northwestern University).

The research team hopes that this report will motivate development of novel agents and epidemiologic research.

Called “Contemporary Survival in Patients with Pulmonary Arterial Hypertension:

A Reappraisal of the National Institutes of Health Risk Stratification Equation,” the study was published on line December 23, 2009, by the European Respiratory Journal.

One of the cooler software announcements to already come out of CES 2010 is from Chevy and OnStar regarding the upcoming 2011 Chevy Volt, their all electric vehicle.  The new Android-based application gives Volt owners added control over their vehicles with options like monitoring charging status, unlocking doors, and more.   There have been rumors for some time that these types of applications would be coming but now those rumors have been confirmed with their unveiling at CES 2010. 

Aside from Android, the app is being released for the Blackberry and iPhone platforms.  With the app, an Android user will be able to monitor the car’s charging status, delay said status until electric rates lower, and even be able to unlock the doors, beep the horn and start the vehicle up.  Users will also be able to access driving stats on their handsets as well.

Notice that we mentioned that OnStar was part of this deal?  Well, that would probably lead you to assume that you must be an OnStar member to use this app, and you would be correct.  So there is certainly a thought process there if you want that membership.  Most dealerships give new car buyers a trial membership which of course pushes over to a full membership after the trial expires.

Still, pretty cool tech, I can see myself converting the vehicle to look like the batmobile and doing sweet things with my Android handset.  How long until we can drive our cars through our Android powered phones?

It looks as if the fate of Saab may soon be complete; barring an agreement between GM and Spyker, or an out-of-the-dark bidder in the next few days. Unlike other GM brands that have gone by the wayside, Saab’s potential demise brought out of the woodwork approximately 30 enthusiasts who braved snow flurries and the bitter cold outside of GM’s global headquarters.

The crowd event was organized by Ryan Emge, editor of Saab.History.com and included almost 30 Saab vehicles congregated near the GM headquarters.

“This is a nice, pleasant gathering,” said the 30-year-old Emge who came from Portland, Maine. “We’re here to gather and show our Saab spirit.”

We should hear something on the issue of Saab later today.

– By: Stephen Calogera

Source: AutoWeek
Photo Credit: Saab History

Dynasty Warriors: Strikeforce is on its way to the consoles and it’s not coming around without a bang. Apart from the Koei Tecmo character crossovers (qjnet/playstation-3/koei-tecmo-crossover-revealed-ninja-gaiden-meets-dynasty-warriors.html) for the PS3 and Xbox 360 versions, new console-exclusive features will