Giving Electronic Commands With Body Language

LAS VEGAS — The technology industry is going retro — moving away from remote controls, mice and joysticks to something that arrives without batteries, wires or a user manual.
It’s called a hand.
In the coming months, the likes of Microsoft, Hitachi and major PC makers will begin selling devices that will allow people to flip channels on the TV or move documents on a computer monitor with simple hand gestures. The technology, one of the most significant changes to human-device interfaces since the mouse appeared next to computers in the early 1980s, was being shown in private sessions during the immense Consumer Electronics Show here last week. Past attempts at similar technology have proved clunky and disappointing. In contrast, the latest crop of gesture-powered devices arrives with a refreshing surprise: they actually work.

CES: Nokia talks up business in the developing world

LAS VEGAS--Nokia President and CEO Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo is just taking the keynote stage at CES Friday to discuss the company's strategy for reaching the world's developing markets with its products.

Update at 9:15 a.m. PST: Nokia is the world's leader in cell phones. And while the company has struggled over the past year to hold its dominance in the high-end market, it clearly dominates the emerging market with low-cost phones tailored to the millions of customers who live on less than $1 a day.

Kallasvuo started by showing off the company's first-ever cell phone, the Mobira Cityman. The big brick phone went on sale in 1987. He compared that device to a tiny phone that is being sold today to the developing world.

This new phone sends text messages, makes phone calls, and has an appointment calendar. But it also has a flashlight, a long-life battery, and FM radio. From farmers in India to fisherman in Indonesia, Kallasvuo said cell phones have quickly become a necessity. These devices are sold for about $32, a 300 percent drop in price in the past five years.

New chips from Intel highlight its lead over AMD

SAN FRANCISCO – Intel Corp. is rolling out new computer chips Thursday that highlight the company's lead over Advanced Micro Devices Inc. in shrinking the circuitry inside its processors.

Condensing the tiny parts of a chip is critical for adding features and reducing costs. Consumers see the difference in better performance and lower computer prices.

Intel's new Core chips, being unveiled at the International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, feature parts whose average width is 32 nanometers, or 32 billionths of a meter. Other upgrades include features to save energy and help speed graphics processing.

AMD's 32-nanometer chips won't appear in personal computers until 2011. It has argued that circuitry size isn't as important as performance and graphics.

Google's mobile hopes go beyond Nexus One

One could be forgiven for assuming Google was about to knock over the smartphone market--two and a half years after Apple did just that--with one quick blow going into Tuesday's Android event with a phone designed by Google and sold at retail by Google. After all, that's what the Internet said would happen leading up to the event.

But what actually emerged from Building 43 on Tuesday is just another Android phone: a nice one, to be sure, but one featuring hardware designed completely by smartphone maker HTC and software features that will soon be available to other Android phones with advanced hardware, like the Droid. The real story is perhaps less sexy than a sleek iPhone killer that so many techies would love to see compete with Apple, but it's a sign that Google CEO Eric Schmidt has learned his lessons about competition over a lifetime in the tech industry.

What Google is trying to do is gradually reel in Apple over a period of years by emphasizing open phones with open application stores sold through a variety of channels running an open-source operating system. And, for good measure, it's also trying to do nothing less than reinvent the way mobile phones are sold in the U.S.

Take The Poll: When Do You Change Your Email Password?

Unlike big Corporations that you may work for, having a strict policy for changing your own GMail, Yahoo Mail, AOL, Windows Live Hotmail or any other email password probably does not exist.

If you are like many users who use Internet based email, most likely you have not changed your password recently, or for that matter, still have the same password since the day you first created the email account.

If you never experienced having your email account hacked, consider yourself lucky. Believe me, you don't want to experience it. Worse, having a false sense of security in thinking that no one will ever find out your email account password is just ridiculous thinking.