It’s also the second week of our new live Monday afternoon timeslot, so remember to adjust your schedules accordingly.

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Second-quarter sales of OLED displays rose 22 percent over the same period last year, and 32 percent over the first quarter of 2009, noted DisplaySearch’s latest “Quarterly OLED Shipment and Forecast Report,” which came out Monday.

The report said that shipments of AMOLED displays were especially strong thanks to their use in mobile phones, with more than 15 different AMOLED cell phone models released in 2009.

AMOLED (active-matrix organic light-emitting diode) screens use less energy than PMOLED (passive-matrix) displays, making them better-suited for portable devices such as phones and MP3 players.

“AMOLED displays have become an important differentiating feature for high-end electronic products,” said Jennifer Colegrove, DisplaySearch director of display technologies, in a statement. “This technology is not only used for mobile phone main displays, but has also penetrated the market for portable media players, digital still cameras, and other applications.”

(Credit: DisplaySearch)

Making OLED TVs has been a costly, time-consuming challenge for most manufacturers. Despite demonstrations of flashy new products from several companies, Sony remains the only firm with an OLED TV on the shelves.

LG Electronics is getting ready to launch a 15-inch OLED TV, says the report, but Sony is still trying to rev up its own 20-inch-plus model, originally announced in 2008 but not likely to appear in stores anytime soon.

As OLED technology improves, DisplaySearch believes that AMOLED displays will hit the PC market, appearing in notebooks and Netbooks sometime in 2010. OLED TVs 20 inches to 29 inches in size should reach consumers by the end of next year, while OLED TVs 30 inches and larger could be seen in late 2011.

DisplaySearch expects the total market for OLED displays to grow from $600 million in 2008 to $6.2 billion by 2016. Use in mobile phones will continue to lead the way, generating $3 billion in sales in 2016, while OLED TVs will surge as the second most popular use, capturing sales of $2 billion by that time.

(Credit: DisplaySearch)

http://news.cnet.com/8301-17938_105-10364297-1.html?part=rss&tag=feed&subj=Crave

Apple is working on a tablet computer, which will reportedly be announced sometime next year.

It’s been a long time coming: The company has supposedly been working on some sort of tablet since 2003, according to a report in today’s New York Times.

Why has it taken so long? Because Steve Jobs reportedly wanted to make sure it’s good for more than just surfing the Web on the can.

The NYT’s Brad Stone and Ashlee Vance: Another former Apple executive who was there at the time said the tablets kept getting shelved at Apple because Mr. Jobs, whose incisive critiques are often memorable, asked, in essence, what they were good for besides surfing the Web in the bathroom.

We’re assuming that the Apple tablet is basically a big version of the iPod touch, capable of playing movies and running apps from the iPhone App Store.

So the last 15 months have been great for Steve’s mandate: With the 85,000 apps on the App Store today, any tablet that can run them will be much more useful today than it would have even two years ago.

It’s also the second week of our new live Monday afternoon timeslot, so remember to adjust your schedules accordingly.

Related links:
>>It’s ‘PSP No’ for converting old UMD discs
>>Rumor alert: New MacBooks only weeks away
>>Wal-Mart sale: Pre for $79.99

>>Watch the Digital City live every Monday at 3pm EST on CNET Live!
>>Subscribe to Digital City on iTunes
>>Join the Digital City Facebook fan page
>>Need more? Follow Dan on Twitter!

Listen now: Download today’s podcast
Subscribe now: iTunes (audio) | iTunes (video) | RSS (audio) | RSS (video)

Second-quarter sales of OLED displays rose 22 percent over the same period last year, and 32 percent over the first quarter of 2009, noted DisplaySearch’s latest “Quarterly OLED Shipment and Forecast Report,” which came out Monday.

The report said that shipments of AMOLED displays were especially strong thanks to their use in mobile phones, with more than 15 different AMOLED cell phone models released in 2009.

AMOLED (active-matrix organic light-emitting diode) screens use less energy than PMOLED (passive-matrix) displays, making them better-suited for portable devices such as phones and MP3 players.

“AMOLED displays have become an important differentiating feature for high-end electronic products,” said Jennifer Colegrove, DisplaySearch director of display technologies, in a statement. “This technology is not only used for mobile phone main displays, but has also penetrated the market for portable media players, digital still cameras, and other applications.”

(Credit: DisplaySearch)

Making OLED TVs has been a costly, time-consuming challenge for most manufacturers. Despite demonstrations of flashy new products from several companies, Sony remains the only firm with an OLED TV on the shelves.

LG Electronics is getting ready to launch a 15-inch OLED TV, says the report, but Sony is still trying to rev up its own 20-inch-plus model, originally announced in 2008 but not likely to appear in stores anytime soon.

As OLED technology improves, DisplaySearch believes that AMOLED displays will hit the PC market, appearing in notebooks and Netbooks sometime in 2010. OLED TVs 20 inches to 29 inches in size should reach consumers by the end of next year, while OLED TVs 30 inches and larger could be seen in late 2011.

DisplaySearch expects the total market for OLED displays to grow from $600 million in 2008 to $6.2 billion by 2016. Use in mobile phones will continue to lead the way, generating $3 billion in sales in 2016, while OLED TVs will surge as the second most popular use, capturing sales of $2 billion by that time.

(Credit: DisplaySearch)

Picasa 3.5 has inherited the name tags feature found in Google’s online version of Picasa, Picasa Web Albums. Using facial recognition technology, the software will try to group similar faces in a set of photos. Though different people may end up in the same group if they resemble one another, name tags nonetheless provide a useful way to label large groups of photos quickly.

“When you first launch Picasa 3.5, it will start scanning the photos in your computer’s collection to create groups of similar faces,” explains Google engineer Todd Bogdan in a blog post. “It puts all these groups into the ‘Unnamed People’ album, from where you can easily add a name tag to a set of faces by clicking ‘Add a name’ and typing the person’s name.”

And when subsequent photos are added, Picasa will attempt to tag faces that it recognizes.

Picasa users who have signed in to their Google accounts gain the benefit of name tag auto-completion using Google Contacts data.

Picasa 3.5 can share name tag data with Picasa Web Albums, and vice versa. However, such sharing is optional as there may be privacy considerations involved.

The software has been integrated with Google Maps to simplify “geotagging,” the addition to a photo of metadata describing the location where the picture was taken. The Places panel in Picasa now allows users to drop a pin on a map to identify a photo’s geographic origin.

The new version of Picasa also features an improved upload process that allows for greater control over which photos get uploaded and shared during importation from a camera.

Although Google released Picasa 3.0 for Linux, a company spokesperson said that version 3.5 is only being released for Mac and Windows due to low adoption of Picasa 3.0 among Linux users.

Although Google has been a vigorous advocate of cloud computing, Picasa is one of several software products that the company distributes for installation on a local computer. Other such software includes Google Chrome, Google Desktop, Google Earth, Google SketchUp, Google Talk, and Google Toolbar, not to mention Web applications like Google Docs that have been retrofitted for offline use with the help of Gears local storage.

InformationWeek Analytics has published a report on the 10 steps to effective data classification. Download the report here (registration required).

The module, called the C 3607w, is about a third the size of Ericsson’s previous wireless products, and the company said it consumes about 40% less power. The low power architecture is achieved by decoupling the processor and connectivity design, and the module can achieve downlink speeds of up to 7.2 Mbps.

Ericsson said the module is flexible because it can be used in conjunction with ARM or Atom processors, as well as with multiple operating systems like Android, Windows, or multiple versions of Linux. The company has worked with multiple HSPA providers to ensure the module is pre-approved to run on multiple networks, and this could cut down on time to market. Ericsson said the C 3607w will be commercially available in the first quarter of 2010.

“Our vision is clear: all devices that can be connected will be connected as the technology required for an all-communicating world is now here,” said Mats Norin, VP at Ericsson, in a statement. “This module opens a new realm of possibilities and innovation for the consumer electronics industry as they can now easily and cost-effectively integrate the power and speed of mobile broadband in today’s and tomorrow’s devices.”

Consumers are already seeing mobile Internet connectivity become more prolific in devices like netbooks, and Sony recently introduced an e-reader that can use 3G data to browse, buy, and download content on the go. Ericsson’s module cannot access CDMA 3G networks though, which may hinder its adoption in the United States because this technology is used by Sprint Nextel and Verizon Wireless. HSPA is used by the majority of operators around the world, and Ericsson described it as the “main track of technology” for the mass market.

InformationWeek has published an in-depth report on Google’s upcoming Chrome OS. Download the report here (registration required).

For those of us who are usually running ragged during major tech events in order to cover breaking news, it’s delightfully different in that there’s no news going on here. (Well, unless you count the attempts to declare AppleScript dead.) Instead, the few brave media folks who dared to join the developers at C4 get to take the time to talk to them, break bread (okay, deep-dish pizza) with them, drink beer with them. It’s a great respite after the madness of Macworld Expo and Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference.

Among the highlights at this year’s conference, which wrapped up Sunday, were:

Briefs, a tool for letting designers rapidly put together tappable prototypes of iPhone apps with basically no code. I can’t wait to get this in the hands of our own designers.

Titanium, a framework for building apps using JavaScript and HTML. This was the most controversial talk of the conference, with many attendees grousing about the speaker’s focus on technologies that are not the core competency of Mac and iPhone programmers. But Rentzsch delights in seeding C4 with speakers who offer a different perspective and get the attendees to think in a different way, and the Titanium presentation certainly did that, though Rentzsch chastised attendees for the tone of the Twitter comments being made by attendees during the presentation.

The Cocotron, an attempt to port to Windows many of the core Cocoa frameworks that Mac and iPhone developers use to create their apps, thereby making it easier for Mac developers to make their apps run on both platforms.

MacRuby, a project which is attempting to make a modified version of the Ruby scripting language into a tool Mac programmers can use to build first-class apps as an alternative to the Objective C language that currently rules the roost.

Cocoa Boutique, a free project that lets developers embed online purchases right into their apps.

There were also provocative five-minute presentations on various topics, including the far-out (yet scarily realistic) investigation of what happens when cameras are so common and storage so cheap that we all just record our entire lives and index it for later access when we need to call up what someone actually said or did at any given moment. It would be easy to write off the talk as outlandish, but given the way technology is advancing, I think it’s not unrealistic at all.

Other speakers at C4 were the irascible John C. Welch, who writes for Macworld and various other publications, along with his own blog and podcast. Welch was the living embodiment of the angry IT guy who calls a software developer to complain about bugs, and while I thought his talk was really funny, if I were a software developer I’d be a little bit scared of him, too.

And finally, one of the speakers at C4 used a pie shake as a metaphor. I don’t think I’ve ever even heard of a pie shake before. Have you? Apparently you put a pie in a blender, pour it into a glass and add a straw, and blammo–pie shake. Seriously, why I have I not spent more time pondering this concept?

Which leads me to today’s Gem, Readability, which, unlike most Gems, isn’t a program you download to your Mac, but rather an online service. Call it–with apologies to ESPN–a Web Gem.

Readability, a project of the Arc90 Lab, is a bookmarklet-based browser tool that reformats a Web page and presents the page’s text content in a plain, easy-to-read format. Inspired by Instapaper, the save-it-for-later-reading Web service, Readability lets you make almost any page more readable with a single click–or even a keyboard shortcut.

To set up Readability, first you go to the Readability Web page and choose your settings–you get four choices each for layout style, font size, and margin width; a live preview shows each setting in action. (My personal choices are Novel style, Large text, and Medium margins.) Then you drag the Readability bookmark from the right-hand side of the Web page into the Bookmarks Bar in your Web browser. That’s all there is to it.

From that point on, whenever you’re viewing a page you want to make more readable, you simply click the Readability bookmarklet in your Bookmarks Bar; the page’s context is immediately transformed into clean, neatly formatted text. (If an article spans multiple pages, Readability will show only the content of the current page; to view the entire article, you should use the article’s “single-page” or “print” view, if available, and then use Readability.)

Want to get the original page back? Click your browser’s refresh button and the page is restored to its original appearance–you don’t have to use the Back button or worry about losing the URL. You can also print the “readable” version of the page, or e-mail the original URL, via toolbar buttons to the left.

If you’re using Safari, you can access Readability via a keyboard shortcut, as Safari automatically assigns a shortcut to each Bookmarks-Bar item–the left-most item is Command+1, the next is Command+2, and so on. I’ve made my Readability bookmarklet the left-most item; whenever I come across a difficult-to-read Web page, I just press Command+1 to make the page readable. (You can assign keyboard shortcuts to bookmarks in other browsers–for example, here’s how in Firefox–but it’s not as simple a process.)

The developers of Readability don’t list browser compatibility, noting only that it works with “most major modern browsers.” In my testing, it works well with the current versions of Safari and Firefox, though it does have a few limitations. First, it occasionally incorrectly identifies bits of article text as non-article content, leading that content to be omitted from the reformatted page; it also sometimes removes images that are part of the article. Second, when multiple blog entries are open in my browser from a single site, invoking Readability occasionally loads the text of an article in a different tab. Finally, some sites, because of the way they’re coded, just don’t work well with Readability.

The good news is that Readability is so quick and easy to use, and so often effective, that in the cases where it doesn’t work properly, a simple Refresh command brings back the original page. I find myself using Readability many times each day to make my Web reading more enjoyable.

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Panasonic shows prototype 3D plasma TV

E-readers could push growth in e-textbook market, analysts say

Review: Logitech Speaker System Z520

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Does Microsoft really think it can outdo Apple and its fleet of iPods with the Zune HD? Get serious. Even with a flaky refresh of the iPod touch last week, the Zune HD still doesn’t stack up that well against Apple’s popular army of music-playing devices.

Microsoft’s Zune HD comes in today at a lower price point than Apple’s iPod touch, but that’s not enough to kill Apple’s domination once and for all. A Zune HD 16GB will cost $219, while the 32GB version comes in at $289. That’s $10 cheaper than a refreshed 32GB iPod touch, which now costs $299.

But will $10 be enough to convince you to chose a Zune HD over an iPod touch? Hardware-wise, there are not many differences between the two players, but I have to give to the Zune HD for the built-in HD radio receiver and the HD video compatibility, though only via the dock which is sold separately.

Although it might have the hardware edge over the iPod touch, with the features mentioned and the crisp OLED display, Microsoft just committed a grave error with the Zune HD: there won’t be a full-fledged app store for the Zune HD on launch—or any time soon, either. Games on the Zune HD will crop up soon, but don’t count on that until the end of the year.

There are more than 75,000 applications in Apple’s App Store at the moment; meanwhile, there are no apps for the Zune HD except the built-in browser. Microsoft is not even shipping the Zune HD with Facebook and Twitter clients. The Redmond giant says it will build apps for the mentioned social networks by the end of the year.

A gap in Microsoft’s Zune HD line is cropping up as well, when compared to Apple’s line-up. While Apple got rid of the 16GB iPod touch last week, the company also lowered the entry price point: savvy shoppers get to choose between the cheapest iPod touch (8GB), now $199, or the lowest-priced Zune HD (16GB), now $219.

Microsoft got rid of the previous Zune models, so there won’t be any smaller capacity Zune players to compete with the upgraded iPod nano, which now features a video camera and an FM tuner. Coming in at $149 for the 8GB model and $179 for 16GB, the iPod nano could tap into Zune HD sales as well, for those looking for an extra kick for a lesser price from their MP3 player.