Samsung may begin producing flexible AMOLED displays this quarter

According to The Verge, Korean news site DDaily says Samsung is set to begin manufacturing its long-rumored "Youm" displays -- a new type of ultra-thin AMOLED panel which is bendable, stretchable, rollable and possibly even foldable. This jibes with rumors we heard in 2011 that Samsung may have been planning to mass produce these very interesting displays in Q2 2012. 

Before anyone gets too excited though, Samsung is curiously expected to ship these flexible displays affixed to a rigid sheet of "protective" glass, initially. Clearly, this dampens some of the excitement surrounding the rumor. However, DDaily's sources claim Samsung has an internal goal of mass-producing fully flexible screens by 2014. 

This is purely speculation, but one reason for the delay may be a lack of devices which could properly house a flexible display. By manufacturing these screens now, Samsung gains experience mass producing them for traditional, rigid devices (phones, tablets and so on). When OEMs begin contemplating flexible gadgets though, Samsung will be ready to supply.

Although the upcoming Youm displays aren't expected to be flexible at first, what they will be is thin -- really thin. Even while married to a glass panel, the displays should measure 1mm in thickness. Without the glass layer, the screens boast a thickness of just 0.6mm. It is possible that this glass could be substituted with a material like Willow Glass or plastic in the future though, freeing the panel from its inflexible constraints.

For anyone surprised to learn of the existence of bendable displays, this sci-fi-sounding screen technology may have a peculiar odor of vaporware about it. In an effort to quash such disbelief though, I'll point out that Samsung has demonstrated this technology in the past. Ostensibly,other companies have been making progress on flexible displays too, including LG and HP, although we've yet to see one made commercially available.

BitTorrent Torque web app turn browser into a file-sharing hub

The company behind the popular torrent downloading software uTorrent has announced a new project called BitTorrent Torque, an alpha release set of tools that can be run from HTML5-compliant web browsers like Google Chrome, turning them into a fully-fledged file-sharing hub.

Lead developer Patrick Williams explains in the blog announcement that Torque works by providing a JavaScript hook to a custom BitTorrent backend. "Torque is a JavaScript interface to a custom torrent client that exposes all the power of BitTorrent to web developers.  Simply put, it allows anyone to utilize our powerful technology to create completely fresh and new experiences for users with just a couple lines of code."

There are currently two extensions available, the first (pictured below) is Paddle Over, which integrates drag and drop file transfers via social networking and sharing as well as other computers. The second extension is OneClick, which is currently available for Google Chrome and is used to convert a typical torrent download into a simple to manage standard in-browser download.

Future Torque extensions will further demonstrate the potential capabilities of its APIs and will eventually provide video streaming, file transcoding and antivirus scanning, among other functions. Right now bugs are expected as it's currently an alpha build, but as time passes its creators hope to increase functionality.

"Torque is both an underlying, fully fledged torrent client, as well as a simple JavaScript interface designed to make the technology as accessible as possible," Williams told TorrentFreak. "Our hope is that the development and use of torrent technologies can scale the same way that a torrent swarm does, and this is our initial effort towards that goal."

The software is still in its infancy, but with web apps gaining more functionality due to CSS3, HTML5 and JavaScript maturing it has resulted in developers being able to create web apps that run across multiple OS ecosystems, saving them resources, time and money.

Micron to buy Elpida, DRAM market left with 3 competitors

Bloomberg brings news from Japan that U.S-based chipmakerMicron Technology will purchase Japanese rival Elpida. This falls in line with a statement made last month by CEO Mark Durcan that Micron would make the purchase, but only if it could avoid stock dilution and the acquisition of too much interest-bearing debt.

Micron is the last major U.S-based maker of memory chips, well known for its brand of Crucial memory and its solid entries into the SSD space. Elpida is a major supplier or memory chips for Apple.

Elpida filed for bankruptcy in February due a perfect storm of falling DRAM prices and Japan's increasingly strong currency, a combination which makes it difficult to export goods which are both profitable and competitively priced.

Micron is said to be paying about 140 billion yen -- or about 1.76 billion dollars -- just to shed a portion of Elpida's debt. The report also claims that Micron will also be investing about 100 billion yen in Elpida's facilities, a shot in the arm which should bolster its ability to crank out DRAM chips.

Micron's absorption of Elpida will leave the global DRAM market with only three competitors: Samsung, Hynix and Micron. Currently, Samsung owns about 41 percent of the market while Hynix comes in a distant second at 24 percent. Both Micron and Elpida weigh in around 12 percent each, meaning their combined total will essentially tie them with Hynix in terms of market volume.

Samsung shows transparent flexible tablet in concept video

Samsung has released a concept video showing what the future of mobile phones and tablets could look like. The clip opens with a ringing phone which is then rolled out and turned into a video conferencing tablet as others look on in amazement.

The remainder of the half minute clip shows potential uses for such a device in multiple scenarios using augmented reality. One scene shows the user snapping a photo of text on a restaurant menu which then shows a 3D image of the dish. Another scene demos a translator app where both participants can speak into the tablet on opposite sides of the transparent screen. The tablet correctly translates and displays the conversation in each user's native language.

The technology in the clip is still several years away but it’s interesting to see how tech companies envision the future. Some aspects, like augmented reality, have been around for several years but have yet to make a huge impact on mobile devices.

Samsung has shown us working prototypes of flexible AMOLED displays earlier this year and Nokia demoed a flexible phone prototype in October.

Although, as impressive as these real-life displays are, creating something like we see in the video from Samsung still presents some challenges as the physical hardware like the processor and memory has to reside somewhere.  Additionally one must wonder how the display would be powered if there are no visible batteries inside the transparent panel.

Microsoft: We've had Siri-like technology for over a year

At the Techonomy conference in Tuscon, Arizona, Microsoft's Chief Research and Strategy Officer, Craig Mundie, dismissed Apple's new voice recognition technology as something Microsoft has had for over a year in Windows Phone 7.

In an interview with Forbes discussing user interfaces, Craig Mundie was asked about Apple's personal voice assistant, Siri. Mundie replied, "as a technological capability, you could argue that Microsoft has had a similar capability in Windows Phones for more than a year, since Windows Phone 7 was introduced".  

Mundie went on to point out that Tellme, the eventual fruit of an acquisition in 2007, does what Siri does. Windows Phone 7 and even Xbox users are most likely already familiar with the product. You can ask it for directions, search the web through Bing or send texts while using natural language. In fact, Tellme does things Siri does not as of yet, such as transcribing voicemails to text. However, the Microsoft official conceded the company had a few things to learn about marketing.

Craig singled out the infatuation people have with Apple is good marketing in itself. Mundie suggested, "maybe we need to pick a feature and hammer on it harder," while explaining that Apple had little choice but to push Siri hard. His reasoning is that many people were disappointed with the iPhone 4S. The disappointment stemmed from the lack of substantial changes to separate it from the iPhone 4. As a result, Apple had to focus on the one thing that would turn eyeballs: Siri. 

Of course, voice recognition itself is actually far from new but Apple would certainly suggest that they do it better, leveraging decade-old technology from DARPA.

You can watch the short interview below where Forbes' Eric Savitz and Microsoft's Craig Mundie talk mostly about Kinect and voice activation.

iPhone 5 production started, 4-inch screen and metal chassis

Reports have come out of Japan that indicate that the iPhone 5 has just started initial production and is slated for release in Q3 of this year. We all knew when the new iPhone 5 would be released, it’s usually about the same time each year but we didn’t know specific details about the phone. The new phone will come with a 4-inch capacitive touch screen as well as a metal chassis to help with antenna sensitivity. It looks like Apple is trying to correct the antenna issue that was uncovered as the iPhone 4 was released last year. The phone will also contain Apples A5 dual-core chip the same as which is inside the new iPad 2.

The new iPhone 5 is also said to be equipped with an “induction pay” or “wave and pay” technology that will allow consumers to use their phones to make purchases at establishments. This technology is made possible by the NFC or “Near Field Communication” chip installed in the phone. The technology is very similar to the current “pay pass” technology that we have on many credit cards today. With this addition to the iPhone 5, you will always be carrying around a sort of “e-wallet” that should speed up payments at enabled establishments. This new news also confirms many rumors that we wrote about earlier.

Micron develops 'Hyper Memory Cube' technology

Memory-chip maker Micron has unveiled a new hybrid memory technology that it claims should offer a 20-fold performance boost over chips currently used in personal computers, while reducing the size of the chip and consuming about one-tenth of the power. Speaking to Cnet, the company said its development breaks a longstanding problem referred to as the "memory wall" to deliver "a staggering amount of DRAM bandwidth directly to the processor."

Essentially, DRAM performance today is constrained by the capacity of the data channel that sits between the memory and the processor. This channel often becomes a choke point for data, no matter how much faster the DRAM chip itself gets, which was more recently evidenced in the industry's slow transition from DDR2 to DDR3 as desktop and notebook makers weren't really seeing a big enough improvement to warrant the move.


There isn't much in the way of technical details at the moment but it would appear that Micron is leveraging memory architecture knowledge from its Numonix acquisition last year to stack several memory layers atop each other and adding a controller chip right into the memory substrate. This not only allows a higher speed bus that will go from the controller chip to the CPU, it also means that memory could be packed more densely in a given volume.

The company hopes to see the so-called "Hybrid Memory Cube" technology in server and networking markets as early as 2012, with significant volumes in 2013, and could then start to work their way toward the consumer space in 2015.