HP unveils Palm-powered tablets

9 February 2011 Last updated at 14:50 ET By Maggie Shiels Technology reporter, BBC News

Hewlett-Packard (HP), the world's biggest technology company, is making a major play for the multi-billion dollar mobile market with a slew of products based on its own operating system.

At an event in San Francisco, the company announced two new phones and a long-awaited tablet computer.

HP's new TouchPad tablet will compete against Apple's iPad, Google's Android-powered machines and RIM's Playbook.

The TouchPad is based on the webOS operating system.

This was developed by Palm and bought by HP last year for $1.2bn (�745m).

HP is hoping its investment will pay dividends with tablet sales expected to soar to over 50 million in the coming year.

HP said the mobile connected devices market is currently worth $160bn dollars.

'Jumbo phones'

The Silicon Valley company that started life in a small garage is clearly betting big that products powered by its own operating system will give it a foothold in the sector and make it a force to be reckoned with.

"Our intention with webOS devices is to transform how people think, how they feel and how they connect," Todd Bradley, executive vice president of HP's personal systems group, told a room full of reporters, analysts and developers.

The two phones will also be powered by webOS. The Veer, which was billed as an alternative to "jumbo phones", is about the size of a credit card with a 2.6 inch screen and 8 gigabytes of storage.

Technology blogger Robert Scoble of Scoblizer.com told the BBC the Veer is "very much a second phone - cute, easy to carry and for going out at night."

The Pre3 smartphone has a 3.6-inch diagonal screen, slide-out keyboard, video calling capability and 16 or 32 gigabytes of storage.

There was no mention on how much the devices will cost.

The Veer will go on sale in the spring and the Pre3 in the summer. It will be joined by the TouchPad which will also hit shelves in the summer.

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Nokia at crisis point warns boss

9 February 2011 Last updated at 06:12 ET

Nokia's new CEO has sent an outspoken and frank memo to his staff that suggests the phone giant is in crisis.

Stephen Elop describes the company as standing on a "burning platform" surrounded by innovative competitors who are grabbing its market share.

In particular, he said, the firm had been caught off guard by the success of Google's Android operating system and Apple's iPhone.

BBC News has verified that the memo is genuine.

"The first iPhone shipped in 2007, and we still don't have a product that is close to their experience," Mr Elop wrote in the note that was distributed to the Finnish company's staff and was first published by technology website Engadget.

"Android came on the scene just over two years ago, and this week they took our leadership position in smartphone volumes. Unbelievable."

Although Nokia leads the global smartphone market in terms of handset sales, its overall share has been gradually declining.

According to research firm IDC, Nokia's share fell from 38% in 2009 to 28% by the end of 2010.

Meanwhile its rivals, including Apple and HTC have seen their share increase, or remain constant.

Ben Wood, an analyst at research firm CCS insight, said the memo showed that Mr Elop has a "deep understanding of the severe structural problems Nokia is facing".

"I think it shows that he has inherited an organisation that is in much worse shape than he anticipated and the work that will be required to get it back on track should not be underestimated," he told BBC News.

Mr Elop's leaked memo also suggests that Nokia is also being squeezed at the lower, non-smartphone end of the market by Chinese manufacturers.

"They are fast, they are cheap, and they are challenging us," he wrote.

Nokia is expected to publicly address its future strategy at a media event this Friday.

Mr Wood said that he thought Mr Elop would use the briefing as a chance to issue a "mea culpa".

"He will use it to say 'we are not in a good position, we have been outgunned and if we are to recover we are going to have to take some drastic decisions'."

Mr Wood said this could involve using Android or Microsoft's Windows Phone 7 operating systems.

"No options will be ruled out," he said.

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Robots to get their own internet

9 February 2011 Last updated at 05:54 ET By Mark Ward Technology correspondent, BBC News

Robots could soon have an equivalent of the internet and Wikipedia.

European scientists have embarked on a project to let robots share and store what they discover about the world.

Called RoboEarth it will be a place that robots can upload data to when they master a task, and ask for help in carrying out new ones.

Researchers behind it hope it will allow robots to come into service more quickly, armed with a growing library of knowledge about their human masters.

Share plan

The idea behind RoboEarth is to develop methods that help robots encode, exchange and re-use knowledge, said RoboEarth researcher Dr Markus Waibel from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich.

"Most current robots see the world their own way and there's very little standardisation going on," he said. Most researchers using robots typically develop their own way for that machine to build up a corpus of data about the world.

Continue reading the main story

"Start Quote

The key is allowing robots to share knowledge. That's really new"

End Quote Dr Markus Waibel

This, said Dr Waibel, made it very difficult for roboticists to share knowledge or for the field to advance rapidly because everyone started off solving the same problems.

By contrast, RoboEarth hopes to start showing how the information that robots discover about the world can be defined so any other robot can find it and use it.

RoboEarth will be a communication system and a database, he said.

In the database will be maps of places that robots work, descriptions of objects they encounter and instructions for how to complete distinct actions.

The human equivalent would be Wikipedia, said Dr Waibel.

"Wikipedia is something that humans use to share knowledge, that everyone can edit, contribute knowledge to and access," he said. "Something like that does not exist for robots."

It would be great, he said, if a robot could enter a location that it had never visited before, consult RoboEarth to learn about that place and the objects and tasks in it and then quickly get to work.

While other projects are working on standardising the way robots sense the world and encode the information they find, RoboEarth tries to go further.

"The key is allowing robots to share knowledge," said Dr Waibel. "That's really new."

RoboEarth is likely to become a tool for the growing number of service and domestic robots that many expect to become a feature in homes in coming decades.

Dr Waibel said it would be a place that would teach robots about the objects that fill the human world and their relationships to each other.

For instance, he said, RoboEarth could help a robot understand what is meant when it is asked to set the table and what objects are required for that task to be completed.

The EU-funded project has about 35 researchers working on it and hopes to demonstrate how the system might work by the end of its four-year duration.

Early work has resulted in a way to download descriptions of tasks that are then executed by a robot. Improved maps of locations can also be uploaded.

A system such as RoboEarth was going to be essential, said Dr Waibel, if robots were going to become truly useful to humans.

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