Samsung has whipped out a new gee-whiz toy, premiering it in the South Korean market: a 5-megapixel camera phone with video recording and MP3 playing capability, a 24-bit color LCD display, and shutter speeds as swift as 1/1000 of a second. Forrester Research says that for American users that would equal cranking the car from zero to 100 mph in no time. On the other hand, Americans being as they are (“The American prayer: ‘Lord, grant me patience – and I want it right now,’” George F. Will has written), they’ll have to wait two years buy the new phone, assuming U.S. carriers willing to subsidize such premium product are found and U.S. buyers are willing to burp up at least $850 for the phone, Forrester said.
For now, Americans for the first time are at least spending a little more on wireless services than fixed-line offerings, according to TNS Telecoms. A third of telecom spending in the second quarter of 2004 went to wireless services while wired line services fell 3 percent, TNS said. The average home spent $47.87 each month for wireless out of a total $158.88 on all telecom offerings, the research firm added. The bad news: Total telecom spending dropped 1 percent from the previous quarter. "These results represent the nature of the hyper-dynamic telecom market today," said TNS vice president Charles White.
Speaking of hyper-dynamic, if you just can’t bear to be away from your television programs, portable help may be on the way. Texas Instruments says they’re developing a chip for cell phones that can capture broadcast signals and thus put anything from Playboy TV to CSI into your cell phone. Under the code name (does this figure?) Hollywood, TI’s chip will take advantage of new television infrastructure now being developed for mobile units. It “will combine the two biggest consumer electronics inventions of our time: the television and the cellphone," said TI senior vice president Gilles Delfassy. "One by one, the industry's most exciting consumer electronics are being integrated into wireless handsets, allowing consumers to get their news and entertainment whenever and wherever they want. With this new chip on the cell phone, users will enjoy digital, high-quality TV in real time."
Police in West Midlands, U.K. are enjoying world recognition – as in, the 2004 International Law Enforcement Cybercrime prize from the Society for the Policing of Cyberspace – for a high-tech system they developed to keep an eye on illegal firearm sales in cyberspace. This system lets officers discover how the guns were brought into the country and where they were intended to go, with the West Midlands Hi-Tech Crime Unit working closely with eBay to develop the system. Police all around Britain are now said to be developing similar tracking systems. Assistant Chief Constable Stuart Hyde said: “This is a major achievement,” said West Midlands Assistant Chief Constable Stuart Hyde, “and demonstrates how local forces, working with industry, can use hi-tech investigation skills to impact on local crime..”
But speaking of child abusers, a new study from the University of New Hampshire says the typical Internet sex offender’s profile may not be what many think. Researcher Janis Wolak says Internet sex abusers aren’t the deceptive, violent predators depicted in the press, and the way they and their victims relate is a little more complicated than you think. "The kids who get involved in these cases are a varied group," she said, announcing the results of her study. "Some of them were kids who were really pretty lonely and there were offenders who were appealing to their desire for adults who were interested and cared about them." As for the adults, mostly men, Wolak said they included those “extremely immature who were looking for adolescent girls because they could relate to them.”
