I called Toyota and asked if there’s an upgrade path for the microphone. I’d pay $100-$200 to have a really high quality mic with noise reduction system hanging from my visor, but there’s nothing. No upgrade path at all. Tough luck. Even third party solutions – of which there are quite a few – basically involve completely rewiring my dashboard and hooking the unit in as an external audio subsystem. And costs hundreds of dollars just to install.

Enter a category of Bluetooth devices called “in-car speakerphones”. The idea is that these are self-contained speaker, mic and Bluetooth devices that let you sidestep the entire car audio system, and since they’re generally designed to clip onto your sun visor, they’re just inches from your mouth and should be clear when used hands free too.

SuperTooth sent us one of their new Crystal units, remarkably priced at about $70 on Amazon.com, and from everything I can tell, it’s a big improvement on my far more expensive Toyota system.

As with any bluetooth device, there’s the hassle of pairing the device with your cellphone, then the trick of actually using it on a day to day basis. Fortunately, I have an Apple iPhone 4s, and if you’ve ever paired a device with your iPhone, you know it’s not too bad, especially since SuperTooth is smart enough to actually print pairing directions on the back of the unit – including the always important four digit security code. Even better, when you first turn the device on it detects that it’s unpaired and automatically shifts into pairing mode.

Your phone, however, isn’t quite that smart. Even with Siri involved. In fact, I asked Siri “enter bluetooth pairing mode” but, alas, she didn’t understand what I was asking.

Thanks anyway.

The trick to pairing a bluetooth device on an Apple iPhone is knowing where to find Bluetooth, because it’s not obvious. Tap on “Settings”, then “General”, then you’ll find “Bluetooth”.

Turn on the SuperTooth Crystal and you’ll see something like this:

That’s it. You’ll only have to do it once.

Now when you’re ready to make a phone call, simply tap on “Sources” and you’ll see it as a new option:

On this particular call, I asked the other party how I sounded and he confirmed that it was significantly better than my usual hands free system, though still “echo-y”, which is somewhat endemic to this type of product. There’s still no replacement to holding the phone itself up to your mouth, but that’s a bad idea when you’re driving, needless to say.

One issue with a portable in-car speakerphone is power: you can plug it directly into your cigarette lighter, but I have having wires all over my dashboard, so its rechargeable battery with 40-hours of standby time is a good addition to this slim device, and with my usage pattern, as long as I remember to turn the unit off at the end of the day and turn it on the next morning, it easily lasts a week between charges. (In fact, it’s rated for 20 hrs of talk time, 40 days of standby)

For its primary purpose, the SuperTooth Crystal is a very acceptable solution, though don’t expect a high-fidelity sound out of the little speaker included. It’s definitely tuned for voice, which makes it a bit puzzling why it also supports A2DP, Bluetooth-based stereo transmission. Cool idea, sort of like AirPlay, but without a good speaker designed for music, I didn’t find it very useful, certainly when compared to my JBL sound system.

If you’re looking for a hands-free solution for your cellphone, one that can sit unobtrusively in your car until you’re ready to make a call, or perhaps a low-cost desktop speaker phone solution, I’d recommend the SuperTooth Crystal. At $69 (through Amazon.com) it’s hard to go wrong.

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Now, according to Accedo CEO Michael Lantz, is what Apple is about to do to the television market with the rumored (but not confirmed) iTV. In a statement emailed to BGR, Lantz claimed that “[t]he TV set industry is in crisis mode.” He argues that while set manufacturers are working to cut costs and add features they are ignoring design. This, he said, creates “a wide open market slot for a high-end design led Apple TV set.” Such a TV, he said, could be sold by Apple for between $2000 and $3000 “with unprecedented margins.

Of course, the iTV is still very much a rumor at this point. Apple has not confirmed anything. Nevertheless, the rumors in recent months have been coming from increasingly reliable sources – including Walter Isaacson, the author of Steve Jobs’s biography. According to Isaacson’s book, Jobs claimed that the iTV was among the last things he worked on at Apple, and that he “cracked it” shortly before his death in October of last year.

According to Lantz, though, the functionality of the iTV is not the primary concern. At a minimum it will have the functionality of an Apple TV integrated. What’s really important, though, according to Lantz, is Apple’s design. He argued that the iTV “will sell on superior design and quality of the actual TV set.” The fact that Apple has a “natural sales channel” in their retail stores and significant “market momentum” will help sell the TVs.

When the second generation Apple TV released in 2010, a device that Steve Jobs had famously called Apple’s “hobby” quickly became serious business. Since then, there has been speculation that Apple would jump the rest of the way into the TV market with their own HDTV set. In recent months, though, the rumors have picked up steam, to the point that it’s pretty clear that Apple really is working on bringing this device to market. If Lantz is right, then Apple could make a pretty huge splash in the television market. Of course, it seems unlikely that the iTV will bring the kind of revolution that the iPhone and iPad brought to the smartphone and tablet markets. Neither smartphones nor tablets were devices with much consumer appeal before Apple came along. Apple’s main contribution was making devices that appealed to consumers and not just business users. The TV though, has always been a consumer product first, meaning that Apple will face a more traditional competition in the TV market.

That said, if the iTV really is coming this year, it’s a distinct possibility that the television market could be about to change in a big way.

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Li-Shiuan Peh, an associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science at MIT, wants cores to communicate the same way computers hooked to the Internet do: by bundling the information they transmit into “packets.” Each core would have its own router, which could send a packet down any of several paths, depending on the condition of the network as a whole.

In principle, multicore chips are faster than single-core chips because they can split up computational tasks and run them on several cores at once. Cores working on the same task will occasionally need to share data, but until recently, the core count on commercial chips has been low enough that a single bus has been able to handle the extra communication load. That’s already changing, however: “Buses have hit a limit,” Peh says. “They typically scale to about eight cores.” The 10-core chips found in high-end servers frequently add a second bus, but that approach won’t work for chips with hundreds of cores.

For one thing, Peh says, “buses take up a lot of power, because they are trying to drive long wires to eight or 10 cores at the same time.” In the type of network Peh is proposing, on the other hand, each core communicates only with the four cores nearest it. “Here, you’re driving short segments of wires, so that allows you to go lower in voltage,” she explains.

In an on-chip network, however, a packet of data traveling from one core to another has to stop at every router in between. Moreover, if two packets arrive at a router at the same time, one of them has to be stored in memory while the router handles the other. Many engineers, Peh says, worry that these added requirements will introduce enough delays and computational complexity to offset the advantages of packet switching. “The biggest problem, I think, is that in industry right now, people don’t know how to build these networks, because it has been buses for decades,” Peh says.

Peh and her colleagues have developed two techniques to address these concerns. One is something they call “virtual bypassing.” In the Internet, when a packet arrives at a router, the router inspects its addressing information before deciding which path to send it down. With virtual bypassing, however, each router sends an advance signal to the next, so that it can preset its switch, speeding the packet on with no additional computation. In her group’s test chips, Peh says, virtual bypassing allowed a very close approach to the maximum data-transmission rates predicted by theoretical analysis.

The other technique is something called low-swing signaling. Digital data consists of ones and zeroes, which are transmitted over communications channels as high and low voltages. Sunghyun Park, a PhD student advised by both Peh and Anantha Chandrakasan, the Joseph F. and Nancy P. Keithley Professor of Electrical Engineering, developed a circuit that reduces the swing between the high and low voltages from one volt to 300 millivolts. With its combination of virtual bypassing and low-swing signaling, the researchers’ test chip consumed 38 percent less energy than previous packet-switched test chips. The researchers have more work to do, Peh says, before their test chip’s power consumption gets as close to the theoretical limit as its data transmission rate does. But, she adds, “if we compare it against a bus, we get orders-of-magnitude savings.”

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Artificial muscles powered by a renewable energy source are desired for joint articulation in bio-inspired autonomous systems. In this study, a robotic underwater vehicle, inspired by jellyfish, was designed to be actuated by a chemical fuel source. The fuel-powered muscles presented in this work comprise nano-platinum catalyst-coated multi-wall carbon nanotube (MWCNT) sheets, wrapped on the surface of nickel–titanium (NiTi) shape memory alloy (SMA). As a mixture of oxygen and hydrogen gases makes contact with the platinum, the resulting exothermic reaction activates the nickel–titanium (NiTi)-based SMA. (42%).

The bad part is that I am thinking this might be an awesome way of running a lander out on Europa and other icy moons around the solar system. If they can drag enough power right from the environment using this same method that will cut down on the amount of power that is needed for our robotic overlords that are exploring the solar system. This might just be an interesting alternative for powering electronics if it can be made small enough. The jellyfish is just the first good way of showing off the technology.

While the US Navy is hemming and hawing on what it could be used for in real life, I am sure they are thinking of some pretty interesting ideas right now for monitoring, tracking and otherwise latching onto enemy warships with a GPS receiver and no one would really notice if this puppy was on someone’s hull. If I can think of this, the boffins over at the USN have probably gone light years beyond what I am thinking. But realistically this is some pretty awesome technology, and well worth reading the original science report. As far as robotic overlords go, with a splash of Doctor Who in there, Jellyfish are pretty awesome.

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Dave’s Answer:

You’re right that the AppleTV has firmware upgrades every so often and that sometimes they’re significant and change the functionality of the device or make it — hopefully! — easier to use. That’s all good, and indeed, it’s one of the great things about a network device: the manufacturer can update and improve the firmware or operating system and just push it out to the device automagically.

The AppleTV does update itself automatically, however it can take a week or longer for it to notice that there’s something new, so one answer to your question is “just wait and it’ll do the work for you”, but let’s dig in further and figure out how to force a system upgrade, because it’s not that incredibly hard…

I know, patience is difficult.

Instead, let’s jump in!

Here’s what your AppleTV displays at the topmost level:

To get to the upgrade, you need to move to the rightmost column, “Settings”:

You’ll want to choose “General” and it’ll show a number of configuration settings:

If you’re guessing that “Update Software” is our choice, you’re right. Move down, then select it. Now the system will check back with Apple to verify that an update is indeed available.

If there is, you’ll have the option of “Download and Install” or skipping it by choosing “Update Later”.

Choose “Download and Install” so your AppleTV will update, then go grab a cup of tea, because it’ll take a while…

Once the update has been downloaded, it’ll go through two stages of update, and the screen does blank once or twice along the way, so don’t panic. Step one:

And, a while later (it can be ten minutes or more), step two:

Finally, when it’s done, AppleTV has the new firmware up and running, and it’s a pretty big change from the earlier interface!

Give it another minute to load the popular movies and it’s even more attractive:

So there you have it. The pics are a bit blurry, but I think you’ll be able to get the gist of how to proceed and update your AppleTV as desired. Good luck!
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Sony‘s crack engineering team decided to see if they could change that and create an immersive headset that contained its own tiny screen, a screen that was so close to your eyes that it had the appearance of a 150-inch HD television screen. And, while they were at it, they added a second tiny screen (both high def OLED), 5.1 audio and a vivid 3D system.

Enter the Sony HMZ-T1 Personal 3D Viewer, as shown on the model, above. Think of it as high-def goggles for any video content you’d like to enjoy in private. Sony sent us an HMZ-T1 to examine and try for a few weeks, and here’s what we found…

The first thing that is surprising about the HMZT1 is that in addition to the big googles, there’s also a video interface box required, one that has to be plugged into a local wall outlet, making the device unsuitable for portable use. Which is one of its great limitations because this would be so, so cool to have on an airplane flight as you lay back and enjoy full HD video and high quality stereo, even being fed from your iPod or iPad with the HDMI interface adapter available on the aftermarket. But it’s not an option.

For home or office use, however, that’s not a limitation, so the question really is how does the device work when hooked up to a Blu-Ray player, a cable box or a computer? And the answer is splendidly, with some reservations.

To test the Sony HMZ-T1, we hooked it up to a 3D Panasonic Blu-Ray player, fed data directly from the Comcast cable box into the device, and — using an HDMI interface adapter — a MacBook Pro computer.

The Blu-Ray player worked very well and the computer interface was terrific: it’s really nice to be able to edit a document or read an ebook or watch a movie on your personal headset, with high quality audio. The cable box didn’t work as well, which was disappointing because we were eager to try watching some HDTV sports, but while the video looked great, the audio was missing and even after checking in with Sony support, we couldn’t ascertain why it didn’t work properly.

On the computer, we tested the headset by watching Rise of the Planet of the Apes and while it was an enjoyable experience, the headset is heavy and even with the many adjustments possible, I could never quite get the images to be perfectly aligned and crystal clear. The result: I could watch it for 10-15 minutes, but then got sidetracked trying to adjust it just a tiny bit more so it’d be clear and crisp.

Here’s how Sony describes the gizmo:

“Enjoy private screenings in jaw-dropping 2D or 3D HD and ear-pleasing 5.1-channel surround sound that simulates the feeling of being in your very own movie theater. Feel like you’re sitting 12 feet away from a 150″ screen and make getting into your game or watching your favorite movie an all-new adventure. Get not one, but two HD OLED displays which are known for outstanding brightness, contrast, color and clarity. Adjust forehead and headband straps for a fully customized fit designed for heads large and small. Keep the unit connected to your TV at all times — with HDMI® pass-through you don’t have to unplug it when not in use.”

With a retail price of $799 for the unit and everything you need to hook it up to your computer system (except an HDMI interface, if you need one), it’s a very interesting addition to a rather banal display market, but it’s also not for everyone. In fact, Sony recommends that it not be used by anyone under 15, so it’s not going to be the perfect holiday present for your fanatical tween gamer.

In summary, I really like the concept of the Sony HMZ-T1. It looks sleek, futuristic, the sound is gorgeous and the screens themselves are bright and vivid. I just couldn’t quite ever get it perfectly adjusted, which makes me feel that if you are interested in acquiring one of these, you’d be smart to try it on at a local Sony Store before you buy it. If it does fit, though, this is one amazing device. And if you’re an adult gamer? This’ll be one step closer to gaming nirvana. It’s that cool.
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There are lots and lots of companies showing their wares in reasonably modest booths, 15×15 feet, 20×20 feet, and then there are the real consumer electronics powerhouses, companies like Samsung, Sony, Intel and Sharp, they have spaces that are larger than your local store. The Sony booth itself was 30,000 square feet and took a year to design and create.

So what was worth seeing?

While journalists are always looking for The Next Big Thing, the reality of consumer electronics is that it’s marked more by incremental improvement than by dramatic leaps in technology. The super-thin OLED TVs? They were bigger this year than last. The iPhone cases? Do I even need to say that they’re basically the same as they were two years ago, just redesigned for the iPhone 4s?

Within all of this incremental improvement there were also some really interesting additions to the world of consumer electronics as embedded technology, global positioning systems, and always-available Internet become more pervasive. Still, things get smaller and cheaper, and tech championed by the costly research labs of large corporations trickle down until they’re being produced as low-budget commodities by companies whose names I can’t even pronounce.

When I go through the show — and I check out the products from every single vendor — I’m not so much looking for the amazing but instead the interesting, the thoughtful, the things that catch my attention. A 72″ HDTV that’s now available in an 84″ model? Not interesting. A TV that can help you find what you want to watch, however? That’s interesting.

WIth that in mind, there were definitely some things that caught my eye at CES 2012.

Cobra’s iRadar Crowdsourced Radar Detection System

Winner: Best Gadget

I own a radar detector but turn it on maybe once a year. In fact, the last few long drives I’ve taken I forgot to put it in the car, so it’s not like I’m some crazy driver who loves to go fast and is one point away from having my license suspended. That’s not what I find so darn cool about Cobra’s second generation iRadar device.

Last year, at the 2011 Consumer Electronics Show, Cobra unveiled the iRadar, a radar detector with no buttons, no indicator lights, a device that was completely reliant on you having a smartphone and used that to display speed, detected radar systems, maps, etc. Nice. This year, however, they upped the ante in a most fascinating manner: the iRadar software is now a shared community database of detected radar locations and types.

What does this mean? If you and I both use iRadar and I drive through an area where a radar gun “paints” my car as I zip past, I’ll get the warning as I would with any other radar detector. But then my iRadar app will automatically share the location and type of radar in use with the rest of the iRadar user community. Fifteen minutes later, when you drive through that same area, your smartphone will warn you that I’d just a few minutes earlier detected a radar in use.

Crowdsourcing at its best. Using the distributed nature of thousands of radar detectors traveling about to paint an accurate and ever-changing picture of where the police are trying to capture speeding vehicles using various technology. Smart.

Even better: You can grab the app itself for free and have instant access to the entire reporting database, though you aren’t really contributing to its success without the radar detector too. Links: iPhone version and Android version.

Now, is it legal? I suspect that somewhere down the road there’ll be some law it turns out that Cobra is breaking by having the shared radar database, but until then, it’s still extraordinarily interesting…

Lenovo “Yoga” Ultrabook

Winner: Best Hardware

As someone who owns both Mac and Windows-based laptops, it’s always struck me that the Windows PC systems are less elegant and slower. Boot time on a Mac can be 20-30 seconds, but on PCs I commonly hear of people who have 2-3 minute (or longer!) boot times. Yes, PC laptops are a lot cheaper, but they’re also less elegant and less attractive.

There’s also a distinct trend in computing that we’re all moving away from desktop systems to laptops and, for a lot of people, that migration continues with a leap from laptops to tablets, primarily the über-popular Apple iPad.

This year’s Consumer Electronics Show reflected this with the introduction of the Ultrabook line of PC laptops. All designed to be ultra-light and boot ultra-fast, they go a long way to addressing the primary obstacles I’ve always had with PCs. In fact, the best of these devices are now easily as sleek and sexy as the Apple MacBook Air.

Most interesting among these is the laptop, a device that, as you can see in the picture, lets you actually fold the screen all the way back so that you in essence create a tablet with the keyboard facing out on the back. It’s touch sensitive, so it’s an instant Win7 laptop.

I know that there have been previous generations of convertible laptops, and I even had a Gateway one for a while, but none of the vendors ever got the hinge right. Even HP’s convertible PC laptop (where the screen rotates 180-degrees and closes so that it covers the keyboard) had a poor hinge.

By contrast, Lenovo’s really nailed the complexity and required rigidity of the screen/keyboard hinge in its Yoga laptop, and everyone I saw who actually touched one got a gleam in their eye. Yes, it’s that cool. Coming soon…

RCA Symphonix / BluWave

Winner: Best Health Product

I can’t think of a more mundane product than a hearing aid. Yes, for old folk and those people who are starting to lose their hearing. Then again, with the amnipresence of iPods and heavy use of earbuds, I expect the next generation will have early onset hearing loss so these devices are going to be more common than you think.

The trick is to figure out how to create a hearing aid that lets you pretend it’s something else so that you aren’t embarrassed to wear it and therefore drive everyone crazy because you can’t actually hear them talking.

Enter the RCA Symphonix. It’s a hearing aid and Bluetooth cellphone headset in one.

Brilliant idea. Now people who need a bit of assistance with their hearing can leave this clipped to their ear and no-one will ever know that they have a hearing aid on. Less embarrassment = more use = a genuine help for people who need it. Smart.

Samsung’s Transparent Smart Window

Winner: Best Glimpse of the Future

This was a prototype that they were showing, a proof of concept if you will, but holy cow, what an amazing futuristic thing: an LCD computer screen that’s transparent. Imagine having it as your bedroom window. Tap on it (or access it remotely via an app or voice control system) and it instantly turns opaque. Tap it again, and it’s transparent. No blinds, no curtains, just a piece of glass with magical properties.

Far, far better, though, is that it can display anything you might put on your computer screen. The demo, as you can see in the embedded video, has a weather widget floating in the glass, along with a digital clock. Got an email from the boss? That could easily show up ready for you to quick review while shaving.

As with any other prototype, this isn’t available to buy, even if you’re part of the so-called 1%. It’s more an astonishing “look what we can do” and a sneak peak at some technology that will absolutely be available in ten years or so. Very cool.

And more…

There were lots of neat things to see, and I certainly came home with some cool goodies, including a Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 and a Sony Bloggie camera that lets me easily live stream events with the push of a button, but CES is about increments, about the migration of tech from prototype and demo to expensive to commodity, and whether you’re interested in smarter washing machines or a slick computer, it’s well worth going. If you can get in and find a room for less than $400/night, that is!

And me? I’ll be back next year…

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Dave’s Answer:

I have a brand new Kindle Fire too and it’s been an interesting experience trying to figure out how things work after spending a few years exclusively on the Apple iPad. There are a ton of differences in the user experience — and Amazon’s got a ways to go for the Kindle to be a useful general purpose Android tablet — but the FIre’s surprisingly capable once you figure out how to make it work properly.

The first thing to realize before you drop your own movies onto the device is that it doesn’t have much space. In fact, if they sold it by featuring the memory capacity, no-one would buy it, as there’s just a smidge over 5GB of available space and no way obvious to expand it with an additional SD Card or similar. Considering my iPad has 64GB of storage, that’s a huge difference.

Still, a typical two hour movie can be reduced down to about 800MB so that should theoretically give you space for 3-4 films if you don’t load it up with music and photos, since it all taps from the same space.

To convert an AVI movie for the Kindle Fire or any other Android Tablet, presumably, you’ll need to produce something that uses the H.264 format and is in MP4 format. The screen on the Kindle is a higher resolution, but it autoscales for 854 x 480 video so that’s the target we’ll use.

To accomplish the task, I’m going to use the terrific multi-platform utility Handbrake. Yep, you read that right. If you’re on a Windows system, you can use the same program with the same settings to get your movie working on the Kindle Fire too. Nice. I’ll use a Mac, however, so the UI itself is slightly different.

To start out, locate your AVI movie source and launch Handbrake. I’ll use my own rip of the terrific Pixar movie Cars 2, as you’ll see.

On the top bar you’ll want to click on “Source”:

Find and choose your AVI source file, then look on the right side of the same bar for the “Toggle Presets” button:

When you click on it, a small window slides out on the right with a long list of Apple devices you can use as the target format. No Kindle Fire, yet, but we can work around that!

Choose “iPad” under the “Apple” option, then look on the main window to see how all the defaults have changed for the output video format. There’s one setting that you must change for the resultant video to work on the Kindle Fire, and that’s “Large file size”:

If you read the pop-up closely, you’ll see that Handbrake warns you of incompatibility with this particular setting too. Just uncheck this box.

Now double-check the output directory and filename . It’s smart to know where it’s going to end up so you don’t have to hunt for the Kindle Fire-ready movie!

If you’re thinking I’ve done these sort of conversions in the past and then had to hunt for the output file, well, you’d be correct. ‘nuf said on that topic!

Everything looks good, so click on the “Add to Queue” button on the top bar, then the “Show Queue” button adjacent to it, and you’ll see something like this:

Press “Start”.

This conversion will take a while. In fact, each movie you convert generally takes about 50% of the running time of the film, based on my experience. Have patience and it’s a splendid time to go get a cup of coffee, do some laundry or pop by the gym for a quick run.

Eventually, though…

That’s the hard part done. Now, how do you get the movie onto your Kindle?

Copying A Movie Onto the Amazon Kindle Fire

Turns out that if you have a standard MicroUSB connector, you can plug your Kindle Fire directly into your computer and it shows up as an external drive. At least, once you turn it on (plugging it in isn’t sufficient to wake it up, one of the many usability differences between it and the iPad) and unlock it if you have a lock code.

On the Mac it’s “KINDLE” and there’s a lot of interesting stuff to see:

As I’m demonstrating in the image above, your newly converted m4v video file can simply be dragged and dropped into the “Videos” folder.

Once it’s done copying you can unplug the Kindle because the last few steps are all on the device, we’re done with the computer at this point.

First thing to realize — and it’s a weird design decision — is that the “Movies” app isn’t where you are going to find your own video content. That’s exclusive to content you buy from Amazon and there’s not even a link to “your own video library” or similar.

Instead you need to go to the “Apps” area and look closely. There’s a “Gallery” app for viewing photos and that’s where your video content will show up.

You can see the app dead center in this Kindle Fire screen shot:

Tap on it and you’ll see a stack of whatever pictures you’ve downloaded onto the device (I have 49) and whatever videos you’ve copied onto the device too:

Tap on the stack of video stills and you’ll see what movies are available:

Which is which? Who the heck knows. Another point where the Android user interface is completely underwhelming, particularly compared to the beautiful iPad display with its movie posters and preview information.

Still, it’s not that hard to tap on a video icon and find out it’s the wrong film. Just go back and tap on the other one, right?

In my case, the second video is Cars 2 and it looks great on the Fire:

That’s all there is to the process. A bit of work, but I always queue up a number of videos to be converted and let Handbrake work overnight. Then you can very easily copy everything in the background and your Kindle Fire’s ready to roll!

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The Forbes Debate On Whether Siri Is A Google Killer

Whether provocatively or by happenstance, Forbes raised the hype by publishing two conflicting commentaries on this.  Eric Jackson wrote a piece on why Siri is a Google killer.  Ten days later David Coursey countered with a piece on why Siri is not a Google killer. Both contributors are knowledgeable in the field so clearly this question is not easily resolved.

Eric Jackson Sheds More Light on The Google Mobile Team

Eric Jackson has written a most interesting post on the history of voice technology and described how some of the key players have been involved. He was involved in the voice technology sector and knows the players and their motivations. You might well think from that review that the present Google mobile team was well placed and very experienced to take the right strategic decision.

One item in that post is a video produced by Apple in 1987 as their vision of where this technology might go.  This is produced below.

An Apple Future Vision Becomes Reality

The first video here is Apple’s visionary view in 1987 of the Knowledge Navigator:

The second video is a demo of the new Siri application on the Apple iPhone 4s.

As you may notice, most of the functionalities envisaged in 1987 are now available almost a quarter of a century later.  It may have taken a long time to come together, but clearly this is a practical approach at this time.

Google May  Continue Its Present Mobile Strategy

Although Siri has done much more in the artificial intelligence field than Android has (as far as is public), Google could certainly put the resources in place to do their Android version of Siri, if it wished.  It certainly has some of the brightest people in voice technology.  However I believe there are reasons why, as an organization, they will be reluctant to do this.  That is why I wrote in Technorati that Siri will be a Google Mobile killer. The reasons I set out in the article were the following:

1. Google Is A Product-Driven Company
2. Google Thinks Apple Is Wrong
3. Google Is Proud
4. Smart Phones Should Use Voice Input Not Finger Swipes

The first reason is why Google will not acknowledge the importance of the fourth reason.

Apple Will Have A 2 Year Lead In The Mobile Internet

I am not alone in this line of thinking.  Gary Morgenthaler, a partner at Morgenthaler Ventures, recognized expert in artificial intelligence, and a Siri board member and investor argues that Apple now has at least a two-year advantage over Google in the war for best smartphone platform.

Apple is now offering through semantic analysis and artificial intelligence the opportunity to interact with your mobile device to home in on the right answer or complete the right task.  This is quite counter to the typical Google approach where they hope by understanding enough about you and your preferences, they will deliver exactly the answer you want in one pass.  That may be an additional reason why Google will reluctantly followed the Siri lead when the marketplace shows that it is inevitable.

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Dave’s Answer:

The first step is that you need to update both iTunes on your Mac OS X system and the iOS operating system on your Apple iPhone 4. The former can be easily accomplished by going to the “Software Update…” option on the Apple menu on your Mac. It checks against the master version server and should report that you have a new version of iTunes to download and install. When you do install it, you’ll need to quit your current version of iTunes first and I always quit all other running apps before applying any update since you never know what files might be shared behind the scenes…

Before you do so, however, it’s a great idea to do one more sync of your iPhone before all these updates. For good luck. Then when you update iTunes, do it again before you update your iPhone system (though it’s quite possible it’ll simply pop up a window saying that you have an update to iOS available and should apply it)

Now, if you’re here, you have iTunes 10.5 on your Mac and iOS 5 on your iPhone.

Ready?

Launch iTunes with your iPhone plugged into your computer and you’ll see the usual:

Pay attention to the “Version” box. Later you’ll see it changes. For now, however, scroll downward on the iTunes window…

Ooops! That’s interesting. iCloud. Coming soon. Keep scrolling down…

That’s the key option that you want to select: “Sync with this iPhone over Wi-Fi”. Check that, click on the “Apply” button on the lower right and unplug your phone from your computer.

Really.

Now check it out: it’s still shown in iTunes both on the left under “Devices” and as a specific device you can examine and tweak:

Notice what’s happened to the Version information too. It won’t let you update the operating system through Wi-Fi (though you can update your iPhone iOS software directly from the phone now, but that’s a separate article) so instead it says “Connect this iPhone using a USB cable in order to update or restore its software.”

What I found most curious about this addition of wifi sync is that when you unplug your iOS devices, they don’t vanish from iTunes any more. Check it out:

The “iPadewan” device is my iPad, and it’s not within wifi range which is why there’s an error symbol next to it. Still, it’s very cool to be able to leave your iPhone in your pocket or briefcase and with a click of the Sync button in iTunes have it get the latest version of iPhone apps, some new music and anything else you want to grab from / copy to the device. Very space age!

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