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Sandbridge’s programmable processor should make it easier for phone manufacturers to handle these challenges. They’ll not only be able to support multiple connection technologies on fewer chips, but they’ll be able to test and add new functions to their phones much more quickly than if they had to wait for a chipmaker to design these technologies into hardware.

New technology from a company called Sandbridge Technologies could help keep smartphone prices in check as carriers begin to move toward 4G wireless networks.

This will become increasingly important as consumers expect more functionality in their wireless devices. Take Apple’s iPhone 3G as an example. The phone supports 3G wireless connectivity, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and GPS. Today all that functionality is supported on multiple chips. With the new Sandbridge processor, a company like Apple could program a single chip to handle all four functions.

On Monday, Sandbridge, based in Tarrytown, N.Y., plans to announce that its new baseband processor for cell phones, called the SB3500, is now shipping to cell phone manufacturers throughout the world. This new processor, which has been in the works for several years, differs from other chips used in cell phones because it’s completely software-based and reprogrammable.

But it isn’t just the fact that multiple functions can be packed onto a single processor. Companies such as Qualcomm and Broadcom already do that. The real difference is that the Sandbridge processor is software programmable. This means that the cell phone maker decides which function to put on the chip. It also means that when new technologies like 4G wireless are introduced, cell phone makers can react quickly and get devices out the door much faster.

“There are several companies trying to do something similar to what we’ve been able to achieve,” Glossner said. “But it’s not easy to do. These other solutions either quickly burn a lot of power or there is a lot of latency.”

Sandbridge isn’t the only company developing programmable chips. Other companies such as Texas Instruments and NXP Semiconductors have also tried to develop processors to handle this task. But these other companies have either been unable to produce a chip that can process fast enough or the chips consume too much power and aren’t suitable for mobile devices, said John Glossner, co-founder and chief technology officer of Sandbridge.

Today wireless operators are just starting to talk about new 4G wireless broadband services. Sprint Nextel is the only carrier in the U.S. to begin deployments using a technology called WiMax. Verizon Wireless and AT&T have each said they plan to use a technology called LTE to build their 4G networks, which are not likely to take shape until at least 2010. What’s more, the Federal Communications Commission has just opened up unused broadcast TV spectrum known as “white spaces” that will likely be used for wireless broadband services. These slivers of frequencies are not contiguous across the U.S., which means that devices will likely have to switch among different types of connection technologies and carrier networks.

What this means is that phone manufacturers will be able to pack multiple technologies and functions onto a single chip. And because it’s software programmable, the phone makers themselves will be able to determine which technologies to support on the chip. This should help phone manufacturers reduce the number of chips needed in a phone, which will ultimately reduce hardware costs and technical complexity in the devices.

“Because we allow manufacturers to pack more functionality into a single chip, we can reduce the cost of those phones by about 15 percent,” said Tanuj Raja, vice president of business development for Sandbridge.

“Because it’s software based, we are announcing the first programmable chip that can support 4G wireless technology even before those standards are finalized,” Raja said.

So what does all this really mean for consumers? Well, it could mean more sophisticated devices at lower prices. Each processor and piece of hardware that is added to a phone costs money and takes up valuable real estate within the phone. If manufacturers can reduce the number of chips used, they can reduce their costs. And hopefully, they’ll be able to pass on those savings to consumers. Or at the very least, they’ll be able to add more functionality without jacking up prices.

Find more deals, coupon codes, and bargains on CNET’s Shopper.com.

(Credit:
Magellan)

As part of an early Black Friday sale, J&R is offering Magellan Maestro 3100 GPS navigation systems for $69.99 shipped. These are refurbished units, but at least you don’t have to deal with any rebates.

The Maestro 3100 offers a 3.5-inch touch screen, 2D and 3D map views, 750,000 points of interest, and multidestination trip planning. But that’s about it in the feature department. Don’t expect text-to-speech capabilities, a media player, or any other advanced options; this is a system designed to navigate you from point A to point B (and points C through T, if you desire–it can handle up to 20 destinations per trip).

CNET gave the Maestro 3100 generally good marks (and a rating of three stars out of five). Users were a bit more generous, bumping the rating to 3.5 stars. But keep in mind all those scores were based on the original list price of $299.99. At 70 bucks, it might have scored even higher. The refurbished 3100 comes with a 90-day warranty.

(Credit:
YouTube)

Hand it to Google, the company continues to try to find the kind of Web video ads that please advertisers but don’t alienate viewers. It’s tricky. The process can sometimes be painful for both company and users. For instance, some of the ads that have appeared lately at the bottom of YouTube videos obscure much of the lower half of the frame.

What’s the use of clicking on the video if I can’t see it? YouTube’s got to pay the bills somehow, but I’m glad they’re looking for less annoying ways to advertise to viewers.

The Web’s largest video site will give users a chance to choose when to watch their ads as part of a test. Those who choose to watch an ad at the outset, what YouTube calls the “promoted video,” will get to choose between ads.

“We are constantly testing a wide range of options to find the right advertising format for the right content on YouTube,” the company said on its blog. “We think giving users a say in the process helps our efforts.”

YouTube said Monday users can choose whether to watch an advertisement at the beginning of a video or to watch a few ads as their video plays.

HTML 5 in its current draft form includes a number of significant advancements, notably several that make the Web a better foundation for applications, not just static Web pages. Among the present HTML 5 features are built-in video and audio, the ability to store data on a local computer to enable use of Web applications even when offline, Web Workers that can perform computational chores in the background without bogging down Web application responsiveness, Canvas for creating sophisticated two-dimensional graphics, and drag-and-drop for better Web application user interfaces.

But the new message indicates Microsoft is getting serious about the effort, digging into many nitty-gritty aspects of the proposed specification. That’s important because Microsoft has of late embraced a standard-centric philosophy when it comes to what technology IE supports, and IE is of course the dominant browser on the market.

The move adds clout to the effort to renovate HyperText Markup Language, the standard used to describe Web pages, which last was formally updated in 1999. In a mailing list posting on Friday, the software giant offered a host of questions and concerns with the present proposal.

“The support of ratified standards (that Web developers) can use is something that we are extremely supportive of,” said Amy Barzdukas, general manager for IE, in a July interview. “In some cases, it can be premature to start claiming support for standards that are not yet in fact standards.”

Microsoft declined to comment for this story.

Google, Apple, and Mozilla have been trumpeting HTML 5 features in their latest browsers, but Microsoft takes a more cautious tone.

“As part of our planning for future work, the IE team is reviewing the current editor’s draft of the HTML5 spec and gathering our thoughts. We want to share our feedback and discuss this in the working group,” said Internet Explorer Program Manager Adrian Bateman in the message. “I will post our notes as we collect them so we can iterate on our thinking more quickly. At this stage we have more questions than answers, but I believe that discussing them in public is the best way to make progress.”

The formal HTML standard is under the governance of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), and Microsoft’s Chris Wilson is a co-chairman of the W3C group developing HTML. But much of the course of HTML 5 has been set so far outside that by a separate effort called the Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group (WHATWG), which browser makers launched years ago when they didn’t like the XHTML 2.0 direction the W3C was trying to take HTML.

After leaving much of the creation of a new version of HTML to Apple, Google, Opera, and Mozilla, Microsoft has begun sinking its teeth into the Web standard.

Microsoft hasn’t been uninvolved in HTML 5. It’s the origin of technology in HTML 5 called ContentEditable, which lets elements of Web pages be edited in place by people using a browser. And Microsoft said its newest browser,
Internet Explorer 8, also supports these HTML 5 components: the DOM Store, Cross Document Messaging, Cross Domain Messaging, and Ajax Navigation.

“Adventureland” star Jesse Eisenberg will be playing Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and singer Justin Timberlake will be playing Silicon Valley mainstay Sean Parker in “The Social Network,” director David Fincher’s cinematic adaptation of the company’s early days.

Jesse Eisenberg, pictured here with 'Adventureland' co-star Kristen Stewart, will be playing Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg in 'The Social Network.'

We heard a few months back that the producers were looking at some bigger names to play Zuckerberg: perpetually typecast nerd Michael Cera and “Transformers” star Shia LaBeouf. But it looks like they’re putting the real star power instead into the casting of Timberlake as Sean Parker.

(Well, it’s the company’s early days as depicted in Ben Mezrich’s juicy and most-definitely-not-authorized “The Accidental Billionaires,” which some have criticized for being factually liberal.)

(Credit:
Miramax Films)

Eisenberg, who turns 26 in a few weeks, is a decently big name himself: he’s also been seen in “The Squid and the Whale” and “The Village.” Timberlake’s musical reputation needs no introduction (he got his start, after all, in boy band ‘N Sync), but his best-known acting role might be the “Saturday Night Live” short “D*** in a Box.”

The news was first reported by Variety, which added that actor Andrew Garfield will be playing Zuckerberg’s Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin. Garfield is perhaps best known for his role in the 2007 Robert Redford film “Lions for Lambs.”

Production for Columbia Pictures’ “The Social Network,” which was written by “The West Wing” creator Aaron Sorkin, is reportedly going to begin in October in Boston.

UPDATE at 11:11 a.m. PT: It looks like the casting rumors were first reported earlier this month by the blog Scriptshadow, albeit in a far less concrete context than Variety–and the report’s coincidence with the Labor Day holiday weekend likely kept it under the radar.

States on the slow end were Mississippi (3.7 mbps), South Carolina (3.6 mbps), Arkansas (3.1 mbps), Idaho (2.6 mbps), and Alaska (2.3 mbps).

The U.S. is the only country without a national policy to promote high-speed Internet access, noted the report. But that may be about to change.

“Every American should have affordable access to high-speed Internet, no matter where they live. This is essential to economic growth and will help maintain our global competitiveness,” said Larry Cohen, president of the Communications Workers of America. “Unfortunately, fragmented government programs and uneven private sector responses to build out Internet access have left a digital divide across the country.”

Signed earlier this year, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act includes a provision for a national broadband plan by spring of next year and grants of $7.2 billion to bring high-speed Internet to rural and remote locations across the country.

That’s a step in the right direction, said the CWA. But the organization would like to see more specific improvements.

(Credit: Communications Workers of America)

The average Internet download speed in the U.S. is slower than that in 27 other countries, according to a new report by the Communications Workers of America.

The 2009 report was compiled using data from the CWA’s latest Speed Matters test, which measures the time it takes to communicate with the nearest server on the Net. Gathered from May 2008 to May 2009, the test tracked the speed of more than 413,000 Internet users.

The report discovered that Internet users who live in the Northeast or Mid-Atlantic regions enjoy faster speeds than those in the South or West. The five fastest states included Delaware (9.9 mbps), Rhode Island (9.8 mbps), New Jersey (8.9 mbps), Massachusetts (8.6 mbps), and New York (8.4 mbps).

The CWA’s 2009 Report on Internet Speeds also compared Internet performance throughout all 50 U.S. states.

Web surfing in the U.S. averages around 5.1 megabits per second (mbps), lagging far behind top-ranked South Korea, where speeds average more than 20 mbps. In 2007, the U.S. download speed was 3.5 mbps, inching up only 1.6 mbps since then. At that rate, notes the report, it will take the U.S. 15 years to catch up with South Korea.

In the report, the CWA called for such measures as an Internet infrastructure with enough capacity for 10 mbps downstream and 1 mbps upstream by 2010, tax incentives for businesses to provide faster speeds, and grants to provide computers and broadband equipment to low-income households.

Let us know if you have any problems with the stable version of Chrome. Developer preview versions of Chrome 4.0 are well under way, but Google has yet to release a Mac version of the browser despite interest from luminaries such as Google co-founder Sergey Brin.

Google redesigned the New Tab page with a click-and-drag mentality, added icons to the Omnibox to distinguish between searches, sites, and bookmarks when entering text in the address bar, and perhaps most significantly, added support for the video tag in the HTML 5 standard in a stable version of the browser.

Google announced Tuesday that the third stable release of Chrome is ready for the world, a little over a year after its debut.

Bringing HTML 5 technologies into Chrome is a huge part of Google’s strategy for both the browser and Chrome OS, coming one day to a Netbook near you. The capabilities delivered by the video tag were a highlight of Google’s presentation to developers at Google I/O in May: the tag allows Web developers to embed videos like they were photos, alleviating the need for plug-ins.

(Credit:
Google)

Chrome releases evolve from developer previews to beta releases to stable ones, and the third version of Google’s Web browser has now earned that coveted status. It’s about 25 percent faster than the Chrome 2.0 stable version, and the new version (click here for download) also comes with a few tweaks.

The stable version of Chrome 3.0 is much faster than its predecessors when it comes to JavaScript performance, according to Google.

In a post to the The WHATWG Blog spotted by Ars Technica, Google’s Mark Pilgrim, the company’s leading HTML 5 evangelist, thanked Microsoft’s Adrian Bateman for joining the conversation over HTML 5 development several weeks ago. “On August 7, 2009, Adrian Bateman did what no man or woman had ever done before: he gave substantive feedback on the current editor’s draft of HTML5 on behalf of Microsoft. His feedback was detailed and well-reasoned, and it spawned much discussion,” Pilgrim wrote.

“As you might expect, much of the discussion since August 7 has been driven by Microsoft’s feedback. After five years of virtual silence, nobody wants to miss the opportunity to engage with a representative of the world’s still-dominant browser,” Pilgrim wrote.

HTML 5 is a big part of Google’s agenda for the next several years with respect to its Chrome browser and Chrome OS project. Google executives have chided Microsoft for its slow embrace of the project, which would make all browsers more capable of running applications, but have acknowledged that Microsoft’s road to HTML 5 is complicated by the fact that many businesses have built applications around the current version of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer browser and would be forced to modify or start over from scratch when the new standards are implemented.

In a rare display of public goodwill between Google and Microsoft, the companies are bonding over Microsoft’s decision to actively participate in the HTML 5 standards process.

Google and Microsoft, of course, are otherwise at each other’s throats in the day-to-day competition to dominate the tech industry. There’s a longstanding animosity between the CEOs of the two companies, and they are each attacking the other’s backyard in hopes of defending their current dominant positions. Microsoft has invested hundreds of millions of dollars in developing a worthy competitor to Google search, and Google has taken aim at Microsoft’s dominant position in office productivity software while unveiling plans for its own lightweight operating system.

Despite its role as the developer of the most widely used browser in the world, Microsoft had been practically silent on the development of the HTML 5 standard until August, when Bateman weighed in on some potential choices for how various tags will be implemented in the standard. Since then, Bateman has endorsed the use of the <video&gt and <audio> tags in the standard, something that Google and other browser developers are very keen in including in the final standard.

Details were scarce, and a Google representative declined to comment on the nature of the conference. But given the timing and participants–Google CEO Eric Schmidt and Verizon Wireless CEO Lowell McAdam–it seems the companies are ready to talk about plans for Google’s Android mobile operating system.

It’s likewise not clear whether we are talking about a smartphone, a Netbook, or something else entirely. It will be interesting to see how Verizon’s traditional policy of tight control over the software that runs on its network meshes with Google’s free-and-open approach to Android applications.

Verizon has yet to release an Android device. At present, the carrier leans on Research In Motion’s BlackBerry smartphones, as well as Windows Mobile phones. But rumors have been building for months about Verizon hooking up with Google on a number of Android-powered phones from companies like Motorola and HTC: The Boy Genius Report reported Sunday that Best Buy plans to offer an Android device for Verizon’s network.

Google and Verizon Wireless plan to hold a joint press conference Tuesday morning on the eve of the
CTIA Wireless IT and Entertainment Show, they announced late Monday night.

Update at 5 a.m. PDT Tuesday: Google and Verizon Wireless announced they are forming a partnership to “leverage” Verizon’s 3G network and Google’s Android platform to deliver mobile applications, services, and devices. They plan to co-develop “several Android-based devices,” and Verizon will release Android handsets in the next few weeks, the companies said.

Lithium ion batteries will power a generation of electric cars slated to come to market in the next two years, replacing the nickel metal hydride batteries used in today’s hybrids.

Seeking out a better auto battery, Nissan Motor and EnerDel said Thursday that they will team up in support of research into a better conductive material for batteries.

The advantage of this method is that the liquids allow for fast charging and discharging. Batteries built this way promise to be cheaper and last longer as well.

(Credit:
EnerDel)

EnerDel lithium ion car battery.

Lithium batteries, which are also used in consumer electronics, are relatively light and allow for higher energy density. But researchers have been looking at novel approaches to improve performance and cost, including different electrolytes.

EnerDel, which makes lithium ion batteries, has agreements to supply Think Global’s city car and Fisker Automotive’s luxury plug-in electric vehicle, both of which are expected to be available in the next year. Nissan, meanwhile, plans to unveil an all-electric sedan next week, which it plans to make available next year.

Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Donald Sadoway and his student David Bradwell earlier this year built a prototype of “liquid battery” that uses three layers of molten metals–two for the battery’s electrodes and an electrolyte liquid in the middle.

The pact calls for the two companies to co-fund research at the Argonne National Laboratory to develop a new electrolyte made of a slurry liquid. The work is being done specifically for electric and hybrid vehicle batteries.

Updated at 7:00 a.m. PT with added information on MIT battery research. Updated at 11:45 PT on October 26 with correct first name of professor Sadoway.