A win for Sprint: FCC approves 3G and 4G on iDEN spectrum

The FCC has just approved an order amending the rules to the ESMR 800MHz spectrum that allows for 3G and 4G network technologies to be deployed on the band. For Sprint, this means that its subscribers will experience massive improvements in coverage, soon.

Strictly speaking, the FCC did not just say that Sprint could deploy CDMA2000 or LTE on ESMR 800, but instead, it developed an amendment to the general rules that govern ESMR 800 spectrum. These rules are known as the “FCC Part 90″, which govern “private land mobile radio services.” The actual amendment to the rules removes the restriction that forces ESMR 800 license holders to use network technologies that were narrowbanded. These services used less than 25kHz of spectral bandwidth, which is even less than 2G GSM (which uses 200kHz). There are also additional amendments regarding the notification of the change in services and such, especially in regards to border interference (since both the Canadian and Mexican borders have ESMR stations in place and active iDEN networks). The companies affected by the amendment of the rules are Sprint-Nextel Corporation and SouthernLINC Wireless (a regional iDEN provider situated in the Gulf coast).

While common convention indicates that perhaps technologies that use 1MHz or more of spectrum would be considered wideband, officially all radio technologies using more than 25kHz are wideband technologies. The FCC has amended the rules to reorganize ESMR 800 and allow for large slices to be used for network deployment, given that the licensee has enough chunks of spectrum to do that.

For Sprint, it means that it can offer massive coverage improvements through its Network Vision upgrade. Part of the upgrade mandates that the older iDEN network will be shut down cell by cell as a new Network Vision cell is installed and activated. When an iDEN cell goes offline, Sprint can go back to a Network Vision cell site and turn on CDMA2000 1X Advanced and LTE services on the frequency band previously occupied by the iDEN cell. This refarming process is similar to what T-Mobile is doing to deploy LTE.

By deploying CDMA2000 and LTE on ESMR 800 spectrum, Sprint will gain an advantage that has principally been held by AT&T and Verizon Wireless: low-band broadband wireless service. Low-band wireless services can cover larger ranges with fewer towers and provide far better indoor coverage than high-band wireless services (like the current PCS CDMA2000 service Sprint offers now). Sprint customers will truly appreciate this upgrade once new CDMA2000/LTE handsets that support the low band frequency is rolled out. The spectrum has already been approved for use with LTE as band class 26, so it is just a matter of Sprint revising its requirements to ODMs and getting the devices out there.

There is a catch, though. Sprint iPhone users will not get anything out of this. The Apple iPhone has absolutely no support for ESMR 800 for CDMA2000, and so it will not benefit from CDMA2000 services on that band at all. Since Network Vision will not improve coverage very much for PCS CDMA2000, iPhone users stand to gain virtually nothing from this. Hopefully the next iPhone will include support for the band, because Sprint users desperately need the coverage boost.

Read more from the FCC

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How Microsoft solves touch on the desktop

Here at ExtremeTech we’ve talked fairly extensively about Windows 8, particularly about how the changes coming to the operating system will affect longtime Windows users. This certainly remains a concern, and the Building Windows 8 blog has been keeping us informed with semi-regular, gargantuan epistles, but I’ve still been thinking a lot about how normal people will interact with Windows 8. These cubicle dwellers, students, and casual users won’t be on tablets and they won’t know whatWindows RT is, but soon many of them will be staring at a tile-tastic Start Screen, wondering that happened to Windows.

Microsoft seems more than comfortable with the disruption — which is refreshing to see from the company — but it will still need to give desktop users tools with which the new OS can be operated. Originally it seemed like all the touch controls and new conventions would be additive and desktop users could just ignore them if they wanted, but that might not have to be the case. With the $40 Microsoft Touch mouse users without a touch display will be able to swipe, slide, and pinch their way through Windows 8.

Microsoft’s Touch mouse has been available for the better part of a year and touch gestures in Windows are nothing new, but we know that they will play a prominent role in Windows in the future. This mouse, and ones like it, could bring multitouch controls to the desktop-using masses, making them both affordable and accessible. It could be one of the tools that let’s Windows 8′s designers achieve both their user experience and HCI goals.

Of course the mouse will work with laptops, but trackpads will be a lot more convenient and popular option. With laptops outselling desktops these days there is no question that the trackpad will be the primary gesture tool in Windows 8. And the Touch mouse will never be for Microsoft what the Magic Trackpad is for Apple — the canonical device by which Apple’s laptop and mobile device interactions are shifted to the desktop — but it could still play an important part in allowing desktop users to take advantage of the features that Windows 8 offers.

With the mandate that Windows 8 “work[s] like a device, not a computer” it’s clear that Microsoft is banking on products like this one to bridge the gap between different classes of users and different modes of Windows usage. If you think that’s strong language, thecompany also noted that it wants “touch as a first-class input method” and that it’s “embracing” touch on the desktop. How do you do that without a refresh to most of the displays in the world and a some nasty cases of “gorilla arm“? A capacitive, multitouch-capable mouse of course.

The final piece to this puzzle is Microsoft’s announcement in February that the Touch mouse will be updated for Windows 8. Specific changes were not mentioned, but I’ve been told that there will be more gestures and better gesture compatibility once Windows 8 hits GA status. Swipes will be able to handle tasks like summoning Windows 8′s charms and app bar, as well as switching between programs. Nothing you can’t with the keyboard, but with the focus on touch it’s important to give desktop users an option.

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Tech wrecks — Lessons from some of the biggest hardware screw-ups

Tech wrecks often headline our daily news, mostly the result of operator error or equipment failure — generally they are “one-off” incidents which leave the front pages as quickly as they arrive. Some failures, though, start with faulty designs, and are doomed to be repeated until diagnosed and fixed. In addition to making for good headlines, these sobering bits of high-tech history offer some valuable lessons that can help shape the way designers think and lawmakers regulate.

We’ve rounded up some of history’s most serious, famous, and instructive hardware design failures for you — avoiding bridges and buildings, as they really need an article or two of their own. Some of these failures were fatal, some a nuisance, and some even a bit humorous. All have lessons for anyone involved in designing or developing high-tech products.

Fire in the hold — Sony laptop batteries

Typical of many design failures, overheating and fires caused by manufacturing defects in Sony-made laptop batteries in 2006 were met with corporate foot-dragging and denial. After Dell recalled over four million of the batteries, Sony insisted Dell was the only computer maker affected.

A week later, after Apple had to recall millions of batteries, Sony changed its tune to claim the damage stopped with Apple. Other laptop vendors including Lenovo and HP were quick to echo the sentiment, giving technical explanations “proving” that they wouldn’t be affected. Yet, over the next few weeks nearly every major laptop maker — including Lenovo and HP — had to recall some of the Sony batteries they had been selling. Sony, and apparently Dell, had known about the manufacturing issue that caused the problem — issues in fabrication that left bits of metal in the cells — many months earlier, but decided the problem wasn’t worth fixing until the fires began being reported by customers.

PC Pitstop recreated the conditions for an exploding laptop battery in their labs, which makes for this compelling demonstration:

It’s easy to forget how widespread the effects of the battery problems were. This news report enumerates the wide variety of issues it caused, like fires in planes and burned vehicles:

The far-ranging impact of the faulty batteries is a great illustration of the law of unanticipated consequences. During the height of the controversy, the number of actual fires reported was well under 100 — a minuscule fraction of the tens of millions of laptops sold. However, when those fires were in cargo holds or in vehicles, the otherwise small failure of a battery and perhaps loss of a computer was magnified into a potentially major disaster.

Another unanticipated consequence was the firestorm of publicity that necessitated the recall. Sony learned that even a few product safety incidents were worth taking seriously, and changed its defect reporting policies after the battery debacle — a lesson Toyota would need to relearn in spades when reports of their vehicles accelerating on their own started to come in.

Square windows that changed the aviation industry — de Havilland Comet

Imagine an aviation industry led by Britain’s de Havilland, with Boeing in a distance second place. That’s how it was after the Comet — the world’s first jetliner — was introduced by de Havilland in 1952. Sleek and fast, it eventually cut six hours off the flight time from New York to London.

In order to take full advantage of its higher-powered jet engines, the airplane flew at 35,000 feet — providing a faster and smoother flight. High-altitude flying is standard today, but pressurized cabins were new and poorly understood at that time. The Comet’s designers opted for large, squared-off windows because they looked more attractive than the simpler, round “porthole” style that had been more traditional. Unfortunately for the Comet, and for dozens of passengers who would die in several resulting crashes, metal fatigue was also not well understood. Stresses piled up around the square corners of the windows, and over time planes began to drop from the sky.

Since the crashes were at high altitude and often over water, it took time before the problem could be traced to the size and shape of the windows. The sleuthing wasn’t successful until after a full-size fuselage was repeatedly pressurized in a water tank — and it failed near the window corners. Once the flaw was uncovered, the fleet was pulled out of service. While the Comet was being redesigned with new windows and a thicker skin, Boeing’s 707 and Douglas’s DC-8 were introduced and became airline favorites. By the time the newly designed Comet 4 re-entered commercial service in 1958 it was too late. Primacy in commercial aviation had moved from the UK to the US, never to return.

Engineers from both Boeing and Douglas are reported to have told de Havilland privately that they also had no idea about the fatigue and pressurization problems, and may well have made the same mistake if it hadn’t been for the Comet. Design problems were also magnified by the manufacturing process. Rivets attaching the windows were punched instead of drilled, creating more stress than expected by the designers — who had planned for drilled rivets. Wherever the blame is laid, the aviation industry benefited from the intensive analysis and resulting learnings about pressurization and metal fatigue.

Faulty O-ring — Space shuttle Challenger

Like most design-related disasters, the catastrophic failure of a pair of O-rings in the space shuttle Challenger was the result of more than just a poor design by Morton Thiokol, contractors for the ship’s solid rocket booster (SRB). NASA was also implicated by the post-mortem Rogers Commission investigation for ignoring warnings about the design for nearly a decade. A launch in cool temperatures — also flagged as a problem – exacerbated the defect, and the result was one of the worst space disasters in history.

78 seconds after launch, an O-ring (and its backup) in one of the SRBs failed, allowing gas to vent outside and begin to rip apart the shuttle. Without any escape system, all seven crew members were doomed once the craft separated into pieces. While the inadequate dual O-ring design (one primary and one backup) is certainly to blame, the incident is also a case study in how organizations ignore warning signs at their peril.

At various times over the nine years prior to the Challenger’s launch, engineers at both NASA and Morton Thiokol realized there were problems and reported them. Even right before the launch, Thiokol recommended a delay due to concerns the O-rings would fail in the cold weather. At that point it was NASA that urged the launch not be postponed — although they didn’t know the whole story about the previous concerns of design engineers about the O-rings. The seal around the O-Rings was being redesigned as the Challenger mission took flight, but the problem was never deemed serious enough to ground the shuttle program — until after the Challenger explosion, when it was halted for 32 months. When the shuttles resumed, an improved triple O-ring design was in place.

Terror on ice — Olympic bobsled run

Greed is at the heart of many tech-related tragedies, and the accidents at Whistler’s luge run built for the Vancouver Olympics were no exception. Hoping to extend the life of the run to gather tourist dollars after the big event, the track was situated on a cramped spot at the popular Whistler ski resort, instead of on a larger, safer space near the city. Normally, sled runs are carefully designed to provide exciting competition at high speeds while still providing for the safety of the competitors. Like any other design challenge, though, eventually the performance envelope gets pushed past the boundaries of safety — in this case magnified by a narrow and steep location for the course.

Even after record-breaking runs of nearly 100 miles per hour and a resulting fatality caused the Luge federation to restrict future courses to 87 mph designs, they also decided not to try and fix the Whistler track. At least by then many minor changes had been made to the run’s safety walls and the starting location to enhance safety.

As we’ve seen with our other design disasters, there was a large paper trail of concerns, legal opinions, and denial leading up to the fatal accident — which only came to light once someone was killed. The Olympic organizing committee (VANOC), the International Luge Federation (ILF) and the run’s designer, Udo Gurgel, took turns both denying they knew of problems and revealing that they had long had concerns. None of them, or the athletes — who had nicknamed turn 13 “50/50″ for their chances of making it through on course — had the courage to actually stop the event or make what proved to be important changes until international attention was drawn to the course by the high-profile accident right before the opening ceremonies of the 2010 Winter Olympics.

While not a conventional hardware failure, as we’d normally think of it, this was a failure of design and a failure to take preventative measures into account. In other words, it might seem different because of the setting and involvement of sport, but it has all the markings of a tech wreck.

First computer bug — Hopper’s Aiken Relay Calculator

When we think of bugs today, they’re usually a software problem. This poor moth, though, was found stuck in the early Aiken Relay Calculator that Grace Hopper’s team was trying to program in 1947. While the moth’s namesakes — computer bugs — have been responsible for hundreds of disasters of all sizes, and likely thousands of deaths, this poor critter did nothing more than cause the group to waste some time and it gave up its life for post-mortem glory. Amazingly, the text “First actual case of bug being found” was actually written in their log by the operators who found the moth. How did they know that bugs and debugging would go on to become two of the most famous terms in computing?

That’s actually the more interesting part of the story — the real history of the term bug. It turns out that there was an antecedent for the use of the word that explains the log entry. Edison, decades earlier, had described the process of troubleshooting a technical glitch in his phonograph as looking for an (imaginary in this case) bug. Even Edison may have borrowed the term from telegraphers — Edison got his start in telegraphy — who used it to describe problems possibly due to insects getting into the cables. So it makes sense that Hopper’s team, with a sense of humor, would refer to the moth as an “actual case” of a bug being found. Perhaps the lesson here is that you don’t have to be the first to use a term to become the one famous for it. Probably no consolation to the now infamous moth.

Purists will point out that the bug isn’t really a technical flaw, but I wanted to end the article on a humorous note because, frankly, failed hardware usually isn’t all that funny. And in any case, the photo is too good to pass up.

[Image credits: Challenger explosion, Bug log, laptop fire, bobsled, Whistler Sliding Centre,computer]

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Control your REM dreaming with Remee

For those of you who haven’t seen Waking Life, lucid dreaming is the ability to remain aware during the heavier REM sleep stages and exert a measure of control over dreams. Some people are able to do this naturally, but it is (at least theoretically) possible for anyone to train their mind to have some control over their dreams. Enter Remee, the sleep mask with an embedded Atmega168 processor and six programmable red LEDs. The device, which recently showed up on Kickstarter after 10 years of development by Duncan Frazier and Steve McGuigan. It was a huge success for the duo, bringing in $572,891 pledges — much more than their goal of $35,000.

The Remee mask is designed to be customizable while being as lightweight as possible. It closely resembles a traditional sleep mask, but it comes with several hardware additions. On the front, it has two light sensors that allow the Atmega168 processor to be programmed by holding the mask up to a computer screen (with the Remee settings website loaded). On the back, it has three red LEDs per eye, which is where the magic happens.

One of the biggest hurdles to lucid dreaming is being able to consciously realize that you are in a dream. What Remee does is activate its red lights in programmable patterns once it detects that you are in REM sleep. The light is not bright enough to wake you up, but just enough to pass through your eyelids and cause visual anomalies in your dreams. Then, during your dreaming, by noticing the anomalies in the distance, you can become aware that you are dreaming. After that, like Neo in The Matrix, can then exert control over the world that only exists in your mind.

True lucid dreaming will still take training and practice, but the Remee mask is a good tool to allow you to break through the veil and become aware during your dreams. It was a very successful Kickstater, but many likely still question whether or not the device is legit. Without having one in hand, I cannot say for sure, but I can vouch for lucid dreaming itself. Everyone’s mind is different, but it is a least plausible that the device could help someone become aware during their dreams.

More information on the Remee and the developers can be found on their Kickstarter page.

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Audi’s 50 mph e-bike pops wheelies, boasts WiFi

Audi, the company that brought you hybrid-diesel racecars, has an intriguing two-wheel concept vehicle: an ultra-light carbon fiber electric bicycle that has WiFi built in, can hit 50 mph, and even has a Segway-like mode that lets it run on just its back wheel (apparently clever computers and gyroscopes will keep you balanced).

Audi unveiled it at the 2012 Wörthersee Tour in Austria — and the e-bike itself is also called Wörthersee (which happens to be a beautiful lake in Austria). The carbon fiber frame weighs just 3.53 pounds (1.6kg) — but with a 2.3kW electric motor and lithium ion battery the bike’s total weight is 24lbs (11kg). It’s pegged as a high-performance bike for trick cycling, including the ability to ride on its back wheel alone in two of the five modes: Pure, Pedelec, eGrip, Power Wheelie, and Balanced Wheelie.

Audi says the e-bike travels up to 31 mph on the electric motor, and up to 51 mph when the rider pedals as well. The battery can be charged in 2.5 hours or quickly swapped. It’s also outfitted with WiFi and a smartphone that provides electronic controls for the bike as well as unlocking the bike — so someone else doesn’t use your bike to pop their wheelies. Price and availability? Be patient, says Audi, all in good time.

Many automakers also sell performance bikes as lifestyle accessories, but nothing like Audi’s e-bike. BMW i Ventures, the New York City-based venture fund for mobility related investments, is providing seed money for a more mainstream electric bicycle that would be light and foldable. Drive to the train station in the suburbs, carry the bike on board, get to your destination city, unfold the bike, and motor electrically to your office a mile or two away.

Read more at Audi — or watch the cool (but rather noisy) video below:

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The Leap: Gesture control like Kinect, but cheaper and much higher resolution

It seems Minority Report-style computer interfaces might arrive a whole lot sooner than we expected: A new USB device, called The Leap, creates an 8-cubic-feet bubble of “interaction space,” which detects your hand gestures down to an accuracy of 0.01 millimeters — about 200 times more accurate than “existing touch-free products and technologies,” such as your smartphone’s touchscreen… or Microsoft Kinect.

Before you read any further, watch the video below. It’s really rather awesome — and apparently the video is footage of a real The Leap unit, rather than a computer rendering (you know a device is serious when the The is part of the product name). You will also notice that it doesn’t only detect hand movements and gestures — you can use objects, such as a pen or chopsticks, or, assuming software support, your favorite pet.

Now, having watched the video, you probably have a few questions. First of all, no, we don’t know what hardware is hidden within the The Leap. Leap Motion (the company behind The Leap) has said absolutely nothing about the tech, other than it’s “unlike anything that currently exists on the market or in academia.” Realistically, the device probably uses some kind of infrared LIDAR (radar, but with light) — or perhaps it’s like a high-definition version of Kinect (which only uses a 640×480 camera, meaning it can’t come close to Leap’s 0.01mm accuracy). On the software side, there’s undoubtedly some magic at work, but again we don’t have any details beyond the fact that it uses “a patented mathematical approach.”

Technical details aside, The Leap is available to pre-order now for $70, and is expected to ship early next year. For now, Leap Motion is actually giving away free units and an SDK to developers — though I suspect there’s a limit on how many Leaps are up for grabs. Once the device gets into the hands of developers, we should have a much better idea of how the technology works.

In practice, I have some doubts about the actual usability of Leap. Personally, I don’t want to hold my arm out in front of me for 8+ hours every day — and I really doubt that interacting with Leap is somehow faster or more productive than a mouse and keyboard. If you want gesture control on a PC, or stylus input, get some kind of Wacom tablet or the Apple Magic Trackpad.

While the video is entirely desktop-oriented, perhaps a more compelling use for Leap could be in the mobile space. With 0.01mm accuracy, it would be easy enough to develop a virtual, gesture-based keyboard. On the other hand, for $70 (cheaper than Kinect!), maybe it’s worth having The Leap on your desk just in case you want to do some lean-back surfing, or other things that don’t require you to be hunched over your mouse and keyboard — or the Leap tech could just be built into the keyboard itself. Anyway, holding your arm out for eight hours might be tiring at first, but it would get easier over time. I can just see it now: The humans of the future will all have massive biceps and pecs.

Read more about Microsoft’s sonar-based gesture detection, and Disney’s Touche, which turns everyday objects into touchscreens

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London police can now download the contents of your phone in seconds

If you’re arrested around London anytime soon, watch out: the Metropolitan Police has distributed kiosks to 16 borough precincts that will allow them to extract data from your mobile device within minutes.

Officials hope this will enable them to respond quicker to situations like last July’s riots. Police suspected that Research In Motion’s BlackBerry Messenger was used as the communication medium of choice among riot ringleaders. While RIM did cooperate with authorities in allowing access to the network, that cooperation did little for those in the field attempting to quell the unrest and respond proactively to situations.

UK-based mobile forensics company Radio Tactics is supplying the system. Called ACESO (pictured below), the device works much like the units used in retail outlets to transfer data between your old and new mobile phone. ACESO downloads call logs, pictures and video, text messages and social networking data. This speeds up the analysis of mobile devices suspected to be involved in the commission of a crime, which previously had to be sent to a forensics lab.

Privacy advocates are sure to be concerned with the use of such a system, and the potential for misuse. It is not clear when and how police officers would use these units. Are devices confiscated and searched before a person is arrested, or will police only use the device once the suspect is arrested and charged with a crime?

Another issue is data storage. The Metropolitan Police are mum on what happens to the data if charges are dismissed. We all expect these police officers to do the honorable thing and delete that data, but there’s quite a few of us out there who have a distrust of law enforcement, and believe that we’re being watched regardless. It seems necessary for the agency to come out and address these concerns.

It’s worth noting that the Metropolitan Police have already had some problems when it comes to the mishandling of property: last month a member of its staff was arrested for the theft of confiscated electronics, some of which included personal data. Officials say they have “rigorous” procedures in place to protect your privacy, though.

Regardless of the procedures in place, what we know so far does not address the obvious issues. A simple suspicion of a crime appears to be enough to trigger the usage of this system. Given the fact that there is often quite a bit of personal data that should be of no interest to police on these phones, privacy advocates are sure to find it intrusive.

There is also the potential for abuse here too. While we’d like to think our police officers are upstanding, some go a bit too far in their efforts to investigate a crime. What protections are our governments giving us to prevent overuse or misuse of this system? So far, there isn’t an answer to that question from what I can see.

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Windows 8 tablet PC makers: We can’t compete with the iPad’s price

If reports from Taiwan are to be believed, hardware manufacturers are struggling to create Windows 8 on ARM (Windows RT) devices that are competitively priced against Apple’s iPad and Amazon’s Kindle Fire. The reason? According to Digitimes, OEMs have to pay Microsoft $90-100 for a Windows 8 license.

While that $90-100 figure sounds a little bit on the high side (Microsoft historically charges OEMs around $50 for desktop licenses and $30 for Windows Phone 7 licenses), it doesn’t really matter: Even at $10 or $20, Microsoft (and OEMs) would be hard pushed to compete with Amazon and Apple on price. Apple effectively gives iOS away (it’s a hardware company, after all), and Amazon gets Android for free. Microsoft has to charge for Windows 8 and Windows RT because it’s a software company; if it didn’t, it wouldn’t make any money, which shareholders might see as a bit of a problem.

The other important thing to bear in mind is that it’s virtually impossible for OEMs to create a tablet that’s comparable to the iPad, for the same price. Apple’s design, supply chain, and manufacturing dominance is so stellar that the iPad is actually one of the cheapest tablets to produce. Famously, the fat, plastic-body, WiFi-only HP TouchPad cost more to manufacture ($318) than the 3G iPad 2($310). Once you factor in the additional cost of a Windows license, there simply is no way for similarly-outfitted Windows tablets to compete on price. (As an aside, this is the same reason that OEM ultrabooks are struggling to match the MacBook Air’s specs.)

Where does this leave Windows 8/RT tablets, then? Well, for a start, Apple applies a huge markup to its tablets: The original $310-to-produce 16GB 3G iPad 2 sold for $629 (this is why Apple is the second most valuable company in the world). Windows OEMs can always undercut that price, but once they factor in license fees the profit margins will drop precipitously. It will also be interesting to see if Intel can price its SoC Atom parts (Medfield and Clover Trail) to compete with ARM. It is due to the double whammy of Intel and Windows “taxes” that Dell, HP, and other desktop PC makers only have a profit margin of around 5% (while Microsoft and Chipzilla laugh all the way to the bank with margins of 20-30%).

As long as someone is willing to take a hit to their profit margins, then, it should be possible for Windows ARM tablets to compete with the iPad and Kindle Fire. Of course, all of this speculation doesn’t take into account the fact that Windows RT could be more desirable than iOS; users might actually be willing to pay a premium for Windows tablets. For that to happen, we’d need hundreds of thousands of Windows RT apps, though, and so far it doesn’t look like that will happen. We should also remember that Apple could quite easily block the entrance of Windows RT by dropping the price of its iPads, and still remain healthily profitable.

Read about my $200 Windows 8 tablet — which seems more like a dream every day

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New Kyocera phone will put voices in your head (in a good way)

Kyocera isn’t really known for successful innovation in the smartphone realm. Anyone that remembers the dual-screen monstrosity that was the Kyocera Echo can attest to that. With Kyocera’s newest foray into Android smartphones, however, there is a notable feature that you don’t see much of. The Kyocera Urbano Progresso uses the bones in your head instead of a speaker to deliver sound to your ear. It’s called bone conduction, but how the heck is it supposed to work?

The sound you go around hearing all day is obviously transmitted to you through the air by sound waves, but you also experience bone conduction. When you speak, your own voice is transmitted through the skull as vibrations. Since bone is considerably more dense than air, your voice sounds lower to you. Ever hear a recording of your own voice? It probably sounds higher than you hear it in your head. Electronic gizmos that use bone conduction need to account for the frequency shift to avoid distortion.

A device that uses bone conduction audio is essentially bypassing the ear drum. It is your eardrum (or tympanic membrane) in the middle ear that concentrates sound waves down into vibrations that can be detected by the cochlea in the inner ear. Bone conduction vibration waves simply affect the inner ear directly. To think of it another way: a bone conduction transducer can act as your eardrum.

A major problem with bone conduction has always been the quality of the sound. Because of the nature of the bones making up your skull, stereo sound is muddy and harder to keep straight. With a phone outputting only mono sound, this is no problem. The range of frequencies you can pick up with bone conduction audio is also narrower than with sound through the air. Again, this is much more a problem for music than it is for phone calls which already have fairly poor audio quality.

One of the biggest barriers to getting bone conduction technology in phones has been the power requirement. It usually takes more power to output enough energy in the form of vibrations to match the volume you would get over the air. Kyocera claims to have solved this problem with its proprietary Smart Sonic technology.

So in a phone, the disadvantages of bone conduction are minimized, but there are also a few clear advantages. If you’ve ever been in a noisy room trying to take a call, you know how frustrating it can be as you press the speaker harder and harder to your ear in hopes of blocking out some of the background noise. With bone conduction, the sound passes right from the transducer to your inner ear making it easier to hear the other party.

People that are hard of hearing could also find unique benefits in the kind of bone conduction used in the Urbano Progresso. Most cases of hearing loss come from damage to the eardrum, which bone conduction handily circumvents. Some users with hearing loss already use hearing aids that make use of bone conduction, so the technology in this phone is not without precedent.

Kyocera plans to bring its Smart Sonic transducer technology to the US next year, but the Urbano Progresso is launching soon on Japanese carrier KDDI. Reportedly, the sound on the Kyocera Urbano Progresso is quite good, so perhaps this will be the first smartphone to successfully get this technology into people’s hands — and ears.

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Paralyzed woman uses first mind-controlled robot arm

Using BrainGate, the world’s most advanced brain-computer interface, a woman with quadriplegia has used a mind-controlled robot arm to serve herself coffee — an act she hasn’t been able to perform for 15 years. I strongly suggest you watch the video below — the expression on her face at the end is really quite beautiful.

BrainGate, which is being developed by a team of American neuroscientists from Brown and Stanford universities, and is currently undergoing clinical trial, requires a computer chip to be implanted in the motor cortex of the patient. This chip (pictured below) uses its 100 electrodes to measure neural activity, which it then transmits to a computer for processing. Like all brain-computer interfaces, the user must train the software — basically, you just repeatedly think of an action, such as move my hand up, and the software eventually correlates this thought with your measured neural activity. Once this is done, you simply think of a movement, and the software moves the robot accordingly.

It’s also worth noting that the robotic arm itself is quite intelligent: It automatically grasps things that move into its hand, and it goes into “safety mode” if it hits an obstacle. I’m sure other advancements will be added to the arm in due course, too — imagine if it could automatically detect graspable objects; and it definitely would spare the user a lot of effort if the robot could automatically maneuver close to your mouth (or other pre-defined locations).

Moving forward, the researchers would like to miniaturize the system and make it wireless. You’ll notice in the video that both BrainGate users have fairly large boxes attached to their heads, which then tethers them to a computer — not ideal, but it should be rather easy to convert it to wireless (and who knows, maybe that box can be tucked behind your ear instead).

Last month we wrote about a similar technology that directly restores movement to a paralyzed arm, rather than using a robot arm. A brain-computer interface is still used, but the output is then fed back into a functional electrical stimulation (FES) device that’s wired into your arm muscles. The big difference, though, is that BrainGate is a very mature technology: The first BrainGate chip was implanted in a human back in 2004, after years of in-monkey testing — while the FES version is still trialing its tech on monkeys, meaning it’s probably at least 10 years behind BrainGate.

Between bionic eyes, the successful decoding of your thoughts by computers, and silicon chips that mimic the brain, and these recent brain-computer interface advances, things are definitely looking up for victims of paralysis and neurological diseases — and cyberpunk, bionic implant junkies like myself.

Read more at BrainGate or Nature (paywalled)

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