The co-founder of SanDisk and one of the illustrious fathers of flash memory, Eli Harari, says that flash memory will “checkmate” hard drives by 2020. This is in stark contrast to Microsoft Research and UCSD, which earlier this week claimed thatsolid-state storage would meet its maker by 2024.

Speaking at the International Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISSCC) on Monday,Harari not only proclaimed that NAND flash would supplant spinning-platter hard drives, but also that DRAM could be on the way out as well. “Today, the cost of NAND per gigabyte is 10 times lower than the cost of DRAM … and that’s not likely to change,” Harari said. “The question is, can 10 gigabytes of NAND or one gigabyte of DRAM give you a better performance boost?”

Flash has been the dominant storage medium for years in the mobile space — cheap NAND was one of the most important factors in the explosion of digital photography and smartphones — and through tablets, ultrabooks, and enterprise applications, SSDs are really starting to dig into the HDD market share. With the steadily declining price of solid-state drives and their far superior performance, it’s really no big surprise.

According to Harari, though, it will be 3D resistive RAM (3D-ReRAM) that results in “checkmate for the hard disk drive industry.” ReRAM is a very old tech, but for various reasons never made it to the limelight — until 2008, when HP created the first memresistor. In much the same way that Intel has moved to FinFET to scale beyond 22nm, 3D-ReRAM is expected to take over from NAND flash at around 11nm, sometime in the next few years.

It is anticipated that 3D-ReRAM will be so fast and high-density that hard drives will be reduced to specific use cases, much like magnetic tape. “I believe that by 2020, flash – -which is highly scaled NAND and 3D resistive RAM –- will be the undisputed king of storage,” Harari predicts.

Finally, Herari also notes that the emergence and increasing reliance on cloud computing and storage could pose an issue, especially for mobile devices. Ultimately, irrespective of how much flash storage we have, mobile bandwidth is finite. There’s no point having hundreds of gigabytes of ultra-fast flash storage both in the cloud and on your phone when it can cost tens of dollars to transfer a single gigabyte of cellular data over a few-megabit connection.

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When it comes to product branding, Nvidia’s track record is actually pretty good. “GeForce” stood for Geometry Force, a moniker that made sense given that it debuted with support for Quake III‘s curved surfaces. “Tegra” is formed from the word “integral,” “Tesla” is a reference to one of the great scientists of the 20th century, and “Ion” was a great name for a product designed around Intel’s Atom (ions are atoms with a positive or negative charge). The name “Nvidia” is itself a reference to the Roman goddess of envy and jealousy, Invidia. The color most commonly associated with envy and jealousy? Green!

Nvidia, in other words, is pretty darn smart when it comes to branding, brand associations, and clever plays on words, which is why the company’s new name for Tegra 3′s Companion Core is abnormally wretched. According to a company blog post, Tegra 3′s unique quad-core + Companion Core will henceforth be known as… the 4-PLUS-1 quad-core architecture. The post offers the following explanation: “The reason is that, the more popular this technology became, the more our customers wanted a name for it that’s unique and descriptive. A name they could put on a box or a store sign that immediately represents its value.”

The problem with 4-Plus-1 is that equations make terrible brand names. The first thing anyone over the age of four is likely to think after reading 4-plus-1 is “five.” Nvidia’s next descriptive phrase? “Quad-core architecture.” As a technical description of how the Companion Core functions, 4-plus-1 isn’t bad. As a descriptive phrase that “immediately represents its value,” it’s terrible. The strongest linguistic and pop-culture references for 4-plus-1 are linked to two Christian bands (one real, one formed by Cartman on South Park), a cancelled British sitcom, Google’s +1 button, and, inevitably, Seven of Nine.

Nvidia seems to be aware of this problem, given that the blog entry actually finishes with a reference to Prince, stating that “while Prince Rogers Nelson initially changed his stage name to Prince and then to TAFKAP (the Artist Formerly Known as Prince) when he took up a symbol combining elements of male and female symbology, 4-PLUS-1 is here to stay.”

Way to take the wrong lesson. Prince changed his name to unpronounceable symbol because he wanted to emancipate himself from Prince, which he saw as being owned by Warner Brothers. This backfired stupendously because it left the world with no acceptable alternative on what to call him. “The dude we used to call Prince” wasn’t actually what Prince wanted to be called — it was the best anyone could come up with.

Nvidia’s mistake, in this case, was to focus on conveying what the technology was rather than what it did. The Companion Core is interesting, not because it means the chip has a PentaQuad of cores, but because it allows Tegra 3 to reduce its power consumption below what it could otherwise reach. Nvidia would’ve done better to wrap the Companion Core concept into a family and call it Low Power Drive, or brand it as “Part of the Optimus family.”

The company claims that 4-Plus-1 is here to stay. We hope not. Companion Core might have been imprecise, but it actually summarized the situation a whole lot more effectively.

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The tinfoil hat-wearing crowd loves to make hay about Big Brother tracking your every move. While some of their claims are a little outlandish, there is past history out there of companies doing some pretty shady things. That is about to change.

After attempting to fight it off for the better part of the year, web companies including Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, and AOL, working with the Obama Administration, are now agreeing to abide by new Do Not Track (DNT) technologies to be built into browsers. This will put some strict (although not necessarily comprehensive) polices on what companies can track you on.

Gone are tracking cookies that customize ads based on the websites you visit, and the data collected can no longer be used for purposes other than advertising. This means companies in the healthcare, employment, and credit industries will not be able to purchase this data to make business decisions. The Federal Trade Commission will add some regulatory oomph, just to make sure these companies follow the rules.

Companies like Facebook would get a pass, allowing their sharing features to continue to work. Law enforcement would also have the right to peer into companies tracking data, and the companies collecting data can use it for research and product development, the US Administration says.

Tracking has become a hot-button issue as of late. Google has consistently been in hot water over its own use of tracking cookies, including just this past week when it was caught circumventing Safari’s privacy settings to install tracking code. The news set off a firestorm of criticism against the company, and spurred additional scrutiny from regulators.

But this goes far beyond Google — as early as 2000, DoubleClick was using similar tracking cookies, following your every move in order to serve you better advertisements. Ironically, DoubleClick is now owned by Google: the two merged in 2007.

Obviously, not everyone’s going to trust that the government has everything under control, and will be working in our best interest. For those of you that still prefer to wear the tinfoil hat, downloading an add-on for your browser like Collusion for Firefox is certainly an option. This particular app will show you how you’re being tracked. Other programs like Spybot Search & Destroy will also detect and remove these types of cookies.

Bottom line here is this: if you are really worried about having your online travails be tracked, take matters into your own hands and foil the efforts of evil Big Brother. Don’t wait for the government to fix the tracking issue or enforce rules against it. Personal responsibility is key.

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For Boot to Gecko to succeed it must have apps, and to create apps you need developers. That’s why, at MWC — according to a source close to the matter — Mozilla will also be announcing that it has partnered up with LG to make a developer-oriented mobile device. Our source couldn’t confirm the specs or the price, but with MWC around the corner we should know soon. Availability-wise, it’s possible that the LG device will go on sale next week, but considering how nascent B2G is — it will probably be usable by the middle of 2012 — it’s important to stress that this is very much a developer device.

Consumers will get their first taste of the Marketplace in Firefox 13, which will feature an app launcher as part of the long-waited Home Tab app launcher. Firefox 13 will be released at the beginning of June, giving developers plenty of time to build apps for both the ‘Fox and B2G.

Now the LG partnership is pretty extraordinary in itself, but that’s not all. Brendan Eich, the creator of JavaScript and the Chief Technology Officer of Mozilla, says that there will be partners, plural, at MWC. Unfortunately our inside source couldn’t give us any information on who these partners might be, but we can make an educated guess: Carriers; carriers like AT&T, Vodafone, Deutsche Telekom, NTT DoCoMo, and many others who have registered their distaste for the proprietary, walled gardens that Apple and Google have been building around their mobile operating systems.

Basically, Apple and Google have so much control over the smartphone landscape that carriers have effectively become nothing more than retailers. Worse than that, their infrastructures have been reduced to that of a dumb pipe, where it is Apple and Google who ultimately decide how the network will be used.

With Boot to Gecko, carriers would have an open operating system, based on an open browser and framework, with a truly open Marketplace. Carriers could create their own Open Web Marketplace and populate it with their own apps, and create their own rules. They could brand the OS and load it up with as much or as little bloatware as they like. With B2G, carriers would once again be in control.

That’s just a tiny, very-zoomed-in glimpse of the future, though. The bigger picture is even more exciting. Basically, B2G is just a cut-down version of Linux that automatically loads Firefox; basically, it’s likeChrome OS, but lower tech. Underneath B2G, however, are Web APIswhich allow HTML5 and JavaScript to talk directly to your computer’s hardware. In the case of B2G, a Web API lets you make a call using an HTML web page, or access the camera to upload a new photo to Facebook. Web APIs are part of Firefox, however, not B2G. These same Web APIs will exist in Firefox for Android and Firefox for desktop, and because they’re an open spec they could even be implemented by Google in Chrome. Ultimately, the LG coup is big news, but Mozilla has much bigger fish to fry: It’s trying to turn every browser into an operating system.

Read more at Mozilla, or read more about Boot to Gecko

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Conventional wisdom dictates that the larger the screen, the further back a viewer needs to be for comfortable viewing. Parents are constantly bugging kids to sit further from the TV, and most people don’t like to get stuck too close to a movie theater screen either. So it makes perfect sense that the tech industry turned this phenomenon into a feature war, starting with Apple claiming that the iPhone 4 family have “Retina displays,” detailed enough so that at a typical distance of 12 inches its IPS screens are claimed to have more resolution than your eye, and therefore are some sort of perfection — at least in detail.

Excitement over this marketing claim-turned-buzzword has led to speculation on the maximum resolution needed for all sorts of other displays, especially monitors and TVs. Pundits have started claiming that the world will end at 4K displays (at 3840×2160 they are double 1080p resolution in each dimension) since from TV viewing distances any greater resolution is speculated to be overkill. That sort of thinking is the product of very limited imagination. It’s based on the assumption that the viewer is looking at the entire contents of the display at once. Typically true for conventional TV shows and movies, but less and less so with screens packed with augmented content, ultra-high definition sources, and immersive videoconferencing.

Don’t believe it? Look out your window. Now walk over to it. Stand next to it. Still looks pretty good, doesn’t it? Doesn’t strain your eyes, and it probably doesn’t bother you that you can’t see everything outside all at the same time. Next imagine a display with the same resolution — and perhaps even the same dynamic range — projecting an image of another place. Decades ago that type of video wall was the subject of science fiction, as in Ray Bradbury’s parlor walls, but we are getting closer to making them a reality. For example, Sharp’s “5D” feature attraction uses 156 LCD screens to create an immersive experience for up to 32 parkgoers at a time.

For me, the “aha” moment was seeing the prototype 8K (four times the resolution of 1080p in each direction) 84-inch display Sharp demonstrated at CES. I could walk right up to it and feel like I was looking through a window at a scene on the other side. Only the fear of being rude to the other couple dozen gawkers kept me from standing next to it in something of a trance as scenes of the Capitol mall and New York City passed by.

There is also good reason to doubt that Apple’sRetina displays have truly matched what the eye is capable of. Optical experiments have shown that humans can actually detect detail up to 600 pixels-per-inch at a 12-inch distance (nearly double the 326 PPI density of Apple’s Retina displays). Limitations on source material, video controllers, and displays have conspired to make our current video walls more of movie screen on steroids than anything you’d want surrounding your living room, but there is good reason to believe displays won’t stop when they reach any arbitrary “retina” threshhold.

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In a recent editorial at The Wall Street Journal, FCC Commissioner Robert McDowell blasted the upcoming ITU World Conference on International Telecommunications (WCIT-12). According to McDowell, Russia, China, and their allies at the ITU want to monitor all internet communications, allow foreign companies to charge for international internet traffic “perhaps even on a per-click basis,” impose economic regulations, take over ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers), and conquer the Internet Engineering Task Force.

McDowell reaches a bombastic crescendoby claiming that the treaty will more-or-less destroy everything, everywhere, writing: “Productivity, rising living standards and the spread of freedom everywhere, but especially in the developing world, would grind to a halt as engineering and business decisions become politically paralyzed within a global regulatory body.”

The FCC Commissioner’s threat assessment is completely out-of-step with the US government’s opinion, as shown in a leaked memo from January 23, 2012. The memo notes that while there was “great and widespread concern” a year ago that WCIT-12 would be a battle over the role the ITU should play in internet governance, the US spent 12 months working to limit the scope and nature of the issues that will be considered at the treaty negotiations. As a result, “There are no pending proposals to invest the ITU with ICANN-like Internet governance authority. Neither cybersecurity nor Internet governance predominate discussion in any region.”

Among the charges leveled at the ITU are claims that the treaty could “Impose unprecedented economic regulations such as mandates for rates, terms and conditions for currently unregulated traffic-swapping agreements known as ‘peering.’” As we’ve said, there’s literally no such agreement under consideration — but the inclusion of this point sheds light on why certain parties are so interested in keeping this issue in the news.

Under the current unregulated peering system, foreign ISPs pay US ISPs a fee to carry internet traffic, which means US companies make a tidy sum of cash off foreign access. If internet servers were truly decentralized — the “Balkanization” McDowell fears — US ISPs would end up paying considerably more money to their foreign counterparts.

Those bright white lines aren’t just revenue sources, they’re control linkages. If you work for the MPAA/RIAA or back laws like SOPA and PIPA, those links are absolutely vital. Any attempt to create an international system of internet governance would weaken the RIAA and MPAA’s efforts to implement SOPA-style censorship. Both bills were aimed at restricting and controlling foreign internet traffic, which means both intrinsically assumed that such traffic would be flowing through the United States.

An equally distributed intra-planetary internet would still take geolocation into account for routing and access purposes, but would effectively eliminate the concept of “foreign” websites. SOPA and PIPA were meant to be palatable to the general US population precisely because they exploited an us/them mentality and claimed to be protecting America. If internet control were to shift towards nations that favored fewer copyright restrictions, internet access as a human right, and limited punishment for piracy, it would be a serious threat to content distributors.

McDowell’s claims are factually inaccurate and hyperbolic. They paint a false dichotomy between the idea that the internet today is a free-wheeling, uncontrolled frontier, while the alternative is a fascist state. The internet, as it exists today, is highly regulated. Some of that regulation was inherited or expanded from the old laws governing telephone access and line-sharing, some of it is applied via laws like the DMCA. ICANN is not a direct arm of the US government, but it’s a far cry from a private corporation. The publicized debates around net neutrality and the FCC last year are further evidence that the idea of an unregulated internet is a fallacy.

At the other end of the equation, no one advocates handing over complete control of the internet to the likes of Russia, China, Myanmar, and Iran. There’s no reason not to open internet governance slowly and gradually, unless you represent a faction who views such a process as an unacceptable loss of control. Regardless of how you feel about the issue, McDowell’s editorial only clouds the debate with demagoguery. It’s a blatant attempt to fire people up emotionally with virtually no grounding in objective fact. The internet is going nowhere, regardless of what happens at the upcoming meeting. Ultimately, however, this isn’t a debate about whether the internet is regulated, but an argument over who should control the regulatory process. If US lawmakers continue pushing bills like SOPA and PIPA, they may find an increasing number of US citizens who think the UN is a more attractive alternative — a concept editorials like this are meant to thwart.

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Graphene, the wonder material that keeps on giving, has now been found to be the thinnest anti-corrosion coating known to man. Researchers at Vanderbilt University, Nashville say that graphene is as effective as conventional anti-corrosion coatings, but five times thinner. Unlike any other anti-corrosion coating, a coating of graphene is transparent.

Metallic corrosion is serious business. According to a 2002 study by the US Federal Highway Administration, the total cost of corrosion across the entirety of the country was $276 billion, some 3.2% GDP; around the same amount that the US spends on its military. For the most part, corrosion prevention generally involves regular coatings of paint — bridges are the most prominent example — and processes such as anodization, where a piece of metal is covered in a protective layer of oxide.

Funnily enough, despite its status as the thinnest and lightest structure known to man, these anti-corrosive coats of graphene could even be applied by rubbing a piece of graphite over a surface. The Vanderbilt study notes that “nickel surfaces coated with four layers of mechanically transferred graphene corrode 4 times slower than bare nickel” — and in this case, “mechanically transferred” involves rubbing with a piece of graphite, or perhaps peeling off a single layer of graphene with a piece of sticky tape, and then applying that to a metallic surface. The next time painters scale the Golden Gate Bridge they might be carrying a lump of graphite instead of a paint bucket.

As far as electronics and other high-tech applications are concerned, though, we are much more interested in the chemical vapor deposition (CVD) of graphene. The Vanderbilt researchers used CVD to grow a one-atom-thick layer of graphene on a piece of copper, which then corroded seven times slower than normal. This same process could be used on the copper interconnects in computer chips, implantable medical devices, high-tech equipment (aerospace, super cars, and so on), or designer goods, where graphene’s negligible size and weight and transparency would be highly desirable.

Read more at ScienceDaily, or find out more about graphene

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One of the most significant challenges AMD has faced with Trinity, its next-generation mobile APU, is ensuring that the chip is positioned properly to capitalize on Llano’s success. Now, new information from Cyclos Semiconductor has shed light on part of the company’s strategy for doing so. Trinity is designed to use Cyclos’ clock mesh technology, which reportedly delivers significant power savings.

All microprocessors rely on a clock rate, which must be propagated across the surface of the chip. Because it controls the function of the entire microprocessor, the clock signal must avoid jitter (inconsistent time between two clock pulses) and skew (clock pulses that arrive at different areas of the chip at different times). High-end microprocessors typically implement what’s known as a clock mesh. This approach minimizes skew, but uses significantly more power than a clock tree. Estimates on how much of a CPU’s power consumption is due to its clock scheme vary, but all agree that the figure is significant.

That’s where Cyclos comes in. The company uses a tank circuit (also known as an LC circuit) to store electrical energy. Electricity passes from the capacitor to the inductor, where it creates a magnetic field. When the capacitor’s charge reaches zero, the current flow reverses — power shifts from the inductor to the capacitor, and the magnetic field dissipates. This process is analogous to the movement of a pendulum or the sloshing of water in a tank, which is where the “tank circuit” moniker comes from.

Here’s the key: It takes significantly less power to keep the pendulum swinging than it does to start over from a neutral position each and every cycle. Cyclos’ design reportedly cuts clock distribution power by “up to 24% while maintaining the low clock-skew target required by high-performance processors.” Cyclos claims that using its technology can cut total IC power by up to 10%.

Using a resonant clock mesh for Trinity/Piledriver isn’t a magic bullet, but it’s a marginal improvement that should help AMD reach its power and clock speed goals. The former are more important than the latter — pushing above 4GHz is pointless if the company can’t keep power consumption at levels that match Intel’s.

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Canon may soon offer a mirrorless interchangeable lens camera (ILC). That’s the buzz in the wake of Canon patent filing for a kit lens for a mirrorless camera, first spotted by the Japanese website Egami. Canon is the world’s biggest camera maker but so far has been absent from the hottest technology, the mirrorless ILC pioneered by Panasonic-Olympus, Sony, and most recently Nikon. Mirrorless cameras offer the quality of a digital SLR without the noise, bulk, or weight.

The Canon patent filing is for an 18-45mm f/3.5-5.6 lens with 12 elements in 11 groups. If it’s to be mounted on an ILC body using the APS-C sensor, the same size as Canon’s Rebel and prosumer 60D-7D cameras, that means it’s a moderate wide-angle to short-telephoto lens, the same as a 29-70mm lens on a full-frame 35mm camera. Not every exciting. This can’t be the only lens coming, unless Canon wants its competitors to get more of a lead than they already have. There definitely needs to be a wider-aperture lens with more range (say 17-55mm f/2.8), a wide-angle zoom, a telephoto zoom, and just-take-one-lens 10X zoom, say 20mm-200mm. Sony has nine NEX lenses. For its DSLRs, Canon has 83 lenses.

The mirrorless interchangeable lens camera was a game-changer for Sony, which was hot early on in the digital camera era (80s and 90s) with the genius idea to capture images on a 3.5-inch floppy disk drive (a Sony invention) mounted on the back of the camera, back when digicams were huge and users were clueless about file transfer via USB 1.1. Sony has been an up and down empire. It lost its way in cameras transitioning to another Sony storage invention, the proprietary Memory Stick, when everyone else gravitated to SD or CF. Being early with a superbly crafted mirrorless camera has Sony back in the game. Nikon followed with the Nikon 1. (Both were preceded by Micro Four Thirds cameras from Panasonic and Olympus.) As a group, these mirrorless cameras are sometimes also called MSC for mirrorless system camera and sometimes they’re called EVIL for Electronic Viewfinder Interchangeable Lens camera.

The closest thing Canon has to a sub-$1,000 ILC is the non-interchangeable lens Canon PowerShot G1 X, $800 street, with mixed reviews. PCMag.com’s Jim Fisher reviews it as “a tough sell, as you can get an equally-capable compact camera, D-SLR, or mirrorless interchangeable lens camera for less money.” The one advantage to the G1 X is the camera is smaller with the lens retracted than its ILC semi-competitors with their basic lenses in place. At that almost-$1,000 price point, the only other hot ticket has been the growth of rangefinder-style retro digital cameras, like theFujifilm X-Pro1; the G1 X looks a little like a Leica, not a lot.

The Micro Four Thirds sensor is a bit smaller than APS-C, which in turn is about two-thirds the size of a full-frame 35mm camera. Micro Four Thirds is a 4:3 ratio (the same as standard-def TV) while APS-C is 3:2 (close to the high-def TV 16:9 ratio). But all have sensors about 10 times as large as most fixed-lens pocket cameras, and the bigger the sensor, the better the image.

As the 800-pound gorilla of cameras, Canon over time has the opportunity to do two mirrorless interchangeable lens camera types:

APS-C mirrorless ILC

This is the camera that would come first; Canon’s take on the Sony Nex/Nikon 1. It would have an APS-C size sensor (give or take) and have purpose-built lenses designed for compactness and light weight, such as the lens described in the patent. But it also could accept the array of Canon EF-S lenses (for APS-C DSLRs) and EF lenses (full-frame and APS-C DSLRs), most likely with an adapter that retains functionality (as Nikon does for Nikkor DSLR lenses). The Canon DSLR lenses would be bulkier than needed. But for many Canon users, they’re already in their lens collections, paid for, and ready for use. The camera would also have a flash shoe that works with Canon’s versatile and not-inexpensive flashes.

This camera would appeal to users looking to step up from as a simpler point-and-shoot digital camera, and would be a must-buy for Canon enthusiasts or pros looking for an additional camera body (except Nikon DSLR users with their own lens investments). A pro would turn to this camera for work where quiet is important, such as a courtroom. Once you’ve got several thousand dollars invested in Canon lenses and flashes, you’re unlikely to switch brands. Canon has a chance to trump Sony and Nikon if the adapter (almost certainly required because of the shorter camera depth) allows auto focus (including continuous focus for action photography), multiple focus points, image stabilization, and auto aperture control, areas where Sony or Nikon come up short.

Super-compact mirorrless ILC

As sensor technology evolves (APS-C is at 20 megapixels, full frame at 40, and how much do you need?), Canon has the ability to come in with a tinier camera with a smaller sensor and still-smaller lenses. The Micro Four Thirds sensor is 17.3×13.0 mm; a sensor 10mm wide with 20 megapixels resolution might be a target. Compatibility with existing Canon lenses would be nice but not essential since even a wide-angle would be a telephoto. The only problem is that dust doesn’t get smaller, too, so smaller ILC cameras will need super dust control mechanisms or even a shutter that slides to cover the sensor when the lens is removed.

Over the course of a century, big advances have come from quartering the size of the previous standard for film or sensor: 8×10 to 4×5 to 2.25 inches squared to 35mm to APS. The APS film format was Kodak’s big move in 1996, just in time to be trampled by the rush to digital. More recently, an ILC digital camera might have been Kodak’s last chance at camera salvation. Canon is in no risk of going under without an interchangeable lens camera but it’s a trend that won’t go away and one no camera maker can ignore long-term.

Read more at Egami (machine translated)

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Asus has taken advantage of native mouse and keyboard support with the Transformer line of devices, and HDMI-out connectors are becoming more and more common on phones. With a few cables and some peripherals, you can run a desktop-like experience from the Android 4.0 phone that rides around in your pocket.

What you need

There are two ways to get HDMI output on your Android smartphone. Some devices have mini-HDMI ports that only require a HDMI-to-mini-HDMI cable or converter. Classic devices like the Evo 4G and almost all Motorola devices use mini-HDMI. This keeps the USB port free for external power or syncing while outputting video. These cables are also extremely cheap; on the order of a few dollars.

Other phones make use of the micro-USB port for video out through a technology called Mobile High-definition Link (MHL). This has become the more common method as it doesn’t require a second plug in the device. Because there is nothing externally different about an MHL-enabled USB port, many users don’t know their device has this capability. The HTC Sensation, Galaxy Nexus, and Galaxy S II are some of the more popular devices that use MHL. Make sure to check device specs before assuming a phone does or doesn’t support video out. MHL adapters are a bit more pricey at roughly $15. An additional standard HDMI cable is also needed, but those are a dime a dozen these days.

What makes this a useful setup is the robust mouse and keyboard support built into each and every Android 4.0 device, as well as the new on-screen buttons in Android 4.0. Almost any Bluetooth mouse and keyboard should be recognized, but some might not have quite the same level of support in software. All the standard functions should work, though.

Finally, and this is the big one, you need an Android 4.0 device. We’re using a Samsung Galaxy Nexus for testing, but you could use a tablet of some sort as well. When Ice Cream Sandwich begins to show up on more devices, many more users will have access to this functionality.

Setting up the display

Android 4.0 devices should need no configuration to get video up on a monitor or TV. Depending on the screen, you may need to tweak the video or audio settings on that equipment, though. If your device has mini-HDMI, just plug in your cable, and the video should be up. Make sure you plug the charger into the device as well to mitigate the battery drain from powering the larger display.

MHL devices like the Galaxy Nexus require you to attach the adapter, plug in the HDMI cable, and plug your power cable into the MHL adapter itself. This additional USB port is often small and unmarked, leading many users to miss it entirely. This provides power for the adapter, and the device simultaneously. The drawback to this approach is that less power is delivered to your phone, and it may actually drain the battery very, very slowly.

Image quality on a 1920×1080 panel is fairly good. The Android user interface automatically rotates, and orients itself for easier use on a large screen. The search box becomes a button, and a new voice search button is shown next to it. There is a bit more banding visible on some UI elements simply by virtue of being up-scaled to 1080p from 720p on the phone itself. If your display has built-in speakers, the HDMI carries sound as well. That’s much better than that tiny phone speaker.

Adding a keyboard and mouse

When you tether a Bluetooth mouse and keyboard, Android will instantly recognize them as input devices, and integrate them into the software. You can type in any text field with the keyboard, and a mouse cursor will be available as a point-and-click device not unlike a PC. It is this step that frees you from holding onto the phone to control the interface.

Keyboard input is very snappy, and all special characters were properly detected on the phone. You can use the arrow keys to navigate around the device, and hit the enter button to open items. The escape key can be used in place of the back button in most (but not all) circumstances. Page up and down on the keyboard are also excellent for paging through the app list, web pages, or documents.

The keyboard we tested with has media controls on it, and we were delighted to find that Android understood them perfectly. Volume control and play/pause worked as intended with the default music player. Alt-Tab will work in most places to pull up a multitasking interface, but not the standard one from ICS. It will use the old Gingerbread-style grid of icons, and hitting tab repeatedly cycles through recent apps.

A mouse is an odd way to operate Android, but it’s by no means useless. The cursor has no right-click functionality, which is a little sad. It would be nice if a right-click brought up a long-press context menu where one is available. The scroll wheel works in almost all apps, with one painful exception being the new Chrome beta for Android.

Pointing and clicking are all well and good, but those times you find yourself simulating swipes with a mouse, it ends up a very unsatisfying experience. Pulling down the notification tray, swiping between screens, and swiping away apps/tabs are all places the mouse feels wrong. Dragging the mouse over to hit the on-screen system button is also a bit odd.

What is it good for?

We found web browsing with the stock browser app to be a solid experience. It works with the scroll wheel, and can use fast useragent switching to pull down the desktop version of a page. Full-screen web browsing actually feels desktop-like with the mouse paired. Clicking links in cramped areas is also much improved with a mouse. Having a cursor that can hover over page elements also lets you use desktop web pages as they were intended.

The Google Docs app was also a good experience with the keyboard attached. The font is a little too big, but it’s definitely workable. Using Gmail was also nice overall. Some of the UI elements are too big for such a large screen, but reading and responding to email is a breeze with a keyboard and mouse.

As you might expect, streaming video is great with the device tethered to a screen. There’s a bit more artifacting than you’d see on the smaller screen, but you have a cellular data connection for mobile access to streaming services. The Netflix app plays well, but since it doesn’t have landscape mode in the main app, it can be a pain to start playback.

If you have a Bluetooth gamepad, some games can also be great fun when mirrored on a bigger screen. Games like Shadowgun almost have console-quality graphics on the right hardware, and will natively support controller input. Your options are a little bit limited right now, but as ICS becomes the standard for new phones, expect more companies to put gamepads out.

You’re not going to completely replace a desktop system with this solution, but an Android phone can take over a lot of traditional computing tasks in a pinch. Word processing and web browsing are great, as is video playback. There are times when the interface just feels awkward, like when you have to swipe with a mouse click. Still, the simple fact that a phone can do all this — and withoutUbuntu for Android — is rather amazing.

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