There is a lot of chatter saying that Apple plans to unveil the new iPad 3 in the first week of March during an event in San Francisco. “Retail availability will follow roughly the same schedule as that of the iPad 2: available for purchase a week or so after the event,” said John Paczkowski who first reported on the new iPad3 in AllThingsD.

The Cupertino based company released the first iPad in April 2010. 300,000 iPads were sold on their first day of availability, and within 80 days, Apple delivered 3 million units. During 2010, the company captured a world market share of about 75 percent by selling a total of 14.8 million iPads.

The second generation iPad 2, released in March 2011, featured a dual-core processor, front- and back cameras supporting the FaceTime video calling application, and a three-axis gyroscope. As in the original iPad, battery life was about 10 hours. The current iPad 2 is available with 16, 32, and 64 GB internal flash memory.

From 2008 to 2011, Fortune magazine named Apple, established on April 1, 1976, the most admired company in the world. Photo: EL

The Fourier transform is one of the most fundamental concepts in the information sciences. It’s a method for representing an irregular signal such as the voltage fluctuations in the wire that connects an MP3 player to a loudspeaker as a combination of pure frequencies. It’s universal in signal processing, and it can be used to compress image and audio files, solve differential equations and price stock options, among other things.

The reason the Fourier transform is so prevalent is the FFT, devised in the mid-1960s, which made it practical to calculate Fourier transforms on the fly. Like the FFT, the new algorithm works on digital signals. A digital signal is just a series of numbers - discrete samples of an analog signal, such as the sound of a musical instrument.

The FFT takes a digital signal containing a certain number of samples and expresses it as the weighted sum of an equivalent number of frequencies. “Weighted” means that some of those frequencies count more toward the total than others. Indeed, many of the frequencies may have such low weights that they can be safely disregarded. That’s why the Fourier transform is useful for compression. An eight-by-eight block of pixels can be thought of as a 64-sample signal, and thus as the sum of 64 different frequencies. But as the MIT researchers point out in their paper, empirical studies show that on average, 57 of those frequencies can be discarded with minimal loss of image quality.

Signals whose Fourier transforms include a relatively small number of heavily weighted frequencies are called “sparse.” The new algorithm determines the weights of a signal’s most heavily weighted frequencies; the sparser the signal, the greater the speedup the algorithm provides. Indeed, if the signal is sparse enough, the algorithm can simply sample it randomly rather than reading it in its entirety.

“In nature, most of the normal signals are sparse,” says Dina Katabi, associate professor of MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) and one of the developers of the new algorithm. Consider, for instance, a recording of a piece of chamber music: The composite signal consists of only a few instruments each playing only one note at a time. A recording, on the other hand, of all possible instruments each playing all possible notes at once wouldn’t be sparse - but neither would it be a signal that anyone cares about.

The new algorithm relies on two key ideas. The first is to divide a signal into narrower slices of bandwidth, sized so that a slice will generally contain only one frequency with a heavy weight. In signal processing, the basic tool for isolating particular frequencies is a filter. But filters tend to have blurry boundaries: One range of frequencies will pass through the filter more or less intact; frequencies just outside that range will be somewhat attenuated; frequencies outside that range will be attenuated still more; and so on, until frequencies are reached that are filtered out almost completely.
If it so happens that the one frequency with a heavy weight is at the edge of the filter, however, it could end up so attenuated that it can’t be identified. So the researchers’ first contribution was to find a computationally efficient way to combine filters so that they overlap, ensuring that no frequencies inside the target range will be unduly attenuated, but that the boundaries between slices of spectrum are still fairly sharp.

Once they’ve isolated a slice of spectrum, however, the researchers still have to identify the most heavily weighted frequency in that slice. They do this by repeatedly cutting the slice of spectrum into smaller pieces and keeping only those in which most of the signal power is concentrated.

The team plans to present the new algorithm at the Association for Computing Machinery’s Symposium on Discrete Algorithms (SODA).

A new algorithm that improves on the fast Fourier transform (FFT) was developed by a team of MIT researchers. The algorithm can help to dramatically compress music and video files. The picture shows sine waves of several frequencies. Photo: Public Domain

By attaching a microphone to a touchscreen, the CMU scientists showed they can tell the difference between the tap of a fingertip, the pad of the finger, a fingernail and a knuckle. This technology, called TapSense, enables richer touchscreen interactions. While typing on a virtual keyboard, for instance, users might capitalize letters simply by tapping with a fingernail instead of a finger tip, or might switch to numerals by using the pad of a finger, rather toggling to a different set of keys.

Another possible use would be a painting app that uses a variety of tapping modes and finger motions to control a pallet of colors, or switch between drawing and erasing without having to press buttons.

"TapSense basically doubles the input bandwidth for a touchscreen," said Chris Harrison, a Ph.D. student in Carnegie Mellon's Human-Computer Interaction Institute (HCII). "This is particularly important for smaller touchscreens, where screen real estate is limited. If we can remove mode buttons from the screen, we can make room for more content or can make the remaining buttons larger."

The technology also can use sound to discriminate between passive tools made from such materials as wood, acrylic and polystyrene foam. This would enable people using styluses made from different materials to collaboratively sketch or take notes on the same surface, with each person's contributions appearing in a different color or otherwise noted.

"TapSense can tell the difference between different parts of the finger by classifying the sounds they make when they strike the touchscreen," fellow Ph.D. student Julia Schwarz said. An inexpensive microphone could be readily attached to a touchscreen for this purpose. The microphones already in devices for phone conversations would not work well for the application, however, because they are designed to capture voices, not the sort of noise that TapSense needs to operate.

The researchers found that their proof-of-concept system was able to distinguish between the four types of finger inputs with 95 percent accuracy, and could distinguish between a pen and a finger with 99 percent accuracy.

A new technology called TapSense uses microphones to distinguish between the tap of a fingertip, the pad of the finger, a fingernail and a knuckle to interact with devices through a touchscreen. Photo: www.imagine-your-world.com

“We have written the application from the ground up in HTML5, so that customers can also access their content offline directly from their browser,” said Dorothy Nicholls, Director, Amazon Kindle. “The flexibility of HTML5 allows us to build one application that automatically adapts to the platform you're using - from Chrome to iOS. To make it easy and seamless to discover new books, we've added an integrated, touch optimized store directly into Cloud Reader, allowing customers one click access to a vast selection of books.”

The Kindle Cloud Reader can be seen as Amazon’s answer to Apple’s App Store policies. To comply with the latest rules, Amazon removed the buy-button from the Kindle app late last month. Through the new application, users can now access over 950,000 eBooks through the browser based app that applies updates automatically to.

According to a 2010 study from Goldman Sachs, Amazon did have a 58 percent market share of eBook sales in the U.S. at this time, followed by Barnes & Noble (27 percent) and Apple (9 percent.) The Kindle Cloud Reader will be available on additional web browsers, including Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, Firefox, and the BlackBerry PlayBook browser in the coming months.
The Kindle Cloud Reader is available for download here.

A new app for Amazon’s Kindle allows users to access over 950,000 eBooks through the Safari and Chrome web browser. Photo: www.imagine-your-world.com

“It remains to be seen whether the next Apple iPhone set for introduction in September will support 4G LTE,” said Wayne Lam, senior analyst for IHS. “However, if it does, two things are clear. First, the iPhone’s minuscule printed circuit board (PCB) will have to grow in size in order to support the first-generation LTE baseband processor as well as all the supporting chipset. Second, the next iPhone’s BOM value certainly will increase substantially compared to the iPhone 4 if LTE is implemented in the same manner as in the HTC Thunderbolt.”

The code division multiple access (CDMA) version of the iPhone 4, currently offered by Verizon, carried a bill of materials of $171.35, based on the IHS teardown from February. If Apple used the same first-generation LTE chips and baseband design as HTC did in the ThunderBolt, BOM of the CDMA iPhone 4 will  rise to $211.10, a 23.2 percent increase that does include any other changes to the design that could further raise the materials cost.

However, recent comments from Apple indicate the company will not take the same design approach as HTC did. “The first generation of LTE chipsets forced a lot of design compromises with the handset, and some of those we are just not willing to make,” said Peter Oppenheimer, Apple chief operating officer, speaking at the company’s April 2011 earnings call.

A more efficient solution for implementing LTE would be Qualcomm SnapDragon MSM8960, a successor to the MSM8655 used in the ThunderBolt. The chip combines LTE, EVDO and HSPA into a single design. This new device not only eliminates the multiple baseband chipset approach employed by the ThunderBolt, but also would reduce the size and cost of making an LTE-enabled iPhone 5.

However, even the new MSM8960 will require the addition of more components, including power amplifiers, radio frequency components and switches. Qualcomm’s next-generation LTE solution is set to be introduced in 2012, which would allow Apple to produce an LTE-enabled iPhone at lower costs.