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The Renoir is LG’s successor to the Viewty, and much like its predecessor, the Renoir is not slated to debut in the U.S. It will come out in Europe in October, Asia, Latin America and CIS in November, the Middle East and Africa in December, and China in January 2009.

LG unveiled its latest touch-screen phone this Thursday, dubbed the Renoir. Also known by its model name KC910, the Renoir is a touch-screen phone with a whopping 8-megapixel camera as well as camera features that LG claims rivals that of even standalone digital cameras.

Other features of the Renoir include text and multimedia messaging, Wi-Fi, A-GPS, 3G HSDPA, a music player, a camcorder with the ability to capture 120 fps slow-motion video and to compress events to 5 fps time lapse recording, built-in support for DivX and Xvid, and more. It is also the first handset to have Dolby Mobile, which promises richer bass sound to the music player.

Though we did not see too many specs on this, LG also announced that it will launch another 8-megapixel cell phone dubbed the LG KC780 in October.

It’s equipped with Schneider-Kreuznach optics, a Xenon flash, auto and manual focus, up to ISO 1,600 sensitivity, and geotagging. The Renoir also has a feature called Touch Shot that lets you focus on an object by tapping it on the screen, and then automatically taking a photo of it when the finger is removed. Another unique feature is Beauty Shot, which removes spots and imperfections from people’s faces–like a digital face-lift, if you will. Finally, there’s Art Shot, which consists of a number of preset effects like black and white to color tones.

LG Renoir

(Credit:
LG )

Ideas?

After all, these people perform two valuable functions:

Ultimately, someone must pay for software in order to have it written. It doesn’t grow on trees and it doesn’t grow on communities, either. That myth has caused more people to ignorantly open source their code than anything else. There are huge benefits from open sourcing one’s code, but open source is not a substitute for the hard work of development, sales, marketing, etc. Nor is it a winning business model, in and of itself.

I read someone lauding this second point the other day, and I admit there’s some validity to it. Most buyers don’t want to take a risk on their purchases: They want to buy what everyone else is buying (or what everyone else would buy if they could afford it). So by providing a big population of users – including free-riders – an open-source community can project safety in numbers.

By using your project they theoretically are not throwing money at a proprietary product or other open-source product, so at least they’re not feeding the competition; or
They provide an emotional safety net who want to buy with the herd.

Open source is a bit the same. There are some who pay for the “full-price rooms/seats,” while others pay by sticking with a project for a long time, devoting either small amounts of cash or code. Marten Mickos talks a bit about this when he refers to those who have more time than money (me sitting on the plane for 125,000-plus miles each year) and those who have more money than time (those that buy their seats in first class).

But what do we do about the majority of people in open source who neither contribute cash, code, or anything other than taking up a seat/room?

Unfortunately, this cuts the other way, as well: The more free-riders, the more encouraged would-be purchasers will be to free-ride, as well. Why should you be the only sucker paying for what everyone else is using for free, and quite comfortably?

The same is true of Delta, on which I fly 125,000-plus miles each year. On domestic flights I nearly always get upgraded to first class, without ever paying for first class. I pay in “loyalty equity.”

For those in the commercial open-source world (and that’s most everyone now), we need to focus on finding ways to draw more people into the cash/code bargain without sacrificing the benefits that derive from fee-free adoption of open source.

commentary

Last night Marriott was kind enough to upgrade me to a junior suite. I say “kind enough” but perhaps it was my due: I stay in Marriott-branded hotels over 75 nights each year. While I never pay for this level of room, Marriott occasionally rewards my loyalty with an expensive room type.

The answer, of course, is “Nothing” as there’s really nothing that open-source projects can do about free-riders. And perhaps the answer is equally that there’s nothing such projects should do about free-riders.

No, no. I know that the ultimate goal is to have computers far more clever than humans so that humans can relax and be just as stupid as they already know themselves to be.

I was fine with IBM’s Deep Blue taking on chess champion Garry Kasparov. The man had been fighting Deep Red all his life, so he was hardly going to be intimidated by another lumbering machine of power.

Watson won’t have to push buzzers and all that. He’ll (it’s not quite decided whether Watson will be male yet) get the questions as computer text. And Jennings, if he participates, will merely try to recreate his normal Jeopardized self.

However, he will be hard-pushed not to be distracted by Watson, as Watson’s computer, a Blue Gene monster, will have a delightful synthesized voice. Yes, Darth Vader, indeed.

The nice thing about “Jeopardy” is that you really have no idea what the questions might be.

You might be thinking that Watson’s Blue Gene will merely be hooked up to the Web. Not so. He’ll have an internal database. And in trial runs his performance has been described as “aggressive and competent.” Well, at least he’s not Omarosa from “The Apprentice”, then.

Still, one can’t help but feel a shudder beneath one’s shirt at the prospect of an IBM computer program beating 74-time champion Ken Jennings at “Jeopardy.”

Oh, couldn't we get Garry Kasparov to take over from Alex Trebek for just one night?

There are far more possibilities to take account of than there are in chess. Watson isn’t merely going to have to think ahead. He’s going to have to interpret and understand. Which, as we know in our own dealings with humans, is a terribly tricky affair.

What is the point?

Those of us trying to preserve the last vestiges of humanity can only hope that when it comes to the big night, Watson’s performance will be fruitful.

(Credit: CC BA Sykes/Flickr)

The IBM brain boxes are aiming to create software that really can get frightfully semantic. Because, of course, that could make a lot of money. If it worked.

However, Watson has apparently got his words mixed up sometimes. He thought “sheet” was a fruit.

However, according to the New York Times, we may now be facing the prospect of an IBM program called Watson (named not after Sherlock’s boyfriend, but after IBM founder Thomas J. Watson Sr.) taking on Jeopardy champions, including, perhaps, 74-time winner Ken Jennings at one of America’s most revered, um, mind games.

Or, as the Great Jeopardy Software itself might put it, sheety.

IBM hasn’t quite decided what Watson will look like. I would suggest a box with a cape draped over it and a pipe in one of its slots. Or perhaps just a slab of metal in a Darth Vader outfit.

“The big goal is to get computers to be able to converse in human terms,” the artificially intelligent IBM team leader, David A. Ferrucci, told the Times. “And we’re not there yet.”
Shame.

In response, she laughed, saying that “Google is not about politics. Google is about innovation and technology and about creativity of people and about what freedom permits in this great environment.” She also reminded the audience that she’s no stranger to the Valley, having begun her professorship at Stanford in 1981. At that point, Secretary Miliband chided me as the question asker by saying Rice’s Stanford stint was before I was born (for the record, I was alive in ’81. I’m a child of the ’70s!).

(Credit:
James Martin/CNET News.com)

Rice visited Google with her British counterpart, David Miliband.

This time, the security precautions were for U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and her British counterpart David Miliband, who were visiting Silicon Valley to tour various companies and meet with tech industry leaders.

(Credit:
James Martin/CNET News.com)

We knew it wasn’t going to be an ordinary visit to the Googleplex when we saw the Bomb Squad truck in the parking lot.

Yours truly was the only reporter who squeezed in a tech question; I asked about Rice’s visit to Google and if she was surprised to be invited to such a well-known liberal outpost in the Valley.

I headed to the Mountain View, Calif., campus Thursday afternoon with CNET News.com’s multimedia team (consisting of me, cameraman Jared Kohler, and photographer James Martin). After a yellow lab sniffed our cameras and tripod, plus my purse, for drugs, bombs, and other no-nos, we joined other members of the media in a roped off “safe zone” in the middle of Google’s main quad. After an hour sunning ourselves in the media pen, Rice and Miliband emerged from their “fireside chat” with Googlers and addressed the media for a brief 10 minutes.

U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice addresses the media in the sunny quad of Google's Mountain View, Calif., campus.

Before we knew it, the pair said their goodbyes and were whisked away by Secret Service. We never even got to find out what they ate in the Google cafeteria.

Five reporters got to ask questions, and even though we were in the heart of tech country, most queries focused on foreign policy–Rice’s stance on freeing Guantanamo Bay prisoners, strife in Iran, etc., which she answered, not surprisingly, with canned political-speak.

CompactFlash memory has been a mainstay in the SLR (single-lens reflex) camera market, but SD has gained a foothold. Nikon’s entry-level SLRs use SD cards, as do all from Pentax, Panasonic, and Samsung. And Canon’s top-end 1Ds Mark III accepts both SD and CompactFlash.

It’s a drag for consumers that there’s such a profusion of flash card formats. Customers often must pay extra when moving from one camera maker to another just to replace flash cards. And indeed, owners of Canon’s existing Rebel, Rebel XT, or XTi cameras will find their CompactFlash cards useless if they upgraded to an XSi.

Canon faced some modest compatibility risks when it chose to design its new EOS Rebel XSi camera with SD flash-memory cards rather than the CompactFlash cards it’s used for all its SLR cameras until this point, but I think the move is smart overall.

But the reality is that Rebel XSi (also called the 450D and Kiss X2 in various parts of the world) customers are more likely to be upgrading from a compact camera, a market where SD dominates. And from a technical perspective, SD performs fine, takes up less critical room in the camera, and in the newer SDHC incarnation can match CompactFlash’s 32GB capacity.

Canon's EOS Rebel XSi goes on sale in April.

Now if we could just get rid of xD Picture Card from Olympus and Fujifilm and Memory Stick from Sony, we’d all be better off. Fujifilm wisely has started selling compact cameras with a dual-use adapter that can accept SD as well as xD, and I’m hoping that’s a harbinger of things to come.

(Credit:
Canon)