Chip maker Marvell wants to get into the tablet business and it is showing a prototype that will offer web access and high-definition content at a price that would beat the competition by a wide margin.

The prototoype tablet, called Moby, is targeted mainly at students who might be looking for a digital device that could give them access to books and the web, and could also act as a music player.

The Moby tablet will be powered by Marvell’s ARMADA 600 series of application processors. These chips can offer gigahertz-class speed, states the company. The device will also bring 1080p full-HD capability, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and GPS connectivity and FM radio. Marvell hasn’t disclosed detailed technical specifications for the device.

Marvell is no stranger to offering visions of fantastic gadgets at low, low prices. Last year, it showed a $100 personal inside a wall plug and has tried to popularize the idea of plug personal that would draw just about 5W of power, come with a 1.2-GHz CPU, a USB port and world wide web connectivity.

Meanwhile, tablets have become all the rage this year. Apple’s iPad will be the first to hit the market on April 3. Other Computer makers including HP, Dell and Samsung have also said they plan to release tablets for consumers.

The $100 Moby will support full Adobe Flash and could run either Android or the Windows Phone 7 operating system.

As intriguing as it is, Moby is just a reference design at this point. Marvell hasn’t stated if it will manufacture the tablet itself or partner with companies who want to take the design and produce it. Either way, the Moby will be available by the end of the year, states Marvell.

Marvell says it plans to announce a pilot program with the District of Columbia Public School system so students in the system can try out the Moby.

See Also:

• Marvell Plans $100 Computer Inside a Wall Plug
• Marvell Plans $100 Personal Inside a Wall Plug
• Marvell’s Super Speedy 802.11n Chipset Leaves WiMax in the Dust
• Next-Gen Cellphones Will Run 1080p Video and 3D Games

Photo: Moby reference design (Harry McCracken/Technologizer)

Via [wired.com]

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When Steve Jobs received his liver transplant, he was considered “the sickest person on the waiting list.” Now he’s speaking out about the faults in California’s current organ donor system which left 400 people dying in wait last year alone: More

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If you can’t pitch the press, pay them. That’s the proposition some review sites have for publicity-starved iPhone developers.

Several websites dedicated to iPhone app reviews are requesting payments from developers in exchange for writeups of their apps, Wired.com has learned. Those payments are not always clearly disclosed to readers, and the practice hasn’t received much discussion outside of gaming blogs.

Soliciting money in exchange for a product review isn’t illegal, but the practice should raise questions about the credibility and independence of the review sites, critics say.

“They prey on people who need exposure,” said Oliver Cameron, developer of the popular iPhone app Postman, who has avoided pitching his apps to sites that request payment for reviews. “It strikes me as a paid ad, really. They never seem to actually ‘review’ it.”

The two sites that were most frequently mentioned by programmers who contacted Wired.com were TheiPhoneAppReview.com and AppCraver.com. Both sites appear in the top four Google search results for the search term “iPhone app review.”

With more than 150,000 apps in the iPhone App Store, rising above the crowd is a major challenge for developers. Getting a good review on the internet can help drive sales and that, in turn, can raise an app’s profile within the App Store. While apps that earn their creators hundreds of thousands of dollars are rare, they do exist, and many developers seek publicity in hopes of achieving this dream.

Driven by that demand, app review websites are offering to “expedite” reviews — that’s, bring apps to the front of the review queue — in exchange for a fee. But at least one site, ThePhoneAppReview.com, has gone even further, and threatened to shun products whose developers haven’t paid for reviews.

The iPhone App Review told independent developer Michael D’Ulisse it would not review his app Pocket Labeler at all unless he paid a fee of $25. The demand is at odds with the website’s About section, which implies that fees only apply to reviews that are expedited. D’Ulisse provided a copy of an e-mail from a site editor:

I would be interested in writing a review and having it on our website (www.theiphoneappreview.com). We do charge a $25 fee for reviews (this is used to compensate our authors), so the decision is yours. If you want a review written, but have no promo codes left, I have the ability to buy the app and add the price of the app into your invoice. Let me know either way. Thanks!

–Sarah Parker
The iPhone App Review

D’Ulisse noted that on a separate occasion in November 2009, he received the same e-mail response from The iPhone App Review when he distributed press releases for his app 2,001 Easy Gifts.

“So you’ve got a reviewer, and she’s an editor at the site who wants to use my app personally but won’t post a review on her site unless I give her $25,” D’Ulisse wrote. “What happened to journalistic integrity?”

The iPhone App Review’s editor-in-chief Shaun Campbell said he was unaware that his site’s writers were requesting payment in exchange for reviews. He explained that the reviewers work autonomously, so he is unsure of how they’re paid by app creators. As of this writing, The iPhone App Review’s About section remains unchanged, stating that fees only apply to expedited app reviews.

“I have never once sent a request for a fee to a developer to review their app,” Campbell told Wired.com. “That is not our policy, which is why that is not stated in the About.”

Campbell stated that his site’s policy is to offer expedited service in exchange for a fee because with the gigantic number of apps in the App Store, it would be an “impossible task to review all the apps we receive, paid or unpaid.” He added that very few talented writers would be willing to review iPhone apps for free and that providing payment ensures quality work.

“The iPhone App Review is not a PR charity,” Campbell stated. “We’re a business, and like in any business, there are costs that need to be recovered.”

Requiring payment for product reviews is not illegal, but the Federal Trade Commission has frowned on the practice. The commission believes a paid review can easily be the same as a paid advertisement, and consumers as a result might be misled into purchasing a product based on a falsely positive evaluation that was purchased.

To address the issue, the FTC in October 2009 published revised guidelines governing endorsements for bloggers, requiring bloggers to provide disclosure whenever a review is written in exchange for money or gifts.

Rich Cleland of the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection stated he couldn’t comment on specific websites, because they must be evaluated on a case-by-case basis. He said that in general, so long as payments are disclosed clearly and accurately, it isn’t considered misleading to the public.

“If a consumer knows that a producer pays for the review to appear, the consumer can make up their own mind to what extent that affects the credibility of the review,” Cleland told Wired.com in a phone interview. “From our perspective, the primary issue is not the payment but the disclosure of the payment.”

Still, paid reviews should raise questions about a publication’s credibility, he added.

“It’s reasonable to assume that a significant number of consumers wouldn’t give the same level of credibility to something they thought was a paid review versus something they thought was an independent review,” Cleland stated.

Every time a review is written in exchange for pay, it should be explicitly disclosed on that review, Cleland said. Paid reviews on The iPhone App Review don’t include such a disclosure in the text of the review.

AppCraver.com also seeks payment for expedited reviews. Lore Sjöberg, Wired.com’s Alt Text columnist, stated he submitted his iPhone app The Cyborg Name Decoder to AppCraver.com for review, and in response the site offered to expedite a review of his app for $150. The letter included a promise to contact Sjöberg “prior to publishing a review that scores lower than 5/10.”

The e-mail also offered Sjöberg the opportunity to purchase an advertisement on the site, along with the promise that every advertised app would also receive an editorial review.

AppCraver didn’t respond to Wired.com’s request for comment. However, it’s worth noting that AppCraver has, in some reviews, disclosed when reviews are “expedited,” providing a link to the site’s policy about paid expedited reviews, which states, “Simply put, an Expedited Review is one where the developer paid to move to the front of the line. Developers can NOT buy a good score.”

Not all iPhone app review sites require money or gifts in exchange for write-ups. The creators of app review sites 148Apps and Slide to Play authored a set of ethical standards called Organization for App Testing Standards, or OATS, that they hope other sites will commit and adhere to.

“Steve and I created OATS out of our concern for the lack of ethics when we started seeing more and more of these sites,” stated Jeff Scott of 148Apps. “While we strive to stick to standard practices of editorial integrity, there are others that seem to operate under a very different set of morals,” stated Scott.

Slide to Play’s Steve Palley said paid reviews are detrimental to the community of iPhone developers and customers.

“Paid reviews damage our entire ecosystem because they harm consumers, period, full stop,” Palley told Wired.com in an e-mail. “People who think they are reading objective reviews are going to be disappointed after taking paid ‘advice.’”

Added Palley, “We decided that we needed to do something to put a stop to it.”

The FTC’s Cleland stated that if blogs are not clearly or honestly disclosing payments for reviews, consumers can file complaints to the FTC’s on the web Complaint Assistant or by calling 1-877-FTC-HELP (1-877-382-4357).

Update: 2:30 p.m. PDT — Matt Marquez, a Mac Directory editor, has published a post about his experience applying for a job at TheiPhoneAppReview, in which Campbell stated all writers were required to charge a fee to developers for reviews.

See Also:

• Apple Expels 1000 Apps From Store After Developer Scam
• iPhone Developer Might Be Bribing Reviewers
• For the iPhone’s App Store, Quantity Really Does Matter
• With More Than Enough Apps, Apple Pushes for Quality
• The Say of Mobile App Stores Summarized in Charts

Photo: Jon Snyder/Wired.com

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It’s a real stretch to say it’s worth paying someone $150 to program your fancy remote control for you; in fact, you’d say whoever is pitching it is trying to upsell you. And they’d agree. [Dell via Consumerist] More

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A wonderful iPhone app for beginning piano players just landed in the App Store.

Called Etude, the app displays digitized sheet music and instructs you to play piano songs with an on-screen keyboard.

On its main screen, Etude, developed by independent iPhone programmer Dan Grover, uses the familiar Delicious Library metaphor of a book shelf from which you choose your score. Tap a title and the app launches the sheet music. Hit the play button and the app plays back the music while scrolling to the right to display the score as the song progresses.

The neatest part to me is an animated keyboard at bottom, which lights up the position of the keys for each note of the song. That should really come in handy for beginners still learning to read sheet music.

The app includes some classics such as Green Sleeves and Moonlight Sonata, but you can also download additional titles through an in-app store. Currently most of the songs available are public domain, but Grover and his partners hope to complete negotiations with sheet-music publishers to offer more contemporary music such as pop songs and film soundtracks.

Personally I’m even more excited about the upcoming iPad version. Just envision your iPad potentially replacing huge stacks of sheet music cluttering up your piano area. Grover told me that an Etude iPad app is in the works and will be ready soon after the iPad launches in April.

Etude is available for an introductory price of $3 in the App Store. Later, it will cost $8.

Download Link [iTunes]

See Also:

• Best Ways to Produce Music on an iPhone
• AirPhones Turns Your iPhone Into a Wireless Music Receiver …
• Mobile Music: Band Geeks Play iPhones, Not Instruments

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That letter Google received from 27 Chinese companies demanding compensation if the search giant pulls out of the country was as authentic as the average Chinese-bought Louis Vuitton handbag, as it turns out. More

Popularity: unranked [?]

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Professor Ishikawa Komuro’s Tokyo lab is superior known for robot hands that can dribble and catch balls and spin pencils between their fingers. Now, two researchers have taken this speedy sensing tech and applied it to the ripping of paper books.

Books are different from other kinds of media, like music and movies — it’s very difficult to get them into a personal. There is no equivalent of CD or DVD rippers like iTunes or Handbrake. This not only makes piracy laborious, it also stops you from turning your own books into e-books.

This high-speed scanner changes that, at least if you have the room and tech skills to build one. By using a high-speed camera that shoots at 500 frames per second, lab workers Takashi Nakashima and Yoshihiro Watanabe can scan a 200-page book in under a minute. You just hold the book under the camera and flip through the pages as if shuffling a deck of cards. The camera records the images and uses processing power to turn the odd-shaped photos into flat, rectangular pages on which regular OCR (optical character recognition) can be performed.

The technique is unlikely to be coming to the home anytime soon (although ripping a book by flipping it in front of your notebook’s webcam would be pretty awesome), but it could certainly speed up massive scanning efforts like Google’s book project.

Superfast Scanner Lets You Digitize a Book By Rapidly Flipping Pages [IEEE Spectrum]

High-Speed Robot Hand Demonstrates Dexterity and Skillful Manipulation [Hizook]

See Also:

• DIY Book Scanners Turn Your Books Into Bytes
• 500 Pages–Per-Hour Book Scanner From Atiz Released
• Google Books Adds Workers’ Hands to Classics

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It’s a concept design, but as most of Tokyo Flash’s production watches are even wilder, this e-ink timepiece will probably make it nearly intact into stores and onto wrists. The stainless steel bracelet covers a panel of the same e-ink “paper” found in the Kindle and other e-readers, with cut-outs to reveal several odd-shaped sections. The paper of course offers the same low-power consumption and high-readability of any e-ink display.

The watch will have a Bluetooth radio to communicate with your cellphone. It will vibrate to give “message, mail and call notifications” and these notifications will also be cryptically encoded into unreadable runes at the top of the display.

There’s no price, no launch date, and not even a picture of a prototype outside of these CAD mockups. We’ve a feeling that an e-ink watch would look awesome, though, and it looks like Tokyo Flash is breaking with long tradition and actually showing the time in normal numbers. Unbelievable.

E-Clock [Tokyo Flash blog via the Giz]

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Umang Dokey’s Windows 7 Phone Series tablet concept is rather enticing, and it even manages to feel genuinely like a Microsoft product, with its mixture of impossible sci-fi concepts (3D video conferencing) and gray office mundanity (a keyboard).

The (non-embeddable) video shows the slim device in action, though it’s all personal generated graphics, as the device doesn’t actually exist. The keyboard is also a fold-out stand, depending on how far you rotate it from its hole in the back (and if you do decide to go all QWERTY, the rest of the unit will surely just topple backwards). The two webcams sit far apart on either side of the 8-inch touch-screen, and when used to make 3D would probably give you the viewpoint of Admiral Ackbar. The Bezel is really too small to let you hold the device without covering the screen with a thumb, and around the back are a couple of recessed joysticks for gaming. It looks lovely, and would probably be awful to use.

But the biggest takeaway from the demo video is that Windows Mobile 7 (sorry, but the official name is too much of a mouthful: just look at that headline up there) is perfect for a touch-screen tablet, with all its floaty, scrolling UI elements. This is what Microsoft should be working on, not some awful Windows 7 tablet.

Tablet Concept [Umang Dokey via da Giz]

See Also:

• It's Not Simple to Make a Tablet, Stantum Slate Personal computer Proves
• HP's Windows 7 Slate Strikes at the iPad

Via [wired.com]

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A new iPhone dock and speaker from iLuv offers an uncommon twist. A literal twist, even. It turns the iPhone 90-degrees and holds it, charging, in landscape orientation. By day, this isn’t so useful, but by night, it means that the screen can display a huge clock so you can know the exact times you wake up cold and sweating from your many fevered nightmares.

The hardware is called the iMM190 App Station and it pairs with a free iPhone application called iLuv App Clock. They collaborate to lull you to sleep at night with your own music library, wake you in the morning with your choice of sounds and all the while tell you the time and weather (so you can decide whether it is worth getting out of bed). The iMM190 can be used upright or horizontally and powered from either the mains or from six AA batteries.

Unless you are the couple in the picture above, who sleep with the lights on, then you may not use the actual clock at night. I’ve tried a bunch of alarm apps and, while they work to wake me with mellow music, the glow of the screen is too bright. Even with a blank black screen image and the backlight turned all the way down, enough photons escape the screen to illuminate the room slightly. This isn’t a criticism of the iLuv app, just a note on iPhones in general (and on my hypersensitivity to the light creeping into my hermetically sealed bedroom).

We do like this trend of marrying hardware and software, though, especially as the apps (including this one) often come free, a kind of software promo. The speaker will cost you actual dollars, though: Ninety of them.

iMM190 [iLuv. Thanks, Jennifer!]

iLuv App Clock [iTunes]

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