Mobile Phone Maker Develop Mobile High-Definition Multimedia Interface.

Data-Base — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 19:35:43 +0000

Nokia Corp., Samsung Electronics, Silicon Image, Sony Corp. and Toshiba Corp. has announced the formation of a Mobile High-Definition Interface working group that intends to create an industry standard for an audio/video interface to connect mobile phones or portable consumer electronics (CE) devices directly to high-definition televisions (HDTVs) and displays.

This new mobile connectivity standard, based on Silicon Image’s Mobile High-Definition Link (MHL) technology, will be defined, promoted and marketed by the working group as an industry standard open to anyone desiring to be an adopter and enable the development of mobile products that adhere to this new standard across a broad connectivity ecosystem.

The working group’s vision for the next generation of mobile connectivity is to provide an easy and cost-effective implementation for manufacturers while offering consumers a simple and reliable mobile connectivity experience. A single-cable with a low pin count interface will be able to support up to 1080p high-definition (HD) digital video and HD audio in addition to delivering power to a portable device.

The working group is expected to organize a Consortium of founding members who will develop a mobile connectivity technology standard specification that governs transmission and reception of high-definition content between portable devices and display devices, to support connectivity in accordance with the new specification.

www.xbitlabs.com

Intel and Nokia started oFono

Data-Base — Tue, 12 May 2009 08:03:45 +0000

oFono.org is a place to bring developers together around designing an infrastructure for building mobile telephony (GSM/UMTS) applications. oFono.org is licensed under GPLv2, and it includes a high-level D-Bus API for use by telephony applications of any license. oFono.org also includes a low-level plug-in API for integrating with open source as well as third party telephony stacks, cellular modems and storage back-ends. The plug-in API functionality is modeled on public standards, in particular 3GPP TS 27.007 “AT command set for User Equipment (UE).”

What makes oFono different?

oFono aims to provide an easy to use interface that can be used to create rich telephony applications without requiring one to have a deep understanding of the underlying technology and its limitations. To accomplish this, oFono provides language-independent D-Bus API that is extremely easy to use without generated bindings or other ‘messy’ steps typically required to use an IPC based API.

The API follows the following four basic principles:

Consistent
Minimal
Easy to use
Complete

Consistent

The API should be consistent. Functionality in oFono is broken up into Interfaces, each with well-defined set of Properties. Each interface has a GetProperties() and a SetProperty() method which is used to accomplish majority of the tasks. Naming conventions are also strictly enforced. This means that once you’re comfortable using one Interface, you should be able to easily orient yourself to use others.

Minimal

The API should be minimal; there shouldn’t be more than one way of accomplishing a task as this leads to confusion and API bloat. We also aim to maintain API compatibility whenever possible, from the very beginning. This means that oFono APIs wil generally focus on the most important use-cases. Other features will be carefully considered before being included in the APIs.

Complete

At the same time, the APIs must be rich and complete enough to enable the creation of feature complete mobile phones. Thus, APIs for all aspects of telephony are planned, incudling but not limited to Voice calls, SMS, Cell Broadcast, Supplementary Services and SIM Phonebooks.

Easy to use

oFono aims to make writing telephony applications as easy as possible. Thus oFono will take care of the core logic, including things necessary for standards compliance. This will allow application writers to focus on what they should be doing: presentation aspects and funky animated UIs.