Qualcomm Atheros created this art to celebrate 802.11 day, a holiday it invented.

I bet you didn’t know it, but today is 802.11 day. (I didn’t know it either until a PR person for Qualcomm Atheros–the Qualcomm division formed after Qualcomm acquired Wi-Fi chipmaker Atheros–e-mailed me.) Not because of any scientific milestone involved in creating the IEEE standard more commonly known as Wi-Fi, but because, well, it’s really 8.02.11. Get it?

The folks at Qualcomm Atheros seized upon the tech equivalent of a bad pun to update a group of journalists about what’s next for the popular connectivity technology–and although the excuse may have been lame, what they had to say was interesting. The last big upgrade, 802.11n, delivered speeds on the order of 100mbps Ethernet, so the standard now in the works is going for the next speed hurdle–1 gigabit.

Maybe they’ll call it gigabit Wi-Fi. But for now, the embryonic standard is simply another IEEE alphanumeric: 802.11ac. (They went through the entire alphabet for various other Wi-Fi related technologies–some of which no one ever cared about–so after 802.11z they started over again with two letters, and 802.11aa and 802.11ab are already taken.)

Qualcomm Atheros technology vice president Bill McFarland estimates it will be a good year and a half before we see actual 802.11ac products, but that would be downright speedy compared to the many years it took 802.11n to get from the IEEE drawing board into my living room. Anyway, here are some things I learned at the briefing:

• It will operate only in the 5ghz band, so it will not be backwards compatible with the vast majority of current Wi-Fi gear that only supports 2.4ghz Wi-Fi (802.11b/g and 2.4ghz 802.11n). Only 802.11a and 5ghz 802.11n gear will work with 802.11ac radios–but McFarland anticipates that at least initially, vendors won’t release products that don’t support 2.4ghz at all.  What we’ll probably see are products that support 802.11ac and 2.4ghz 802.11n.
• To attain gigabit speeds 802.11ac will be able (among other things) to use wider bandwidth channels to send data streams. Today’s Wi-Fi products use either 20mhz or, at most, 40mhz channels; in contrast, 802.11ac gear must support 80mhz channels–or, optionally, 160mhz channels. And its radio waves will support denser data transmissions than 802.11n, so that one 802.11ac stream will be able to carry roughly the same amount of bandwidth as three 802.11n streams.
• Access points can send and receive up to 4 8 spatial data streams, twice as many as 802.11n. And 802.11ac devices will be able to intelligently parcel out the streams based on the capabilities of simultaneous clients. If you have two smartphones on the network, each with one 802.11ac antenna (this is typical for smartphones) and one notebook with two antennas, a 4-antenna 802.11ac access point can simultaneously direct one stream to each smartphone and two to the notebooks. An 802.11n device cannot divide streams up this way, so it communicates with one device at a time, which slows things down. Of course, this means that on a network with lots of clients operating simultaneously, nobody will get top speed: the gigabit bandwidth will be divvied up.

How will 802.11ac stack up against WiGig, another high-bandwidth standard in development that operates on the 60ghz band? Basically, WiGig will be faster–but only at relatively short distances where walls and ceilings aren’t involved, making it more suitable for cable-replacement applications. McFarland says he believes the two will co-exist nicely.

Given the generally leisurely pace of new Wi-Fi technology adoption, I imagine it will be several years before 802.11ac becomes as familiar as 802.11n is now. But migration from 2.4ghz, which simply doesn’t have the bandwidth capacity required for the many wireless devices it is called on to support, is long overdue. Ask anyone who’s tried to stream media over a 2.4ghz Wi-Fi network in a big city. I just wish notebook and smartphone makers would be more proactive in supporting 5ghz Wi-Fi: even today, most don’t. Perhaps with gigabit Wi-Fi as a carrot, more people will make sure to demand 5ghz Wi-Fi, with or without support for legacy 2.4ghz gear.

The e-reader didn’t show up, and I kind of forgot about Mirasol–until yesterday. Here at Qualcomm’s Uplinq conference, there was a press conference with Qualcomm CEO Paul Jacobs, and  someone asked him about Mirasol. Which I wish I’d thought to do.

Jacobs said that the technology is still in the works. Qualcomm had indeed been readying an e-reader, but it wasn’t thrilled with it and decided that Mirasol needed more refinement in general. He said that there’s a Mirasol plant which Qualcomm expects to be manufacturing displays in six to eight months–but that won’t be mass production yet. And he didn’t give any estimates of when products with Mirasol screens might go on sale.

Bottom line: Mirasol is still on its way, but it isn’t imminent. It might still be exciting once it shows up–we still need displays that do color and animation and which can last for weeks on a charge.  And I think back to the first time I saw an OLED display. That was about a decade ago in a lab at Kodak. It was a very rough-around-the-edges OLED, and the technology didn’t start showing up in consumer products for several years. But when it did, it was awfully cool. Mirasol could be, too.

So Apple is suing Samsung, accusing it of imitating Apple products with its Galaxy phones and tablets. The most startling thing about the news may be that the two companies weren’t already in court with each other. Over the past few years, the mobile industry has been so rife with suits and countersuits that if every complainant managed to sue every subject of its ire out of business…well, there’d hardly be a mobile industry left.

I had trouble remembering the precise details of the umpteen cases that have made headlines–as well as some related relationships, such as Microsoft’s licensing agreements with Amazon and HTC–so I decided to document them with a handy-dandy infographic, as much for my own edification as anyone else’s.

A few notes:

• This covers only patent-related suits, not ones solely over trademarks, employee poaching, and other issues.
• It only address mobile-related tussles (which is why LG’s attempt to prevent Sony from importing the PlayStation 3 into the US isn’t listed).
• It only involves great big companies, not smaller ones who are doing some of the suing.
• I’ve identified software and hardware companies that work together on devices (such as Microsoft and Samsung) but haven’t tried to indicate OEM and component relationships.
• I’ve also shown some licensing relationships I know about, but there are probably others.
• Any cases which I’ve forgotten about or didn’t know about in the first place aren’t here.

With that out of the way…

If you’ve got any corrections, additions, or thoughts about any of this, lemme know. I may update the graphic as future events warrant…although the mere thought of even more mobile legal spats cropping up is depressing me…

FLO TV was–can we speak of it in the past tense yet?–a classic example of the right product at the wrong time. Judged on its merits, it was quite impressive: It delivered live TV with no hiccups, and Qualcomm lined up an impressive roster of big-name content partners. If it had been around a decade ago, it might have been an iPod-like hit. But in the age of plentiful Internet video on smartphones, it felt pricey and a tad retro. And one neat device that could have made it more appealing to more people–Mophie’s FLO TV jacket for iPhones, which was announced in January at CES–hasn’t shipped, and now presumably never will.

The service also suffered from schizophrenic support from Qualcomm. On one hand, I’ve seen prime-time TV commercials for it within the last week or two. On the other, when I spoke with FLO TV president Bill Stone back in March, he seemed oddly diffident about the whole business, and spoke openly about using the technology and spectrum for purposes other than a consumer TV service.

Oh, and the name FLO TV probably didn’t help: It doesn’t describe the product very clearly. In a best-case scenario, it sounds like it’s an all-Polly Holliday channel.

Even if FLO TV’s timing and marketing had been better, it might have been doomed by forces beyond its control. Today, any gadget that fits in your pocket automatically competes with smartphones–and chances are that smartphones can do something similar, probably at a lower cost or no additional cost at all. Even if a device has advantages that smartphones don’t, such as FLO TV’s robust video and audio quality, convincing large numbers of consumers to buy it in addition to a smartphone is going to be a tough sell. (Handheld satellite radio receivers, which were briefly a hot item a few years ago, suffer from the same challenge.)

Sure, some existing non-smartphone gadgets will stick around–the best pocket-sized point-and-shoot cameras are still much better than any cameraphone, and Apple wouldn’t have released redesigned iPods last month if there wasn’t a big market for them. But can you envision an entirely new type of handheld gizmo being so exciting that it competes successfully with the Swiss Army Knives that our phones have become?

Mirasol’s technology produces screens that look a lot like the E-Ink ones found on nearly every e-reader to date–they’re unilluminated and therefore look better in bright light than in dim environments.  But Mirasol’s displays, unlike E-Ink, do color and have decent refresh rates. If the shipping version of the display technology’s as impressive as the demo, that means that it’ll allow for e-readers with color pages, video, and slicker user interfaces. Here’s a photo of a concept device that doesn’t do the technology justice.

The Mirasol technology, which involves tiny mirrors creating colors by refracting light, doesn’t have anything to do with how E-Ink works, but it shares some of the virtues that make it a good candidate for e-reading devices, including extremely low power consumption. (Like E-Ink, it only draws power when the page is being changed, not when an image is static.) Actually, a Mirasol representative told me that it uses far less power than even E-Ink.

The tech demo at Digital Experience knocked my socks off, but Mirasol isn’t quite ready to go into consumer products yet. Qualcomm says to expect an e-reader incorporating the the technology by the third quarter of the year.

Trouble is, there’s already a smartbook. It’s a German company, and as TechCrunch’s Robin Wauters is reporting, it’s decided to protect its trademark by going after use of the term to describe these mini-netbooks.

The whole situation is reminiscent of Psion’s period of trying to stomp out use of “netbook” (which was soon resolved). This time, though, I’d shed no tears if the chip companies and others behind the new gadgets were forced to to find a new name for their platform. Unless you want to argue that smartbooks are, indeed, the smartest computing device to date, the term isn’t descriptive. Unlike “desktop” or “notebook”  it’s just marketingspeak. Even “smartphone” is clearer, since smartphones are indeed smarter than mere phones.

The category is tough to describe in a clear way: Intel’s similar MID (Mobile Internet Device) concept isn’t very helpful or alluring. But here are few stabs at new terminology, just in case we need it:

• Netnetbook
• Netbookerino
• Tinybook
• Smallishbook
• Leanbook
• Kneetop
• Netpaperback

Any other candidates?

The real question about smartbooks, of course, is whether the world needs ‘em. I’m looking forward to seeing some examples in person in January at the Consumer Electronics Show. Historically, the track record of devices too big to fit in a pocket and too limited to serve as full-blown computers has been crummy. (Sorry, UMPCs.) But with the rise of smartphones and the decline of operating systems as the defining factor that determines what you can do with a computer, smartbooks aren’t an inherently nutty idea.

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