47% of Pinoys think cellphones irreplaceable: study

Forty-seven percent of Filipinos believe their mobile phones would be harder to replace than their wallets, a worldwide survey by global market research firm Synovate said Friday.

The survey, which interviewed 8,000 respondents across 11 markets, showed that the Philippines was the closest market to being split on the issue of which was harder to replace -- the mobile phone or the wallet.

The Synovate survey said 47 percent of Filipino respondents say their mobile phone would be harder to replace while 52 percent chose their wallet or purse.

Synovate Philippines managing director Carole Sarthou said Filipinos would find the mobile difficult, or even impossible, to replace. "The connection to other people stops when the phone is lost. It's a storehouse for photos and videos, but most vital are contact details. Filipinos seek constant connection," she said.

Steve Garton, Synovate's global head of media, noted that the mobile phone is slowly taking over as a purchasing tool for Filipinos.

"The mobile has yet to take over the wallet or purse as the absolute epicenter of people's lives but it is certainly on the way. This is happening now, for example, in the Philippines and Africa where millions of dollars have been transacted via mobile. The telco has effectively become a bank, allowing even those in rural areas to send and receive mobile money," he said.

Garton said Filipinos are using their mobile phones as more than just communication devices. Eighty-seven percent of Filipinos use the phone's alarm clock feature, 63 percent play games regularly, 48 percent listen to or download music, 44 percent watch video clips and 13 percent even watch TV -- all on their mobile phones.

Sarthou explained this is part cultural and part circumstantial. "It's part of the national psyche to love social connections, music and entertainment. How the Filipino love affair with the mobile is different compared to developing nations is that, in many cases, a mobile is all people have.

"It's the only way they can listen to music, the only way they can play games and the only way they can communicate from afar. Many Filipinos use this instead of the Internet and computers and it's not surprising that it has become such a multi-purpose, multi-tasking tool."

The survey showed that three quarters of the 8,000 plus respondents never leave home without their phones (led by 92% of Russians and 89% of Singaporeans) and more than a third (36%) go as far as to say they cannot live without their mobile (topped by 60% of Taiwanese and 49% of Singaporean respondents).

Sleeping with their cellphones

Sarthou said most Filipinos would rather risk interrupted sleep than go to bed without their mobile phones. The survey showed that 70 percent of Filipinos go to bed with their phones, compared to 62 percent of mobile users in Malaysia.

Fifty-four percent of Filipinos confess they feel excited when their phone rings or beeps for a message.

Some Filipinos have also used text messaging in managing their relationships. The survey showed that 23 percent of Filipino mobile users have broken up with someone via text messaging while 17 percent of Filipinos have been dumped in a relationship via text.

Fifty-seven percent of Filipino mobile users said they used text messaing to lie about why they were running late or where they are. Forty-nine percent of Filipinos also said they used a text to say no or send a difficult message.

The Synovate mobile phones survey was conducted online in June 2009 in Canada, Denmark, France, Malaysia, the Netherlands, the Philippines, Russia, Singapore, Taiwan, Britain and the United States.

Nokia unveils its first Linux phone

The world's largest handset maker Nokia unveiled on Thursday its first high-end phone running on Linux software.

The Finnish firm has dabbled with Linux since 2005 using it in "Internet tablets" -- sleek phone-like devices used to access the Web that have failed to gain mass-market appeal in part due to their lack of a cellular radio.

The new N900 model, with cellular connection, touch screen and slide-out keyboard, will retail for around 500 euros ($712), excluding subsidies and taxes.

Nokia's workhorse Symbian operating system controls half of the smartphone market volume -- more than its rivals Apple, Research in Motion and Google put together.

Nokia said Linux would work well in parallel with Symbian in its high-end product range.

"This is in no way putting Symbian in jeopardy," Anssi Vanjoki, head of sales at Nokia, told Reuters.

"Open source Symbian is going to be our main platform, and we are expending and growing it the best we can, both in terms of functionality as well as distribution ... populating more and more of our product line with Symbian," he said.

The new model will use ARM's Cortex-A8 processor.

"If you look at the energy management properties we have in ARM, at least today, they are clearly better, miles and miles better, than what we have in Intel architecture," Vanjoki said, adding the company would not count out using Intel processors in the same product range later.

Linux is the most popular type of free, or so-called open source, computer operating system available to the public. It competes directly with Microsoft Corp, which charges for its Windows software and opposes freely sharing its code.

Powering LCD screens and cellphones wirelessly

Eric Giler of Witricity demonstrated a wondrous magic trick: the ability to power an LCD screen and three different cellphones using no wires. "Let's face it, wires suck," Giler said at TEDGlobal. "Batteries also suck." The day is coming when Witricity's technology, known as resonant energy, or technologies closely related to it, will allow us to chuck those annoying tethers and cut way back on the 40 million disposable batteries manufactured every year.

Witricity's technology involves running high-frequency, alternating current into one magnetic coil and tuning a nearby coil to the exact same frequency. This allows the coils to couple their magnetic fields and share power. It's not dangerous. Giler has had requests for his technology from all the usual suspects, such as consumer electronics makers, the military and medical devices manufacturers, and he's also had interest from a company that makes electrically heated dog bowls. We don't want a pup to chew into a live wire. That would suck.

Hot Fusion In 25 years

The advent of fusion power has been a long-deferred dream of nuclear physicists, and its potential for limitless energy (the sun is a fusion reactor) has spawned much hype and wackiness. Its potential as a carbon-free source of energy has also brought it into the circle of the climate-anxious. But we're getting closer, and real fusion power has been generated more than a few times in the laboratories. The only problem is that a sustained reaction to produce base-load power requires temperatures in the range of 150 million degrees Fahrenheit.

TED presenter Steve Cowley, a plasma physicist and director of the Culham Science Centre of the U.K. Atomic Energy Authority, says we will have fusion power and he puts its arrival date some time in the 2030s. His is the hot fusion kind; Cowley totally dismissed the fantasies of tabletop cold fusion, which others insist can be feasible.

The attractiveness of hot fusion is that its raw material is the widely abundant lithium, which is used to make the deuterium and tritium atoms that get smashed together at those temperatures. The nice part about putting fusion in our future is that it offers permanent energy security without carbon's ill effects. While we may have only a few hundred years or so left of oil and gas in the Earth, according to Cowley, and only a thousand years of uranium using today's reactor technologies, we have 50 million years of lithium in sea water.

Cowley and his Culham center is a big part of the international research consortium that is aiming at completing the $13 billion experimental thermonuclear reactor in the south of France. Nearer term, the Culham center will once again fire up the JET, or Joint European Torus, its smaller experimental reactor in 2013 and break some more records for heat and power. Its last fusion reaction produced 16 megawatts for about a second, but required more than a gigawatt to do so. Clearly, there's room for improvement, but plasma physicists measure their progress in decades.