The Nintendo Wii’s motion-sensing controller helped create a new market for accelerometers, most commonly used to deploy airbags and part of the product group known as Mems (microelectricalmechanical systems).

STMicroelectronics, Europe’s biggest chipmaker, has just created a standalone division for Mems for what its director, Benedetto Vigna, describes as an era of consumerisation of the technology.

He told us today he expects the success story to continue with the gyroscope – not that large spinning wheel on an axis, but a silicon chip version, activated electrically and disturbed in a range of only 10 to 100 atoms to detect side-to-side movement and orientation.

The PlayStation 3’s controller has an accelerometer and a gyroscope, making it more sophisticated than the Wii, but Sony has yet to exploit all the possibilities through software.

STMicro sees a big market in mobile phones for these Mems devices. Camera phones that need image stabilisation can benefit from accelerometers and gyroscopes combined. STMicro says its solution can be just 1mm thick, much smaller than standard piezoelectric sensors, while being cheaper and consuming less power.

Other applications include scrolling through Web pages or maps by just tipping the phone, location-based services and even a pedometer application that calculates distances walked and calories used.

Pictures on a handset can switch from portrait to landscape mode automatically as it’s rotated and silencing the phone in a meeting can be as simple as turning it face down and tapping it.

STMicro’s biggest market right now is computers, with around 30m laptop hard drives equipped with “free-fall” technology that “parks” them to avoid data loss if the notebook is dropped.

Research in Motion, the Canadian maker of the iconic BlackBerry family of wireless communicators, is gearing up to launch a slew of new products over the next few months.

These include the ‘Indigo’ which is due to be unveiled at next month’s 3GSM tech fest in Barcelona and is expected to marry a full Qwerty mini keyboard with the BlackBerry Pearl’s cool multimedia capabilites and the ‘Crimson’ about which relatively little has leaked out so far.

Jim Balsillie, RIM’s chief executive, remained appropriately tight-lipped during an interview at RIM’s Waterloo, Ontario HQ this week.

He did nevertheless promise "different form factors and different protocols" along with "better GPS and mapping, better video, better music and memory: all kinds of application capabilities." He also said new devices would feature better global capabilities, better partnership frameworks and new carrier launches.

"This conversion space is the most interesting space imaginable, and the most interesting time imaginable, so we’re going full on to keep up," he said.

Meanwhile he was showing off the latest white version of the BlackBerry Pearl, which he dubbed the ‘pearl Pearl’ and said he had given a pair to his teenage son and daughter who apparently have taken to them like the proverbial ducks to water.

Dad said, like other young Blackberry converts, they mostly use their new toys for messaging, media and browsing, but don’t talk on them very much.

Paul Taylor, New York

Any negative comments about Apple’s forthcoming iPhone have focused on its proprietary nature and hefty price tag. At $499 and $599 its price points match those of Sony’s PlayStation 3.

ISuppli, the chip research firm, took apart a PS3 recently and discovered the sum cost of its materials and manufacturing was $805.85 for the 20Gb model and $840.35 for the 60Gb version – representing a $306.85 subsidy of the cheaper version.

In contrast, iSuppli has not yet got his hands on the iPhone but has estimated Apple is charging around double what it will cost to manufacture.

It says the 4Gb version will cost $245.83 for parts and manufacturing and the 8Gb version $280.83. The most expensive component will be its 3.5-inch touch screen at $33.50.

This represents the usual healthy profit margin for Apple and buyers can expect no relief from Cingular, with iSuppli predicting the operator will not offer it at a subsidised price.

ISuppli’s analysis is at variance with the opinion of Nomura analyst Richard Windsor, who sees the iPhone as a crunched down Mac Mini with added cell phone parts that should cost around $800.

The iPhone will be available by mid-year in the US and later elsewhere. Mobile phone users in Europe and Asia, who can’t wait, will be able to buy an iPhone lookalike as early as next month from LG.

Today it unveiled the Prada-branded KE-850, a touchscreen phone with a 2-megapixel camera that will sell for 600 euros in Europe.

LAS VEGAS: Yahoo!, the internet media company, chose the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas to launch version 2.0 of its Yahoo! Go online application suite for mobile phones, which features a smart new ‘carousel-style’ interface designed to make it much easier for mobile phone users to access online information.

The application, which is device specific, will initially be available on Motorola’s flagship Motorazr maxx V6 and MOTORAZR V3xx handsets and will be available for about another 70 mobile devices from leading phone makers shortly.

Marco Boerries, in charge of Yahoo!’s Connected Life broadband division, said the service would be available for at least 400 mobile phone models by the end of the year and that it was also lining up deals with mobile carriers in the US and elsewhere to pre-load the software onto their handsets.

Yahoo! Go has widgets enabling Yahoo! email, location-based local information and maps, news, sports, finance, entertainment, weather, photo sharing and search.

The slim Neo1973 cellphone that will be unveiled at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas next week bears little resemblance to the two-pound brick it commemorates – the phone used by inventor Martin Cooper at Motorola to make the first cellphone call in 1973.

But the Neo hopes to post its own small landmark as the first to be based on an all-Linux platform, according to its maker, Taiwan’s First International Computer.

FIC  has been promoting the OpenMoko platform as open source Linux-based software that can offer new opportunities for developers, enthusiasts and enterprises to configure phones just how they want them and not how a manufacturer like Nokia dictates. MontaVista is providing the Linux kernel, Trolltech the middleware and Sean Moss Pultz, FIC’s product manager and OpenMoko “evangelist” is assembling a posse of Linux devotees to help develop applications.

This first phone may only have geek appeal at an unsubsidised $350 and we suggest a subtle penguin motif somewhere to entice Linux followers.

Chris Nuttall, San Francisco

We’re onto the medal rostrum in our rundown of the 10 Tech Things you won’t be able to buy this Christmas. In the bronze medal position:

3. The iPhone – this has to be top of the list of rumoured iPod variants and seems likely to be unveiled at Macworld at the beginning of January. A phone that plays music and looks cooler than a RAZR or LG Chocolate could shake up the wireless world, particularly if Apple goes the whole hog and becomes a mobile virtual network operator (MVNO) to promote its services.

But right now the company is saying nothing to suggest the iPhone will even be announced and the same goes for reports about a wireless iPod, the widescreen iPod or the touch-screen iPod.

The iPhone name already appears to have been taken anyway. Linksys announced an iPhone family of products on Monday, beginning with a Voice-over-IP handset (pictured) that works with Skype.

The countdown so far:

10. An Enzo Ferrari   9. Halo 3  8. The $100 Laptop 7. The iPod wannabes 6. Pleo the dinosaur

5. If I Did It   4. TMX Elmo

Guessing about Apple’s next invention is one of the tech world’s favourite parlour games, but Michael Gartenberg at Jupiter Research is starting to rue the onset of December iPhone madness.

While I know that December is the best month for Apple rumors, this is starting to get out of hand as mainstream press and analysts comment about a product that may or may not even be announced at Macworld. […] No doubt we’ll see lots more in terms of rumors before Macworld and probably another note or two from analysts with the “Scoop”. As in the past, almost all of these will be wrong.

He goes on to offer some advice to the journos who keep calling him asking for details on Apple’s rumoured mobile handset:

You must presume one of two things, I either don’t know any details so why ask or if I did know details, I probably couldn’t tell them to you for publication (or tell them to you period) so again, why ask? Please, let’s skip this question for the next few weeks, OK?

Better turn off that ringer on your phone, Michael, because I think we’re all in for a long few weeks until Macworld starts on January 9.

At last an IT company is showing a bit of creativity in showing buyers how to use its products. Motorola, which launched its new China-market mobile smartphone in Hong Kong this week, has realised that nobody actually reads the manual – but people do watch TV.

So the new Motorokr E6, an entertainment-oriented reworking of Motorola’s popular Ming smartphone, comes with a pre-installed instruction video to teach buyers about its fancy functions. Watching the intro should also get smartphone neophytes used to the idea of watching video on a handset screen.

Starring Taiwanese pop star Jay Chou, the 20 minute video features jokey kung-fu fights mixed with simple demonstrations of how to use the Rmb3,700 handset. (See part of the video on YouTube here) “Phones are getting so complicated these days,” says Ian Chapman-Banks, general manager for Motorola mobile devices in north Asia. “It’s a great way to engage with people.”

Mure Dickie, Hong Kong

US phone companies have been losing access lines to cable rivals (and to a lesser extent, VoIP companies like Vonage) for the past few years. But could the trend be slowing?

Richard Lindner, AT&T’s chief financial officer, says he believes the access line losses have reached a plateau. "Cable companies tend to make big penetration gains in the first year and then tail off," he told his audience at a Credit Suisse Media and Telecoms conference in New York.

"Our expectation is that 2007 will not see an increase in access line losses."

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