Humble TV gets smarter as it joins the battle for computer attention

There was a time when Eidiya, the money given to buy gifts at Eid, was spent on clothes with perhaps a little left over for games and toys.As the end of this holy month approaches, however, children of all ages will more likely be scouring the Web looking for the latest gadgets from Apple, Nintendo and Microsoft, all of which have new high-tech toys on the way.Apple's iPhone 5, which is rumoured to be launched next month, has had its features and official launch date kept secret. However, gossip has emerged about the device featuring facial recognition, an edge-to-edge screen, voice control and a curved design. Apple product announcements have consistently set the smartphone and tablet trend over the years, leaving rivals such as Samsung with its Galaxy range to play catch-up. Google, Microsoft and Nokia will also be closely watching Apple's next move. Google's acquisition of Motorola Mobility last week signalled its intention to take on Apple in the smartphone space by now having the hardware capability to build phones and mobile computing devices.Yet it could be a few years until the search giant releases a phone, and when that happens, Motorola is likely to maintain its brand identity, says Magnus Nystedt, the editor of PCWorld Middle East."Motorola as a brand name is really, really strong. It stands for something, quality," says Mr Nystedt. "It's a brand name they want to keep." On the other hand, Microsoft has already had its Windows Phone 7 operating system appear on numerous phones such as the Samsung Omnia 7, but the US company has been readying with Nokia to release a phone possibly later this year. At the end of the second quarter this year, Microsoft had just 1.6 per cent of the global smartphone operating system market, according to the information technology research company Gartner, but it has potential to do well in the next six months with Nokia's backing. "A company like Nokia has got lots of bad press of late of producing devices that from a physical sense are absolutely amazing. [On] their hardware side they're brilliant, they're really attractive looking phones," says Thomas Shambler, the editor of Stuff Middle East magazine. "But it's always been a let down by their Symbian kind of old-school operating system, so the software hasn't been there." It's not just competition in the smartphone and tablet world where Apple has set the trend. The company's other popular product, the MacBook Air, has inspired Intel to conceptualise what it has called Ultrabooks. The small notebooks will cost twice as much as the average tablet at more than US$1000 (Dh3,673), offer a low-voltage Intel Core processor, a frame no thicker than 21mm, at least five hours of battery life and fast boot times. The battle for our computing attention, though, is also coming from another source, the television.Smart TVs can connect to the internet, either by using built-in Wi-Fi or an Ethernet cable connected to the back of the set. The result is a television that lets users access video streaming services to watch what they want to watch when they want to watch it, and use television applications - similar to mobile applications developed for smartphones. From / The National