Altair's Developments Pave the Way for a New Generation of Rechargeable Batteries

RENO, NV. – February 10, 2005 – Altair Nanotechnologies, Inc. (NASDAQ:ALTI) announced today that it has achieved a breakthrough in Lithium Ion battery electrode materials, which will enable a new generation of rechargeable battery to be introduced into the marketplace, as well as create new markets for rechargeable batteries. These new materials allow rechargeable batteries to be manufactured that have three times the power of existing Lithium Ion batteries at the same price and with recharge times measured in a few minutes rather than hours.

palmOne, Inc. announced that summary judgment had been issued in its favor dismissing Xerox Corporation's claim that palmOne's former text-entry system, Graffiti(R), infringed a Xerox patent. In a decision released today, Judge Michael A. Telesca of the United States District Court for the Western District of New York held that the Xerox patent was invalid.

(DANNY HILLIS:) I have always envied Alexander the Great, because he had Aristotle as a personal tutor. In those days, Aristotle knew pretty much everything there was to know. Even better, Aristotle understood the mind of Alexander. He understood which topics interested Alexander, what Alexander knew and did not know, and what kinds of explanations Alexander preferred. Aristotle had been a student of Plato, and he was himself a great teacher. We know from his writings that he was full of examples, explanations, arguments, and stories. Through Aristotle, Alexander had the knowledge of the world at his command.

Of course no one today knows all that is known, in the sense that Aristotle did. Now there is far too much knowledge for that to be possible. The scientific revolution, and the technological revolution that followed it, led to a self-reinforcing explosion of knowledge. The explosion continues. Today not even the most highly trained scientist, the most scholarly historian, or the most competent engineer can hope to have more than a general overview of what is known. Only specialists understand most of the new discoveries in science, and even the specialists have trouble keeping up.

This problem isn't new. In 1945, Vannevar Bush wrote an essay for Atlantic Monthly about out the problem of too much knowledge. He wrote,

Nokia Corporation, Royal Philips Electronics (NYSE: PHG, AEX: PHI) and Sony Corporation establish the Near Field Communication (NFC) Forum to enable the use of touch-based interactions in consumer electronics, mobile devices, PCs, smart objects and for payment purposes. Touch-based interactions will allow users to access content and services in an intuitive way by touching smart objects and connecting devices just by holding them next to each other. The new forum will promote implementation and standardization of NFC technology to ensure interoperability between devices and services.

Motorola Inc. will bring a revised ultrawideband (UWB) proposal to a meeting of the IEEE 802.15.3a task group in Orlando, Fla., this week, along with what it says is proof that the new scheme offers a tenfold efficiency improvement — at very short ranges — over a competing technology vying for the nod as the IEEE UWB standard.

The altered proposal reflects Motorola's be-lief that the application sweet spot for UWB is no longer full-room networked video distribution over distances of up to 10 meters, but wireless links for handheld devices and peer-to-peer cable replacement applications within a range of about 3 meters.

Toshiba Corp. has developed what it believes is the smallest functional hard drive for next-generation cell phones and other portable gadgets — a nickel-sized disk that can store two to three gigabytes of music and video.

At 2 centimetres in diameter, the Toshiba drive would beat a 2.2-cm model from Hitachi Global Storage Technologies, Hitachi's U.S. unit. But the Hitachi drive stores 4 gigabytes. Hitachi refused to give shipment figures or other details.

Hitachi and Japanese ciggie lighter maker Tokai will ship a direct methanol fuel cell system for PDAs in 2005. And they have already built the prototype, the pair said this week.

Intel offers a glimpse of what the chip giant has in store for mobile devices as the company shares details of its upcoming Bulverde processor range.

Intel on Wednesday disclosed several technical details of its next-generation of Intel XScale technology based processors aimed for use in mobile phones, PDAs and other wireless devices. Currently only known as 'Bulverde', Intel claims the new range of chips enhances low-power and multimedia performance. And, it adds camera phone capabilities.

Executives at Amazon.com are negotiating with several of the largest book publishers about an ambitious and expensive plan to assemble a searchable online archive with the texts of tens of thousands of books of nonfiction, according to several publishing executives involved.

Amazon plans to limit how much of any given book a user can read, and it is telling publishers that the plan will help sell more books while better serving its own online customers.

Enterprise Java applications will be able to run directly on Palm Tungsten handhelds now that Palm has licensed IBM's WME (WebSphere Micro Environment) Java run-time environment, the companies announced Monday.

Semiconductor maker STMicroelectronics today announced a Bluetooth chipset and reference design using the Human Interface Design (HID) standard that allows mobile keyboards to work with laptops, PDAs and mobile phones.

Keyboards powered by the chipset, which combines ST's STLC2150 Bluetooth RF Transceiver and STLC2410 baseband along with Bluetooth HID profile software, can be used for data-entry application to multiple platforms. A complete reference design is also available.

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