Despite the weak economy taking its toll across most consumer markets, portable multimedia devices will thrive i teh next few years, says market researcher In-Stat.
Even the weak economy can’t overcome a broader migration to mobile and portable devices, as indicated by the proliferation of portable electronics categories, says a new report. Portable electronics device shipments will grow more than 10% in 2009 versus 2008. The category, which includes digital radio receivers, e-readers, edutainment toys, handheld game consoles, MP3 players, portable media players (PMPs), and personal navigation devices (PNDs), is expanding to over 400 million units in 2009. By 2013, it will approach 600 million units. While some segments, such as handheld game consoles and MP3 players, have hit maturity and peaked, other segments continue to emerge.
“We’re seeing significant growth in the e-reader segment, as it evolves from a nascent market,” says Stephanie Ethier, In-Stat analyst. “And while MP3 players have peaked, this represents more of a migration to video-capable devices, as shipments of PMPs continue to expand.”

Recent research by In-Stat found the following:

- Shipments of portable entertainment devices in Europe will be 157 million units in 2013. Shipments to Japan will be 58 million.
- Worldwide unit shipments for PNDs (navigation devices) will reach approximately 56 million units in 2012.
- Total worldwide shipments of PMP & MP3 players will reach 225 million in 2009, with Asia-Pacific representing the largest geographic market.
- Worldwide e-reader shipments are expected to grow from almost 1 million units in 2008 to nearly 30 million units in 2013.

Mobile standard for windowing graphics

The Khronos Group has released version 1.0 of the OpenWF standard for building windowing systems and providing display control functionality in accelerated mobile
and embedded devices.
OpenWF enables a new degree of portability, acceleration and abstraction for windowing systems while adding functionality and features through close integration with Khronos application APIs. OpenWF acts as the underlying route to the display for advanced graphics and multimedia content generated using APIs such as OpenGL ES for fast and portable 3D graphics, OpenVG for vector graphics acceleration and OpenMAX for multimedia.
OpenWF provides two separate but complementary low-level APIs for composition of content and the configuration of display devices: OpenWF Composition and OpenWF Display. OpenWF Display enables portable access to display control hardware for manipulating screen attributes, while OpenWF Composition allows for layering and system-wide composition of application content. The two APIs can be used together or independently, depending on specific platform needs.
OpenWF enables highly-optimized mechanisms to display application content in a windowing system. By eliminating redundant memory accesses, consumed memory bandwidth may be reduced by more than half, resulting in significant power savings.
“If the UI is slow, nobody cares which CPU or GPU is inside the device,” said Petri Kero, CTO of drawelements Ltd. “System software needs to take full advantage of whatever is under the hood. We have been working on this for a long time already, and we're very excited to see OpenWF standardize the key interfaces.”
“OpenWF provides a critical missing link for rich media content presentation pipeline. It rids the industry of proprietary methods of uniting media sources with displays and results in faster time to market and better utilization of hardware,” said Jarkko Kemppainen, Director of Platform Business at Symbio.

OpenWF’s key features include:

OpenWF Composition:

• Provides layered 2D composition functionality implementable on low-power
hardware

• Enables system-wide composition of application content

• Includes alpha-blending, masking, resizing, rotation, mirroring

• Defines scalable acceleration for low-end dedicated hardware through to
high-end GPUs

• Optimizes use-cases, such as long-running video playback with subtitles,
for low power



OpenWF Display:

• Defines a windowing system-level interface to control display hardware

• Provides configuration control over mode-setting of built-in and external
displays

• Includes discovery, power, resolution, rotation and pipeline control

• Supports multiple interfaces including HDMI, DVI, S-Video, embedded LCD
panels and legacy display adapters