Supercharging phone graphics

Today’s smart and feature phones are powerful graphics devices. Too bad they’re using only a fraction of their graphical capabilities—at least that’s the take of Scottish middleware company Picsel.

The typical high-end feature phone can support multiple simultaneous video streams, 3D user interfaces and display any number of documents. But the fact is that the hulking graphical interfaces most applications use today squander those resources and make the handset experience far more humdrum than it has to be, said Zubair Salim, head of marketing for Picsel.

As you might expect, Picsel has an answer to that problem: an embedded middleware solution it claims can deliver the full multimedia and graphical capabilities of the phone. It may sound like smoke and mirrors—like some kind of processor acceleration trick or display sleight of hand—but according to Salim, Picsel has simply found a way to bypass the bulky proprietary viewing and multimedia applications that typical reside on the handset, creating a more pure link between the content and the processing resources displaying it.

Picsel started out with its file viewer, which allows push e-mail devices to open Excel, PDF, PowerPoint and Word documents without the original Acrobat or Microsoft application or plug-in. But it’s quickly moving into multimedia, creating 3D picture viewers, multifile video players and even its own multimedia Web browser, which extends multimedia capabilities on the Web to the wireless application protocol device. The key, Salim said, is that Picsel isn’t creating multiple applications to handle these various tasks, but rather a single viewing application that bypasses the other content applications on the phone and interacts directly with the multimedia processor embedded in the phone.

“We have one content engine designed for everything,” Salim said. “A lot of mobile content today is PC content just shoehorned into the phone. … We’ve reengineered that content, though. We can generate the same content using algorithms that Picsel has patented.”

According to Picsel’s estimates, its basic file viewer is now in 80 million devices around the world, but it is beginning to push its more robust content and Web browser into devices. At CTIA Wireless 2007, Picsel demonstrated a video browsing engine that played 10 thumbnail-sized videos simultaneously on a Samsung BlackJack screen. Salim, however, said Picsel plans to go even further than just the multimedia database on the phone. It eventually wants to push upward through the file structure to handle the graphical interfaces of the entire phone itself.

“What you’re seeing is us moving deeper into the user interface,” Salim said. “That’s where Picsel sees itself in the future.”