After personally trying out Sprint's AIRAVE, we're confident that femtocells have a place in this world. Thankfully, Motorola's already trying to make them less of an eyesore by integrating a CDMA femtocell into something we wouldn't mind showing off in the den: an inconspicuous digital photo frame. The "3-in-1" concept also includes a VoIP soft phone that would theoretically enable calls to be made right from the frame. Of course, Moto's not handing out any sort of release time frame, but let us be the first to say that this thing needs to hit store shelves on the double -- just make sure it's not carrier specific, and toss in a GSM version while you're at it, okay Moto? Check out the demonstration vid after the break.

[Thanks, Dave]

Remember that cool Ubicell in-home booster we played with back at CTIA? Sprint's finally starting to roll out the device this week as the "Airave" in "select areas" of Denver and Indianapolis this week. Overall, the concept is very similar to T-Mobile's @Home service -- it connects through your ISP, racks up a monthly fee ($15 in this case, $30 for families), boosts your signal and doesn't deduct plan minutes -- but with the Airave, CDMA signals are served up instead of @Home's WiFi, which means any Sprint handset should work like a champ. The box itself runs $49.99, not a bad entry fee considering the healthy list of benefits it affords. Look for it in the rest of Denver and Indy along with Nashville later this year followed by a nationwide rollout in 2008.

Ericsson (yes, sans Sony) unveiled what it calls the Femto Cell Solution this weekend, a wireless access point for the home that broadcasts GSM, WCDMA, and WiFi wireless standards. Yes, you read that correctly: a wireless access point with GSM, designed for the home. By routing voice calls over a broadband internet connection to a backend VoIP system, the Femto can both boost cellphone signals for use in the home, and provide an easy way of letting network operators offer services tuned to the needs of customers that have abandoned their phone lines (hopefully meaning cheaper bundles.) Once it's all setup, cellphone users should simply have to walk within range to take advantage of the better signal emanating from the "world's smallest GSM radio base station." The only downside that we can see to all this is the potential for more health scares, seeing as this combines two of the wireless standards that have drawn the most publicity in this area (no matter how illogical some of it seems.) Still, if you can bear the thought of introducing yet another radio transmitter to your humble abode, then look for the Femto through select network operators around the middle of this year. Remember, you can always rely on your old friend, Mr. Tin Foil.

We'll admit, there's not a whole of gizmos invented 100 years ago that we still rely on (and bicker about) on a near-daily basis, but broadcast radio has managed to stay in our homes, cars, hearts, and complaint letters for a full century. Exactly one hundred years ago today, Reginald Fessenden fired up his transmitting station at Brant Rock, Massachusetts in order to broadcast a "brief speech," followed by an Edison phonograph recording of Handel's Largo." He also sent out a few other holiday jams and well-wishes to those spending Christmas "onboard US Navy and United Fruit Company ships equipped with Fessenden's wireless receivers." Fessenden earned more than 500 patents in his lifetime, including credit for the "radio telephone, a sonic depth finder, and submarine signaling devices." So while the FCC tries to regulate it, and we prefer the cleaner, less ad-filled satellite rendition of radio, we're still raising our glasses to a technology that's changed technology over the past hundred years, and here's to a hundred more.

[Via Slashdot]

Instead of fighting about property lines and whose dog is keeping everyone up at night, researchers from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign want you and your neighbors to get together and share your WiFi signal in a method that supposedly delivers better performance to each individual user. Assistant computer science professor Haiyun Luo and graduate student Nathanael Thompson of the school's Systems, Wireless, and Networking Group have released a free download that analyzes local airwaves and exploits unused bandwidth from one network to complement ones experiencing heavy usage, but always gives users priority access to their own signal. Part of the two-year-old PERM project, the application uses flow-scheduling algorithms to determine bandwidth allocation, and has so-far undergone testing on Linux clients and with Linksys routers. Security is obviously a key concern in such a sharing setup, so PERM developed the software to both "preserve a user's privacy and security, and mitigate the free-riding problem."

[Via PCWorld]