The S01 runs Android “Ice Cream Sandwich” 4.0 in a near-unrecognizable form, featuring a simplified layout with very large onscreen buttons. But it also has other features tailored to its target audience, such as what Orange describes as “a unique screen technology” that essentially forces users to press icons harder in order to make them work – the idea here is to help those who aren’t used to touchscreens to avoid accidentally launching things they don’t intend to launch.

The handset also adjusts the frequency range of its audio depending on the user’s age, and even slows down the speech of fast-talking callers. A personal security alarm is also included.

“As Fujitsu’s first extensive entry into the smartphone market outside Japan, we are delighted that Orange — a company that holds a strong position in the European market — will be offering our phone, which features Fujitsu-exclusive human-centric technologies,” Fujitsu corporate SVP Nobuo Otani said in a statement. “We are committed to the success of this partnership as we strive to expand our smartphone business overseas, while advancing the promotion of Japanese technology worldwide.”

This shouldn’t be so unusual

It’s worth noting that Fujitsu is not the only mobile phone maker to target senior citizens: Sweden’s Doro has built an entire business around that market, although its handsets are much simpler. Doro also has an application pack for making Android tablets more senior-friendly, and a similar approach has been taken in the smartphone realm by carriers such as Sprint.

In some ways, the application pack idea could serve as a transitional solution for senior citizens who find the standard smartphone interface a bit difficult to handle. If Microsoft’s Windows Phone styling becomes an influencer and UI designs become more generally big-button, there will be less of a need for such things in the future.

But more fundamental technological solutions, such as those Fujitsu is displaying in the Raku-Raku/Stylistic range, will always find an audience. And let’s face it, with an ageing population in much of the developed world, there’s a growing market to address here. Looking at things that way, it’s actually quite surprising how few players are focusing on the accessibility angle today.

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I spoke last week with Hirokazu Anai of Fujitsu Labs, who explained to me the thinking behind the Todai Robot project and the challenges in making it happen. At a high level, the project wants to create a system that can read and understand questions on the university’s entrance exams (Fujitsu is focused on math, while IBM is working on the history portion) and be able to answer them at a rate high enough to pass — currently between 80 percent and 90 percent for the first-stage exam, and then 30 percent to 40 percent for the second, more-difficult stage. The most-difficult problem, Anai said, is getting the robot to understand the questions and convert them into code that a computer can understand.

However, he added, trying to create a system that can carry out all the necessary calculations on a single consumer processor only makes the project more challenging. For the math questions Fujitsu is focused on, once the system converts natural language into computer-readable code, it then must choose from a collection of computationally complex computer-algebra algorithms the correct one to answer the question. If the system were running on a supercomputer, Anai said, the whole process would run a lot faster because of the increased computing power.

A workflow for a sample math question.

The Todai Robot project’s anticipated completion date of 2021 speaks to the difficulty of pulling this off, as do the issues IBM is running into trying to convert its Watson question-answering system into something capable of running on devices such as mobile phones. Building such intelligent systems is never easy — it took IBM several years to get Watson Jeopardy!-ready — and doing so on a single processor means a lot of optimization just to account for the limited capacity. Anai acknowledges it will be a tough goal to meet, although he’s confident that his team, at least, will be able to solve the math aspect ahead of schedule.

Through a translator, though, Anai said designing the exam-taking robot to run on a laptop means the project has greater utility once it makes its way into the public sphere. He noted manufacturing, insurance and even the travel industry as areas that could benefit by putting this type of decision-making power in the hands of regular users who might come across tough math problems in their day-to-day jobs. And even expanding the system to a small computing cluster could help generate answers significantly faster, still without requiring a major capital investment.

Feature image courtesy of Shutterstock user Palto.

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Sequoia, an IBM BlueGene/Q System using 1,572,864 processor cores, scored 16.32 petaflop/s on the Linpack Benchmark, the yardstick used to measure such things. The incumbent top dog, Fujitsu’s “K Computer” in Kobe, Japan, came in second with a 10.51 Pflop/s score using 705,024 SPARC64 processing cores.  Another IBM BlueGene/Q system called Mira, which scored 8.15 petaflop/s using 786,432 cores, was ranked third.  (See chart for the top ten or here’s the complete list.)

China, which had the top-ranked supercomputer in its Tianhe-1A supercomputer two years ago, now has two systems in the top ten.

IBM supercomputers led the list accounting for 213 or 42.6 percent of the top 500, followed by Hewlett-Packard with 138 systems (27.6 percent). Cray was next with 5.4 percent. Appro, SGI and Bull rounded out the top vendors on the list.

Some other fun facts: Fifty-eight of the top 500 use accelerators or co-processors, up from 39 six month ago. Fifty-three of those supercomputers use NVIDIA chips. Two of the others use Cell or ATI Radeon processors and the other uses Intel MIC technology.

Nearly three-quarters of the top 500 supercomputers (74.4 percent) run Intel chips, down from 384 (or 76.8 percent). Sixty three systems (12.6 percent) run AMD Opteron chips.  And, the number of supercomputers running IBM Power processors share grew to 58 up from 49 last year.

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As more companies consider moving applications and data to the cloud, compliance and regulatory issues often direct them away from public cloud implementations in general. Germany’s data privacy laws, which treat data about German citizens differently from other data a cloud might host, are an example of these restrictions.

With its new offering, Hybrid Cloud Services for Microsoft Windows Azure, Fujitsu can use its global presence to make sure that data stays within prescribed areas, said Jeff Stucker, Fujitsu’s Microsoft alliance manager. And, because Fujitsu fields both Azure and non-Azure-based clouds, it can help companies run new workloads in Azure and legacy applications in other Windows-based hosted environments.

“For customers doing cutting-edge technology, especially on the Microsoft stack, the platform capabilities of Windows Azure are perfect but not all workloads are a great fit,” Stucker said.

Traditional, legacy applications like ERP need to run in non-Azure environments, and Fujitsu runs a variety of hosted platforms that will let those legacy applications run where they should and link them as needed to Azure-based applications. “Someone needs to bring that all together,” Stucker said.

Fujitsu is launching the hybrid services now in the U.K., U.S., Australia, Spain and Canada, with other regions to follow

In July 2010, Microsoft brought Dell, Hewlett-Packard and Fujitsu together at its Worldwide Partner Conference to bless Azure. They all promised to launch Azure-based data centers within a year. But of those three, only Fujitsu delivered, launching its public Azure cloud in August. Those companies also said at the time their work implementing Azure would result in an Azure appliance implementation that would allow customers to eventually run Azure in-house. That Azure appliance is not yet available either.

In the meantime, both Dell and HP have also pledged to build OpenStack based clouds and Dell actually launched a VMware-based cloud.

Photo courtesy of Flickr user Carlos Gutiérrez G.

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…It comes on the same day that Japan’s leading mobile operator NTT Docomo launched its new 4G LTE network and showcased the already-contested 10.1-inch Galaxy Tab as a flagship device for the service.

The suit, first reported by Japan’s Kyodo news agency, says that Apple is seeking ¥100 million ($1.3 million) in damages, plus a slightly more costly penalty: an injunction on the sale of Samsung’s Galaxy line of handsets in the country.

Back in April of this year, Samsung fired the opening salvo by filing a patent suit against Apple in Japan — that suit was part of a suite of legal filings from Samsung that also included Germany and South Korea.

From the looks of the report by Kyodo, the injunction request from Apple, filed on Wednesday, only covers handsets for the moment — not tablets. A further post from Reuters says that the injunction covers the Galaxy S and S II smartphones, as well as the smaller, older Galaxy Tab 7.7.

But if actions in other countries are any precedent, we may also see Apple extending that request to cover new tablets as well — such as the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1, a device that has seen injunctions in Europe (some now lifted; others still in effect), as well as a court-ordered delay in launching in Australia as the companies continue the discovery element of their suit.

As coincidence would have it, today NTT Docomo, the country’s biggest mobile operator, unveiled its 4G LTE network — branded Xi (pronounced “Crossy”) — and at the same time showcased two new 10.1-inch tablets that it will be promoting and selling with the service: Fujitsu’s first Android tablet, the waterproof Arrows; and Samsung’s Galaxy Tab 10.1 (pictured) — the same device that has been the subject of Apple complaints elsewhere.

Both devices will be branded as NTT Docomo devices on the front, rather than Fujitsu and Samsung, and will have several applications specially optimized for Docomo and preloaded on to the devices, including the Skype-owned video sharing app Qik, and the Hulu premium video service, its first foray abroad, which was announced last week.

The Docomo LTE service is due to launch at the beginning of October: that gives Apple the rest of this month to get its ducks in a row and decide what further action, if any, it might take next.

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If that doesn’t convince folks to buy it, perhaps the “up to two hours” of runtime in Windows mode will. I’m being facetious, of course, mainly because this is as niche as a mobile device gets, and I think Fujitsu would be better off spending the R&D dollars for this product on something with stronger mass-market appeal. While the phone will surely find a small market, I can’t help but think this is the worst possible combination of product brands when it comes to a mobile device.

Symbian was fine in its day and still has a massive global following, but even Nokia, its biggest supporter, has dumped it for Microsoft’s Windows Phone 7 platform. Speaking of Microsoft, using Windows, a desktop operating system, on a 4-inch, 1024×600 mobile device screen will be an exercise in frustration for all but the most patient. Optimized for mobile use, Windows Phone 7 is enjoyable; Windows, not so much without a mouse and full keyboard. And I suppose that Intel, which has been claiming it will power smartphones this year, can add this as a feather in its cap.

There’s a problem though: Intel’s 1.2 GHz Atom Z600 chip is under-clocked to run at 600 MHz in the F-07C, and that won’t bring stellar performance to the phone’s Windows personality. Fujitsu could probably boost the chip to run at full speed, but the handset would then use more power and that quoted “up to two hours” of Windows runtime might be closer to one. Even worse, once you run down your battery using Windows, you’re stuck without a mobile phone.

Don’t get me wrong; the concept of a full computer in your pocket has sounded cool for years. In a world of smartphones and post-PC devices, however, this approach by Fujitsu takes a traditional computer view, and some would argue that today’s smartphones essentially are pocketable computers. It also exemplifies that some companies still don’t understand the mobile space and sadly appear destined to become mobile losers.

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Fujitsu will operate its cloud out of its new, energy-efficient data center in Sunnyvale, Calif., bringing to North America the same service already available in Singapore, Japan, Australia and the United Kingdom. The press release announcing the news states Fujitsu’s IaaS cloud “is built on open standards with published APIs and includes 24/7 global support for the infrastructure platform.”

North American customers can use the cloud for free until Aug. 31; it becomes generally available on Sept. 1.

It will be interesting to see if Fujitsu, which sells a lot of servers globally but hasn’t really been able to break into the North American market, will be able to do so in cloud computing. In offering IaaS, Fujitsu will be competing against pure-play clouds such as Amazon Web Services ( s amzn), Rackspace and GoGrid, as well as against services-focused clouds such as Verizon/Terremark, IBM, and forthcoming offerings from HP and Dell.

Fujitsu’s best chance for distinguishing itself and gaining North American traction will be innovating on enterprise-friendly features, something we’ll be discussing in more detail next month at Structure 2011 in San Francisco. As public cloud computing becomes a legitimate option for large companies, cloud providers that address these customers’ concerns around security, performance and availability will be at an advantage in winning their business.

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As I lay out in my weekly update at GigaOm Pro (subscription required), 2011 could give some long-running green IT assertions a chance to prove themselves. Sheer power capacity restraints — not enough substations per data center — are forcing data centers to constrain energy consumption. That could make 2011 the year for lower-power challengers to Intel’s x86 architecture’s server dominance.

Atom-based servers from SeaMicro and the ARM-based systems from Marvell and startup Smoothstone offer low power use in exchange for slower performance, and Nvidia’s upcoming ARM-based server CPU for integration with its GPUs, could provide a new low-power, high-performance alternative. How quickly these offerings find their way into servers and data centers may help indicate what value the market places on energy efficiency.

Then there’s cloud computing, which could be more energy-efficient as a byproduct of its overall promise to better-manage IT assets. Microsoft says switching to the cloud can shave 30 to 90 percent of the carbon footprint from large to small enterprise computing environments. But when the power used to transport data to and from the cloud becomes large enough, cloud computing can be a net energy loser. I’d be interested in seeing the math behind cloud computing efficiency across more use cases — data-intensive video streaming or storage retrieval, versus simple web hosting and office support type situations. That would give the industry more visibility into just how green their cloud computing plans really are.

Finally, while green data centers are all the rage, office computing environments aren’t investing as much to energy-manage their networked IT environments — even when the technology can pay itself off in less than a year’s time, as startup Verdiem claims, or cut power bills by 20 percent, as Fujitsu promises. More advanced technology, such as from French startup AVOB’s promise to ramp down processor speed and voltage, promises even deeper savings and faster payback. Will corporate IT pick up on the offer?

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Image courtesy of Ramsesoriginal via Creative Commons license.