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This may not come as a surprise to anyone who owns an iPhone or tests set-top boxes, but wireless and consumer technologies are driving the growth of many of the largest chip vendors. According to the latest rankings released for the first half of the year by IC Insights, Intel keeps its top spot, but the most growth came from Qualcomm, which saw its sales increase by 29 percent over the same period in 2007.

Wireless chip vendors Broadcom and Infineon also saw their growth increase, while the No. 2 wireless chip maker, Texas Instruments, remained flat (it’s still ranked as the third largest vendor, though). Fellow blogger Vijay Nagarajan would likely point out that this is less of a wireless industry problem and probably has to do with TI’s non-existent 3G baseband chip catalog (it does do custom chips for 3G). Other than wireless, Nvidia, Samsung, and Panasonic all saw growth rates above 20 percent, indicating the strength of consumer devices.

chart from IC Insights

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I played with the demo version of Samsung’s consumer-oriented iPhone killer in April and found it fun, but maybe a bit too much gadget crammed into too small of a space for me. It’ll be out on June 20 with a $200 price tag on the Sprint network, and today reviews appeared in a variety of places. David Pogue points out that the Instinct is long on features and short on polish when compared with the iPhone; Walt Mossberg agrees, saying the hardware is nice, but Apple’s software beats the Instinct’s hands down.

The lack of zing in the Instinct is a shame, and it shows how hardware and software can combine to create a novel design or a novelty design. The touch experience on the Instinct is a novelty design. It’s what Samsung calls a haptic touch screen, which means it vibrates when a user touches in a command. Pogue calls it gimmicky and he’s right, but I liked it anyhow. However, it’s hard to think of ways to integrate that vibration into features that push the Instinct to go beyond the constraints of a modern cell phone.

In contrast, the iPhone’s novel use of accelerometers and software give it the ability to orient itself (something the Instinct can’t do). That’s a feature that provides a similar Wow factor as haptic touch, but also can be used to change that way games are designed, turning the movement of the device into a type of joystick. That’s novel. Regardless of its novelty screen, people will buy the Instinct and it will certainly follow the iPhone in bringing touch as a user interface to the masses.

Sprint and Samsung have declared mobile WiMax to be ready for launch in Baltimore and Washington D.C. later this year. The two firms said on Thursday their trials met Sprint’s technical specifications, which means mobile WiMax is now out of the gate in an urban area. Previous deployments have focused on rural areas, fixed WiMax or a similar service that isn’t true WiMax, so this could be mobile WiMax’s big test. Let the network upgrades begin.

When it comes to mobile phones, it’s all about touch screens — this year. But what will they look like in four or five years? I recognize that in 25 years they’ll be implanted into our bodies, à la Ray Kurzweil’s thesis, but how will we we improve upon them in the meantime?

Since Apple has scored the touch crown, Samsung is going hands-free. It’s filed for a patent to let your fingers do the talking — simply wave them in some predetermined way to, for example, pull up a phone number, navigate the web or play music. The patent is focused on how the phone’s camera is used to translate the hand signals and then deliver those instructions to the device for execution. For an example of how this could go wrong, think back to the movement-controlled radios in “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” (the book, not the movie).

If your fingers can’t walk the talk, then it’s up to voice. Nuance Communications along with an undisclosed OEM are playing around with a button-less phone that will be entirely voice-controlled. I love using speech instead of my hands, but since the Nuance-powered voice recognition on my BlackBerry Pearl consistently offers to call my friend Trudy every time I ask it to call Om, I’m a little concerned about how that will work. C’mon Nuance, I can see confusing Om with Home, but Trudy? I don’t get it.

So touch, talk or sign, when it comes to mobile phones, it’ll be whatever pushes your buttons.

Image courtesy of cellpassion.com

Playing with the Instinct, Samsung’s answer to the iPhone, is a fun experience, but not one I could handle on a daily basis. The touch interface is nice, with a satisfying vibration each time the phone registers a touch command, but lacks an accelerometer to register the changes in direction, like the iPhone has.

The Instinct will be available in June, and it appears to have all the features a consumer could dream of wanting. In fact the phone has so many features crammed onto it, and it’s such a small device, that it was hard to do things without accidentally taking a picture or hitting one of the three hard-wired buttons on the bottom. The same thing happens on my BlackBerry Pearl, however, so my fat fingers might be the problem.

The navigation feature, which is powered by TeleNav and incorporates voice-activation technology from Microsoft (acquired through its TellMe acquisition), was my favorite. I could just tell the phone the name of one location and it would bring up a list of others nearby. Click on a car icon and it figures out where you are and then offers turn-by-turn directions to the place of your choosing. The icon will also appear near addresses in emails, eliminating one step in getting directions.

The phone uses a proprietary Samsung- and Sprint-developed operating system. The software-based keyboard can be used in landscape mode or vertically. When web searching, the keyboard contains a handy dedicated “.com” key. Surfing was easy and you could drag your finger across the screen to navigate down the page.

The television service, provided by Mobi, is still under development, so was slow to load and pixelated. Downloading music was easy, although the files downloaded from the Sprint store were a scant 1 MB, which makes me wonder about their quality. Battery life is about 5.5 hours, according to a spokeswoman, which includes a mix of talking and data usage. The phone will also come with a second external battery.

The best part about the phone seems to be that these features will be available under Sprint’s unlimited plan. That includes, texting, talking, navigation and data. But without an idea of what Sprint plans to charge for the phone, it’s hard to say how this stacks up against the competition that is similarly aimed at challenging the iPhone. And although not as intuitive as the iPhone, if the price is reasonable, given how many services Sprint includes in the plan, the Instinct may be a bargain.

The dance between consumer tech companies and bloggers is fraught with grand entrances, missteps and even broken toes, but the story Allen Tsai is telling over at Mobiledia essentially involves the company beating the crap out of the blogger in response to a company mistake.

On Jan. 10, Tsai posted a story about Samsung’s new M800 device, complete with official company press photos of the new phone. The gadget blogs picked it up, hailing the M800 as Samsung’s answer to the iPhone. On Jan. 17, Tsai received a cease-and-desist order from Samsung that not only instructed him to pull the post, but demanded to know the source of the leak that allowed him to get the photos and specs associated with the phone. The next day Tsai took down the post — and put up the C&D letter.

In the post accompanying the letter, Tsai says he gathered the Samsung photos from the company’s own press site, to which he’d had access for well over a year because he blogged about cell phones. He further infers that he gathered the details about the phone from FCC data as well as a recent Samsung press release on a similar phone. Samsung has not yet responded to questions about the case, but Electronista, which also published a story on the M800, didn’t receive a C&D letter. Is Samsung just going after the little guy? For the record, Tsai says he has never had a C&D letter sent to him before. Perhaps it should be regarded as a rite of passage in the blogging world. Or maybe Samsung is just trying to develop the same love/hate relationship with bloggers that has worked so well for Apple.