News for Monday, 15 May 2006

As we were already mentioning it couple of weeks ago, some iMac core Duo 20" owners were complaining about a disturbing problem with their display creating visual interference or "ghosting".
Hereafter is a report from Emmanuel about this topic and the future fight vs. Apple.

A large number of iMac Core Duo 20" are affected by a display problem creating ghosting interference.
Apple has acknowledged the problem (unofficially); but refuse to perform any hardware exchange (motherboard exchange) to solve the problem of many owners of plagued iMac Core Duo.
The largest French Consumer Association "UFC" has decided to prepare an action vs. Apple concerning this display problem (in French):
http://www.diesirae.info/imac/6B4...
All information are collected on the following page:
www.diesirae.info/imac

Apple is getting popular, so as a consequence, any problem with Apple products will be known and commented, leading to justice action if Cupertino keeps ignoring the problem.
Is the problem affecting the APX and its "prone to die one month after the end of the warranty" syndroma going to be the next subject of UFC justice action against Apple in France? It could really well be...

IBM has started to release information concerning its Cell processor performance. According to their PR, the Cell is up to 35 fold faster than a G5 Dual 2.0GHz for some 3D rendering.
Behind this number used as a typical marketing argument, on should not forget that the Cell is a really "specialized" processor optimized to be extremely competitive for some dedicated tasks, but it will remain on a every day basis, much slower than most of PPC or x86 processors sporting current consumer computers.

Couple of weeks ago, Lite-On has acquired BenQ Player/Burner Division. What was not announced at that time is that former BenQ Division had licensed in, from Philips, technologies and patents to manufacture Blu-Ray players and burners.
This is a good news for customers, it will turn price competition for Blu-Ray peripherals earlier than expected by other manufacturers such as SONY or Pioneer. Currently, the retail price for a Blu-Ray burner is around US$1000. With Lite-On to deliver models in a couple of weeks, current price could be divided by 2 by the end of the year, before an additional 50% cut down in 2007.

Following the announcement of its first P-recording-based HD model, Hitachi has also mentioned to work on adding P-recording technology to 1.8"HDs.
Such HD will initially spin at 3600rpm vs. 4200rpm today. This decrease in rotation speed will save energy, up to 20%, according to Hitachi, making it the storage device for future iPod.
The storage capacity of such drive should initially be around 100GB.

Hitachi could not leave Seagate as the single P-Recording-based HD manufacturer on the market.
Today, Hitachi announces the first 2.5" HD using the perpendicular recording technology. The 5K160 is dedicated to notebook, features 160GB storage and spins at 5400rpm. In addition, new component for the reading head could improve reliability by 2 fold.
Its availability is expected for this summer and its price should be around 269 US$. At the opposite of Seagate offer, this HD will be available both in ATA and SATA interface; so one will be able to install it in all recent Apple notebook models.

RealPlayer 10.1 Universal Binaries version (Build 412) solves problems encountered by FireFox and Camino users when browsing pages requiring RealPlayer plug-ins.
http://www.real.com

Thanks to Martin to have sent us the article on the front page of Japan times, describing the rumor about Apple and SoftBank around a putative iPhone project (Sunday 14th issue). From this article it might be possible to define if it is a true iPhone project, or rather a new Motorola-like mostly centered around " iTunes Mobile".

Indeed, the estimated release of this device (next year) argues in favor of a real iPhone project (implementing "iTunes Mobile" in a mobile phone would not required more than couple of month to be up and running)