Tuesday May 08, 2007

- Intel - NVidia: Beginning of a Love Story? - Eric - 16:49:55

According to Digitimes, NVidia is looking for a closer partnership with Intel. NVidia could even be ready to exchange part of its graphics technologies for improving its relation ship with Santa Clara's giant. This information comes couple of weeks after AMD's acquisition of ATI and also the announcement made by Intel to strongly strengthen its GPU division, aiming to provide consumers with something more than shared memory-based graphic chipsets.

NVidia might be looking for a technology partnership for improving its engraving processes in order to reduce heat release while improving performance. With the exponential increase of power consumption by GPUs, NVidia might need to follow the strategy built by Intel around the Performance/Watt scale. Indeed, if in desktop having eager graphic cards is not that much a problem, it becomes an issue in a notebook while companies try to offer the longest battery lifetime as it recently became one of the most critical point for consumers. Last but not least, ATI/AMD with the recently released Radeon 2900 GPU might have taken back the lead, and NVidia might need to enter tight relationship with Intel to be competitive for the next GPU generation.

- Apple and LED-based LCD Panels: Plans and Problems - Lionel - 16:34:27

In its call for a Greener Apple, Steve Jobs officially mentioned the arrival of notebooks using LED-based LCD panels before the end of the year.
According to Digitimes such transition might already be on-going. Indeed, Apple is reported to have already certified 13.3" and 15.4" LED backlighted panel from AU Optronics (AUO) and Chi Mei Optoelectronics (CMO). Mass production is reported to start as soon as Q2-Q3 2007.
If this information is interesting and important for improving run time of future MacBooks, some problems remains. First, LED-backlighted LCD panels will be more expensive than the current technology, and it will strongly impact the price of MacBook models, so it might appear as a BTO option in a first place. Second, the LED backlight technology is currently only validated for LCD panels up to 15.4", and one can not imagine Apple to offer such option only for the entry level and mid-range notebook models; leaving the MB Pro 17" with the current backlighting technology. From our information, 17" LED-based LCD will still need months of R&D work before being ready to go for mass production.
To conclude we strongly think that Apple will indeed use LED-based LCD modules before the end of the year, but it will most likely be used in currently unannounced sub-notebook models, such as a 13.3" MacBook Pro-like ultra-portable, targeting a different niche market than the current MacBook Pro offers.


[translation by Linathael]

- LCD Self-powered Display by Motorola - Lionel - 11:40:02

Source : TG Daily

The patent 7,206,044 was granted on April 17th 2007 to Motorola and describes ways to design LCD panels with dual features: display images and create energy.
By association solar cell to LCD panel, Motorola expects to increase run times in future mobile phones, and why not in the future eliminate the need for conventional charging. With this technology, 75% of the light is transmitted to the solar cell, versus 6% with the current LCD panels. In addition, Motorola claims that the technology will be compatible with the forthcoming OLED panel.
On mobile phone, display is the most power-consuming component besides the CPU, and in the future, large LCD or OLED display-enable mobile phones might be the default design while it is today synonyms of short battery lifetime.


[translation by Linathael]

- Spanning sync: but what's left to .mac ? - Kalomir - 10:45:44

PDA or Bluetooth smartphones users, you synchronize your calendars with one or many Mac ? you may for sure be one the lastet captive clients of .mac.

Actually, if the made in Apple Internet suite makes you pay, among various services, a dear price for a (very) limited amount of disk space and a (very) slow iDisk, .mac could still be considered by macusers as more convenient than many 3rd party solutions, so far as calendars synchronization is concerned. To sum up, if you create your calendars in iCal, then sync them via iSync with your Bluetooth cellphone, in order to be able to add modifications on the Mac or on the phone, the missing link was called .mac. This solution limitation is that on another computer (typically: PC at work or at a friend's), you can't edit calendars, as this can only be done on iCal, or on a cellphone that's not necessarily made for that.

As often when speaking of a free alternative, that's where the Google ogre came. If it is very easy to pu online calendars created in iCal via Google Agenda, for the reciprocal — import in iCal the modifications made online using Google Agenda — to be true, it was quite difficult, for instance: "I save the Google calendar on my desktop, reimport it in iCal, then sync with my Bluetooth device".

This is not true any more, thanks to a new missing link in the iCal/ iSync/ Bluetooth device trilogy : Spanning sync. During the day, edit your calendar events on your Mac, or a PC, or the phone... using Spanning sync, which looks like a simple system prefpane, once you entered your setttings, synchronization is transparent and sur, so you won't lose any modification by mistake.

As this works flawlessly, you'll soon become addict. As for me, I've used it over two months without trouble before writing this news item. Of course, now that beta testing is over, spanning sync comes at a price : $29 for a year, $65 for a lifetime licence. A price to compare to .mac $99, provided you don't use many other features of the Apple suite of course... A a French user, I wasn't even disturbed by a very approximative French version...




Even if Spanning sync is not free any more, it's worth its price given its use. And it shall certainly not remain alone in this sector.

If Apple hope .mac will have a future with the upcoming iPhone (directly concerned as it is a WiFi and Bluetooth peripheral at the same time), they should probably think of a way to make it more attractive: what does the iWeb/ .mac duo that you can't do with Picasa for instance? Even macusers aren't guaranteed customers...

To learn more (video)

[translation by Kalomir]