News for Thursday, 15 March 2007

Engadget got their hands on a LG Prada phone, you know, the one dubbed as "iPhone killer"... because it sports the same form factor, large touchscreen and glossy black finish.
But here is what they have to say of their first impressions:

We have been diggin' this phone since we first laid eyes on it, but now that we have finally had a chance to use it a bit, we can't help but feel fairly underwhelmed. The build quality looks top-shelf, but feels like inexpensive plastic, and while the idea behind the touch interface is grand, typing an address in a browser was nasty.

Well, obviously, it's not because you copy Apple's products look that you can do better than Apple. And the cohorts of so-called iPod killers are living (or rather dead) proof of this fact.

The CeBIT 2007, the world's largest trade fair for digital IT and telecommunications (Hanover, Germany, March 15th-21st) starts today. While most of the worldwide manufacturers will be there to unveil their last products, Apple should once more ignore this event.
We will of course follow this major trade fair to discover novelties that might find their way in our Mac in the future.

Number of Blu ray devices currently available on the market is rather expensive and there is real performance or specification difference between most of them (burning speed ranging from 2x to 4x).
It might change, as Sharp unveiled a new blue laser diode able to burn single or double layer BD and HD-DVD media at 6x.
But the diode is not all in a burner, and all mechanical parts as well as the controller will have to be validated and qualified to support the rotation speed and data transfer management required at such burning speed, without forgetting that it must be safe for the consumer.

For the CPU transition from PPC to Intel, Apple had to find a x86 CPU able to deliver a performance level equivalent to the PMG5 Quad 2.7GHz, if possible featuring at least 4 Cores, and faster than the default PC solutions.
Based on 4 Cores, with its 1333MHz FSB and 16GB supported RAM, the current Mac Pro was the proper answer, despite the fact it was limited to the FB-DIMM, a type of memory technologically more advanced than DDR2, but more expensive and with a slower bus.
But Intel did not intend to let AMD invade the desktop computer market, and pushed to develop a Core 2 Duo Conroe featuring 4 Cores. This week, Intel will unveil Core 2 Duo-dedicated motherboards with a higher FSB, from 1033MHz to 1333MHz, and supporting the DDR3, a memory with a faster access time and bus.
So today, while it is clear that Apple will soon unveil the 8 Cores Mac Pro powered by Xeon 5355, Intel seems to have preferentially invested in supporting a faster evolution for the Core 2 Duo desktop and mobile version rather than the corresponding Xeon/server version; simply for business/profit reason.
So one can question the future of the Xeon-based Mac Pro, if the accelerated development of desktop CPU brings them to a performance level equal if not superior to their server CPU brother? One way to prevent such problem could be lying in Leopard with an improved and more efficient multicore processing management system. But Intel is already planning 8 Cores Conroe/desktop CPU for end of 2007 beginning of 2008.

Probably due to the rumored Apple subnotebook, all manufacturers of NAND announce their flash memory-based HDs. After SanDisk yesterday, Super Talent unveiled its SSD SATA offer.
If performance is lower than the one reported by SanDisk with its new super fast SATA interface, only 28MB/s vs. 67MB/s (reading) and 45MB/s (writing), and a MTBF "limited" to 1 million hours; Super Talent offers several models: 1.8" 32GB, 2.5" 64GB and an exclusive 3.5" 128GB.
Prices remain unknown so far, but it could be interesting to test a RAID Stripping based on 4 x 3.5" 128GB disks in a Mac Pro, of the overall (and unsafe) storage capacity would only be 500GB, but performance might be quite astonishing with HD access time reduced to 0.1 ms!