News for Friday, 11 May 2007

Pioneer offers numerous Blu-ray-based products. Couple of days after the BDC-2202, Pioneer announced another computer-oriented BD drive the BCD-S02, a BD combo model. Both models can play BD video/media on a computer, in addition to contents stored on CD and DVD.
The BDC-S02 is a SATA format drive, and in addition to its technical specifications, its size makes it compatible for being installed in Mac Pro.
Expected around US$250, the BDC-S02 should be available in Europe in May.

Hitachi announces immediate availability of their new laptop hard drive, named 7k200.
It will be available in various capacities up to 200 GB and, as its name implies, will be spinning at 7200 rpm. Using the S-ATA interface, it is announced with an average latency of 4,2 ms (a figure that seems a bit optimistic for a disk of that size).
According to the manufacturer, it uses a similar amount of energy as the 5400 rpm models, and generates the same level of operational noise.
One more thing: "hard-drive level encryption" technology is offered, and the press release indicates that it should not affect performances. The list price is given at $249 with availability this summer.
And thanks to the drive's height being within the 9,5mm limit, it will be physically compatible with MacBook and MacBook Pro models.

In a press release, D-LINK announced to the immediate availability of product upgrades to draft version 2.0 for its Draft 802.11n Xtreme N product line.
This upgrade does not bring much improvements and is mostly provides "Connect with Intel Centrino" certification to ensure compatibility and interoperability with Intel Santa Rosa wireless 802.11n chipset.
Other manufacturers of wireless devices will probably offer firmware upgrade in a near future, and users will mostly benefit of an improved interoperability between different 802.11n wireless peripherals. Mac users should expect a future upgrade of the Airport Extreme n firmware if Apple can secure enough resources to work on this firmware update.

According to Bloomberg ranking unveiled yesterday, Apple ranked 4th when considering top selling notebook brand in USA for March 2007, capturing 9.9% of market share in USA.
When considering desktop hardware, Apple ranked 5th with 7.7% of market share, probably supported by iMac sales as the 8 Cores Mac Pro could not contribute.
One should take those numbers with a grain of salts as those figures are for "brick and mortar" retail sales only and do not include direct/internet sales, sales from Wal-Mart or warehouse clubs; as Dell does not appear in any ranking.
When looking at the music digital player ranking, the iPod ranks first with 68.9% market share, followed by SanDisk 11.2%, Creative Labs 3.6% and Microsoft and its Zune are only 4th with 2.5% market share.