News for Thursday, 19 July 2007

While the success of the iPhone is already beyond expectations, it also has direct impact on some sectors of the consumer electronics’ industry. First, the component makers, and especially for touch screen technology, the Japanese company Nitto Denko has reached its production capacity and will not be able to produce larger volume before April 2008 when its second plant will be ready. In the meantime, other sources indicate that Taiwan-based Wintek will be the touch panel supplier of Apple's new iPod video starting shipping for the second half of 2007. The touch panel used for new iPod video will be less complicated than that for Apple current iPhone.
Assembly companies (including Inventec Appliances and Quanta Computer) are aggressively competing to become a partner for iPhone production. Currently, Foxconn is the unique assembly partner for the iPhone, but Apple might need to extend its panel contractors as the European iPhone is planned to be introduced by the end of the year, while Asian iPhone should arrive in Q1 2008. In the meantime, rumors of a potential iPhone nano, or iPhone 3G, could also explain the need to additional assembly partners for Cupertino.
Once more, it demonstrates how the success of Apple products can shake the consumer electronics' industry and strongly impact the life of components, such as the 1.8" HD for the iPod, the flash memory for the iPod nano.

LG launched the FlatronWide L206W, a 20" display to be connected via USB2 instead of VGA, DVI or HDMI. According to the manufacturer, display performance and quality will remain the same despite the smallest bandwidth of USB2. This could be achieved thanks to a technology developed by DisplayLink. A virtual graphic card installed in the computer compute, encode and decode on the fly data to be transferred to the display.
One should not expect ground breaking performance, but this new solution might be very attractive for users who work simultaneously with several monitors, as the system can support up to 3 displays via a Hub, while six monitors could be managed in the future.

A small application entitled iASign was developed to activate an iPhone without going through Apple or AT&T, by generating a plist file which is then recognized as valid by iTunes during the registration process. Once the file is installed, one can then use an old AT&T subscription plan or a pre-paid card.
We are still far from being able to use the iPhone with another carrier, even though hackers are trying hard to overcome the protection. It is also quite funny to remember that some people, among them analysts, were not expecting the Apple/AT&T system to survive more than couple of days before being hacked.

While first SONY-branded accessories were initially released last year, the offer is now strengthened with 2 new docking stations dedicated to the iPod:


It seems that SONY does not want to stay away from the iPod accessories business even though it affects its historical policy of proprietary format and technology.

Several users are still waiting for AMD/ATI to release a new Radeon X800 Mac Edition RoHS compliant. The production was stopped last year to respect the new regulation for reducing the use of hazardous compounds in consumer electronics. AMD/ATI regularly postponed the date of the launch of a new card.
According to a XLR8yourmac.com reader, ATI does not plan to relaunch production of a RoHS compliant Radeon X800 Mac Edition as the potential market is currently too small.
For some users it is of course a problem as the Radeon X800 was the only powerful card available for the some Powermac G5. Graphic cards have always been the Apple's Achilles heel, and we would have an easier life if Apple would accept to license its drivers to other manufacturers in order to given them the opportunity to release Mac-dedicated products.