News for Thursday, 23 August 2007

Samsung announced that the price of NAND chips used in flash memory will increase by... 20%!
After announcing that it would only be able to ship 85% of ordered NAND chips, Samsung decided to correct the deficit by increasing unilaterally the price of its NAND chips, while other manufacturers will most likely not change their prices as they are in a perfect position to gain market shares.
It is unclear if this could be due to the recent drop in NAND chips yield following electricity shortage in production plants, or if Apple placed a huge order to collect enough chips for its new iPod nano with 16GB of storage space.
Samsung might play a dangerous game by predicting a shortage of NAND chips and a subsequent increase of price due to development of flash memory-based devices such as SSD, iPhone for Europe and Asia, etc.

The website Deezer launched the first free and legal music on demand website, artists and music majors are paid thanks to the ads displayed on the deezer.com website. The catalog is huge, but the MP3 encoding quality is variable ranging from 192Kbits/s for recent albums/tracks to only 64Kbits/s for older albums/tracks. Of course, ads are displayed, such as prominent links to the local iTunes Store, but it will also give you the chance to create your own playlist, get organized, with an iTunes-like interface (even some iTunes icons are being used on the website).
If the website is delivering streaming only music, one of our team members showed us how to easily recover the MP3 source file with entirely completed tags. For legal reason we will not reveal the way to hack the system, but for sure some people will quickly develop application to record the streaming sources. If such offer will always have to fight vs. hackers, it is a good initiative as it will offer consumers a web-based iTunes-like interface for listening to their music while traveling from one location to another. It will also offer a way to listen to music on corporate computers where most employees do not have the administration to install any software or application to play music. It is a true alternative to subscription-based music listening offers currently available, especially in USA.
The entire PR is avialable here: http://www.deezer.com/press/cp_deezer_220807_en.pdf

The high-end iMac is powered by an Intel 2.8 GHz Core 2 Duo Merom, a processor which did not officially exist till yesterday. The German website Heise identified its entry in Intel Core 2 Duo mobile CPU catalog: Core 2 Extreme X7900, with the corresponding price US$815 per unit for 1000 unit order...
The power consumption is of course proportional to the high clockspeed, 44W instead of 35W for lower models; but it does not seem to affect the silence of the new iMac 24" at work.
As all the Intel "Extreme" CPU, the multiplication coefficient of this processor should not be locked, so on a BIOS-equipped PC motherboard, one could easily push it to 3.0GHz and even more. On a Mac, we miss such overclocking tools, and despite a genial hack, the frequency will remain unchanged, even tough we would really enjoy to push it in its "Extreme limits".

Apple released an update for its freshly introduced iMovie '08, aka iMovie 7.0. If you already own iLife '08, then you should have seen it from your software update panel, or you can download here directly here: http://www.apple.com/support/downloads/imovie701.html

This update addresses issues associated with publishing to .Mac Web Gallery. It also improves overall stability and addresses a number of other minor issues.