News for Tuesday, 29 January 2008

In an attempt to spur more iPhone sales, O2 announced renewed iPhone plans, starting on February, 1st.
The £ 35 plan now holds 600 minutes.
The £ 45 plan now holds 1200 minutes, thus replacing the £ 55 plan.
A new £ 75 plan has been announced too, with 3000 minutes (50 hours) credit.
All plans have unlimited (fair use policy) data communication, unlimited O2-hotspot access and 500 SMS.
They're not lowering the cost of the iPhone plans, but they're offering more minutes (and SMS in some cases) for the same price.

After a long wait, Coriolis Systems has released new versions of iDefrag and iPartition, now compatible with Leopard.
They ran into a bug in Leopard’s AHCI driver relating to large block reads, this of course being a problem for partitioning and defragging operations.
Until the bug is fixed, Apple gave them a work around which they've incorporated, and so it should be safe to use their software. Be aware that these temporary workarounds have a noticeable negative impact on performance.

For the last several years Apple has had a very strong presence at MIDEM ('The world's Music Market'). It was impossible to ignore the iPod which cornered the market on ad space at the entrance to the conference center.

But not much doing, this year. The choice spot has been taken up by SFR and it's music-to-cellphone offerings (Thanks to Frédéric for the photo).


We'll probably never know if Apple just wasn't interested, or if SFR's finances were more convincing but the latter explanation is perhaps the right one as SFR has a vested interested in making everyone forget the iPhone's existence. On the other hand, in previous years Apple also had a presence inside with booths and a store, this year they are conspicuously absent.

Yesterday, with the release of the Radeon HD 3870 X2, ATI/AMD took the trophy of for the fastest consumer-oriented graphic card back home. As illustrated by its name, this card is powered by two RV 670 GPU engraved at 55nm, and supported by 512MB of VRAM for each.
While it seems that ATI/AMD was a bit late in delivering optimized drivers for this card, performance level are in line with the expected raw power, at least when comparing it for the NVidia GeForce 8800 Ultra.
Thanks to the 55nm engraving process, ATI/AMD could maintain power consumption lower than 200W, an already amazing draining source for the PSU.
Chances we get such double GPUs card in a Mac are quite low, as its performance levels are directly linked to optimized drivers to split computing request over the 2 GPUs, while synchronizing tasks and output. Indeed, Apple can not even get optimized drivers for the GPU installed in our Mac...

Many among us ordered the MacBook Air without ever having seen it other than in a photograph. Apart from the visitors of the MWSF and some journalists, few people have had the chance to get close to one. Things could change as of today (or Wednesday according to sources'), the Apple Stores are due to receive some. Alas for French, unless one takes the Eurostar to see it in London, it is still be necessary to wait.
One does not even know if the Apple Store will have some machines to sell, but a few is likely, at least as long as the essential 10.5.2 update needed to be able to use the DVD reader of another Mac is not available. If Apple keeps its promises, the first MacBook Air ordered at their store should leave the factories in early February. One hopes that the festivals for the Chinese New Year that starts on February 7 and gives 7 days off in China will not disturb too much the routing of the products.