News for Wednesday, 30 January 2008
During the past years Motorala has been a pillar among the constructers of mobile telephones. Many of you will remember telephones made by Motorola being among the best of their era, such as the Startac 85 which had revolutionized the market with its price (around 1500 euros) but especially with its miniscule size at that time.
These last years have been difficult for the company, especially 2007 when their sales dropped leaving them with 13% share of market against 23% previously. This division is the most at a deficit, leading some to predict that Motorola should quickly separate, especially as they have not satisfactorily negotiated the turn towards more technically advanced devices.
In this enormous but terrible market of mobile telephony, Nokia and Sony-Ericsson have taken the lion's share with models that cover the full range needed by the consumer. Apple and HTC have the appearance of small players trying to find a place.
For Apple to take a significant market share, it would be necessary, as they did with the iPod, to design several models of the iPhone so that they can be bought by people having different budgets. However this will be difficult without giving up its ecosystem of sharing the remuneration earned by the operators.
By
linathael.
Original by
Lionel
- 30/01/2008 17:12:20 CET - Category: Video
As
AMD/ATI yesterday with Radeon HD 3870 X2, NVidia has a Dual GPU graphic card in the pipeline, and one can expect it to be released in a near future too. It will be powered by two G92 GPUs similar to the one found on the GF 8800 GT. Unlike ATI/AMD, NVidia decided to associate tow graphic cards into one, with the cooling system sitting in the middle. Both printed board are connected via a SLI bridge and will be connected to the computer motherboard via a single PCI Express slot.
As for the Radeon HD 3870 X2, the NVidia Dual GPU graphic card model will sport a total of 1GB VRAM, and is expected to be roughly 30% faster than the current high end model from the company, the GF 8800 Ultra.
As usual, we remind our readers and Mac users that they should not dream of seeing such 3D accelerators in their Mac as Apple does not want to release SDK in order to allow third parties to develop dedicated drivers or more Mac compatible graphic cards.
By
linathael.
Original by
Lionel
- 30/01/2008 13:15:49 CET - Category: Laptop
MacWorld reports to have received confirmation that the first MacBook Air are shipping. As usual, the first batches to be sent as the default model (1.6GHz, 80GB HD). It seems that the first SSD-based MacBook Air will only be shipping later.
Currently, the delay between the order and the shipping for a non-BTO MacBook Air model is estimated to 3 weeks, so the new notebook might be selling quite well.
By
xavier.
Original by
Lionel
- 30/01/2008 11:48:13 CET - Category: Mac Intel
When installing a server in a datacenter, the power usage is an important factor to take into account.
Apple has published the usage of the new Xserve in a
technote.
It states that an Xserve mono 2.8 GHz, accompanied a 80 Gb HDD, 2 Gb RAM and a Radeon X1300 graphics card consumes maximum 247W, and 204W under low workload.
On the other hand, a machine equipped with 2 CPU's (8 cores at 3 GHz), 3x 300 Gb SAS 15000 rpm storage, 32 Gb RAM and the same Radeon X1300 consumes 409W when fully loaded, and 300W when 'idling'.
These numbers give us a pretty good thought about the power consumption of an equivalent Mac Pro,
knowing the 3.2GHz CPU's require 120W each, against 80W for the other models.
By
linathael.
Original by
Lionel
- 30/01/2008 11:01:13 CET - Category: iPhone
No, our servers are not getting nuts one more time. This key sent by anonymous users to our forum is the key used by Apple to sign some procedure in iPhone OS/installation.
We do not know how such information has been released on the internet; especially that Apple will likely modify it before releasing the SDK.
So why publishing it? Hereafter is our position:
While we can understand that Apple wants to keep an eye on third-party application to ensure that they do not affect stability of the iPhone and iPod touch OS, we are also concerned with the fact that Cupertino might voluntary prevent and limit the range of freedom application development on such devices, and by extension define what is politically correct or not.
We think that the iPhone is a fabulous product, and one should have the freedom to fully enjoy it once having purchased it. We are not speaking about SIM unlocking or even jailbreaking (it becomes useless with the key), but simply the freedom of using the device as you wish to do it (while respecting the legal aspect), and not as you are limited to do it. A bit like while buying a DVD player, the manufacturer would prevent you playing some movies…
Apple has just made available (via the usual Software Update) a small update of its productivity suite iWork ' 08.
Keynote will be updated to version 4.0.2, Pages to 3.0.2 and Numbers to 1.0.2.
The official statements accompanying these updates are somewhat laconic, one learns for Pages and Numbers as these correct problems of compatibility with Mac OSX, while that of Keynote primarily addresses performance issues while playing or exporting presentations.
