News for Thursday, 31 January 2008

Garmin with its strong reputation with GPS systems, announced its first device that includes a mobile telephone.

The apparatus is equipped with a 3,5"touch screen, supports 3G (HSDPA) and of course has an advanced GPS unit. It will be equipped by default with maps of the United States, and all of Europe.
It will also have a mall application, be capable of surfing on Internet, and has audio and video playback...
In short, this device is positioned to compete with the iPhone. The pronunciation of its name, Nuvifone, leaves little room for ambiguity. It will be available in Q3 2008 with a price that has yet to be disclosed.

As number are now out and publicly available, including worldwide sales for the iPhone, analysts rushed to their calculators and evaluated that around 1 millions iPhone are being used with another carrier than those exclusively engaged in a partnership with Apple; in other words, those iPhone have been SIM unlocked.
Depending on analysts, this is either good or very bad, and many of them to criticize the business plan set up by Apple for the iPhone, especially with sales in UK and Germany being lower than expected.
Some analysts would like Apple to dramatically cut the price of its mobile phone model, but they have forgotten that the end price will be impacted by the famous 30% cash-back on carrier subscription plans.
It looks that many analysts disagree with Apple's strategy concerning the iPhone, and this the first time since months, if not year, that Apple is publicly criticized in its choices. As it makes articles being negative with Apple, it brings some black clouds in the sunny Cupertino's sky.
To re-conquer journalists and analysts, Apple will have to unveil new models and projects, and as for the Apple TV update the offer. It will be the price to pay to boost Apple's stocks as well as reviews.

In one of its "hot news" items, Apple has announced that the delivery of the MacBook Air has begun, and has profited by this good news by passing a bitter pill of "delay" concerning the Apple TV update.
The new software, that will enable movie rentals, will not be ready for another one or two weeks.
One should also note that Apple has signaled delays in delivery of other products, for example: the RAID card for the Mac Pro where delivery has been pushed back from the end of January to the end of February.

After MacBook and MacBook Pro 15", it is now the turn of the 17" models to have a compatible battery proposed by Fastmac.
The price is $99.95 and is higher capacity and longer life than the original Apple battery.
Last year, we have tested the True Power model destined for the MacBook, and it kept its promises, being perfectly compatible, but also higher powered than the original battery.
The battery is garanteed for 1 year, extended to 2 years under certain conditions that are unexplained at present.

In 2004, the French gendarmerie has started to abandon Microsoft, instead adopting Open Source software, replacing at that time OMS Office by OpenOffice. In 2006
it was the turn for Explorer to be replaced by Firefox. The cycle will be finished within 5 years when all their PC (70 000) will give up Windows for Ubuntu, a distribution of Linux.
The decision will have no impact on the sales of licenses by Microsoft, it represents only one tiny insect bite for the company which boasts of a sale of 400 000 OEM licenses of Vista each month in France.

Samsung announce a new variation of its 3,5" hard disk of 1 TB, the Spinpoint F1R. It brings better a reliability, its MTBF increasing from 800 000 hours to 1,2 million and is proposed with a cache of 16 or 32 MB (compared to only 16 for F1).
The advice of Samsung is to use this disk in business environments to obtain more reliable RAID volumes.
If the difference in price with the basic model is acceptable, this disk is appropriate for all those that seek maximum reliability, knowing that they, in any event, will make regular backups their crucial data. This aspect becomes increasingly problematic with the explosion of the capacity of the hard disks.

After the iWork suite yesterday, now it is the turn of iWeb to have a small update. The accompanying explanation is not any more explicit than the others (This update resolves the problems of compatibility with Mac OSX).
However these successive updates guarantee that the release of the much awaited version 10.5.2 of Leopard is close!