News for Monday, 31 March 2008

According to Dow Jones Newswires, Hon Hai Precision, the Taiwan's largest contract manufacturer of electronic products, might have secured an exclusive contract with Apple to manufacture the new iPhone models.
There are no details provided in this news, but one will easily think of a 3G iPhone, featuring video conferencing and a new OLED display as it would improve both power saving and rendering. The forecasted released date is May, at the same time the registering of iPhone trademark is expected to be finished in Japan...
In addition, if you expect to buy an iPhone while traveling in USA, you might be disappointed as Apple Stores in some US States have simply none in stocks. (New-York for example); this is without counting Europeans working in US (the current exchange rate making the iPhone much cheaper in US), or gray market professionals making stocks of iPhone by paying people in the street to buy the 5 iPhones package from an Apple Store.

Intel surprised the market when announcing its Atom CPU, previously code-named as Silverthorne, and aiming to power future Mobile Internet Devices (MIDs) and Ultra Mobile PCs (UMPCs). The surprise was not coming from the technology achievement behind such announcement, but by the price of such CPUs: raging from 29 et 49 USD.
some analysts immediately question the financial profitability of such CPU models, and recent information should convince them that this is no issue. Intel is reported to expect manufacturing 2500 ATOM per 300mm wafer, with an estimated yield of 90%, is production cost vary from 4 to 8 USD and retail price from 29 to 49 USD, one can quickly define the substantial margin generated by the founder.
For sure, ARM CPUs as well as VIA CPU has to be ready to face a stronger competition in a near future, and we should not be surprise to see the ATOM ending up into some Apple-branded device.

Gigabyte trusts in its fast RAM-based disk, aka iRAM. With performance level higher than the SSD, it looks really promising on paper. The new generation of iRAM is now available and features a brand new dedicated case:


To use it, you simply need to install DDR 266, 333 or 400 RAM modules, plug it to the PSU, and connect it to the SATA port; it will then be recognized as a HD by the system.
In theory, one could use it without any problem on a Mac, except the backup application bundle with it which is only for Windows. However, the iRAM only accepts at most 1GB RAM modules, which will then make a 4GB HD, based on today’s requirements and availability, this is rather too small to get a full performing system installed on.

Many people have met the problem of synchronisation of their bookmarks after the Safari 3.1 update in Mac OSX 10.5.2.
This syncing problem affects iPhone, Ipod Touch and the .mac accounts.
Apple has published a solution:
- Quit Safari 3.1.
- Open Terminal (in /Applications/Utilities).
- Type or paste the following command in Terminal:
defaults delete com.apple.safari RegisteredSafariSyncClient
-Open Safari 3.1 again.
-Sync via .Mac again.