News for Monday, 16 June 2008

T-Mobile unveiled its new iPhone 3G bundle offers, aiming to sell as much units as possible.
The iPhone 3G will cost only 1 € if the customer signs up a 24 month subscription plan of 89 € monthly. On the other side of the subscription offers, the iPhone 3G will cost 169 € for a monthly abo of 29 €.
Orange did not officially unveil its offers for the iPhone 3G, and tries to empty its stocks of the iPhone rev1.

Last week, we were already expecting the new Radeon HD 3870 to be best GPU for Apple-branded Pro application as AMD/ATI drivers are usually better optimized than those for NVidia cards. Rob Art from Barefeats confirmed our expectations by testing different cards.
The Radeon HD 3870 is 21 to 41% faster than a GeForce 8800 GT, bringing an important graphic acceleration for all Motion-based application including iMovie. Interestingly, it seems that this card obtain high performance level in the Mac Pro rev2 than in the rev1. In summary, if you are mostly a gamer, then you will pick the GeForce 8800 GT, but if you mostly rely on Pro applications from Apple then you best choice will be the Radeon 3870 HD. If you already own a GeForce 8800 GT, then you can try to overclock it to reduce the performance gap with the Radeon HD

Several thousand .Mac users in Europe have been struggling over the last year with slow data transfer speed, while in EU lost users have access to broadband internet (ranging from 5 to 24 Mbit/s). Our German friends from FSKLOG, reports how Apple is aiming to potentially solve this issue. If one compares the description of mobile.me in USA USA and in UK, or from any EU Apple Stores, one can easily notice that the allowed traffic per month will be limited to 100 GB in EU while US subscribers will be granted 200 GB. This is a bit weird when one considers that in USA access to high-speed internet is rather limited when compared to EU...
Last but not least, mobile.me will be priced 79 € vs. 99 USD, again a major difference when considering the exchange rate with USD... So it seems that Apple decided to solve the data speed transfer of .Mac and future mobile.me accounts in EU by limiting the amount of data to be transferred, reducing the bandwidth with USA... Is Europe again paying the aggressive pricing policy of Apple service and hardware in USA? Why is Apple not simply installing a mobile.me server center in EU to offer a much better service to local subscribers?

While last week we were reporting about the competition among physics engines between PhysX and Havok, NVidia announced the availability of a new driver which will bring support for PhysX on GeForce 8, 9 and GTX 2X0. Interestingly for Mac users, NVidia has been using its CUDA technology for porting the physics engine to its recent GPUs via a simple driver update.
If one considers that there is a beta version for OS X for CUDA, and that its Apple's name will be Open CL in Snow Leopard, we can expect such engine to be available for Mac in a near future. It remains however unclear if such support for our Mac will be also available as a firmware update of if one will have to wait for Snow Leopard and its dedicated graphics API set Open CL.

In order to stop AMD cpus equipped with 3 cores becoming an attractive option, Intel decided to cut the price of some of its products.
Thus Core 2 Duo Quad Q8000 running at 2,33 GHz with a 1333 MHz bus will henceforth cost $203, a very low price for this type of product.
Unfortunately for the Mac world, these price cuts relate to only the segment where AMD is present, and that Apple does not use. We will thus gain nothing from this war, unless, of course, that Apple proposes a small tower positioned between the iMac and the Mac Pro.