News for Monday, 23 June 2008

Softbank, the Japanese operator having obtained an exclusive iPhone contract revealed the tariffs at which the two models will be marketed. The 8 GB at 23.040 Yen (ie 139€) and 16 GB at 208€.
The basic subscription including the unlimited exchange of data will be 44€ which is much higher than than proposes by other operators with different phones.
In the final analysis, only Orange (France) has not communicated yet on the tariffs of the 3G iPhone and of the associated subscriptions.

In the UK, Apple and O2 would face an obstacle: people eager to acquire a 3G iPhone in the Apple shops will not be able to profit from the discount that makes the iPhone much less expensive, and even "free" if bought with various subscription plans.
The problem is related to the incapacity of the employees of the Apple Store to make customers sign a contract and to validate it before ringing up the sale. If no solution is found, Apple will only be able to sell in its shops the iPhone equipped with a prepaid card, and only at the full price.
In France, not to be confronted with these problems, Apple Premium Resellers will become Orange agents, which will allow them access to the data network of the operator(Orange) in order to fill and to validate the contracts related to the iPhone.

If the war between BD and HD-DVD is now over, it did not really change much the penetration of HD format in mass market, both for standalone HD player and for BD burners in our computers. Despite some price cuts, a BD player remains around 300€.
Nevertheless, all companies involved in this field are actively working in improving specifications and technologies. Last week, NEC announced a new controller able to manage BD burning at 8x, while being smaller in size and less power consuming than current models. Panasonic on its side announced new BD media certified for 6x burning speed. LG is already claiming that one can burn 4x BD media at 6x.
The most important evolution will most likely be the arrival of organic layer-based BD media which will be cheaper to produce as requiring only minor modification of the current DVD-R fabrication lines. They will also open up the doors for faster burning speed. However, as encoding of binary digital information is inverted on such media, one will have to update the firmware of all already existing BD burners when such media will be available…

While we are still waiting for the first Apple Store in France, Cupertino will open such Apple-dedicated area in Montréal, the sixth in Canada. Its location is in rue Sainte-Catherine Ouest on the left side of Ogilvy's shops.
As usual, it is currently covered by the famous block box during building phase. A longtime Macbidouille/Hardmac reader could take some shoots as the doors opened at the time he was passing by.

Several websites have published a comparison of new graphic cards from AMD/ATI and NVidia. Hardware.fr released a test between the GeForce GTX 2x0 and the Radeon HD 4850.
If the GeForce GTX 2x0 was so far the flagship graphic card, it was also among the most expensive one, so targeting it for high-end users, rather that the mid-range category which represents the main market. This is the market targeted by the new AMD/ATI Radeon HD 4850. With an aggressive pricing, around 150 €, this card is an excellent performer, and even pushed NVidia to refresh its GeForce 9800 GTX to with thinner engraved GPU and higher core and memory clockspeed (aka GeForce 9800 GTX+ or v2.0). Such upgrade gives the lead back to NVidia card in this market segment but the Radeon might capture a reasonable piece of the market.
This is very annoying for us Mac users to not be able to test those new models of graphic cards in our Mac, especially considering that it is rather easy to install such models in Hackintosh… Let’s hope that OpenCL in Snow leopard will solve most of those hurdles…

The German website Apfeltalk.de published several screenshots of Snow Leopard unveiling some news functions.
Among them, the ability included in safari to save web sites as independent web applications, or (even better?) to synchronize your address book with a Microsoft Exchange base.
Of course, this is only the beginning of the new functions packed in Snow Leopard, but one should not forget that the main goal of the future OS is not to change the GUI but rather to shape the deep layers, and prepare our favorite OS to the forthcoming evolution: heavy multicore processing and usage of GPU to boost non graphical computing tasks.

You certainly saw this information last week; 91% of Japanese are not interested in the iPhone according to a survey.
This figure was extremely well stressed by those who do not like the iPhone.
However, as we wanted to show with positive spin in the title, it is promising. Apple has a potential sale of 10 million devices, which is excellent for a product that wants to be top-of-the-range in a country where the foreign makes always face difficult sales, except Camembert cheese or Champagne.
It is amusing to note that those which considered it intolerable the objective of Apple to hold 1% of the market of the portables phones, now deride that they cannot reach 10%.
[update] Our survey carried out on the 3G iPhone shows that more than 2/3 of our readers are ready to buy one of them :)