News for Monday, 6 October 2008

Bouygues Telecom (France) has decided to sue Apple, its objection being the impossibility of proposing the iPhone to its customers.

Even their site was ready to propose the iPhone to its customers, but due to a problem with the agreement with Apple, they had been obliged to follow the example of SFR and give a substantial discount to their customers buying a desimlocked iPhone at Orange and then signing on with them.
But obviously, this route is too costly for them, at least costly enough to go to court, where there is a risk of being cut out completely from this 'official' iPhone route and have to wait for the day when Apple finishes with its contract of exclusiveness.

While the first cheaper BD burners arrive on the market, Sanyo announced to have developed a new laser diode able to deliver the power (450 mW) required to burn Blu-ray media at 12x. Equipped with such diode, a burner would save 25 GB of on a BD-R in 10 minutes, a perfect timing for performing large volume of backup. In addition Sanyo indicates that such diode would be able to manage 4-layers BD media, not officially available yet, that would offer 100 GB of storage per disk.
According to the current physical specification, 12x burning speed on BD media should be the new frontier for a long time, as faster speed would involve rotation speed higher than 10,000 rpm, and media with better physical resistance to avoid any damage or potential danger.

The company Fusion IO announced the future availability for Q1 2009 of a SDD dedicated to hardcore gamers. With a capacity of "only" 80 GB, and available as a CPI-Express card, it will offer extreme data transfer speed, up to 600 MB/S in reading mode. Its price should be below the 1000 USD tag, representing nevertheless a fortune but targeting a defined niche market of gamers almost looking for the top-notch component for their computer. Fusion IO also announced to offer Mac OS X drivers for such high performance drive before the end of the year.

Western Digital announced the availability if its second generation of 3.5" Green HDs featuring significantly improved power efficiency and performance level. This new generation will consume up to 20 percent less power and offer a 10 percent increase in performance over the previous version. This is this type of green HD that we installed in Time Capsule as the heat release is also reduce and those HD are almost silent.

A rumors about a new Apple project named entitled "brick" has been floating around on the web for some time, and has been associated with several new hardware: ultra compact notebook, home file server, successor of the Apple TV...
The last version of this rumor would associate "brick" to a entirely new and revolutionary manufacturing process for notebook case. The company might have developed a process involving lasers and jets of water to get the case of future notebooks from a brick of aluminum, dropping all metal embossing technologies, and could even reduce the use of screws and hand working. Of course such technology would open the door of unlimited choice of shapes, and design, while bringing precision to a new frontier as parts would then perfectly adjust one in the others.
On a practical point of view, one will have to evaluate the cost of such process, and how Apple could have invested billions in such process. Of course, Aluminum pieces resulting from the process could be recycled to create new brick, or even better, old Alu notebook cases would then be recycled to create new ones. For sure, Apple would then capture the crone for the greenest notebook manufacturing company.

In spite of its best efforts and expensive advertising campaign, Microsoft has not managed to impose Windows Vista on the public. The demand for the XP operating system continues to be very strong, with a number of customers requesting to have it on their new machine in the place of Vista.
In order not to lose market share or at least sales, Microsoft announced to the PC retailers that they will have another 6 months to offer to their customers an update making it possible to downgrade their machine to the old OS. The new deadline is henceforth fixed at July 31, 2009.
This offer is nothing more than an artifact of sales. Officially, XP is not on sale, but it is possible for customers to buy one of the two most expensive versions of Vista (Business or Ultimate) and to downgrade free and officially to XP. Thus, these customers officially buy a version of Vista which makes it possible for Microsoft to enter it such and to also make more money.
As things stand, many customers will bypass Vista and will jump from XP directly to Windows 7, assuming that it is really better than Vista.