News for Wednesday, 12 November 2008

In an Interview, Greg Joswiak, vice president of the iPhone and iPod division, declared that the iPhone/iPod Touch had a real future as a games platform, especially helped by the AppStore that allows the sale of the software without a physical store; this allows them to be proposed at much lower prices, and of easily to be updated in the event of a bug.
If the things were at the beginning not clear, the undeniable success of the AppStore gave wings to the ambitions of Apple which sees itself in future to take on the croupiers of Nintendo and also Sony in this very profitable market segment.
It is in the interest of Apple to sell more iPod Touch/iPhone so that they can sell then more games and thus creating a virtuous circle, however this ambition will have implications on the future of the products concerned.
To start with, Apple will be obliged to ensure a great stability of the OS and the material in order to to ensure the continued existence of developers. Admittedly, they never made an effort for the Mac, but it will do no good to frighten away these freshly arrived developers right now. For us this means that it is not worth waiting for material revolutions on the level of the iPod Touch/iPhone, due to reasons of compatibility. It is always necessary that the customers want to change (upgrade) their product without having to throw their software.
Thus the evolutions are likely to centre on other aspects such as battery life, video-telephony and improvement of the performances.
It goes without saying that we are more than ever curious to see the way in which Apple will manage its growth under this new angle of attack.

It seems that HD manufacturers decided to all communicate about new products today. After Hitachi, it is Fujitsu’s turn to unveil new series of 2.5" HD spinning at 5,400 rpm, and featuring up to 500 GB of storage space. Those new models are the first HDs using the highly secured AES 256-bits encryption system. In addition, it is also a low power HD, with only 1.4 W on reading/writing mode. It seems that this is the new reference value for power consumption of 2.5" HD, most likely to compete with current SSD models which are for most of them above this figure.

Hitachi announced new series of low power consumption 2.5" HD. Named 5K500.B, those HDs feature an encryption system, a rotation speed of 5400 rpm, and a maximum storage capacity of 500 GB.
The main difference with other similar 2.5" HDs is the claimed low power consumption of only 1.4 W in reading/writing cycles. With such figures, standard 2.5" HDs are back on stage and do not fear the reported power consumption of current SSD. It seems that the future development of mass production for SSD has suddenly boosted HD manufacturers to unveil and/or applied innovative technologies to the standard disk-based HDs. It will not only relocate such HDs as a true alternative to still expensive SSD, but also improve battery lifetime of our notebooks.

Another story of a rejection of an application for the AppStore raises new questions. It concerns the CastCatcher software which allows, like many others, listening to Internet radios on the iPhone. This rejection is much stranger since it relates to an update of the software to the 1.3 version.
Apple justified its refusal of an online update of the settings of this software since it would consume too much bandwidth on the cellular network.
However, the old version, 1.2 remains online but it has exactly the same consumption of bandwidth.
This is perhaps an error with the screening by Apple, but it leads us to ask if does not rather indicate a new policy, probably initiated by the telephone operators who see the problems with the use of their resources in this way. But one can also imagine that Apple intends to propose an equivalent service soon on its iPhone, via iTunes or quite simply that this use erodes the sales of iTunes Store.
Whatever the reason, this decision reinforces the impression of an arbitrary style that many people have already on the decisions by Apple to put online, or not, software.

It is now close to a year and half since we announced to you Apple's intention to establish an Apple Store within the Carrousel of Louvre. But since then, and in spite of an official announcement by Apple, nothing has moved. We inquired discreetly and pasted together some interesting information on this subject. To start, installation work of this Apple Store will begin at the beginning of 2009. But the best remains to come. Apple has modified its projects, and rather than to construct a store in the place initially envisaged, they have succeeded in making a large coup.

They will take over the Résonances shop which is on the right the image and also (at least) part of the restaurants which are in mezzanine on the first floor. Here are photographs of this shop and mezzanine.



There is amply enough surface to make an Apple Store with a big size whereas the preliminary draft had only a relatively small surface, at least according to the standards of Apple. Of course the great advantage of this site is its sight of the inverted pyramid which will be just opposite to the entry. Here is a picture looking out with the escalators.

Work will certainly take a few months, as it was the case for the other shops of Apple, which lets to us hope for an opening in spring.
PS: Apple also took up many options in France, primarily in shopping malls in construction, such as the Odysseum in Montpellier. 2009 should be the year of Apple Stores in France.

Samsung announced that the production of chips of 512 MB of PRAM (a non-volatile memory based on a phase change in glass from amorphous to crystaline state) engraved in 65 nm will start in first half of 2009.
This memory has the role to replace Flash NAND in the future. Contrary to the traditional memory, the 0 and the 1 are materialized by a phase change of the material. Its advantage is to be able to pass from one state to the other very quickly and without needing to set the cell to 0 before a rewrite, which allows a very significant performance gain at the time of writing the data. It has as other advantages: one is to have a lifespan 10 times greater than other memory chips.
However it remains limited by its lack of density since one can manufacture MLC memory chips containing 30 times more data.