News for Thursday, 27 November 2008

Due to the time zone, apple Black Friday is already available in new-Zealand, and it seems that this year, discount will be very similar to the ones available last year. In other words, quite poor...
So, if identical discount are applied in Europe, an iMac 20" will cost you 35 Euro less than the standard price, while you will save 64 euro for the other iMac models. Concerning MacBook, Apple offers 77 Euro discount, and 13 euro for iPods. Definitely not the super promotion expected by many Mac users...

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has filed a petition for a write of certiorari in the United States Supreme Court, seeking to overturn a decision taken by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit (CADC) in Rambus' favor. Last April of this year, the CADC determined that the FTC failed to demonstrate that Rambus harmed competition by launching legal action to all RAM manufacturers' or companies being involved in the field. Many analysts agree that Rambus is living on its patents whose claims are often too broad and overstated. This is linked to a previous story starting in March, when a Federal District Court jury found that Rambus did not engage in anticompetitive conduct and did not commit fraud, mislead or make misrepresentations to JEDEC. This was the result of Rambus strategy of manipulating and hiding data or information supposed to be transferred to the JEDEC, which is the consortium responsible to define and validate standard format for RAM. Rambus is used to file patents on technology or specifications, and while hiding such filing, proposed those formats to JEDEC to become a new standards. Once JEDEC accepts those specification as a new standard, the patent is then issued, and becomes public (18 months between filing and patent issuing), and then Rambus can sue any company willing to use such new format/specification, selling licenses. JEDEC was of course suing Rambus for this maneuver, and the FTC seems to have decided that current Rambus strategy is a true thread for the entire industry, despite the initial decision taken by the CACD. It is quite clear that the FTC would not launch such a heavy legal action if the organization did not have real serious concerns about Rambus business practice.

We might like high-tech products and tools, but with time it is quite rare that we are surprised by a product, not only from its design, interface, usage, but also considering its specifications. Today, this is an announcement coming from Toshiba and one of its future products: a flash memory card of 16 GB in Micro SDHC format:

If this announcement just comes as a proof that capacity of memory card keeps increasing (no limits?), when one look at specification it is quite amazing to think that one can now store 16 GB of data on a card which is smaller than a nail! In addition, such card will soon make comparison of handheld device based on their storage capacity almost useless, as the 32 and 64 GB memory card in CF or SD format are already available or around the corner. So soon, one will be able to store more data on a CFHC or SDHC than on a Blu-ray media, so one could further understand why some analysts think that there will be no real successor to the DVD, and Blu-ray might have a hard life to survive while it is far from being fully adopted.

Many consistent testimonies makes us believe that the 2.2 firmawre of the iPhone tends to reduce the battery life by 20 to 30%. It seems that for an unknown reason the device consumes much more power while sleeping, and sometimes even becomes hot.
If the drop of battery life was not enough, we have also noted at least on one occasion that the telephone became hot at the bottom a pocket while at the same time any synchonisation or Push function was disabled.

For the second time, Apple is prohibit airing a advertisement praising the merits of the iPhone on the British TV channels.
This time,the UK equivalent of the BVP judged that speed of posting the Web pages as shown by the iPhone was not realistic and could induce consumers to buy in error an apparatus after seeing such advertisements.
Apple failed in their defense, the display of a new web page being instantaneous in the advertisements, which we never succeeded in reproducing, even using Wi-Fi under optimal conditions.
They will have to modify their publicity if they want it again to be aired.
One can also read the story of one of the 17 complaints, where it seems that poor customer service causes a revenge attack.... see:
bad apple