News for Friday, 23 January 2009

Even if Microsoft still has a hope to see Zune to impose rather than to just exist, there should remain no doubt about the reality.
The company has just announced that income related to the activity of the mp3 player underwent a fall of 54% that is 100 million dollars per month less compared to the same quarter of last year.
Their mp3 player is not sold any more, which is not surprising knowing that it practically ceased any evolution for a long time and that it has difficulty to make any headway against the aging iPod Classic, and no question of speaking here about the Touch.
The public thus seems to know quite well about this, even though that Microsoft will certainly continue long enough not to lose face.

For the fourth consecutive year, sales of DVD have fallen. In 2008, losing 5,5% in volume and 7,5% in value.
Since 2004, this market lost 600 million euros to be only 1,3 billion now. On the other hand, the sales of Blu-ray and in VOD progress but not enough to compensate for this loss allotted by the SEVN (Synicate of digital video editors) to piratage. They ask the public authorities to pass as fast as possible the law against piratage (ex Hadopi).
They also hope that the modification of the timescale of the release of the media will help to start again the market.

Even if the market of the 2,5" SSD has largely taken off, that of the 1,8" has developed more slowly, especially for the models with a thickness of 5 mm.
As all those who have looked for disks for the MacBook Air V1 know, there are practically none, and alas, things are likely to remain in this state, as the format Flex ATA used by Apple is in the process of disappearing.
Things are better for those which have a model of the second revision which has adopted the SATA.
Especially as PQI announces the SSD S518.

It has the perfect format to fit the MacBook Air V2 and, on paper, the performances is excellent, 150 MB/s for reading and 90 MB/s for writing, better than those of the SSD that Apple installs in these machines.
Of course, it will be necessary to check with tests that the real performances conforms with those announced.

A market, in which it seems essential to be present, seems to be that of the SSD. But certain industrialists are not yet ready to market their own products. But this does not hold them back, they sell products manufactured by others under their marque.
Thus, Kingston announced to have signed a partnership with Intel to sell under its marque the SSD disks of the series E and M.
On its side, Corsair, another maker of memory chips and USB keys also launched its range of SSD.

The details and the announced performances do not allow any doubt. They are rebranded Samsung SSDs.
Even though the point of reselling products of made by the competition does not immediately jump to mind, it makes it possible these two manufacturers to also make a name in this market while waiting to be able to make up lost time in this technology.
One can at least congratulate them to have chosen the two manufacturers offering the most balanced products in the market. The other advantage will be also to find more easily these disks in the stores.