News Archive for 07/09/07
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Wireless technology company InterDigital today announced that it has inked a seven-year licensing agreement with Apple to provide wireless technology for the company's iPhone as well as any future handsets, according to Reuters. InterDigital designs, develops, and provides advanced wireless technology to power voice as well as data communications. The company is a well known developer of wireless communications in the tech industry responsible for creating technology embedded in every 2G (EDGE), 2.5G, and 3G (HSDPA) device on the market. At least one analyst believes the new deal spans 2G and 3G cellular technologies covering bandwidth allocation as well as roaming and power efficiency controls. The analyst also thinks the deal will likely include some form of packet data coding and delivery.
A new report appears to confirm two major developments in the world of e-books. The New York Times claims that Amazon's Kindle reader is indeed real, and should finally see a release in October. Pricing has been narrowed to $400-500, and users will be able to connect via EVDO to a special e-book store. Aside from this it will have its own web browser, and may come with some free books and subscriptions to newspapers like the Times, Le Monde or the Wall Street Journal. A keyboard and scrollwheel should simplify the interface, but the e-ink screen will not display color or animation.
British cellular provider O2 is in the midst of adding EDGE mobile Internet access to its network, an internal memo leaked to Engadget reveals. The company's technicians are reportedly upgrading its GPRS towers to incorporate support for the protocol across its entire network and is focusing primarily on larger cities as well as areas that have been more likely to use the slower GPRS format in the past. A precise completion date was not specified, but the rollout is slated to finish within "a few weeks," according to the note.
Virgin Mobile will soon carry the Super Slice, an upgrade of the earlier basic Slice built by UTStarcom. The phone will be the first for Virgin Mobile America with Bluetooth, and further unlike the original Slice, the Super will have a VGA camera. Features should otherwise be relatively basic, highlights including IM, e-mail, and MP3 ringtones. The battery handles up to 4.3 hours of talk time or 11.7 days of standby. Super Slices should go on sale later this month for $60 without a contract.
Palm intends to release a device on September 12th that is something other than the hotly anticipated Centro, according to company representative Stephanie Richardson. The smartphone maker emphasized that while it was still on track to release a new device in Europe on September 12th as confirmed by a teaser site, the actual product will be significantly different and hasn't been revealed to the public. "Check back later for more info," Richardson said.
Sans Digital has introduced its new TowerRAID series, which includes the TR4M SATA to JBOD enclosure and the TR4U SATA to USB 2.0 JBOD / Spanning enclosure. The new TowerRAID TR4M is a compact 4-bay tower utilizing an SATA II port multiplier feature, where one single eSATA cable connects to four 3Gbps SATA II hard drives. This unit comes with a 2-port eSATA PCIe card (HA-SAN-2ESPCIE) at no additional cost, which allows the connection between two TR4M units (up to 8 hard drives) using only two cables. It supports RAID 0, 1, 0+1, 5, 5+spare, spanning and JBOD. It is priced at $360. The TowerRAID TR4U is a selectable hardware JBOD or spanning enclosure that utilizes the USB 2.0 interface for storage expansion. The JBOD mode allows the computer to see each individual hard drive, while the spanning mode presents multiple hard drives as one combined drive. Various combinations of JBOD and spanning mode can be used. Both units feature hard drive bay cover, cable-less backplane, and tray-free swappable design. It carries a price of $250.
BlackBerry owners are experiencing their second major outage of data service in one year, according to multiple reports from readers and those on the web. Both AT&T and T-Mobile users in the US have reportedly been unable to either browse the web or use the smartphone line's characteristic push e-mail service since this morning, effectively crippling their use for most owners. Neither carriers nor the BlackBerry's creator Research in Motion have commented on the issue, though contact with T-Mobile technical support has confirmed a "slowdown" in mail delivery affecting all its BlackBerry subscribers.
Sony is prepping a notebook it hopes will overturn conventional wisdom about the design of basic systems, according to momentarily leaked images from a German website. The 15.4-inch VAIO NR will be considerably thinner than the N series and should also have tapered edges that create a smoother designer look than the outgoing model. Every system will also be based on Intel's Santa Rosa platform regardless of performance and should take advantage of improved GMA X3100 integrated graphics; ExpressCard/34, Memory Stick, and SD card readers will also be standard.
An older patent filed by Google, now finally published, points towards the company's deeper involvement in the cellphone industry. Originally submitted in February of 2006, the patent documents concepts called "gpay" and "gbuy," which would allow phone owners to pay via SMS messaging. A given example has a customer at a farmer's market, sending a payment offer to a vendor; he specifies the vendor's ID, and the amount to be sent. To receive the payment, the vendor must be registered with an online service, where he can also confirm that the payment has been made.
Discussions are in place that could switch the One Laptop Per Child project at least partially to Intel's processors, the two companies said today. Following the firms' recent agreement to collaborate on future projects, the OLPC team has confirmed that it has been helping Intel engineers create a new chipset and processor that could meet the extremely low power draw and high sturdiness levels needed for the project, which has focused on providing notebooks to developing regions where money and harsh weather would not support normal computers. OLPC's current system, the XO, runs on a 433MHz AMD Geode
High-definition TiVo recorders will soon get the same media sharing features as their standard counterparts, a spokesman for TiVo's product marketing confirmed late yesterday. Both the high-end Series 3 and the TiVo HD will have access to TiVoToGo and multi-room viewing that lets Series 2 units share recorded shows with portable devices like the iPod or between networked TiVos. Series 2 and HD models will also have support for exchanging unprotected videos between each other, though Series 2 units "just can't play" HD video due to the processing power needed to decode the images, the agent said.
Vigor Gaming Computer has launched several new laptops, all targeting the mid- to high-end. The peak is the Atlantis PRO (pictured), intended to be a desktop replacement: it boasts a 20-inch widescreen, capable of resolutions up to 1680x1050. It is also equipped with a Turion 64 X2 processor, and has graphics supplied by twin GeForce Go 7950 GTX cards. Two 250GB hard drives are linked in a RAID-0 configuration. Prices start at $2,799.
The regular Atlantis is more closely targeted at gamers, with two programmable buttons, and the ability to boost storage up to 750GB through RAID-0. While keeping the same video cards, a 17-inch screen boosts resolution to 1920x1200, and the CPU is replaced with a Core 2 Duo. A base system costs $2,419.
The unexpected iPhone price cut is likely to pose a major challenge for its immediate rivals in the smartphone business, according to new financial analyst reports. While the Apple phone is still expected to sell at a premium relative to most competitors, the reduction will narrow the gap between the handset and other high-profile competitive models, many of which were expected to thrive in part due to an assumed larger gap. Palm in particular may take one of the largest hits, according to Oppenheimer researcher Lawrence Harris, as some of the company's phones are priced the closest to the Apple device and share a similar mixed-media focus.
Epson today made a surprise announcement late into the CEDIA electronics show today for its PowerLite front projectors. The PowerLite Pro Cinema 1080 UB earns the UltraBlack nickname of its title with the use of a new D7 image chipset, polarizing filter, and a 12-bit color substrate. Mixed together, these elements can produce contrast as high as 50,000:1 -- the highest in the industry, Epson says, and higher than the just introduced Sony VW200's 35,000:1 figure. Epson also promises dual HDMI 1.3 ports with deep color support and a 1,600-lumen brightness that can be useful in less than ideal movie viewing conditions.
Canadian cell provider Rogers today became the first North American carrier to pick up the BlackBerry Curve 8310, Research in Motion's upgrade to its first mainstream smartphone with a full-size keyboard. The upgrade adds true GPS reception with BlackBerry Maps software that both provides driving directions and pre-assigns them to contacts for future use. The Canadian edition also has full access to instant messaging through either Yahoo! Messenger or BlackBerry Messenger for fellow members of RIM's push e-mail service.
A series of new network hubs for Windows Media Center PCs will bring greatly expanded features versus earlier devices, according to Microsoft and its suppliers. A new series of Windows Media Extenders from several companies will take advantage of updated hardware and software to play formats often used by hobbyists but rarely supported by network hubs such as DivX or XviD, allowing TVs and other devices across the home to play these videos without a direct connection. The new update will also allow protected HD video at a full 1080p to be distributed across a network, including wirelessly; devices that use 802.11n Wi-Fi will be able to feed as many as six HD shows across a network at once, Microsoft claims.
MicroNet Technology has announced a new Network Attached Storage solution that offers multi-terabyte capacity, an integrated print server, an iTunes music server and zero-touch automated backup. The new Fantom Drives G-Force MegaDisk NAS appliance is the first NAS RAID solution in the G-Force MegaDisk product line. It's based on a dual-core processor and has a built-in iTunes Server that enables sharing of MP3 and MP4 content, including content purchased from the iTunes Store that is properly authorized. Each MegaDisk NAS unit incorporates dual SATA300 disk drives with Native Command Queuing technology to optimize read and write performance. All MegaDisk NAS functions, including RAID options, are managed and monitored via a web interface.
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