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10-Inch Tablets For $299?
June 5, 2011 by admin
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Taiwan’s Micro-Star International unveiled two new Android-based tablets at Computex this week that appear much sleeker than the WindPad tablets it has manufactured in the past.
The WindPad Enjoy 10 and Enjoy 7, which are being shown in a location further away from the show floor, will start shipping to retailers at the end of July, priced at $299 for the 10-inch version and $199 for the 7-inch version, said MSI product manager Rory Chen.
The tablets on show here were running the 2.3 Gingerbread version of Android. MSI hopes to start using the 3.0 Honeycomb Android OS on the tablets later this year, but it’s unlikely to be available with the first devices that go on sale.
The Enjoy 10 isn’t as thin and light as the iPad 2, and a spec sheet shows the new tablets have no 3G option — only Bluetooth and Wi-Fi. It’s also behind the iPad in other areas such as memory and storage. But the Enjoy 10′s $299 price tag makes it considerably cheaper than Apple’s tablet, which starts at $499 for the Wi-Fi-only model.
Intel Is Still The Market Leader
Reports now show that Intel shipped 44 percent more Microprocessors than Samsung and Intel’s overall shipments grew 25 percent year-over-year. Meanwhile Samsung’s first quarter microprocessor grew by 15 percent. The report also noted that Toshiba and TSMC came in a respectful 3rd and 4t with 10 and 18 percent of year over year growth respectively. Texas Instruments came in 5th barely edging out Renesas which appears to be closing the gap on TI.
Super mobile chipmaker Qualcomm was 10th and showed a 22 percent growth year-over-year; while AMD ranked 12th, with 2 percent growth. One would have thought that AMD would have been one of the top five manufacturers.
Unfortunately Nvidia and Sony ended up at the bottom with ended up at the bottom with six and 14 percent drop in sales, respectively.
Is Intel Facing The Heat?
Analysts at Goldman Sachs are saying that chip maker Intel may be in a pickle as microprocessor shipments slow and it faces stiff competition. That said, analysts have advised stockholders to sell Intel as they downgraded the stock.
James Covello and Simon Schafer of GS said that there will be a surplus in chips due to plant expansion. Meanwhile the rest of the gang on Wall Street is forecasting a six percent year-over-year rise in Intel’s sales, amid expanding gross margins, Goldman says otherwise and that sales will be flat due to excess capacity.
Furthermore, Intel is expected to face problems dealing with better chips from their main rival AMD: while tablets are cannibalising notebooks with ARM kicking its tail in the mobile space.
Can Intel Tablets Take Business Away From iPads?
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Tablets based on Intel’s first dedicated tablet processor may not be a smash hit among consumers like Apple’s iPad, but they could find much better acceptance within enterprises, analysts said this week.
Apple’s iPad is the ‘Golden Child’, but Intel’s Oak Trail processor could bring a fresh crop of tablets that are more closely aligned to security, software and hardware needs of businesses, analysts said. By supporting the Windows 7 OS, Oak Trail tablets will integrate better than the iPad into IT environments relying on Windows.
Tablets with Intel’s 1.5GHz Atom Z670 processor from Fujitsu and Motion Computing went on sale this month and will start shipping in June. Fujitsu is taking orders for the Stylistic Q550 Slate PC tablet, which is priced starting at US$729. Motion Computing is taking orders for the CL900 Tablet PC, which is priced starting at $899. The business tablets come with Microsoft’s Windows 7 OS and include solid-state drive storage. Intel has said 35 devices based on the Oak Trail chip will become available starting in May.
Apple may be spurring consumer tablet innovation, but computing needs are very different in the corporate world, said Stephen Baker, vice president of industry analysis at NPD. Outside the Apple ecosystem, there is a whole world of corporate applications and computing needs driven by Windows, Baker said.
New Atom Architecture In The Making
Word on the street is that Intel is in the process of developing an entirely new Atom architecture based on its 3D transistor technology they announced last week. This new architecture should enable more power efficiency on the chip.
The new processor is being called Silvermont and the Atom will encompass a system-on-chip design, similar to Intel’s Z760 Atom or ARM’s processors. Silvermont is being designed on Intel’s 22nm process and harness the power of Intel’s 3D transistor technology that has yet to be tested.
Tablet Users Are Dropping Laptops
According to Neilsen people who have owned laptops and now use tablets as a PC device are ditching them like hotcakes. Under the study conducted around 77 percent of tablet owners are now using their device in the same capacity as they used their laptop computers. This strange because there are many applications or functions that a tablet is not able to process or handle.
One third of the tablet owners also admitted that they find themselves using their desktops even less since they acquired a tablet PC. Furthermore, thirty percent of those surveyed who own both a laptop and desktop who owned a laptop find themselves using their tablet more. A small percentage (2) of those Neilsen interviewed said they had stopped using their laptop computer altogether.
Samsung Infuse Smartphone Outed
May 9, 2011 by admin
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AT&T Wireless and Samsung Mobile jointly announced the thin and lightweight Infuse 4G smartphone during a press conference Thursday in New York.
The phone is 8.99 millimeters (0.35 inches) thick, making it just a fraction thinner than Apple’s iPhone 4, and has a 4.5-inch Super AMOLED display, one of Samsung’s most advanced, stated Jeff Bradley, senior vice president for devices at AT&T Wireless.
The device weighs 4.7 ounces and is powered by a single-core ARM processor running at 1.2GHz. It runs Google’s Android 2.2 OS and will become available in the U.S. on May 15, priced at $199 with a two-year wireless contract. It runs on AT&T’s HSPA+ (Evolved High-Speed Packet Access) network, which AT&T considers a 4G service.
The display shows more pixels than Samsung’s earlier AMOLED smartphone screens offered on the AT&T network, Bradley said. Infuse also includes an 8-megapixel camera with auto-focus and flash.
AMD Drops Prices On Certain Chips
As AMD casually outed their new processor pricing lists. Over all AMD dropped the Athlon series between 2 and 25 percent based on the model. The highly sought after Athlon II X4 645 dropped from $112 to $102 and the eco-friendly 605e dropped from $122 to $98. Dual core and triple core Athlons were shown love as well with cuts between 3 and 12 percent, and 5 and 25 percent respectively.
There are many Phenom deals as well with the dual-core 560 dropping from $102 to $90 bucks. The EE quad-core 905e processors got a price drop around $65.00 dollars bringing the price to $100.00. AMD’s much touted 9xx Black Edition saw roughly a 10 percent price drop too with the flagship Phenom II X6 discounted from $239 to $205.
AMD Outs Phenom II X4 980
AMD just let the world see the glory of its processor prowess with the introduction of its fastest quad-core processor; which is called the Phenom II X4 980 Black Edition.
The chip is said to run at a lightning fast 3.7GHz. The processor is also features a 6MB of L3 cache and a 125W TDP. Like previous Black Edition processors, the new Phenom is unlocked, which will also those techies to freely overclock the Phenom over 4GHz with no issues.
Intel Developing Thunderbolt Technology
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A new interconnect technology being developed by Intel could be ready for market by 2015 and will be able to move data between computers at up to five times the speed of its recently launched Thunderbolt technology, an Intel researcher said earlier this week.
The new technology uses silicon photonics, which combines silicon components with optical networking, to transfer data at up to 50 gigabits per second over distances of up to 100 meters, said Jeff Demain, strategy director of circuits and system research at Intel Labs, at a company event in New York.
Intel expects the technology to be ready for use in PCs, tablets, smartphones, televisions and other products by 2015, Demain said. As well as being faster than today’s interconnect technologies, it’s expected to lower costs because the components will be built using existing silicon manufacturing processes.
The technology could possibly be used in TVs and set-top boxes to carry video streams at much higher definition than those available today. Image resolution is likely to quadruple by the middle of the decade, when successors to 1080p have arrived, and that will mean more data has to be pushed to the TV.
It should also enable faster data transfers between smartphones, tablets, PCs and peripherals such as external storage drives.
The technology still has a way to go, but Intel showed its progress at the event in New York Wednesday. It showed what it said were working prototypes of the silicon chips used to transmit and receive the laser signals.