According to AMD and nVIDIA, Intel is not sharing their specs for the USB 3.0 open host controller. It is officially expected to appear on the market in 2009 and comes with a lot of bandwidth upgrade when compared with the USB 2.0 so we are dealing with something special here. The possibility of going ahead in this market could lead to a lot of money and there is a big chance that both AMD and nVIDIA think that Intel is trying to do this.

USB-IF was founded in 1995 by Intel in collaboration with others like HP, Microsoft, NEC, NXP Semiconductors and Texs Instruments. USB-IF is now working together to bring USB 3.0 to life (it is also being called “PCI Express over cable” so you might also find it under this name). Bandwidth will be increased 10 times as compared with USB 2.0 and transfer will be at around 5 gigabits per second. A lot of the intellectual property behind this new technology was not created by Intel but nVIDIA and AMD think that the company is currently holding a lot of information to itself. They claim that Intel is working silicon so the open host controller is working but they are not giving specifications to chipset and processor Read more »

A lot of sources in the hard drive industry claim that Western Digital is currently working on a Raptor Hard Drive that would come at 20,000 RPM. This is linked with the fact that analysts consider that SSDs will soon become affordable in around 1 year and SSD manufacturers are working hard on toping each other. Also, hard drive manufacturers are currently worrying about the impact that SSDs can have on their business because performance is becoming more linked with other aspects than storage capacity. This is where the Raptor line has an advantage.

The new Western Digital hard drive line is sure to be highly popular although it is quite similar to the new VelociRaptor. It will share similarities in the 2.5 in drive and the 3.5 inch housing. We do not have a lot of details about the topic as everything is still in development and no time frame has been released. According to some sources the hard drive is supposed to be silent and will feature an incredible platter spinning speed of 20,000 RPM. It seems that Western Digital did not manage to get this silent part well done yet and progress aimed to be achieved through an improvement in housing.

This is a classic T-Mobile versus At&T battle although Starbucks is the one that is caught in the middle. T-Mobile is now suing Starbucks because of their free AT&T Wi-Fi offer. The problem is that the two companies are actually promoting free Wi-Fi in a market where T-Mobile currently has the exclusive right to “sell, market and promote its services” because the infrastructure transition to AT&T is not complete. Technically speaking, there are only 2 markets that run Death Star certified equipment in Bakersfield and San Antonio. This basically means that all the other stores are on T-Mobile so it is considered that AT&T is making money off T-Mobile’s back. The problem is that the customer is the one that will suffer and I am sure that everyone thought that the transition to AT&T was done at the Starbucks locations that allow it. It is hard to know what will happen with this in the future but it looks like the law will have to be respected and a trial is in order from the point of view of T-Mobile.

According to a French message board, a new Samsung Blu Ray Player is to appear on the market and it will be called BD-P2500. Although there are a lot of rumors out there, what is interesting now is the fact that this here blu ray player would be the first one that has hardware to support full spec BD-Live from Samsung. On the other hand, the company also announced that the BD-P1500 will become “BD-Live-ready” if you get a firmware upgrade that is needed in order to get to 2.0 spec. The new rumored blu ray player would come equipped with this 2.0 action and this would make it a lot easier. Still, this might just be a good rumor.

Japanese cell phones are highly complicated and they have a lot of features, we all know this. The problem is that it is estimated that people actually only use a maximum of 10 percent of the functions of mobile phones in Japan, according to Nobi Hayashi. He actually gave an example in the Panasonic P905i, which comes with 3-inh TV, GPS, 3G, motion controlled Wii Style games and the hard truth is that all these are not that perfect as motion controls are slow and the TV cuts out. We have a lot of complicated menus that do hide the cool functions in deep sub-menus. With this in mind the iPhone should be quite good as it is easy to use and has enough features.

Talking strictly about the iPhone Hayashi said: “It may sell modestly as a smart phone or as an upgraded iPod, but it’s not quite cutting it as a competitor in our mobile-based culture.” This basically means that the iPhone would need more features in order to be suitable in the Japanese smart phone market. A recent poll also showed that half of the people in the poll would want to buy an iPhone but only a fifth actually knew what it was. The only thing that is good at the moment for the iPhone in the Japanese market is the Apple brand, which is well known and might sell alone a lot of the units that will be sold. An increase in features would be good and might pull off a huge surprise in the country but still, the current line of features of the iPhone is considered not enough for the Japanese mobile market, even if the leaders have too many features. Quite strange, no?