iPhone 3G Unveiled at a Stellar Price Point
July 11 can't come soon enough. We now know that as the day when the oft-rumored iPhone 3G will land in US stores. Revealed earlier today during Steve Jobs' keynote address at the Apple WWDC, the iPhone 3G could very well turn the mobile phone market on its head with its laundry list of features and incredible price point. Here's a breakdown of the new device:
• 3G cellular network resulting in much faster download speeds compared to EDGE.
• GPS integrated with maps. Location-based software will redefine how we interact on the go, and Apple wants to be at the forefront.
• Enterprise support for push email, calendar, and contacts with Microsoft Exchange.
• MobileMe replaces Apple's .mac service as a personal version of Exchange, supporting push email, calendar, and contacts.
• Other miscellaneous details: iPhone 2.0 firmware, 300 hours of standby battery life, 8-10 hours of 2G talk battery life, 5 hours of 3G talk battery life, 7 hours of video battery life, 24 hours of audio battery life, all plastic back.
Perhaps the most impressive aspect of the new iPhone is its price: the 8GB model will cost only $199 with a contract, while a 16GB model will be available for $299. Having just picked up a Nokia N82 last week for almost double the price of an 8GB iPhone 3G, you'd better believe that sucker is getting returned for Apple's new hotness. Sure the camera is a downgrade, but at that price who cares? It makes you wonder how Nokia and other premium handset makers will adapt their pricing model, now that Apple is packing most of their features into a phone that generally costs about half the price. In the end, no one but the consumer benefits the most.
(Source: Apple iPhone)
Time for AMD to Take Their Ball and Go Home
Poor AMD. Two years ago, Intel's Core architecture was unveiled and it absolutely decimated AMD's offerings. They've been playing catch-up ever since. Though their latest release, Phenom, didn't go as smoothly as possible, they at least have a somewhat competitive offering for mid-range and low-end builds. Unfortunately, most users would still be better off going with an Intel branded processor. It seems that AMD's only hope would be for Intel to severely drop the ball with its new architecture, Nehalem, giving AMD time to release their own new architecture and become competitive.
Unfortunately for AMD, it appears that those hopes have been dashed. Intel has done it again if the latest numbers coming in from Computex in Taipei are any indicator. Anandtech got there hands on two samples, and their site is currently being hammered by all of the benchmark-hungry nerds. Here are Anand's conclusions:
First keep in mind that these performance numbers are early, and they were run on a partly crippled, very early platform. With that preface, the fact that Nehalem is still able to post these 20 - 50% performance gains says only one thing about Intel's tick-tock cadence: they did it.
We've been told to expect a 20 - 30% overall advantage over Penryn and it looks like Intel is on track to delivering just that in Q4. At 2.66GHz, Nehalem is already faster than the fastest 3.2GHz Penryns on the market today. At 3.2GHz, I'd feel comfortable calling it baby Skulltrail in all but the most heavily threaded benchmarks. This thing is fast and this is on a very early platform, keep in mind that Nehalem doesn't launch until Q4 of this year.
The fact that we're able to see these sorts of performance improvements despite being faced with a dormant AMD says a lot. In many ways Intel is doing more to improve performance today than when AMD was on top during the Pentium 4 days.
AMD never really caught up to the performance of Conroe, through some aggressive pricing we got competition in the low end but it could never touch the upper echelon of Core 2 performance. With Penryn, Intel widened the gap. And now with Nehalem it's going to be even tougher to envision a competitive high-end AMD CPU at the end of this year. 2009 should hold a new architecture for AMD, which is the only thing that could possibly come close to achieving competition here. It's months before Nehalem's launch and there's already no equal in sight, it will take far more than Phenom to make this thing sweat.
Time to pack up and head home, AMD. 2009 is going to be 2007 all over again, with consumers being foolish to buy anything running on AMD processors.
(Source: AnandTech)GE to Introduce Holographic Storage by 2012, Stores 110 DVDs on Single Disc
Discovery Magazine has some juicy details about General Electric's plans to introduce a consumer-level holographic storage medium by 2012. A single CD-sized disc will be able to contain 1 terabyte of data, or the equivalent of 110 DVDs.
To store data holographically, a laser beam (1) is split in two (2). One half of the beam passes through an array of hundreds of thousands of gates (3). Each gate can be opened or closed to represent a binary 1 or 0. The gates either block or pass the beam, filtering it into a coded pattern, or signal. The other half of the beam, known as the reference beam, is bounced off a mirror (4), so that the reference beam and the signal beam encoded with digital information intersect somewhere within the plastic storage medium (5). Light waves from the two beams interfere with each other, imprinting into the plastic a hologram—a three-dimensional pattern. By varying the angle of the mirror, millions of holograms can be created in the same piece of plastic. To read data from storage, the reference beam alone is used to illuminate the hologram. The resulting image can be read by a sensor and converted back into 1s and 0s.
(Source: Discovery Magazine)
