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SYED UMER

DDR2 (Double Data Rate 2) memory has been available for quite some time. New computers, even computers released within the last three years or so come equipped with DDR2 memory. An improvement over DDR memory, DDR2 produces faster performance with less energy consumption. With the way that DDR memory products are designed, none is backwards or forward compatible with the other. For example, if you have DDR memory, you will not be able to upgrade using DDR2 or DDR3 memory. You can only upgrade DDR memory with other DDR memory.

DDR3 memory is still relatively new, and is the most advanced and up-to-date technology you could put on your computer. It does work faster than DDR2 memory, and even uses less energy to perform at such a high capacity. Because this technology is still fairly recent, you probably won’t find it a lot in new computers. One of the biggest setbacks in regards to DDR3 memory is its entry level price range. The lowest price you’ll find for DDR2 memory is about $18, whereas DDR3 at its cheapest ranges around $85. This comparison is used with a stick of 1GB memory for desktop computers.

Related with: (www.brighthub.com/computing/hardware/articles/12461.aspx#ixzz0mI2RWfzR)

SHANGHAI: The unveiling of Apple’s iPad tablet computer was one of the most anticipated technology events in recent years, but a similar looking device has been on sale in China for nearly six months.

The touchscreen iPad look-alike marks a new milestone by Chinese manufacturers: cloning a product before it had even been announced, mused a Shanghai city blog website.

But Shenzhen Great Loong Brother Industrial Co. — makers of the Chinese device, which resembles an over-sized iPhone — said Apple appeared to be the copycats.

“We don’t understand. Why did they make the same thing as us?” Huang Xiaofang, an executive at the company, said.

The iPad-like “P88″ was launched in August and was on show last year at the Internationale Funkausstellung consumer electronics fair in Berlin, she said.

“We launched it earlier,” she said.

Although thicker and heavier than the iPad, the P88’s specifications boasts a slightly larger screen, faster processor, larger memory and, unlike the iPad, has USB ports, according to the manufacturer.

But its battery life is only 1.5 hours compared to the iPad’s 10 hours.

Apple’s first iPads will ship worldwide at an entry-level price of 499 dollars in two months.

But for gadget fanatics who cannot wait, Huang said the P88 is available now on Great Loong Brother’s web site.

Apple announced iPad, a new device with features similar to iPod touch and iPhone but with a modified interface. and enhanced capabilities. The iPad is for surfing web, reading, watching pictures and videos, email and for accessing apps such as maps, contacts and a calendar. Apple also announced a new e-book store and a version of iWork for the iPad. With so many features packed in one beautiful device, iPad competes with — and could potentially replace– devices such as netbooks and electronic book readers such as Kindle. Watching the video on Apple website, it is clear that Apple iPad is more than a large size iPhone – its a stylish mobile Internet and entertainment device from Apple which will drive up mobile broadband usage and result in a larger wallet share for Apple.

Models vary by memory and connectivity options (WiFi is cheaper than 3G). Pricing ranges from $500 to $829. International pricing has not been announced yet. With iPad, Apple can clearly capture many market segments and just like the iPhone store, it is hoping for developers to come up with innovative apps to keep user interest high.

LAS VEGAS: A German electrical engineer who helped make MP3 players a reality has turned his attention to making “dumb devices” act smart.

Karlheinz Brandenburg, now a professor at Ilmenau University of Technology in Germany, is backing Perfect Stream technology that lets computing power in the Internet “cloud” do the thinking for simple gadgets.

“When I first met these guys it sounded crazy to me,” Brandenburg said while courting partners for Perfect Stream at a major Consumer Electronics Show that ended Sunday in Las Vegas.

“But I have a fondness for crazy ideas because when we started MP3 it seemed crazy to everyone as well.”

MP3 is now a nearly ubiquitous format used for digital content online and in mobile devices such as smartphones and music players.

The idea with Perfect Stream is to have digital video and audio tailored to individual tastes and delivered as a service to essentially any gizmo that can talk to the Internet.

Perfect Stream has proven itself in Germany and the company was at CES to license the technology to Internet service providers in the United States.

“This technology works and now we are trying to internationalize it,” said Nikolas Samios of Perfect Stream.

Services can be programmed with a person’s preferred shows, news sources, music, Twitter feeds, or other Internet content and the data can be routed to digital picture frames, in-car navigation systems, feature phones, game consoles and more, according to Brandenburg.

“It bridges the different technologies,” Samios said.

“These are all walled-garden devices that usually never talk to each other.”

Personalized Internet streams can flow seamlessly to sophisticated online electronics or to “any kind of stupid phone, a 50-dollar phone with a prepaid plan,” according to Samios.

The key is in processing digital content on servers “in the cloud” and then feeding it to gadgets that need only receive and decode the data, Brandenburg said.

Perfect Stream demonstrated the service on a series of devices, including an inexpensive Internet radio and a Philips television with basic Internet connectivity.

Apple introduced the new wireless Magic Mouse, the first mouse to use Apple’s revolutionary Multi-Touch technology. Pioneered on iPhone, iPod touch and Mac notebook trackpads, Multi-Touch allows customers to navigate using intuitive finger gestures. Instead of mechanical buttons, scroll wheels or scroll balls, the entire top of the Magic Mouse is a seamless Multi-Touch surface.

“Apple is the Multi-Touch leader, pioneering the use of this innovative technology in iPhone, iPod touch and Mac notebook trackpads,” said Philip Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of Worldwide Product Marketing. “Apple’s Multi-Touch technology allows us to offer an easy to use mouse in a simple and elegant design.”

Magic Mouse features a seamless touch-sensitive enclosure that allows it to be a single or multi-button mouse with advanced gesture support. Using intuitive gestures, users can easily scroll through long documents, pan across large images or swipe to move forward or backward through a collection of web pages or photos. Magic Mouse works for left or right handed users and multi-button or gesture commands can be easily configured from within System Preferences.

The Magic Mouse laser tracking engine provides a smooth, consistent experience across more surfaces than a traditional optical tracking system. Magic Mouse uses Bluetooth wireless capabilities to create a clean, cable-free desk top and its secure wireless connection works from up to 10 meters away. To extend battery performance, Magic Mouse includes an advanced power management system that works with Mac OS X to automatically switch to low power modes during periods of inactivity. The wireless Magic Mouse is powered by two AA batteries which are included.

Pricing & Availability
Magic Mouse comes standard with the new iMac and is available at the end of October at Apple’s retail stores and Apple Authorized Resellers for a suggested retail price of $69 (US).

In a blog Google finally wrote that it has designed its mobile phone which it is sharing with its employees to do the pre-launch testing. The phone is called NEXUS and is running Andriod OS and it is being manufactured by HTC for Google.

Though, there are dozens of other Android based phones in the market but this piece of machine has been taken care by Google itself from A to Z including all the application and the look and feel of the hardware.

Google plans to release the phone early in 2010 from its online stores. According to its plans, Google is not going to launch it through any operator as it is the case with most of deals.

After Google launched its Android operating system 2 years back aiming the future in mobile phone industry, many other manufacturers including HTC, Motorola etc introduced handsets equipped with Android. Google wants Android to take the lead which in turn will further enhance Google’s penetration as more and more people will be using Gmail, Google maps, Google search thus generating huge advertising money.

Google has not yet sold the hardware in its business history, it will be real fun to see it selling the phones with all of its might.

src=’google blog’

A new MP3 player is now available called the MP3 Micro Sport. It seems to have no controls except for just 1 button and due to the small size of the device, it sits in your ear like a small bluetooth headset.

We are not entirely sure how the single button operation works. Maybe it uses a sequence of button presses to start, skip and control volume etc…

Included with the MP3 Micro Sport player is another headphone that you attach to the main unit and wrap the cable around the back of your neck to provide both ears with sound.

Apple recently announced the 3rd gen iPod shuffle and literally a day later iFixit managed to get their hands on one and dissect it.

The true volume (as in size) of the 3rd gen shuffle is 4326 cubic millimeters and it weighs just 10.7 grams. If you matched the weight of the 17″ MacBook Pro against the shuffle then you would need 286 of them. This shows how small and light it actually is. On to the dissection…

Taking apart the iPod was not too much of a challenge for iFixit as they have done a bunch before. The photo series starts off showing the iPod being split apart with a small tool and an iPod opening tool. Once inside they noted that there wasn’t much in the way of it being serviceable due to the small size and lack of parts. Inside there is an IC chip that has a CPU, RAM and 4GB of memory. A 3.7 volt battery was soldered to the board. Finally one last thing was found in there that was the headphone jack.

Take a look at the full series of photos on iFixit and some other technical details such as battery capacity

Via: SlashGear

MSI are launching a new laptop computer in the X-Slim range called the MSI X350. The X350 has a 13.4 inch screen that has a 1,366 x 768 resolution and is backlit by LED. The X250 weighs 3.31 pounds.

The laptop is described as being ultra-thin and comes with 2GB of DDR2 memory, has a chiclet style keyboard and a 1.3 megapixel camera. Powering the X350 laptop is an Intel CULV Core 2 Duo Processor.

The laptop has a gigabit Ethernet port for connectivity along with WiFi and optional Bluetooth. On the outer edges USB 2.0 ports can be found along with an SD/MMC memory card reader and audio in and out jacks.

The MSI X350 runs the Intel GMA 4500MHD graphics chipset and also comes pre-installed with Windows 7 Home Premium edition. For power you get the option of either a 4 cell or 8 cell battery that can provide up to 9 hours of usage between charges.

No details on pricing or availability are known just yet although we’d expect to see details over at CES at the latest.

Via: TFTS

It appears the new Cisco IP Phone 7985G Videophone is OEM’ed from Tandberg (image to left which is identical to the image I posted about the Cisco videophone on Friday).

If the Cisco videophone has the same feature-set as the Tandberg 150 MXP, then it does indeed support SIP, which I was unsure about when I broke the story on the new Cisco videphone. In fact, the Tandberg 150 MXP also supports the H.323 protocol as well, which is a plus since many legacy videophone systems from Polycom and other manufacturers support H.323. I wonder if Cisco also added their SKINNY protocol to the phone? That would make it 3 protocols running on the Cisco videophone.

According to Tandberg’s website the Tandberg 150 MXP has the following features, which I assume the Cisco phone will have as well:
• Optional IM and webconferencing
• URI Dialing
• H.323 & SIP support.
• Up to 512 kbps IP
• Superior video quality incorporating the H.264 standard
• Standards-based embedded encryption (AES & DES)
• Protection against network interruptions with automatic Downspeeding and IPLR

The Tandberg 150 MXP retails for US$2,990, which seems extremely steep to me. I doubt Cisco could get away with selling a business desktop videphone for three thousand dollars. Even high executives such as CEOs aren’t going to want to pay $3000 for a desktop phone -that’s more than the price of many IP-PBX systems! Just how much margin and markup is on this Tandberg phone that Cisco can still make a few bucks on it? Seems very odd to me that Cisco didn’t just build their own videophone. They certainly have the expertise to do this. Further, I would think they could build it less expensively and sell it for much less with a higher profit margin. The only thing I can think of it that this phone is more of a “conference room” videophone and not a desktop videophone for every employee. Certainly today most high-end videoconferencing systems do cost around $3000 so it does fit much better in the conference room videoconferencing space.

Personally, I think Cisco would be better off going after the business desktop videophone space. Let’s assume most small to medium corporations have between 1-4 conference rooms. Assuming the max – 4 conference rooms, that’s only 4 X $3000 = $12,000 sale per business. Now instead let’s assume Cisco makes a desktop videophone that retails for $1000 and assume the average business has 50 employees. Multiple $1000 X 50 = $50,000 sale per business. Of course, not every business is going to need videophones on every single employees desk, but if given the choice between a IP videophone and regular non-video IP phone that is only a few hundred dollars less, many will opt for the more expensive video phones.