Category: Brands and Companies

All Brands and Company Names

HP to Move Part of Notebook production to Japan Factories

This is not everyday news, infact it is quite the opposite of everyday news. According to Japanese Paper the Nikkei, HP has decided to move production of its Japanese selling notebooks to Japan based manufacturing units at factories in Akishima near Tokyo. HP also plans to hire 50% more workers in Akishima, boosting the number of employees there to 450.

HP claims this will increase efficiency, be closer to the market, stand out with a “made-in-Japan” label, and push down delivery times especially to Japanese business customers. According to Nikkei the delivery of the notebooks will go down to just 5-10 days vs the current 15-30 in Japan. HP currently holds 10% market share in Japan , which makes it the number 5 PC vendor in Japanese territory.

June 18, 2011
Intel 710 and 720 Series SSD Specs Leaked

The upcoming 710 Series, codename Lyndonville, and the 720 Series, codename Ramsdale, SSDs from Intel have had their specs leaked via a German Website. Both series are due for release in the next few months and set as replacements for the X-25E series of SSDs.

The 710 series will be available in 100, 200 and 300 GB capacities and will use MLC NAND storage. They will have a read speed of 270 mbps and write speeds of 210 Mbps. While these speeds are not exceptional, these drives are geared towards the enterprise. They come with AES-128 encryption and a mean time between failure of 2 million hours. The 710 series is launching in this quarter and we should have a pricing soon.

The 720 series is what we’re really exited about. It will come in flavours of 200 and 400 GB and will use the more reliable SLC NAND flash storage and will also come with AES-256 encryption. It will be the first Intel SSD line to switch from the SATA interface to a PCI Express interface. This will allow the drives to have a phenomenal read speed of 2200MBps and an unheard write speed of 1800 MBps. That is not a typo. The speeds are in Mega Bytes per second. These devices are expected to launch later this year at prices that would probably be through the roof.

June 18, 2011
Innovation : iCard ECG Monitors your Heart on your iPhone

Now thats called innovation. The new iCard ECG uses an iDevice to monitor your heart through any clothing you may be wearing, It attaches to the back of your iPhone with a velcro strap and sends ECG data to an app on the device.

With the device attached to you iPhone just hold the mix to your chest and voila instant heart rate. Surprisingly there are already apps in the iOS AppStore and Android Market place that monitor your heart rate using the camera and flash on your portable smartphone, but those can be highly inaccurate.

June 18, 2011
Apple Increases Attack against Samsung, Adds More devices to the Suit
Apple has added a bunch of other Samsung Smartphones to their already existing Lawsuit, that claims that Samsung Infringes copyrights that belong to Apple. The new additions to the suit include
- DROID Charge
- Exhibit 4G
- Galaxy Ace
- Galaxy Prevail
- Galaxy S
- Gravity
- Infuse 4G
- Nexus S 4G
- Replenish
- Galaxy Tab 10.1
- Galaxy S II
Apple had earlier already filed a complaint against Galaxy S, Nexus S, Epic 4G, and Galaxy Tab among other products.

[quote]Before Apple’s introduction of the first iPhone product, no other company was offering a phone with these features. Prior mobile phones were often bulkier and contained physical keypads. Some had a rocker-style navigation button and sets of buttons for numbers and calling features. Others had a front panel with a partial or full QWERTY keyboard and a screen. None had the clean lines of the iPhone, which immediately caused it to stand apart from the competition.[/quote]
June 18, 2011
Microsoft gets Green Signal from Antitrust for Skype Acquisition

Microsoft has been given the US antitrust approval for the large acquisition of Skype for its VOIP integrations within all of its offerings including, and not limiting to, Windows, Xbox and Zune. The total cost of this is set at US $8.5 Billion and the transfer of funds will commence and end in one single sweep.

Microsoft will be updating the Skype APIs to make them usable within their own infrastructure, and should be updating the end user clients very very soon. Microsoft has constantly repeated that existing Skype users will and should not be affected by the new changes.

June 18, 2011
Leaked : Sony Ericsson Xperia Duo : Apparantly
An allegedly leaked shot of the upcoming Sony Ericsson Xperia Duo has been leaked. This device is not yet announced so one can only hope that its real.

Almost identical in appearance to the Xperia Arc this device will boast a dual core processor to add to the amazingly awesome experience of the existing Arc.

There is a large edge to edge display which appears to be larger than 4.3 inches. The Timescape UI also looks pretty different with a new revamped dock that reminds us of the iOS multitasking toolbar.

Here is our wishlist
- 1.2 GHZ dual core
- 8 MP. SONY cybershot Camera
- 3MP Front camera
- 4.5 inch Bravia engine display with a high resolution say qHD
- 1GB of RAM
and while we are at it lets ask for a 32GB onboard and a 2000 mah Battery, hihg hopes, huh?

[IT168]
June 18, 2011
Sony Ericsson signs deal with NFC chip maker. (PR)

Mobile Phone companies are gearing up to offer the Google Mobile Wallet service to their users. Sony Ericsson is next in line after Samsung to join in on the payment system implementation to order its NFC chips from manufacturer NXP. According to the deal Sony will PN65 and bring it to future future Android-based Xperia models.

[toggle title_open=”Collapse Press Release” title_closed=”Read the Press Release” hide=”yes” border=”yes” style=”default” excerpt_length=”0″ read_more_text=”Read More” read_less_text=”Read Less” include_excerpt_html=”no”]

Sony Ericsson selects NXP’s NFC Solution for its Android-based Smartphones

Today NXP Semiconductors N.V. (NASDAQ: NXPI) announced that its world leading near field communication (NFC) technology has been selected by Sony Ericsson for inclusion in its Android-based smartphones. Sony Ericsson, a leading, global mobile handset manufacturer focused on communications and entertainment, will use NFC to further enhance its consumers’ mobile experiences, creating a portfolio of smartphones that enable mobile transactions. Using simple touch gestures, consumers will be able to make purchases or connect to a point of sale (POS) terminal, ticketing terminal or location-based promotional tag simply and securely with their NFC-enabled smartphones.

NXP provides complete embedded, secure NFC solutions and recently announced that its NFC software is open source on the Android platform and enables the Google Wallet application. Sony Ericsson intends to use the NXP PN65 NFC solution in their Android-based smartphones, which includes the NFC radio controller, the embedded secure element and NFC software. The embedded secure element enables NFC to be used for mobile transactions. Building on NXP’s extensive background in secure identification, the PN65 uses advanced cryptography to offer the highest level of security for transactions, with the technology already being extensively used in contactless banking cards, e-passports, e-ID cards and secure access systems.

“Building on Sony Ericsson’s leadership in Android and mobile gaming, the integration of near field communication into our Android-based Xperia™ portfolio is another step in delivering the most entertaining smartphones,” said Jan Uddenfeldt, Chief Technology Officer at Sony Ericsson. “NFC offers our consumers the ability to broaden their communication experience beyond the phone, and we are poised to drive the development of new, exciting and creative entertainment experiences.”

“This latest move from Sony Ericsson is another proof point of the strong momentum and potential of NFC,” said Rick Clemmer, president and CEO, NXP Semiconductors. “Based on continued strong customer endorsements we have the opportunity to increase the sales of our NFC products 2-4 times as a percentage of total NXP revenue in the second half of 2011 from the approximately one percent it represents today. NFC offers a game-changing opportunity for mobile phone manufacturers to provide creative and innovative smartphones to their customers.

NFC is a market proven technology co-invented by NXP in 2002. In 2004 NXP co-founded the NFC Forum to lead the collaboration with all industry stakeholders and help standardize the technology. NFC technology evolved from a combination of contactless identification (RFID) and interconnection technologies. Ranked as the number one contactless IC vendor by ABI Research for three years in a row, NXP is the global leader in NFC solutions, field proven in over 150 NFC trials and landmark commercial deployments worldwide.[/toggle]

June 17, 2011
Apple now sued for “iBooks” Trademark infringement

New York publisher John T. Colby purchased assets belonging to publisher Byron Preiss several years ago, and included in that buy were more than 1,000 books published under the “ibooks” name. Apple does however have a trademark for “iBook” which was a laptop they released prior to MacBooks.

John T. Colby currently owns the copyright to the iBooks name and has decided to Sue Apple for the same.

[quote]Apple’s use of the mark ‘iBooks’ to denote the electronic library that can be accessed via its iPad tablet computer and its iPhone is likely to overwhelm the good will of plaintiffs’ ‘ibooks’ and ‘ipicturebooks’ marks and render them virtually worthless,” Colby’s lawsuit states.[/quote]

June 17, 2011
Apple will Pay Nokia $600 Million upfront, and $550 Million Yearly Post That.

According to Deutsche Bank analyst Kai Korschelt, The dying breed Nokia stands to sustain in the market thanks to is greatest rival today – Apple. Apple and Nokia announced early on Tuesday that they had reached an agreement regarding a series of patent disputes filed by each company over the past few years.

Korschelt estimates that Apple will give Nokia a $608 million lump-sum payment up front. post that, Apple will like pay Nokia a 1% royalty on all iPhones sold each quarter as a licensing fee. At the current market sale rate, the fruit company will pay the team at Espoo a whopping $550 Million in yearly licenses.

[toggle title_open=”Close the Release” title_closed=”Read the Nokia release from Tuesday” hide=”yes” border=”yes” style=”default” excerpt_length=”0″ read_more_text=”Read More” read_less_text=”Read Less” include_excerpt_html=”no”]Nokia enters into patent license agreement with Apple

Apple payments to Nokia settle all litigation and have positive financial impact

Espoo, Finland – Nokia announced that it has signed a patent license agreement with Apple. The agreement will result in settlement of all patent litigation between the companies, including the withdrawal by Nokia and Apple of their respective complaints to the US International Trade Commission.

The financial structure of the agreement consists of a one-time payment payable by Apple and on-going royalties to be paid by Apple to Nokia for the term of the agreement. The specific terms of the contract are confidential.

“We are very pleased to have Apple join the growing number of Nokia licensees,” said Stephen Elop, president and chief executive officer of Nokia. “This settlement demonstrates Nokia’s industry leading patent portfolio and enables us to focus on further licensing opportunities in the mobile communications market.”

During the last two decades, Nokia has invested approximately EUR 43 billion in research and development and built one of the wireless industry’s strongest and broadest IPR portfolios, with over 10,000 patent families. Nokia is a world leader in the development of handheld device and mobile communications technologies, which is also demonstrated by Nokia’s strong patent position.

This agreement is expected to have a positive financial impact on Nokia’s recently revised outlook for the second quarter 2011 of around break-even non-IFRS operating margin for Devices & Services.[/toggle]

June 17, 2011
Microsoft releases SDK for Kinect for Windows

A huge number of developers rejoiced as Microsoft on Thursday announced the new SDK for Kinect on WIndows. What this means is that the already hacked and exploited Kinect will now bring a full Sdk to be used for gestures and computations while in an open framework officially supported by Microsoft themselves.

This will also begin a new era of Gesture controlled PC games . If you want to download and develop using the SDK head on over to the link mentioned to kick-off.

[Microsoft Blog]

June 17, 2011
HTC Sensation : Hands on feat SGS 2 and iPhone 4 : Unboxing Video Now Up!

Just as we predicted the Sensation Arrived Tuesday and we took full liberty to unbox the Sensation and do the full thing on video for you guys. (more…)

June 16, 2011
Xbox 720 Coming in 2012?

Microsoft’s Xbox 360 has been around for many years. It’s successor, dubbed the Xbox 720 is rumored to be released during E3 in 2012. A high level source from Crytek, the makers of Crysis, claims that:

[quote]Microsoft will announce the existence of a new Xbox within the next 12 months, hinting that an E3 2012 reveal is likely. [/quote]

Although no console specs have been confirmed, DirectX 11 – which includes tessellation, multi-threaded rendering and compute shaders – which has had a hugely positive effect on visuals, will probably be included. The Crytek source also claimed that Microsoft was likely to launch the new Xbox 720 before Sony launched the PS4.

Both Microsoft and Crytek have declined to comment on the matter.

June 15, 2011
iPad 3 to have a Double Resolution Screen?

Rumors abound that the iPad 3 will have twice the resolution of the iPad 2. While the current device has a 1024×768 resolution, images discovered by a person familiar with the beta release of iOS 5 have a resolution of 1536 x 2048 and have created further speculation on wheather Apple will increase the resolution on the device.

Doubling the resolution of the iPad 3 will quadruple the number of pixels over the iPad and iPad 2. This would be similar to the introduction of the Retina Display on the iPhone 4 which allowed the phone to jump from a resolution of 480x320px to 960x640px. According to Apple CEO Steve Jobs, the limit of the human retina to discern pixels is 300ppi at 10 to 12 inches. The new iPad 3 display at 2048x1536px would still fall short of the ‘Retina Display’ as it would still have a pixel density of 264 ppi.

Rumors of an enhanced display for the iPad have persisted since before the release of the iPad 2, with some reports suggesting that Apple planned to include a 2048 x 1536 display on the iPad 2, but ran into last-minute “engineering issues” that prevented it.

June 15, 2011
Apple and Samsung will Defeat Nokia as the Top Phone Manufacturer by July

Looks like everyone in this world believes that Nokia is a dying breed. Analysts from Nomura Research say Nokia’s will lose the top spot this quarter for the first time since 1996. Its a shame really. Also, according to the Analysts the top two spots will had by Apple and Samsung pushing Nokia to No. 3.

[quote]“Nokia looks set to relinquish its smartphone crown to Samsung and Apple,” Nomura wrote in a note to investors on Monday. “Further emphasizing the shift in power to Asia is our forecast for HTC to almost match Nokia during 2012.” Nokia will retain its lead in overall cell phone sales, Nomura says[/quote]

June 14, 2011
Make calls from you iPad 3G : PhoneIt-iPad

The team from iPhoneIslam that hacked Facetime into iPhone 3Gs is back with what people though was impossible making calls from the iPad. Since the day the iPad was launched people wanted to use it as a phone. This new app allows just that but with a pretty knacker. The app costs 20$ or about Rs. 900, well worth it for converting your iPad 3G into a large iPhone.

[iPhoneIslam]

June 14, 2011