Steve Jobs confirmed the worst kept secret in the technology world when he confirmed the existence of the iPhone, a revolutionary mobile device that combines telephone technology, PDA functionality and all the well-known features of the iPod.
The iPhone is essentially just a single screen. There are no keys or buttons, and indeed Apple is making much of its patented touchscreen technology. In fact, patents are a bit of a feature of the device with Apple protecting its baby with over 200 of the things.
Users are able to navigate the iPhone by using a virtual keyboard that’s smart enough to know when accidental tapping occurs. The screen also takes in gestures such as scrolling, pinching and stretching motions. Most impressive of all, well to TechSmec.com at any rate, is the smart screen which knows when the user is holding the iPhone in landscape or portrait and adjust the interface accordingly.
The iPhone, which starts at $499, will “reinvent” the telecommunications sector and “leapfrog” past the current generation of hard-to-use smart phones, Jobs said.
“Every once in a while a revolutionary product comes along that changes everything,” he said during his keynote address at the annual Macworld Conference and Expo. “It’s very fortunate if you can work on just one of these in your career. … Apple’s been very fortunate in that it’s introduced a few of these.”
Apple, now renamed Apple Inc. from Apple Computer Inc., shares jumped more than 6 percent on the announcement.
Even TechSmec.com, weary of many over-hyped Apple revelations over the years, has to admit that the iPhone is a device worth salivating over.
January 9th, 2007
Hitachi has announced the imminent release of the world’s first one terabyte hard drive. The Deskstar 7K1000 will retail for only $399 which weighs in at just 40 cents per gigabyte.
Seagate had earlier announced their own terabyte drive, but failed to provide a release date or a price, and in our book that makes them the loser.
“The industry’s first one-terabyte hard drive represents a milestone that is 50 years in the making, and it reasserts the hard drive’s leadership as the highest-capacity, lowest-cost storage technology,” said Shinjiro Iwata, chief marketing officer, Hitachi Global Storage Technologies. “In the 51 st year, Hitachi is leading a new era for hard drives — not only providing large amounts of affordable storage, but also customizing and optimizing hard drives to deliver products that are smarter, more durable and more useful to the consumer.”
Interestingly for those who own, or are thinking of buying, a PVR, Hitachi also announced the Deskstar’s cousin, Cinemastar, aimed squarely at the home electronics market. Like Deskstar, Cinemastar has a one terabyte capacity.
January 6th, 2007
SanDisk has introduced a 32-gigabyte, 1.8-inch solid state drive (SSD) as a drop-in replacement for the standard mechanical hard disk drive. Initially aimed at enterprise users as the first step toward mass consumer adoption, SanDisk SSD offers field-proven durability to keep mobile PCs working in the toughest of conditions and improves the overall user experience.
Previously, large capacity flash-based drives had been used primarily by the military, aerospace and telecom industries, which demanded high performance and reliability under challenging environmental conditions. But now the declining cost of NAND flash memory has made SSD a viable and economically attractive alternative to existing technologies in a wider variety of applications, including mobile PCs aimed at enterprise and consumer users.
“This is an important milestone for SanDisk in our relentless quest to create new large-scale markets for flash storage solutions for consumers in the personal computing space,” said Eli Harari, SanDisk CEO. “The 32-gigabyte SSD that we are announcing today represents the fifth generation of flash-based solid state drives developed by msystems, which we recently acquired. The 32GB SSD has been made commercially viable through SanDisk’s technology leadership coupled with msystems’ tremendous experience and IP, which are captured in the high-performance, low-cost system controllers that distinguish this product.
“Once we begin shipping the 32GB SSD for notebook PCs, we expect to see its increasing adoption in the coming years as we continue to reduce the cost of flash memory. When these SSD devices become more affordable, we expect that their superior features over rotating disk drives will create a new consumer category for our retail sales channels worldwide,” said Harari. It is projected that inclusion of the SanDisk 32GB SSD in a notebook PC could increase the end-user price by around $600 in the first half of 2007, he added.
Using NAND flash enhanced by SanDisk’s patented TrueFFS® flash management technology, SanDisk SSD delivers two million hours mean time between failures (MTBF)i. With no moving parts, it does not need to spin into action or seek files in the way that conventional hard disk drives do. These characteristics, combined with SanDisk’s advanced flash management technology, make it possible for SanDisk SSD to deliver excellent performance compared with hard disk drives and competing solid state drives.
The SanDisk SSD announced today achieves a sustained read rate of 62 megabytes (MB)ii per second and a random read rate of 7,000 inputs/outputs per second (IOPS) for a 512-byte transferiii – more than 100 times faster than most hard disk drives. Taking advantage of this performance, a laptop PC equipped with SanDisk SSD can boot Microsoft Windows® Vista™ Enterprise in as little as 35 secondsiv. It also can achieve an average file access rate of 0.12 milliseconds, compared with 55 seconds and 19 milliseconds, respectively, for a laptop PC with a hard disk drivev.
Another advantage of SanDisk SSD is its extremely low power consumption rate compared to the hard disk drive: 0.4 watt during active operation versus 1.0 wattvi . This is particularly important to extend the battery life for the benefit of enterprise road warriors. These results enable new operating systems, such as Microsoft® Vista™, to provide mobile PC users with a superior overall system experience.
“There has been a huge increase in demand for NAND flash memory over the past few years from consumer devices such as digital cameras, MP3 players and mobile phones,” said Robert Gray, analyst with IDC, based in Framingham, Massachusetts. “There are dramatically higher bit capacities and lower prices, so the technology is now well positioned to be the foundation for new generations of potentially disruptive solid state drives. Enterprise mobile PC users will find the high performance and low power consumption especially attractive,” he added.
SanDisk SSD 1.8-inch 32GB solid state drive is now available for original equipment manufacturers. It is the first in a range of solutions that SanDisk will be offering to bring flash to the mainstream mobile PC market.
January 6th, 2007