IT-Code-News: IT News HeadLines (TechConnect Magazine) 08/06/2009

Galaxy intros another custom GeForce GTX 260 card
Nvidia partner Galaxy keeps on giving GT200-based solutions, and the latest is the GeForce GTX 260+ Overclocked Edition. The company has already released a couple of custom GTS 260s, and the new model is slightly slower than them although it still is factory overcocked, with the GPU, 216 Processing Cores and 896MB of GDDR3 memory being set to 625, 1350 and 2000 MHz, respectively. In addition to the OC, the card comes with a custom dual-slot cooler, DVI and HDMI outputs, 3-way SLI support, dual-BIOS, and the Xtreme Tuner Utility software.

The price tag of the new GTX 260 has now been revealed, yet.

Opera Mobile 9.7 beta released
Announces and previewed at CTIA Wireless 2009 in April, Opera Mobile 9.7 is now available for testing in beta form. Coming for Windows Mobile-based phones, the browser is based on the Presto 2.2 rendering engine which delivers faster page loads and better overall performance, and features Opera Turbo support, plus the Opera Widgets manager and Opera Widgets SDK.

"There are other mobile browsers on the market that claim to be faster and more Web site-compatible on Windows-based phones, but I challenge users to take Opera Mobile for a test drive and discover a new standard for speed and compatibility. Opera Mobile 9.7 leaves other 'sluggish' and 'painfully slow' browsers in the dust," said Jon von Tetzchner, CEO, Opera Software. "It is our belief in One Web that challenges us to develop technology such as Opera Turbo. Not everyone owns a 3G phone and not everyone needs to. This is why Opera's focus is on improving our browser so that your EDGE network feels like you're surfing 3G style or better."

To give the Opera Mobile 9.7 beta 1 a try download it from this page.

AMD reported planning price cuts for Radeon HD 4800 models
AMD has kept Nvidia in check for quite a while now with the pricing scheme of its Radeon line-up and as it prepares to roll out the first DirectX 11 graphics cards, it is set to put even more pressure on Santa Clara's Green Goblin. According to a report AMD is prepping the ground for the launch of the RV870 cards and that includes cutting the price tag for all its Radeon HD 4800 models.

Through the cuts the RV790-powered Radeon HD 4890 is expected to go down to $199, the HD 4870 to under $149 (certain models can already be found for less than $150), while the HD 4850 is set to drop further under $99. The bulk of the price slashing is said to start taking effect as of next month.

Sager shipping the Core i7-powered NP9280 desktop replacement
Californian company Sager Notebooks has recently started to deliver that it claims is the world's most powerful desktop replacement, the NP9280. Seen below, the 5.23kg machine features a 17-inch 1920 x 1080 pixel screen, and can be equipped with a Core i7 (920, 950 or 975 EE) processor, up to 12GB of DDR3-1066 memory, a GeForce GTX 280M 1GB graphics card, up to three HDDs/SSDs, an 8x DVD or Blu-Ray drive, a 12-cell battery, and features eSATA and HDMI ports, plus a 3.0 megapixel webcam.

Available with Windows Vista Home Premium, Business or Ultimate, the NP9280 has a starting price tag of $2349.

Sony said to be working on Android powered Walkman
It debuted less than a year ago on smartphones, it's being loaded onto netbooks - the Android platform is being adopted left and right and it's not slowing down as Sony is being reported to use it for upcoming Walkman portable media players.

The Japanese company is still trying to regain some of its former glory in the music player market and one of its rumored moves is to release models based on Android sometime in 2010. The increasingly-popular open source platform is certainly a great fit for a handheld so it will be nice to see it implemented on a Walkman.

takeMS readies the mem.line rubber external HDDs
takeMS is now gearing up to expand its external hard drive offer with a new family of mem.line external hard drives. The mem.line rubber line-up includes 160, 250, 320, 400 and 500GB 2.5-inch drives measuring 19 x 138 x 80 mm that feature an aluminum casing with a "silk touch" coating for added resistance, a USB 2.0 port and read/write speeds of (up to) 30 MB/s.

The Germany-assembled drives come bundled with a water resistant protection bag and are expected to hit stores shortly.

Samsung unveils two Series 50 SyncMaster LCD monitors
Samsung Korea has just announced the latest additions to its SyncMaster line-up, the 20-inch P2050G and 23-inch P2350G Series 50 widescreen LCD monitors. Bearing the Touch of Color 'glow', the new LCDs feature a sleek and sexy Crystal Rose black bezel, a 2ms response time and a contrast ratio of 50,000:1.

Likely boasting a resolution of 1600x900 pixels, the P2050G will cost about $277, while the Full HD (1920x1080) P2350G goes for $325.

Celeron E3000 series duo said to arrive in Q3
Although it has only recently released the Celeron E1600, it seems Intel is preparing to launch a new series of Celeron processors in Q3. The E3000 family it said to debut with two models - the E3200 and E3300, which are dual-core 45nm parts clocked at 2.4 and 2.5GHz respectively, that boast a FSB of 800MHz, 1MB of L2 cache and a TDP of 65W. Unlike the 65nm E1000s, the upcoming Celeron E3000 CPUs will include support for virtualization.

There's no word as to the new processors' prices but they should cost under $60.

Storage software market down 5.2% in Q1
As just reported by IDC, the global storage software market was not able to escape the financial and economic crisis and because of that in Q1 it experienced the first decline in 21 consecutive quarters of year-over-year growth. With $2.8 billion in revenue this past quarter, the market went down 5.2% compared to Q1 2008, with only one major player being able to actually grow on-year - Symantec.

"The storage software market had its first year-over-year decline in more than five years," said Michael Margossian, research analyst, Storage Software at IDC. "The combination of the normally slow first quarter for most companies with the continued economic climate was displayed in this quarter's results. A majority of companies displayed either negative or very low year-over-year growth."

With revenues of $612 million translating into a market share of 21.8%, EMC topped the storage software chart, followed by Symantec with 18.9%, IBM with 12.2%, NetApp (8.3%), CA (4.3%), and Hewlett-Packard (3.5%).

Hitachi exec talks HDD platter storage boost
Talking at the Information Terminal Festival 2009 last week, Hitachi Global Storage general manager for Planning & Strategic Marketing, Tetsuya Kokubo has provided an outlook for the increase of platter storage density. According to Kokubo, from the current 400Gb per square inch, the market will go to 600 Gb/in2 around year-end or in early 2010, reach 1.2 Tb in the second half of 2011 and top 2.4 Tb/in2 in 2013 or 2014.

The estimates suggest that single-platter 3.5-inch hard drives will reach a capacity of 750GB in the next six-nine months, with four-platter 3TB models coming in the same time frame (currently the highest-capacity 3.5-inch HDD has 2TB ). Going forward, 4 - 5.5TB HDDs should arrive in 2011, while the 10TB mark would be broken in 2013/2014.

Monday, June 8, 2009

IT News HeadLines (TechConnect Magazine) 08/06/2009

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