IT News HeadLines (Elite Bastards) 10/04/2010

Samsung claims notebook HDD capacity, performance crown

Samsung's mechanical hard drives have frequently impressed in recent years in the desktop sector, and it seems as though the company is determined to make similar inroads when it comes to notebook hard disk drives. The result is the Spinpoint MP4, which supposedly boasts both capacities and performance to shout about.

The MP4 delivers 640GB of storage spread across just two platters, making it the highest-density, 2.5-inch drive around. Combined with a 7200RPM rotation speed, 16MB of cache, and improved caching algorithms, Samsung says you can expect up to a 30 percent performance boost over 5400RPM drives.

The features don't end there, however. Samsung's MP4 boasts external USB 3.0 support, NCQ, an optional Free Fall sensor, and a decrease in power consumption by 34 percent during read/write operations when compared to the MP2.

Hot Hardware has more on these forthcoming drives.

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NVIDIA WHQL GeForce 400 series driver 197.41 released

With GeForce GTX 470 and 480 boards arriving early with some US retailers, some individuals are already finding themselves able to pick up the fruits of NVIDIA's labours, and to coincide with that the company have also released a new WHQL driver set which supports only these new cards. There's no real news about any improvements or additions with this release, but you can find all of the download links below.

Download NVIDIA WHQL GeForce 400 series driver 197.41 for Windows XP Home/Professional
Download NVIDIA WHQL GeForce 400 series driver 197.41 for Windows XP Professional x64

Download NVIDIA WHQL GeForce 400 series driver 197.41 for Windows Vista/7 (32-bit)
Download NVIDIA WHQL GeForce 400 series driver 197.41 for Windows Vista/7 (64-bit)

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iPhone OS 4.0 coverage

Yesterday saw Apple lift the lid on a new iteration of their iPhone OS, and although iPhone users won't be able to enjoy using it until the summer (and iPad owners will have to wait longer still), if you want to know what it's all about then there's plenty of coverage around the web about what's new and improved in version 4.0.

The big one is, of course, multitasking. It isn't a new feature by any stretch of the imagination but it's one that has been a long time coming to the iPhone OS. Multitasking in iPhone OS 4.0 works by double-tapping the Home button, which will then bring up a view of the currently running apps. You can leave as many as you want open for as long as you want yet (we haven't seen any battery life tests yet so it's hard to tell how it'll affect performance), though you can close them by holding your finger over a currently running one. This'll bring up a red icon to close whichever one you've chosen, stopping it from running altogether.

So, how well does it work? Not bad. It's not fantastic, but not bad. It can be pretty hard to navigate once you have a bunch of applications running, though currently, with third-party apps, it works more like an app switcher. This will be remedied once developers have had some time to work on their software, but in the mean time, it's not reaching its full potential (it's only beta one, after all). There are a couple screenshots in the gallery to help illustrate things a bit better, for those still confused.

Neowin

Mail will get a number of longed-for improvements in iPhone OS 4.0. Apple has finally added a unified inbox to Mail, so those of you setting up multiple e-mail accounts on your iPhone can see all your mail at once without switching accounts. Business users will likely applaud the ability to add more than one Exchange account. And Apple made switching between different inboxes much faster.

Other improvements include a threaded message view, which keeps related replies together, and the ability to open mail attachments if you have an app installed that can handle a particular file type.

ArsTechnica

Meanwhile, Engadget have spent some hands-on time with iPhone OS 4.0, where they also include some video coverage of the OS in use:

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Apple iPhone OS 4 event - Live coverage

We know that today sees Apple launching and promoting the next version of their iPhone Operating System, but what exactly will iPhone OS 4 contain?

For live coverage of the event, check out Engadget's live 'blogging as it happens!

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