Asus U30Jc Optimus-equipped laptop ships in the US
Asus has today introduced in the US, the U30Jc 13.3-inch laptop which is based on Intel's Calpella platform and features Nvidia's Optimus graphics switching technology. Asus' new thin and light portable PC boasts a Chicklet Wide Spaced keyboard, a 13.3-inch (1366x768) LCD screen, a 2.26 GHz Core i3-350M CPU, 4GB of RAM, a 320GB hard drive, GeForce GT 310M discrete graphics (which kicks in only when gaming or using GPGPU-enabled apps), an optical drive, a HDMI output, 802.11 N WiFi, a built-in webcam, and Altec Lansing speakers.
The Asus U30Jc boasts a 5600mAh battery providing up to 9.5 hours of operation, runs Windows 7 and has a starting price tag of $900.
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Apple official - over 300,000 iPads sold on launch day
Hot on the trail of analysts and their predictions, Apple has today (Monday, April 5th, 2010), announced that more than 300,000 iPads were sold on the device's launch day - Saturday, April 3rd. This quite promising number includes units shipped to people who pre-ordered the shiny tablet, devices delivered to channel partners and sales at Apple Retail Stores.
"It feels great to have the iPad launched into the world - it's going to be a game changer," said Steve Jobs, Apple's CEO. "iPad users, on average, downloaded more than three apps and close to one book within hours of unpacking their new iPad."
Accordng to Apple, iPad early adopters have already downloaded more than 1 million apps for the device and over 250,000 ebooks from the iBookstore. Not bad for a US-only launch but that's Apple's top market anyway.
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HP makes some marketing exec changes
Doing some post-Easter cleaning, HP has named David J. Shirk as senior vice president of Worldwide Marketing, HP Enterprise Business, and made Deborah Nelson, the current lead of HP Enterprise Marketing, chief of staff for the Enterprise Sales, Marketing and Strategy unit.
Shirk, who comes from Siemens where he was executive vice president of Global Marketing and Communications, will be heading marketing for HP's $54 billion Enterprise Business which includes the company's server, storage, networking, software and services offering.
Deborah Nelson's new role makes her responsible for driving the HP Enterprise Business sales and marketing agenda and make HP "the partner of choice for enterprise solutions and the clear leader in client loyalty."
Both Shirk and Nelson are reporting to Thomas E. Hogan, executive vice president, Enterprise Sales, Marketing and Strategy.
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Chip sales slip 1.3% in February
The Semiconductor Industry Association (SIA) announced that in February chip sales reached $22.04 billion, which is 1.3% sequential down compared to January's $22.3 billion revenue, but also up 56.2% over the $14.11 billion reported for February 2009.
"The February sales numbers reflect continued recovery of sales of semiconductors, with demand principally driven by growth in sales of electronic products in emerging economies," said SIA President George Scalise. "Unit sales of the two leading demand drivers for semiconductors - personal computers and cell phones - are now projected to grow in the low- to mid-teens in 2010. While the 56 percent year-on-year growth reflected in the February sales number is encouraging, it is important to note that January and February of 2009 marked the low point for the semiconductor industry during the worldwide economic downturn."
According to SIA's report, in February all major markets saw a sequential drop, the highest being in the Americas - 3.7%, while the lowest was, obviously, in the Asia Pacific region, just 0.4%. The European market slipped 1.8% in February, while Japan went down 1.1%.
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Facebook buys photo sharing service Divvyshot
Trendy social network Facebook is gobbling up photo sharing service Divvyshot, the deal being announced by the latter this past Friday. The acquisition, which was not been detailed, will see Divvyshot's staff joining the Facebook engineering team to focus on Facebook Photos.
"We know many of our users will have mixed feelings about this move," said a statement on Divvyshot.com. "While this means Divvyshot as you know it will cease to exist, it’s important to realize that our unique approach to photos will live on. This is an opportunity to touch hundreds of millions of users with the best parts of our product. That's something we hope you can get behind."
San Francisco-based Divvyshot has already stopped new registrations for its service and pulled the iPhone application published through the App Store, the plan being to redirect all its visitors to Facebook.com six weeks from now. Those who have uploaded photos are advised to download them in the coming weeks in order to move them to a new cloudy location.
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ASRock 880G Extreme3 motherboard exposed
In addition to the this 890GX-based board, ASRock is preparing the release of another Extreme3-branded motherboard, the 880G Extreme3. Equipped with the AMD 880G & SB850 chips, the upcoming ATX release boasts the UCC (Unlock CPU Core) function for unlocking CPU cores, the Turbo 50 auto-overclocking feature, supports AM3 processors, has an 8+2 phase power design, and packs four DDR3-1800 memory slots.
The 880G Extreme3 also includes Radeon HD 4250 integrated graphics, three PCI-Express x16 slots (CrossFireX and Hybrid CrossFire-ready), one eSATA and six SATA 6.0 Gbps ports, Gigabit Ethernet, 7.1 channel audio, two USB 3.0 connectors, D-Sub, DVI and HDMI outputs, Instant Boot, a debug LED, plus Power, Reset and Clear CMOS buttons. ASRock's motherboard should be released in late this month.
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A-Data's new DDR3L memory gets Westmere-EP certification
Taiwanese memory maker A-Data has proudly announced that its DDR3L registered and non-registered modules have been certified by Intel for use withing Westmere-EP-based servers. A-Data's Intel-approved offer includes 1GB, 2GB and 4GB RDIMMs and DIMMs working at 1066 MHz and 1333 MHz, that operate at 1.35V (hence the L for low voltage).
"Enterprise often requires 24x7 operations from server memory for data accessing and collecting with reliability and performance requirements," said Richard Shen, manager of A-Data product management department. "We are proud to offer our DDR3L 1066/1333 MHz R-DIMM and DDR3L 1066/1333 MHz ECC DIMM low voltage server memory that has certified by Intel to enterprise customers, which delivers high performance and great reliability with less power consumption to meet enterprise's critical requirements, as well as to protect and to preserve the environment."
A-Data's DDR3L memory models are all backed by a lifetime warranty.
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Ubuntu 10.10 is codenamed Maverick Meerkat
We're less than a month away from Ubuntu 10.04 aka Lucid Lynx's release so the team developing the well-known Linux distribution has felt that this is the perfect time to reveal the codename of their next OS. Expected to arrive in October, Ubuntu 10.10 will be known as Maverick Meerkat, this name being chosen to best reflect the philosophy behind it.
The 'maverick' comes from the idea that, because it's not an LTS (long-term support) OS, Ubuntu 10.10 will be able to feature significant changes and improvements that are aimed at bringing it to single consumer PC that ships from a major manufacturer.
As for the 'meerkat' - Canonical Ltd founder Mark Shuttleworth explains that "Meerkats are, of course, light, fast and social - everything we want in a Perfect 10. We're booting really fast these days, but the final push remains. Changes in the toolchain may make us even faster for every application. We're Social from the Start, but we could get even more tightly connected, and we could bring social features into even more applications. Meerkats are family-oriented, and we aspire to having Ubuntu being the safe and efficient solution for all the family netbooks. They are also clever - meerkats teach one another new skills. And that’s what makes this such a great community."
More Maverick Meerkat info will be presented in documentaries set to be aired in the coming months.
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BDXL specs to bring 128GB Blu-ray discs
50GB doesn't seem to be enough for optical media so the Blu-ray Disc Association (BDA) has stepped up and introduced two new, high-capacity specifications based on the Blu-ray technology - BDXL and IH-BD. The BDXL specs will enable the release of write-once discs with up to four layers that can store up to 100GB and 128GB of data, and rewritable discs with up to 100GB of space.
The Intra-Hybrid Blu-ray Disc (IH-BD) incorporates a 25GB BD-ROM layer and a 25GB BD-RE layer so the user can view and not overwrite the data put on the former, but also write on the latter.
"Professional industries have expressed a desire to find optical disc solutions that enable them to transition away from magnetic media for their archiving needs," said Victor Matsuda, Blu-ray Disc Association Global Promotions Committee chair. "Leveraging Blu-ray Disc to meet this need provides professional enterprises with a compact, stable and long term solution for archiving large amounts of sensitive data, video and graphic images using a proven and widely accepted optical technology."
The BDXL and IH-BD specifications are set to be made available in the next few months.
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Samsung and Lenovo said to be working on VIA VX900-based netbooks
The Atom-dominated netbook market may suffer a little shake soon enough as both Samsung and Lenovo are reported to be planning the introduction of low-power, low-cost mini-PCs that make use of VIA's latest chipset, the VX900.
Said to debut by June (we'd bet more on Computex at the beginning of June), the VX900 netbooks would have a battery life comparable to today's Atom machines, be powered by a Nano processor, and offer 1080p HD video playback 'by default'. The VX900 chip also features DirectX 9 integrated graphics and supports both DDR2 and DDR3 memory. More info about Samsung and Lenovo's VIA-based netbooks should come about in the coming weeks.
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