Last week Intel announced to have started to produce processors at 22nm. If this transition has passed without any notable problem, one continues to wonder how they will manage to continue to make increasingly smaller sized devices in a near future. One should manage to make chips under 20nm, but then, to gain every nanometer will be an increasingly difficult challenge.  One of the routes under consideration before going to a quantum computer, would be to use carbon, in its two-dimensional form, graphene. Researchers of the American university of Arizona announced to have made a break-through in this field. They succeeded in producing a transistor containing graphene which was able to reach the frequency of 300 GHz. Even though others such as IBM had already succeeded in producing similar transistors reaching 100 Ghz, their prowess is especially in the way in which the transistor was produced. They used nano-needles that were used as guides with the manufacture of this transistor.
Of course, there are is still years of research before being able to manage to manufacture a graphene billion transistor processor, but since this compound was discovered only 6 years ago, we are permitted to hope.

Electronic manufacturer have been facing a shortage of workers in China in the last year. In order to remedy the problem, some companies have decided to relocate part of their production, such as Foxconn that decided to move part of their production lines in central China.
Apparently, the growth of the industry is still very strong and qualified workers are missing again, which leads to an increase of salary. It is good for the workers but not that great for those subcontractors. 
China seems to be nearing the end of the time in which it is possible to always produce more while driving the costs down. Some electronic companies are now looking at other countries such as Thailand, which is doing a lot to attract that new industry.

The massive recall of the first Sandy Bridge chipsets has, as expected, a negative impact on the sales of the new platform.
As a reminder, this bug blocks the SATA II interfaces, leaving only the other 2 SATA III interfaces active.
Because the bug didn’t have any consequence on computers needing only to SATA ports, laptops manufacturers started selling them with the faulty chipset, but apparently, customers, who knew about the bug but not in details, were reluctant to buy the new Sandy Bridge laptops.

Apple was apparently the only manufacturer lucky enough to receive very soon new upgraded chipsets. It was even proven by the fact the the Superdrive, which is connected through a SATA II rather than SATA III interface.

To go back to the Sandy Bridge, everything should go back to normal by the end of April, when Intel will be produce enough controllers to replace the faulty ones and to meet the demand. It is probably what is keeping Apple from upgrading the iMac models. They absolutely need flawless chipsets as the 27 models need 3 SATA connectors on their motherboard for HDD, ODD and an optional SSD.

Since the iPad’s initial launch on April 3rd and the 3G iPad’s launch on April 30th, customer demand for the product was exceptional and even beat Apple’s expectations. Up until a couple weeks ago the shipping times for all iPad models stood at 7-10 business days until recently changing to 3-5 business days. Up until yesterday the iPads shipping time read 1-3 business days and finally today iPads are said to ship “within 24 hours.”

This begs the question, are Apple’s initial production issues due to very high demand finally over?, Or is customer demand just down overall? So far Apple has sold well over 3.2 million units and announced the 3 million mark back on June 22nd. Let us know what you think in the comments.

via RazorianFly

OCZ in barely more than two years became a major player in the very young market of the SSD, always using the best controllers available in order to offer competitive products.
The company has just marked a new course in its long-term strategy in this market by purchasing for 950.000 dollars the company: Solid Data.  They have the knowledge on certain key issues based around the Fiber Chanel connections and in manufacture of hybrid discs using Flash memory and DRAM for boosting the performances.
One can suppose that the next range of professional SSD of OCZ will use this newly acquired knowledge and that this technology is not used for general public SSDs.

The future availability of a CDMA iPhone for the US carrier Verizon seems to be more and more likely for early 2011. According to the last tidbits, Apple might have placed an order for 3 million units to be ready for distribution by the end of the year.
This launch would mark the end of the exclusive partnership between Apple and AT&T. The later seems to get prepared to such future competition as its CEO indicated recently in an interview to have no fear on this topic.
For Apple, it will of course be beneficial as it will be able to offer its iPhone to new customers in USA. It could also be a perfect timing for Apple to modify the iPhone 4 in order to correct the antenna issue; however, Apple would then have to update the name of the mobile phone.

Applidium an iOS software developer has just informed us that they have submitted an iPad port of VLC to the AppStore. Quoting them:

After several months of porting, we are proud to announce the submission to Apple of VLC for the iPad! This application stands out for two reasons. First of all, it’s a free application. But that’s not all. VLC is an OpenSource project. We are currently preparing our patches for submission to the main VLC tree. And obviously, once the application is released on the AppStore we will of course publish all of our modifications.

If everything goes well, VLC for the iPad should be available next week. To celebrate the release of this application, we’re organising a competition. To be won: a pre-release version of the VLC application, one week before the official release! All you have to do is to follow @applidium on Twitter. We will randomly pick 5 people out of our followers on Sunday, and we’ll send them their own version of VLC for the iPad!

We look forward to being able to test this port and above all to discover its features.

It is now years that Apple and Japanese authorities are having difficult discussion about the first generation iPod nano (model sold from September2005 to December 2006). In some rare cases, the device was overheating (27 reports with 6 fire ignition) and the Japanese authorities have asked Apple to comment and explain such issues. Apple has not been a pro-active partner, and has been long in answering while also exchanging under cover about 30 units that also had this overheating issue, without reporting it to the local authorities. This was probably too much for the latest, and Apple has been condemned to replace all iPod nano 1G of Japanese customers if they express the wish to have it exchanged. A nice gift for a 5 years old device… and a good lesson to Apple too.

Things change fast when it comes to USB 3.0, well except on the Mac. Patriot has just released a new flash drive compatible with that interface, the Supersonic. It features a reading speed of 100 MB/s and a writing speed of 70 MB/s.

Other USB 3.0 flash drives have reached a higher speed, but it is a record for a drive that has only one controller, able to manage 4 flash memory chips. That design allows the drive to have standard size and weight for high capacity (32 or 64 GB) flash drives since it is 7 cm (2.75 inch) long and weights 16g (.56 ounces).

When the iPhone then the iPod touch came out, nobody except some visionaries could have foreseen that they were going to cut a good chunk of the market of portable game consoles in addition to their prime functions.
However, today, there are tens of thousands of games available on the AppStore. Elsewhere, some of the developers of these games believe now more in their future under iOS that under other platforms.
To arrive at this point, Apple nevertheless profited a favorable timing. Sony PSP had come out in 2005 and Nintendo in 2006. Apple thus did not have head-on competition with new products. This is what awaits them in the next months. Nintendo announced that its 3DS will come out in March, and Sony would be about to reveal its new PSP about which one does not know much yet. The war thus will start again with more serious reasons for the competitors of Apple such as increased power, and for at least Nintendo, the 3D. Under these conditions, the rumour of yesterday about Apple intention to also offer 3D rwith the iPod touch becomes that more consistent. Much more than the iPhone, the game belongs to the first sales points of this device, and Apple cannot allow to let itself be outdistanced, even partially, or risk seeing its dear developers using iOS going elsewhere.