TechEye |  |
- Microsoft to kill Nokia brand
- Intel woos Chinese tablet makers
- Intel lucks out on Acer phone
- AMD samples Seattle with PR metaphors
- Apple TV can't connect to iTunes
| Posted: 21 Apr 2014 02:56 AM PDT It seems that the days of a Nokia phone are past and the brand will become a dead parrot once Microsoft has its claws in it. Nokia flogged its devices and services business to Vole last year and the deal has been jumping through the various regulatory hoops ever since. Microsoft expects to close the deal later this month and when it does, Nokia's phone business will thus be renamed. Vole has not made an official announcement as yet, an email sent by the company to suppliers reveals that Nokia's phone division will be renamed Microsoft Mobile Oy. The Oy is not an exclamation of threat, Oy is just Finland's equivalent of Ltd. The division, Microsoft Mobile, will stay in Finland as a wholly-owned subsidiary of Vole. Official business address will be changed from Nokia HQ on Keilalahdentie to Keilaranta in Espoo. Apart from the change in legal address, another change after close of the transaction would be the removal of Nokia's logo from purchase orders. Microsoft will assumes all rights, benefits and obligations of Nokia's devices and services business, including its agreements with suppliers and partners, Microsoft is telling its suppliers that they can also continue to do business with Nokia, for example on Advanced Technologies, NSN and HERE Maps, for which the Finnish company will communicate with them separately. |
| Intel woos Chinese tablet makers Posted: 21 Apr 2014 02:55 AM PDT Intel is trying to get into the cheap and cheerful Chinese market by convincing OEMs behind the bamboo curtain that its low-power Bay Trail processors are an ARM alternative. Several Eastern device makers have already announced upcoming Android tablets with Bay Trail chips. Already PC maker Asus has taken the bait and may be getting ready to launch its own line of Android tablets with Bay Trail processors and it looks like they'll be competitively priced at around $149 and up. Several US retailers have posted listings for an unannounced Asus ME176 tablet with an Intel Atom Z3745 processor and Android 4.4 KitKat software. These 7-inch tablets will have 1GB of RAM and 8GB of storage which is underwhelming, but might work for retailer-subsidised projects. They will run Android 4.4 KitKat, feature IPS screens with wide viewing angles. Intel's Atom Z3745 processor is a 64-bit, 1.33 GHz quad-core chip. It features 311 MHz Ivy Bridge graphics (with max speeds of 778 MHz), and it's an x86 processor with support for up to 4GB of RAM. The advantage is that the gear should be able to support Windows and other operating systems as the Atom Z3745 is very similar to the Atom Z3740 CPU found in Windows devices such as the Asus Transformer Book T100 and Dell Venue 8 Pro. But the low end of the market is getting pretty crowded. Intel-powered $149 tablets will have to fight Android tablets with low-cost ARM chips from companies like Allwinner, Rockchip, and MediaTek. |
| Posted: 21 Apr 2014 02:48 AM PDT Acer will be launching a 4G handset in Taiwan in the next quarter, but it will not be touching Intel's offerings with a ten-foot barge pole. Instead Acer will be using chips from MediaTek and Qualcomm despite the fact that the hardware maker has been using Intel for its Liquid smartphones for emerging markets in Asia. This will be a blow for Intel. Taiwan is rolling out its LTE network and Acer would have helped it shift a fair number of chips. Acer had not said why it has not chosen to further its partnership with the chip giant, while its rival Asus has chosen to launch its range of Intel-powered smartphones, the ZenFone series, in Asia. It might have something to do with the fact that Intel's Merrifield Atom chip will support LTE, but this is using a separate LTE radio instead of being integrated into a single package like Qualcomm's offerings. Intel has been slow at coming out with an integrated chip and this is not expected until the end of 2014. Word on the street is that Acer is still chums with Intel, it just not want to show up at a Taiwan market with phone which is heavier than the rest. Intel is still playing catch up in the mobile market and last week's quarterly results showed that it is paying the price. In the most recent quarter, Intel's Mobile and Communications group lost a staggering $929 million and shipped only five million tablet units during the quarter. This is mostly being spent on R&D as a result of the company's push into mobile. One of the reasons Intel lost money was because its 2G/3G modems saw a steep fall-off as shipments of LTE-enabled smartphones, powered by Qualcomm increased. In other words, Intel's lack of an LTE modem to pair with its applications processor solution during 2013 was disastrous and now even its best mates have to look elsewhere. |
| AMD samples Seattle with PR metaphors Posted: 21 Apr 2014 02:46 AM PDT AMD began sampling its Opteron A1100 64-bit ARM processors (codenamed "Seattle") and is already touting using as many mixed metaphors as its PR department can think up. CEO Rory Read said that Seattle was a "key milestone" in an "ambidextrous strategy" and that the company planned to begin shipping the chips in the final quarter of 2014. After all, left and righted handed people are so dependent on milestones. Read said Seattle was the industry is first at 28nm technology, positioning AMD as the only SoC provider to bridge the x86 and ARM ecosystems for server applications. Resorting to a surfing metaphor, Read said that AMD was catching it just as the "wave is forming". This is going to be an important market over the next three, five, 10 years, he claimed. Of course the tube could collapse and leave AMD looking silly with its legs in the air while the board goes flying. Meanwhile, Lisa Su, AMD's SVP and GM of global business units, said that many customers were interested in Seattle, but she is not sure how much of that interest will actually translate into cash sales. "Relative to revenue", it's probably too early to tell what's going to happen in 2015... but interest in the platform is quite high, she said. She said that it was important that AMD get some of the ecosystem there, we guess that means that AMD needs to make sure that the energy, water, nitrogen and soil minerals and other abiotic components are functioning correctly. Su said that it was also important to have SeaMicro systems working with Seattle but she refused to put a date on the launch of such SeaMicro Fabric servers, clarifying that the "Q4 statement was a chip statement." The upcoming 64-bit ARM-based server SoCs (system-on-chip) from AMD will be available with four or eight ARMv8-based Cortex A57 cores, up to 4MB of shared Level 2 cache, 8MB of shared Level 3 cache, eight PCI-Express Gen 3 lanes, two 10 GB/s Ethernet, and eight SATA 3 ports. Further, the A-series chips support up to 128GB of DDR3 or DDR4 ECC memory as unbuffered DIMMs, registered DIMMs or SODIMMs. |
| Apple TV can't connect to iTunes Posted: 21 Apr 2014 02:43 AM PDT Engineers at the fruity cargo cult Apple are left having to explain to the supreme darlek why its iTunes upgrade meant that the Apple TV could not connect to its flagship iTunes. Apple's business model depends on a walled garden of delights, where Apple fanboys buy an expensive bit of gear and then go to Apple's own site to buy all their media content. With a bit of luck, users never visit any other sites and only obtain information on the outside world through Jobs' Mob reality distortion field. All that was put at risk after it was revealed that the Apple TV, which is mostly supposed to connect to iTunes, could not manage the job any more. It seems an update of the iTunes software broke the Apple tellies, Now you would think that not only would Apple be aware of the problem, but also such a stupid mistake would be rapidly fixed. However, that would not be taking into account the fact that Apple has to acknowledge that it made a mistake, and this often takes therapy. The problem was first reported on April 17 on Apple's official support forums. By now that thread has become quite lengthy with repeated complaints by Apple TV users who are unable to make their set-top boxes connect to iTunes. The first generation Apple TV was released back in 2007 and the company sold it until 2010, so there are quite a few of them out there. One poster described that this simply happened out of nowhere. He had full access to iTunes Store the night before, but in the morning it started displaying an "iTunes Store Not Available" message. Access completely disappeared, except for movie trailers, after he unplugged the Apple TV. Nothing seems to work. Of course, in Apple philosophy nothing is supposed to be backwards compatible if it was sold four years ago so we don't fancy Apple users' chances that it will see the need to fix the problem that quickly. |
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