Fujitsu has started a new initiative called “Service Built for Android” that will focus on home electronics based on Google Android platform. Through the new program Fujitsu will offer consulting, engineering and other expertise to its partners for running devices based on the open-source Android platform. The company is planning to use the platform in various devices like cellphones, portable media player, GPS devices, set-top boxes and netbook like PCs.  Fujitsu says this will speedup development for Android based devices, helping them get to market sooner.
Companies like Freescale have already joined Fujitsu in Service Built for Android to provide support for its i.MX processors that are used in portable media players. This collaboration would speedup development of user interfaces and services based on Android platform.
This new development will be a big blow to Microsoft, as Fujitsu has been using Microsoft’s Windows CE and Windows Mobile platform in its various devices. Microsoft has been trying to penetrate the portable media player and cellphone market for many years. But Apple’s iPod has been the winner in portable media player, and now iPhone and Google Android is taking away the small smartphone market share that Microsoft had.
The development of Windows platform for portable devices has been really slow, it been two years since iPhone was launched and Microsoft still doesn’t have a answer for the Mac OS X platform.  This is forcing Microsoft’s partners to look for alternatives, the open source and free Google Android is becoming a very good alternative for companies like Fujitsu.

Microsoft has filed a patent application titled “Smart interface system for mobile communication devices”. The application describes a docking station that will allow a smartphone to work as PC with full peripherals support. Microsoft says that the intelligent cradle (docking station) would act as an interface between the mobile device and the PC peripherals.
Many similar patent applications have been filed but what makes this application different is that the docking station contains processer, storage and embedded OS. The docking station will translate the signals from the phone to external hardware and vice-versa. The docking station will effectively add processing power to the phone so that it can be used as a PC replacement.
According to Microsoft, intelligent cradle will allow smartphones to work with hundreds of peripherals like mouse, keyboard, touchscreen, camera, optical drive and set-top boxes.
The concept is very interesting and can be very useful, but like many other concepts shown by Microsoft when it will actually be implemented no one knows.

A new study by McAfee that was based on responses to a survey of more than 800 chief information officers in various countries, estimates that more than $1 trillion were lost due to cybercrimes last year. The respondents estimated Data theft and breaches resulted in loss of data worth $4.6 billion and $600 million cleaning up after breaches.
McAfee found that 42 percent of respondents believed that displaced workers were the biggest threat to sensitive information on the network. Around 25 percent respondents were planning to avoid China for data storage, whereas 47 percent Chinese respondents said they believed US posed that greatest security risk.
The title of the McAfee report was “Unsecured Economies: Protecting Vital Information” and it was released at World Economic Forum annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland on Thursday.
[Via CNET]

Philips has unveiled world’s first ultra wide 21:9 cinema aspect 56-inch LCD HDTV in UK. The new TV will have 2,560 x 1080 resolution, Philips’ Ambilight technology, Pixel Perfect Engine, five HDMI ports, WiFi, DLNA support and Ethernet. Philips hasn’t provided technical details like contrast ratio and brightness.
According to techradar, to fit 16:9 picture on the screen, Philips will use a new algorithm that only stretches at the far edges of the video, so the central focal point doesn’t lose integrity. The 56-inch TV will ship in second half of 2009 and should be priced around $3000. We have added video of the TV in action above.

A $10 laptop with 2GB RAM, WiFi, Ethernet, expandable memory and 2 watts power requirement would be showcased in Tirupati, India on February 3rd. The $10 laptop has been developed by Vellore Institute of Technology, Indian Institute of Science and IIT Madras as an answer to Nicholas Negroponte’s $100 laptop that Indian government rejected two years back.
R P Agarwal, Secretary of Higher Education in India said, “At this stage, the price is working out to be $20 but with mass production it is bound to come down”. Along with the laptop Indian Government will also launch ‘Sakshat’ portal that will provide e-content feed to students. The $10 laptop will ship within six months.
A $10 laptop can definitely make technology more accessible for students in rural areas, improving the overall education system.
[Via The Times of India]

Intel will reveal details about its upcoming eight-core Xeon Processor based on Nehalem microarchitecture at International Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISSCC) in San Francisco on Feb 9th. The information about Intel’s plan to preview the new chip was revealed in ISSCC’s Advance Program guide.
The 8-core Xeon processor will be able to process 16 threads and will be manufactured using 45nm process technology. It will have 2.3 billion transistors and bandwidth of 6.4GT/s.
According to Intel, the new processor features enhanced Core microarchitecture, 3-level caches and 2-way SMT is implemented in 45nm high-k metal gate CMOS. The processor family has a coherent point-to-point link and integrates memory controller, power-management microcontroller and power-gate transistors and scales from sub-10 to 130W in mobile, desktop and server applications.
No other information is available, but it is highly likely that we will see the new processor in market by Q3 2009.
In another Intel related news, the company is planning to lower its mobile Core 2 Duo prices in second quarter of 2009. The 2.8GHz T9600 will see a 40 percent price drop from $517 to $309, while the 2.53GHz T8700 will see a 17 percent drop from $236 to $197. Other processers in mobile Core 2 Duo lineup will also see similar price drops. It is believed that Intel will be reducing the prices of its Core 2 Duo processor to make room for upcoming mobile processor update.

Code Strings in Apple’s latest iPhone Firmware have revealed that Apple already has a working version of next generation iPhone. MacRumors has discovered and posted the portion of code on their website (shown above) that is designated as “iPhone2,1”.
According to MacRumors, the first generation iPhone that was released in 2007 had “iPhone 1,1” label, whereas the iPhone 3G has “iPhone 1,2” label indicating a minor hardware revision.  The use of 2,1 in the label implies that the next generation iPhone will see major hardware revision. The same thing happened with iPod touch, first generation was labeled “iPod1,1”, but the second generation that got first processor, speaker, microphone and volume control was labeled “iPod2,1”.
Additionally, Pinchmedia has released more information about iPhone 2,1.

The above information is consistent with the details our sources have told us about the next generation iPhone. According to our sources, Apple has been working with various iPhone prototypes since launch of iPhone 3G and only recently they have decided the final hardware for the upcoming iPhone. It is very likely that we will see the next gen iPhone in summer of 2009.

Samsung announced today that it has developed 4Gb DDR3 memory chip, doubling the maximum capacity of DDR3 chips available today. Samsung used 50nm manufacturing technology to increase the capacity of the chip while not increasing the size. This increase in DDR3 chip capacity will allow production of laptop memory module with up to 8GB storage and desktop/server memory with up to 32GB storage by using dual die packaging.
The new DDR3 chips are more power efficient; they run at 1.35 volts compared to 1.5 volts required by current DDR3 chips. The new chips can transfer data at 1.6Gbps, making them one of the fastest DRAMs available today for laptops.  According to Samsung, the memory can deliver 40 percent power savings for larger servers, as the overall power required for running a 50nm 16GB DDR3 memory module is 40 percent less than memory available today. Samsung didn’t say when it would start mass production of the new memory.

AT&T today reported that their Q4 2008 revenue increased by 2.4 percent to $31.1 billion. But their profits were down by 23.6 percent to $2.4 billion from $3.14 billion, for same period a year ago.
Wireless was once again the biggest growth engine for the company. Wireless service revenue grew 13.2 percent to reach $12.9 billion in Q4 2008. AT&T added 2.1 million new wireless subscribers bring the total number of subscribers to 77 million. AT&T sold 1.9 million new iPhones for this holiday season.
AT&T says it now has 4.3 million iPhone 3G users, which has increased its data revenue for wireless business by 51.2 percent compared to fourth quarter of 2007. This is the 12th consecutive quarter that data revenue grew more than 50 percent. Now data revenue represents 26.6 percent of total wireless revenue.
The other area where AT&T saw strong growth was U-Verse service. AT&T added 264,000 new customers bringing the total number of customers to more than 1 million. AT&T will be hosting a conference call at 10 AM EST, where we should get more detailed information about Q4 results.

Verizon today reported that it has added more than 1.2 million new customers in Q4 2008 bringing total number of customers to 72.1 million, which is up 9.9 percent compared to last year. With increase in number of subscribers Verizon also saw 15 percent increase in revenue. The company credited this rise to growth in wireless market. According to Verizon 37 percent of all cellphones sold were high-end devices and revenue from data plans for smartphone’s jumped 41.4 percent.
However, even with stellar revenue results, Verizon avoided to provide information about BlackBerry Storm unit sales, solidifying the claim that Storm had an uninspired launch. It has been unofficially estimated that Verizon sold 500,000 Storms during the holiday season, which was nowhere near AT&T’s sales of more the 2 million iPhones during the fourth quarter. Many analysts are blaming this lackluster BlackBerry Storm launch on buggy software and delayed November release.

Western Digital today announced the world’s first 2 Terabyte (TB) hard drive that has industry-leading 500GB/platter capacity and 32MB cache. The new hard drive is part of WD’s environmentally friendly, cool and quiet Caviar Green hard drive lineup.
The hard drive features advance technologies like StableTrac, Which secures the motor shaft at both ends to reduce system-induced vibration and stabilize platters for accurate tracking during read and write operation; IntelliPower, which fine-tunes the balance of spin speed, transfer rate and caching algorithms designed to deliver both significant power savings and solid performance; IntelliSeek, which calculates optimum seek speeds to lower power consumption, noise and vibration and NoTouch ramp load technology, which is designed to ensure the recording head never touches the disk media resulting in significantly less wear to recording head and media as well as better drive protection while in transit.
Along with 2TB capacity the hard drive will be available in 1TB and 1.5TB configuration also. The 2TB model WD20EADS is priced $299 and is available now.
[Via Slash Gear]

Apple today released the latest firmware update 2.2.1 for iPhone and iPod touch. The update weighs 246.4MB and contains bug fixes and stability improvements. You can download the update by using Check for Update feature in iTunes when you connect your device. Apple’s release note with the update says:

Microsoft has been promising that the upcoming IE 8 browser will be more web standards compliant and perform faster on standard web technologies. But the tests performed by ZDNet on IE 8 RCI that Microsoft released yesterday show otherwise. ZDnet took the latest build of IE 8 and benchmarked it using Acid3 test, Sunspider and Google V8.
On Acid3 test, which measures how closely browsers comply with web standards, IE 8 scored 19 out of 100, far below its competitors like FireFox (93/100), Safari (98/100) and Opera (100/100). This shows that like IE 7 the latest version of the browser will follow its own web standards.
JavaScript performance has become very important for web surfing and Sunspider benchmarks the time required to load JavaScripts (lower the time better it is). Here also IE 8 RC1 failed miserably, it came last and was three times slower than Firefox, Safari and Chrome. Only Opera was able to match IE’s slow performance. 
In another JavaScript benchmarking tool provided by Google, V8 v2, IE 8 again came in last with the lowest score. Here also it was more than three times slower than Safari and Chrome. Despite addition of new features it looks like performance of IE hasn’t improved much. IE 8 is still in beta; we will see what changes Microsoft makes to improve performance when it releases the final version.

An image leak of updated Windows 7 beta version 7025 shows that Microsoft is planning to follow Vista’s approach of releasing various feature limited versions of the operating system. The leaked image shows OS options of Starter, Home Basic, Home Premium, Business and Ultimate.
Microsoft was criticized by media for putting artificial limits on the Vista OS, when they released seven different versions of the OS aimed at driving up the average price of the Windows OS. In Vista the Starter version had limit on maximum screen resolution as well as number of application that can run simultaneous on the OS. The Home Basic version came without Aero Glass and Windows Media Center. All the versions of Vista carried the entire feature set, but were artificially limited to sell the Ultimate version that was priced about $500.
We do understand that needs of business users and home users differ, but having three different home versions and two different business versions of the same OS is clearly an attempt at confusing the customers in to buying the higher-end version.
[Via Electronista]

Apple has released NVIDIA graphics update that addresses issues with Mini DisplayPort to Dual-Link DVI adapter and also improves HD performance on Mac notebooks using NVIDIA’s GeForce 9400M chipsets and Mac desktop using NVIDIA’s graphics chips. The update is available via Software Update feature on Mac and it is 3.2MB in size.
Apple in the release note says the update improves cursor movement when using Apple Mini DisplayPort to Dual-Link DVI adaptor for Mac Laptops and HD video playback. Apple provided no other details.
So we decided to test the update ourselves. We used Xbench to test before and after difference in performance on 2.0GHz MacBook (Unibody). We looked for improvements in Quartz Graphics, OpenGL Graphics and User Interface tests. There was only slight improvement in Quartz Graphics test from 154.68 to 159.68 points, whereas OpenGL test saw a decrease in score from 138.59 to 134.50. But it was the User Interface Test that improved by 6.6 percent from 226.27 to 241.01.  So Apple has definitely improved User Interface performance like cursor movement and page scrolling with this update, go ahead and download it to see the difference.

For past few years, Intel has been ruling the processor market as their Xeon chips not only offers better performance but also lower power consumption. And, as AMD is not able to match Intel’s processor performance they are doing the only thing they can do, toss another acronym “ACP” to show that their processors are better.
AMD says the ACP is the truth about power consumption. ACP stands for Average CPU Power and according to AMD it is designed to give customers a more accurate idea of the power consumed by the processor, which is not provided by TDP (Thermal Design Power). The ACP values for each power band include the power for the cores, memory controller and HyperTransport links.
The five new processors that AMD announced are part of Opteron HE series and have ACP of 55 watts. The processors are 2376 HE price $575, 2374 HE priced $450, 2372 HE priced $316, 8376 HE priced $1,514 and 8374 HE priced $1,165. The HE processor will have speeds ranging from 2.1GHz to 2.3GHz and they are designed to address requirements for data centers.
AMD says that the ACP of these processors will be in mid-40s range, even though their TDP will be 79 watts, which is similar to Intel’s 2.66GHz Xeon quad core E5430 processor. This shows that AMD has tossed up a new acronym ACP for power consumption just to make power requirement of their processors seem lower on paper when compared to Intel’s TDP rating.
Along with HE processors, AMD has also released high performance SE processors that run at 2.8GHz and have 105 watts ACP (137W TDP). There will be two SE processors 2386 SE for $1,165 and 8386 SE priced $2,649. You can get more information about ACP from a white paper published by AMD.

As expected, Microsoft today released IE8 RC1 (release candidate 1) for Windows XP and Windows Vista users. This is the third major public beta release of the IE 8 and Microsoft has already said that it will give one more build to testers before finally releasing the complete product.
In IE8, Microsoft has added features like private browsing, improved security and a new type of add-ons called accelerators. Microsoft is hoping that IE8 will help the company regain some lost ground in the browser market with the new features, which are already present in browser like FireFox and Safari.
Dean Hachamovitch, IE general manager said in an interview that there would be little change between the release candidate and the final version. He didn’t give any information about when the final version of IE8 will be released.
The IE8 Release Candidate 1 is available for download at Microsoft Download Center.
[Via CNET]

Apple today announced that iLife ’09 will be available tomorrow, January 27, and features major upgrades to iPhoto, iMovie and GarageBand, with breakthrough new ways to organize and manage photos, create movies and learn to play music. iLife ’09 is included with every new Mac and is available as a $79 upgrade for existing users through the Apple Store, Apple’s retail stores and Apple authorized Resellers. The iLife Up-To-Date upgrade package is available to all customers who purchased a qualifying new Mac system from Apple or an Apple Authorized Reseller on or after January 6, 2009 for a shipping and handling fee of $9.95. iLife '09 is available on Amazon for $79 with free shipping and pre-order price guarantee.