The latest iPhone, an incremental upgrade to last year’s model, lures crowds on its launch date

The iPhone’s magic is still there: The crowds turned out to see — and buy — Apple’s iPhone 3G S early Friday morning as it launched around the world.

In Paris, several hundred people waited patiently in front of the Orange store on the Champs-Elysées, to the bemusement of passing tourists. They were hoping to be among the first in the world to buy the new phone when the store opened at one minute past midnight. Orange is one of three network operators selling the iPhone in France: the others, SFR and Bouygues Telecom, will offer the phone from June 24.

Among the customers waiting in Paris, one was so keen to start using his new iPhone that he had dragged along a friend with a laptop so that he could activate the phone without returning home, using the store’s Wi-Fi hotspot.

In Boston, more than 120 people lined up outside of the Boylston Street Apple store by its 7 a.m. opening, but unlike past launches of hot Apple product launches only a handful waited outside overnight. One of those was Patrick Morton, a recent college graduate who was the first in line had been using a BlackBerry smartphone on another network.

“As far as the new upgrade, I don’t think it’s that significant over 3G but over a BlackBerry its pretty significant, the speed, the compass, the MMS will be good, the tethering once we get that,” he said.

In fact, the iPhone 3G S supports both MMS and tethering as a modem, but in the U.S. AT&T’s network does not. Tethering capabilities, which allow the iPhone to share a 3G wireless broadband connection with a Mac or PC via Bluetooth or USB (Universal Serial Bus), were also added to appease user demand. However, Apple warned that the tethering service will be unavailable in some countries. That frustrates some customers

“Yeah, that’s actually been disappointing,” said Christina Ghobrial, who was also in line in Boston. “I did download the Quip application on the last iPhone that I had and it was helpful but it wasn’t the best because it wasn’t as good as being able to send a picture in a text message.”

The iPhone 3G S, unveiled earlier this month at Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference, is considered to be an incremental upgrade of the original iPhone 3G, which was announced at last year’s WWDC. The new phone is “faster and more responsive” than the original iPhone, with more battery life and close to double the storage, Apple said.

The iPhone 3G S has a maximum of 32GB of storage, double that of the iPhone 3G. Users will get talk time of up to 12 hours on 2G networks and up to five hours on 3G networks, with a standby time of 300 hours. Users can browse the Internet for up to five hours on 3G networks on a single battery charge and for up to 9 hours on Wi-Fi networks.

Apple also addressed user desires, adding a 3-megapixel digital camera with autofocus. Perhaps the biggest upgrade in the smartphone is the ability to shoot video, which the previous iPhone models lacked. That addition was enough to lure some customers to stand in long lines.

“I’ve always wanted to have a camcorder when I’m out and you see the most unusual things so having that camera right now will mean amazing things,” said Andy Ghobrial as he waited in line at the Boylston Street Apple store.

The new smartphone also has a faster chip so applications and Web pages will launch more quickly, Apple said. An upgraded graphics core makes 3D gaming more efficient.

The smartphone runs the iPhone OS 3.0 operating system with new features such as cut, copy and paste, and MMS (multimedia messaging service). The iPhone OS 3.0 includes a software development kit with over 1,000 application programming interfaces that enable features such as push notification and mapping inside applications.

The iPhone 3G S will be available in more than 80 countries in the coming weeks. In the U.S., Apple announced that the iPhone 3G S will cost US$199 for the 16GB model and $299 for the 32GB model. The price of a first-generation iPhone 3G has been reduced to $99.

In Europe, prices for the 32GB model range from free to €250 ($350), depending on the duration and monthly cost of the accompanying airtime contract.

(Peter Sayer in Paris, Agam Shah in San Francisco and Nick Barber in Boston contributed reporting and writing to this article.)

Some users are upset at Intel’s strategy to rename the tags attached to Core chips

Intel’s strategy to rename its chips and platforms has seen some opposition from chip enthusiasts, who say the new naming conventions are even more confusing.

The chip company on Wednesday said it was making changes to the naming convention of Core processors, switching the derivatives attached to it. Tags like Core 2 Duo and Core 2 Quad will be replaced by names like Core i3, Core i5 and Core i7, depending on the type of PC and configuration.

Chips for entry-level desktops and laptops will carry the Core i3 brand, while chips for mid-level and high-end PCs will have Core i5 and Core i7 tags respectively. The Core i7 tag is already being used on Intel’s Nehalem-based chips that go in high-end desktop PCs.

Intel said it will continue to use its Atom brand for low-power processors used in netbooks and smartphones. The company will also retain the Celeron and Pentium entry-level chips for mainstream laptops and desktops. In platforms, the company said it would phase out usage of the popular Centrino brand to describe mobile laptop platforms by early next year.

“For PC purchasing, think in terms of good-better-best with Celeron being good, Pentium better, and the Intel Core family representing the best we have to offer,” wrote Bill Calder, an Intel spokesman, in a blog entry on Wednesday. The change will make it easier for customers to differentiate and recognize brands in the future.

“The fact of the matter is, we have a complex structure with too many platform brands, product names, and product brands, and we’ve made things confusing for consumers and IT buyers in the process,” Calder wrote.

But the glut of name changes has confused some users even more, who complained of the new names being incomplete. The changes would not fully reflect how the Core chip would perform, some people wrote in response to the blog entry.

“Too confusing. Make the names longer and more telling,” wrote someone identified as Jonah, in a comment on the blog. Dismissing the new naming conventions as meaningless, multiple posters asked Intel to either retain the old names or change chip names to reflect the number of cores, clock speed and cache.

Calling the name changes “nonsense,” another poster, John, wrote “I buy a Core 2 Duo, I’m getting a 2 core processor made out of Core 2. Usually the clock speed is advertised as well. I buy a Core i5 who knows what the hell I’m getting except maybe Intel marketing.”

In all the opposition, Intel found support from a few posters who said that the name changes could make it easier to distinguish chips.

“I can see how replacing the confusing mess of “Core 2 Duo T6400″ with “Core i7″ could make things easier for the typical consumer when browsing the laptops at Best Buy,” wrote a poster, Colin.

The dedicated core of enterprise desktop users will include programmers and task workers

With laptop shipments gaining momentum over the past few years the question arises: Are desktops on the verge of being banished from the enterprise?

Desktops remain the primary computers of “task workers,” which includes clerks, accountants and others who are bound to their desks, and programmers, with laptops becoming the primary computers for many other enterprise employees.

Enterprise use of laptops has exploded as they become affordable and companies seek to provide greater mobility to workers while also increasing productivity. Laptops allow employees to telecommute or work on the road, and can make it easier for salespeople and executives to close deals. Laptops also reduce the need to buy separate monitors and other peripherals.

Laptop shipments increased by about 60 percent between 2006 and 2008, while desktop PC shipments flattened during the same period, according to Gartner. Toshiba sensed the laptop trend as early as 2001, when it stopped selling desktops and focused on selling mobile products and servers.

But that doesn’t mean doom and gloom for desktops, said George Shiffler, principal analyst at Gartner Dataquest. There will be a core of desktop users, including programmers who need the speed of a desktop. Desktops will also remain a tool for task workers as companies look to secure data and reduce maintenance costs, analysts said.

“Why give a laptop to somebody working in a call center?” Shiffler asked. Such workers do not need laptops, which are more expensive and generally require more maintenance, or even a top-line desktop — all they need is a basic desktop.

Laptops are also more vulnerable to theft, analysts said. Stolen laptops could cost companies an average of $49,246, with computer costs and the value of data included, according to a study released in April by Ponemon Institute.

While desktop PCs account for the bulk of personal computers sold to enterprises, the gap in laptop sales to enterprises is closing. Of 168 million PCs sold worldwide to professional organizations in 2008, about 95 million were desktops and 73 million were laptops. That’s compared to 94.6 million desktops and 47.3 million laptops that shipped in 2006.

Concerns about data integrity triggered Guidance, a Web software provider, to choose a majority of desktops for its hardware infrastructure. The company of 50 employees has a mix of 80 percent desktops and 20 percent laptops.

“Because desktops are stationary, they have a lot of advantages,” said Jon Provisor, chief technology officer at Guidance. Desktop maintenance is easier for tasks such as remote security scans and software patches, Provisor said. Desktops are also always connected to the network, which makes it easier to manage them remotely.

General maintenance is difficult for laptops on the road, and users may load rogue software that introduces malware into the network, he said. “[Laptops] aggregate a whole bunch of software — like plug-ins for Facebook or images or video which end up corrupting the system drive. The desktop is a business tool that is simpler and easier to retain,” Provisor said.

Steve Rausch, director of information services at Gibson General Hospital in Indiana, agreed, saying desktops are better suited for office tasks like payroll management. The hospital has deployed desktops for employees such as clerks, who are not mobile.

Security breaches worry Rausch the most, as it’s hard to track the lost information from a stolen laptop. “Then we have to tell all our customers that there’s a potential that your Social Security number, financial information have been stolen. That’s a black eye for us,” he said.

Replacing laptops also could be expensive compared to desktops, Rausch said. Desktops have a lifespan of about five years, as opposed to three years for a laptop, Rausch said.

Laptop components and batteries also need to be continuously replaced, Provisor said. “From our perspective, desktops are here to stay,” he said.

There is a growing interest in devices like virtual desktops and thin clients, which are disk-less terminals that pull resources like storage and memory from central PCs like servers, said Roger Kay, an analyst at Endpoint Technologies Associates. These small devices have fewer components, consume less power and use less space than traditional minitowers, which could save enterprises money.

For example, Guidance has placed orders for Hewlett-Packard’s Compaq dc7900, a small desktop without a power supply that combines components from a laptop and desktop in one box. Rausch is considering disk-less thin clients for use in Gibson General Hospital rooms to take down patient data. Such thin clients access data from servers rather than storing it in memory.

Stripping out IE from Windows 7 is an attempt to duplicate a failed remedy from an earlier antitrust ruling, Opera says

Microsoft’s plan to strip out its Internet Explorer (IE) browser from Windows 7, due for sale in the fall, in Europe is designed to force the European Commission’s hand as it devises an antitrust remedy to restore fair competition in the browser market, said Jon von Tetzchner, the CEO of Norwegian browser maker Opera.

“Microsoft is trying to set the remedy itself by stripping out IE,” he said in a phone interview Friday.

Opera complained to the Commission about the bundling of IE in Windows in 2007. The complaint sparked an antitrust probe that resulted in formal charges of monopoly abuse in January this year.

The Commission is now formulating a remedy that would include the creation of a ballot screen containing a selection of browsers for users to choose from when they install Windows on their new computers.

Von Tetzchner said such a remedy is just as important now as it was before Microsoft announced the plan to unbundle IE from the new version of the OS.

Microsoft, however, is trying to derail the process by offering a version of Windows without a browser, said Von Tetzchner. “They are trying to replicate the remedy in the media player case, which we all know didn’t work.”

“If Microsoft got its way there would be no ballot screen, just a version of Windows that has no browser at all — just like the edition ‘n’ of Windows that resulted from the earlier European antitrust case,” he said.

In that case in 2004, the Commission ruled that Microsoft had distorted competition in the market for media players by bundling its Windows Media Player into Windows. It ordered the software giant to sell a version of Windows that had the media player stripped out, as well as selling the fully bundled version of Windows.

The ruling didn’t insist on a price differential between the two versions. Microsoft complied, launching Windows edition ‘n’ which, not surprisingly, bombed in the market.

The Commission doesn’t want to make the same mistake this time, in its remedy for restoring competition in the browser market, and rival browser makers are insistent that there must be no repeat of the edition ‘n’ debacle.

“It’s very important that there is an effective remedy for the browser market,” Von Tetzchner said.

“Now that Microsoft has acknowledged it has been breaking the law by bundling IE into Windows, the Commission must push ahead with an effective remedy,” he added.

A ruling by the Commission was expected late this year. Von Tetzchner said it may come sooner, following Microsoft’s decision to strip out IE from Windows 7. “Their decision should make room for a faster conclusion,” he said.

In 1996, database and applications software vendor Oracle and Unix workstation supplier Sun Microsystems got together to launch a bold campaign to revolutionise computing.

The hegemony of software giant Microsoft and chip maker Intel would be toppled by the ‘network computer’, the two companies argued, a thin client device that would draw data and applications from a network such as the Internet.

At a time when the total number of PCs sold annually worldwide stood at 70 million, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison made the staggering claim that there would be a billion network computers by the year 2006.

In light of that ultimately unsuccessful launch by these two ‘first-movers’ in network computers, announcement of the industry-reshaping $7.4 billion acquisition of Sun Microsystems by Oracle makes a little more sense – even though, in more recent times, the two companies’ cultures could not have been more different.

There is no mystery as to why Sun was looking for an acquirer; it was in real danger of going bust. Its final financial report as a stand-alone company, published just days after the Oracle deal was announced on 20 April, revealed quarterly revenues down 20% year-on-year to $2.61 billion, and a net loss of $201 million. In November 2008, Sun announced a plan to lay off around 6,000 workers, almost a fifth of its workforce, to claw back costs.

More perplexing is why Oracle would want to be Sun’s knight in shining armour. IBM, which just weeks before was rumoured to be close to sealing the deal, seemed a more logical suitor, and Oracle’s announcement was met primarily with surprise.
Sun’s portfolio is already a complex mix of hardware and software, so bolting it onto to Oracle’s database, middleware and applications stack makes for a confusing picture. What is more, Sun wasn’t able to make money from its own portfolio, so how will its new owner?

There are some obvious areas of synergy. The addition of Sun’s Solaris operating system, for example, allows Oracle to sell businesses support for the entire stack, from operating system to applications via middleware and databases. And it will certainly benefit Oracle to own MySQL, the leading open source challenge to its database business which Sun bought for $1 billion only 18 months ago – if only because it allows it to kill it.

Others are more puzzling. Ellison described the Sun-developed Java programming language as “the single most important software asset we have ever acquired,” even though Sun made it largely free and open source in 2007.

The answer to this particular conundrum may lie not in technology per se, but in personnel. Oracle’s Fusion middleware range is based on Java, and the Sun acquisition will bring with it some of the world’s experts, including original Java inventor James Gosling.

Indeed, this boost is one way in which the Sun buy makes perfect sense. The acquisition brings with it considerable technical talent (Sun was for long the Apple for enterprise to the techies who may not have chosen to work for the sharp-suited corporate Oracle, but who would ultimately prefer that prospect to redundancy).

Another reason relates to cloud computing. Ellison has to date been one of the most vociferous cloud heretics. Even as he announced cloud computing initiatives in partnership with Intel and Amazon last year, he rubbished the term. “What the hell is cloud computing?” he said. “We’ve redefined ‘cloud computing’ to include everything we currently do.”

And despite the fact that he was Salesforce.com’s sugar daddy, he has been equally cool on software-as-a-service. “It’s hard to point to any software-as-a-service provider that’s doing a good job of improving its profitability,” he said a year ago.
But this was all before he owned a hardware company that not only builds its own servers and storage systems (Oracle is now the world’s biggest supplier of tape libraries, for example) but that has already made significant investments in building a cloud computing infrastructure.

The combination of Oracle and Sun is the only company that makes everything in a ‘cloud’ above the component level, especially since Oracle’s acquisition of virtualisation management tool vendor Virtual Iron that was announced shortly after the Sun deal. “We will be the only company out there that can provide everything from the applications to the disk,” said Oracle president Charles Phillips at a recent customer conference.

according to Oracle’s official website,

There are substantial long-term strategic customer advantages to Oracle owning two key Sun software assets: Java and Solaris. Java is one of the computer industry’s best-known brands and most widely deployed technologies, and it is the most important software Oracle has ever acquired. Oracle Fusion Middleware, Oracle’s fastest growing business, is built on top of Sun’s Java language and software. Oracle can now ensure continued innovation and investment in Java technology for the benefit of customers and the Java community.

“Sun is a pioneer in enterprise computing, and this combination recognizes the innovation and customer success the company has achieved. Our largest customers have been asking us to step up to a broader role to reduce complexity, risk and cost by delivering a highly optimized stack based on standards,” said Oracle President Charles Phillips. “This transaction will preserve and enhance investments made by our customers, while we continue to work with our partners to provide customers with choice.”

For many, this seeming reversal of the evolution of the IT industry will send shivers up their spine. But this is the direction the industry appears to be moving in; customers’ hunger for value and simplicity, and anger over money wasted on integration, is prompting the return of the ‘one stop shop’ vendor.

Having added Sun’s technical wizardry to his own ruthless commerciality, Ellison has one of the strongest hands in the sector. We may see those billion network computers yet.

I read it on CRN,

Gigabyte rolled out their latest range of motherboards featuring its 24-phase power VRM design and Smart 6 technologies during Computex 2009 in Taiwan. The vendor also showcased various motherboard models featuring the Intel P55 chipset series as well as the GA-MA785G-UD3H based on the AMD 785G chipset.

The vendor’s proprietary 24-phase power VRM is designed to enhance the efficiency of power delivery to the CPU while reducing heat, by spreading the workload over the 24 power phases.

Gigabyte also introduced its Smart 6 Technologies (including Smart QuickBoot, Smart Recorder, Smart TimeLock, Smart Recovery, Smart QuickBoost and Smart DualBIOS for better PC system management) that have been designed keeping user-friendliness in mind.

The vendor displayed its flagship X58 chipset-based GA-EX58A-Extreme motherboard and the upcoming Intel P55 chipset-based GA-EP55-UD5 motherboard. Both motherboards feature the 24-phase power VRM design that enable uninterrupted power delivery to the system for overclocking ability, combined with low temperatures for stability. They also support next generation SATA at 6Gbps to deliver twice the data transfer rate of current SATA motherboards. Also on display was the Smart TPM that allows users to lock the TPM protected content remotely, by using a Bluetooth-enabled mobile phone.

On the AMD side, the vendor presented the GA-MA790FXT-UD5P, i.e. the AMD Dragon Platform motherboard for AMD AM3 Phenom II processors that deliver high performance computing for work, home and gaming. The new flagship motherboard for the AMD platform supports 45nm AMD Phenom II processors featuring Hypertransport 3.0 technology. Other noteworthy features include high-performance DDR3 support that allows the vendor’s motherboard to reach memory speeds of up to 1666 MHz for fast memory access.

Further, Gigabyte showcased its GA-MA785G-UD3H motherboard that features DirectX 10.1 gaming and fluid computing with ATI Stream technology. The motherboard features an AMD 785G chipset with ATI RADEON HD 4200 graphics and is AMD’s Mainstream Desktop solution for Microsoft Windows 7.

The range of motherboards will be distributed in India by Avnet, Ingram Micro, Redington and Neoteric Infomatique.

Here is a news I found on Infoworld, I thought I would like to share it with the readers, it goes,

Google tests ‘revolutionary’ cloud-based database

The Fusion Tables online database with data-spaces technology is designed to sidestep the limitations of conventional relational databases

Google has released an early version of a new type of database whose approach to data management will be revolutionary, according to an analyst who has studied the technology behind it.

On Tuesday, Google quietly announced in its research team blog a new online database called Fusion Tables designed to sidestep the limitations of conventional relational databases.

Specifically, Fusion Tables has been built to simplify a number of operations that are notoriously difficult in relational databases, including the integration of data from multiple, heterogenous sources and the ability to collaborate on large data sets, according to Google.

“Without an easy way to offer all the collaborators access to the same server, data sets get copied, emailed and ftp’d — resulting in multiple versions that get out of sync very quickly,” reads the Google announcement, which has been largely overlooked, probably because it was made on the same day the company held a high-profile press event to launch its Google Apps Sync for Microsoft Outlook.

Under the hood of Fusion Tables is data-spaces technology, which will make conventional databases go the way of the rotary phone, according to Stephen E. Arnold, a technology and financial analyst who is president of Arnold Information Technology.

Data spaces as a concept has been around since the early 1990s, and Google, realizing its potential, has been developing it since it acquired Transformic, a pioneer of the technology, in 2005, Arnold said.

Data-spaces technology seeks to solve the problem of the multiple data types and data formats that reside in organizations, which have to scrub the data and make it uniform, often at great cost and effort, in order to store and analyze it in conventional databases.

Data spaces envisions a system that creates an index that provides access to data in its disparate formats and types, solving what Arnold calls the “Tower of Babel” problem.

In the case of Fusion Tables, the technology should allow Google to add to the conventional two-dimensional database tables a third coordinate with elements like product reviews, blog posts, Twitter messages and the like, as well as a fourth dimension of real-time updates, he said.

“So now we have an n-cube, a four-dimensional space, and in that space we can now do new kinds of queries which create new kinds of products and new market opportunities,” said Arnold, whose research about this topic includes a study done for IDC last August.

“If you’re IBM, Microsoft, and Oracle, your worst nightmare is now visible. Google is going to automatically construct data spaces and implement new types of queries,” he said. “Those guys are going to be blindsided.”

Fusion Tables is an early version of the product, as evidenced by its “Labs” label, which means Google considers it an experimental product. “As usual with first releases, we realize there is much missing, and we look forward to hearing your feedback,” Google’s blog post reads.