News tagged ‘Intel’

Dan Primack from Pehub.com reported yesterday that Google acquired Agnilux. The latter is a startup company in San-Jose comprised of former Apple, P.A. Semi, Cisco and TiVo employees. It is intriguing that there almost no public information about the reasons why Google bought it and what Agnilux has recently been working on. One of the Google representatives confirmed the information but didn't comment it on.

Agnilux's website is currently unavailable, so we have no information about the company. But because of former P.A. Semi employees it seems like Agnilux may be working on a new chip that can be a rival to Qualcomm's SnapDragon or Apple's A4 SoCs. But, according to an investigation made by New York Times in February, one of the employees named Mark Hayter said:

"We want to make a splash. We don't want our manufacturer to take our intellectual property before we're ready".

So it looks like the company's main purpose in kept in a big secret. But it is known that later NYT heard from another Agnilux employee that the company is working on server and has a partnership with Cisco. Well that might be interesting to Google whose thousands of servers till this moment have been made by the company's engineers but not purchased.

According to the sources from Apple Insider, AMD representatives have been seen recently on the meeting with Apple's top brass. The discussion was about the possible partnership between these two organizations as Apple looking forward in bringing AMD's CPUs to workstations and notebooks. The main reason for changing its main processor supplier is probably the try to increase the flexibility and competitive options of Cupertino's company. Another explanation is problems, that were encountered with Intel recently (they include limited availability of recently produced processors and new chipset designs that don't allow using any video chips except its integrated graphics chip).

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Paul Rand is not a well-known person, but it was he who created logos for such famous companies like ABC Television, UPS, IBM and NeXT. He didn't actually design any of the logos for Apple, but he was chosen to be portrayed with an Apple logo for a print ad.

In 1993 Steve Jobs gave an interview to Alan Pottasch and Doug Evans. That was a time when he was a chief executive officer of NeXT and concentrated on porting their NeXTSTEP OS for x86 processors. That year Apple changed the guard from J. Sculley to M. Spindler.

At that interview Jobs spoke much about Rand as of an artist who became a "gem" for the company. He also says:

"When you scratch the surface of any of his work, you find out the depth of the intellectual problem solving that's taken place."

His speech reflects the ideal of current Apple's products. It is not only the hardware design that attracts people, it is also a software and the forseen interaction beneath it.

California-based company MicroUnity System Engineering filed a lawsuit against Apple, Acer, HTC, LG, Google, Nokia, Motorola, Palm, Samsung, Spring, Qualcomm, Texas Instruments and AT&T. It accuses these companies in infringement of 14(!) separate patents about mobile processors.

The lawsuit was filed few days ago in a District Court in the Eastern District of Texas, a place where patent complaints are filed commonly in hopes to get a favorable outcome. The devices named in the document are iPhone 3GS, iPod Touch (32 Gb and 64 Gb versions), Motorola Droid, Google Nexus One, Palm Pre and Nokia N900.

The patents that were named in the suit are listed below:

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It seem like Apple have always been concentrated on Macs and iPhones/iPods/iPads, so their Apple TV product may be considered more like a hobby. But the company's main rival thinks of  it as of another field to work on.

Intel, Sony and Google created a team to work on the device called GoogleTV. The latter already has its prototype. The New York Times says it consists of Intel's Atom processor and Android OS with Chrome web-browser. The project has been under development for a few months and there is still a work to do, but preliminary the device will be introduced this summer. To test their set-top box Google cooperates with Dish Network.

The NYT's source say:

“Google wants to be everywhere the Internet is so they can put ads there.”

It sounds plausible, because GoogleTV device is planned to allow users to browse the Internet, watch YouTube videos, check out Hulu content and even run Web apps and games.

There are so many iPhone 4G concepts created by different our users. Some show futuristic devices that are hard to create, while others are closer to reality.

Today we have an interesting concept designed by Francesco Maisano. It shows iPhone with more rounded design than the current one. We can also see some implementation of the future Firmware 4.0 - a special SpringBoard with Widgets for weather, calendar and clock. As for hardware there is a front camera, a flash for main camera, an intelligent Home button and much more. Take a look:

Analyst Ashok Kumar of Northeast Securities shared his ideas about the future Apple Tablet device. Kumar said the tablet processor will be manufactured by Samsung and will be based on the Cortex-A8 ARM architecture with a speed of about 1GHz. There are also rumors that the tablet, along with the next generation iPhone, would be based on ARM's new Cortex-A9 architecture with two or four cores.

Also this week, Jeffrey Fidacaro of Susquehanna Financial provided a projection of how much the internal components of Apple's tablet might cost without even knowing for sure what they are. The analyst assumes the device will run on an Intel Atom processor, would include 2GB of DRAM, and sport a 3.2 megapixel camera. If Apple went with an ARM-based processor, Fidacaro said, the tablet's cost could be reduced by as much as $50. If Apple will use a 128GB SSD, the price will be increased by several hundred dollars. Here is a quick list:

Many users are unable to sync their iPhones on PCs equipped with Windows 7 and Intel P55 Express chipset. Gigabyte is the first company who fixed this issue. They've released a beta BIOS that addresses the problem. Asus and MSI, which also use the P55 express on their motherboards, haven’t issued any updates yet, but hopefully will soon.

Microsoft Windows 7 will probably be a very popular OS. iPhone is already one of the most popular phones. So compatibility between the two is expected, right? Well, many users report in Apple forums that they get "error 0xE8000065" message whenever they attempts to sync. The problems might be in Intel P55 Express chipset's USB controller. We hope that either Intel or Microsoft will find a solution.

Here is a list of changes from iSapzio (sorry, screenshots are in Italian):

1. You can now enter to Settings-Store to see the balance and billing information:

2. Another change concerns volume control in the iPod app (or the "Music" on iPod Touch). While using Firmware 3.0 beta 4 on iPod Touch first generation, we can see that the controls for the volume are gone. This is an intelligent system, that turns on and off volume control, depending on USB, headphones and AD2P connection:

3. Fixed problems with iPhoto and displaying thumbnails of the screenshots / images from the CameraRoll.

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If your Skype app crashes first read this article. Here is a list of applications from Cydia that might cause the Skype app to crash:

• IntelliScreen
• mAdvLock
• mCoolPhone
• MobileHook
• MobileLog/iLog
• Rock Extensions

If you have these apps and problems with Skype, uninstall them and wait for release updates for them.

Wallpaper Labeler (AppStore link) and gCalWall Lite (AppStore link) let you add appointments and notes to the home screen. With Wallpaper Labeler, you can enter any text you want to your wallpaper, so you can leave yourself (or whoever finds your phone) notes. The other app, gCalWall, pulls down upcoming appointments from your default Google Calendar and splays them all over your home screen. You have to update it manually, which is kind of a drag, but the dev says that iPhone API won't allow for automatic updating. Both apps are free

In the past you could only use Intelliscreen paid app on a jailbreaked iPhone.

via gizmodo, lifehacker

Intel showed off a prototype handheld based on Moorestown, its upcoming Mobile Internet Device (MID) platform designed to enable a new generation of ultra-thin, touchscreen devices with extensive battery life.

Moorestown will consist of a system-on-a-chip (SOC), codenamed "Lincroft," which integrates a 45nm processor, graphics, memory controller and video encode/decode onto a single part. The platform will support a range of wireless technologies including 3G, WiMAX, WiFi, GPS, Bluetooth and mobile TV.

The divice will be avaliable sometime in the 2009-2010 time. Here is a video with presentation from IDF:

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iPhone-Backgrounder (available for jailbroken iPhones via Cydia Installer) brings another much-desired functionality that Apple's not allowing for legit apps—the ability to run in the background.

This is very usefull for iPhone applications like Skype (Fring), MobileChat, IM+, and many others.

To enable backgrounding for the currently-running instance of an application, press and hold the menu/home button until a message pops-up stating "Backgrounding Enabled". Note that only the current instance will be affected; if the application is terminated and relaunched, the new instance will not have backgrounding enabled.

To properly terminate an application instance that has backgrounding enabled, press and hold the menu/home button until a message pops-up stating "Backgrounding Disabled".

Issues:

• Application immediately quits when holding menu/home button:

  One possible cause is having the Intelliscreen application installed with the "App Launch Boost" option enabled. This option can be disabled in Intelliscreen settings on the "Performance" page.

• Application "XXX" runs fine in the background for a while, then suddenly quits:

  This is most likely due to the device being low on available application memory (RAM, not disk space). This can be caused by either having too many applications running at the same time, or by using applications that require a lot of resources. Unfortunately there is no fix for this issue, other than to avoid having too many backgrounded applications.

Digital Daily notes that Apple's market capitalization at $159.37 billion is now worth more than Google's which is at $157.56 billion. Apple's market cap first exceeded $100 billion in May of 2007. Apple was included into the S&P 100 index at that time. For interest, MacDailyNews compiled a list of the market values of other notable companies:

• Microsoft (MSFT) - $255,648,204,000
• IBM (IBM) - $169,964,678,000
• Apple (AAPL) - $157,012,662,240
• Google (GOOG) - $156,392,862,560
• Cisco (CSCO) - $142,125,692,160
• Intel (INTC) - $135,658,860,000
• Hewlett-Packard (HPQ) - $111,866,423,760
• Nokia (NOK) - $97,746,699,520
• Research In Motion (RIMM) - $71,143,935,000
• Disney (DIS) - $59,257,501,500
• Dell (DELL) - $50,483,256,060

via macrumors