Hardware Archive

"Dell reported its third-quarter earnings results Thursday, showing a small improvement over the last quarter, but revenue was down 15 percent over the last year, and profits fell 54 percent. The company reported revenue of $12.9 billion, within analysts' expectations between $12.8 billion and $13.5 billion. Earnings were 17 cents per share, when excluding 6 cents of pretax expenses and amortization. That's 54 percent off the 37 cents Dell recorded a year ago. Besides its acquisition of Perot Systems last month, there weren't too many positive signs in the recently completed quarter. Shipments were also down 5 percent across its businesses."

"Qualcomm has revealed that its 1Ghz Snapdragon ARM chip will ship in an upcoming Lenovo smartbook. AT&T has already partnered with Lenovo to sell the product. New smartbook products will bring ARM into the small form-factor laptop market and could give Intel's Atom some serious competition."

The Miami New Times News (try saying that out loud ten times in a row really fast) has a long story on the Pedraza brothers, the two men behind Psystar, which is located in Miami. The story details the brothers' youth, and, of course, talks a lot about Psystar and Apple. There is a lot of interesting stuff in there not covered before.

Is complexity (and wearing this on the outside) an inherit part of open source design? FactoryJoe compares the OpenOfficeMouse (a mouse with 18 programmable buttons and even an analogue joystick) and the Apple Magic Mouse-"To me, the OpenOfficeMouse seems like such a typical product from the open source community."

Litl LLC launched today a Linux-based laptop design, named "Webbook". The device comes with a custom simplified interface, it can run third party web apps, and it can operate both in a laptop mode, or by bending backwards the screen, in the "easel TV-like mode". The Webbook can also connect through HDMI to an HDTV, and a remote control is sold separately. The Webbook goes in auto-maintainance mode, when in sleep. The Atom 1.6 Ghz/1 GB RAM device sells for $699. More info here and here. Videos of the UI here.

"VIA has introduced out its latest Nano CPUs, pitching the new 3000 family of low-power processors at makers of thin'n'light laptops and of all-in-one desktops. The Nano 3000 series runs to six processors, clock at between 1GHz and 2GHz. They all sit on an 800MHz system bus. Four U3x00 models consume just 100mW of power when idling - the two L3xx0 Nanos consume 500mW at idle. VIA touted the new parts' support for 64-bit computing, virtualisation and the SSE 4 media processing instructions. Like past VIA processors, the new ones have on-board AES and SHA encryption engine."

When Psystar announced it Rebel EFI package, the company was quickly accused of simply taking open source code, repackaging it, and selling it for USD 50. While selling open source code is not a problem, not making the source code available if the license demands it is. Netkas, famous OSX86 hacker, and a Russian site are now claiming they have found the smoking gun.

Asustek has unveiled its first supercomputer, the desktop computer-sized ESC 1000, which uses Nvidia graphics processors to attain speeds up to 1.1 teraflops. Asus's ESC 1000 comes with a 3.33GHz Intel LGA1366 Xeon W3580 microprocessor designed for servers, along with 960 graphics processing cores from Nvidia inside three Tesla c1060 Computing Processors and one Quadro FX5800

As if selling non-Apple labelled computers with Mac OS X pre-installed and licensing the technology to do so to third parties wasn't enough, Psystar has now moved ahead and has started offering its Rebel EFI package for everyone to buy and use. It makes it possible for just about anyone to install Mac OS X on a non-Apple labelled computer.

And it's that time of the, eh, quarter again. The third quarter of 2009 has ended, so IDC and Gartner both published their figures on marketshare and sales. The big news is that Acer has surpassed Dell and is now the number two PC manufacturer in the world.

Aspects of the mouth-watering Eee Keyboard have been mysterious since we first heard about it at the beginning of this year. Now that the FCC has had a go at the device and has released its documents, we have sweet description in full. "Several of the documents hidden from our anxious eyes during the FCC filing have now gone public. Not only can you visually inspect its innards, the feds have also laid bare the full spec sheet for the ASUS Eee Keyboard model EK1542. Beneath the 5-inch, 800 x 480 pixel touch panel (with stylus) we'll be getting Windows XP Home running on an Intel Atom N270, 945GSE / ICH7-M chipset with Broadcom AV-VD905 video decoder, 1GB of DDR2 memory, either 16GB or 32GB of flash storage, 4-hour battery, Bluetooth, 802.11b/g/n WiFi, gigabit Ethernet, HDMI and VGA outputs, integrated stereo speakers and mic, 3x USB, headphone and mic jacks, and external WiFi / UWB antenna. The Eee Keyboard's on-board Ultra-Wideband (UWB) throws 720p content to your TV within a 5-meter range (10-meters for non-video transmissions) via a UWB receiver packing 2x USB ports, another mini-USB port, audio out, and HDMI. You can even connect to two external monitors at the same time using UWB and either VGA or HDMI cable. Now all we need is a final date and price... ASUS?"

Not that we haven't known that this would one day happen, but it's still an exciting development nonetheless. Some folks over at the University of Missouri have whipped up nuclear batteries small enough to run the typical mobile device of today. They don't quite specify if has enough voltage to power something like a phone or a laptop as the batteries are being designed with MEMS and NEMS technology in mind, but they claim that these penny-sized batteries hold one million times the charge of "regular batteries." Whether a "regular battery" by their definition is the standard AA, the typical laptop battery, or a watch battery is unbeknownst to us peasants. It's being designed for MEMS and NEMS technology, but why not have it power my lappy if it's got the voltage? Imagine running one's computer for seven hundred years, and imagine all of that delicious space saved from the curse of conventional laptop batteries. Perhaps we don't need wireless electricity after all.

Remember those nearly pointless USB 3.0 cables one could buy way back in the golden days of April? If you were one of those who bought one by mistake or merely wanted to use its USB 2.0 speed until you had an actual 3.0 device and controller, now is your chance. Buffalo is offering what they claim to be the "world's first!!" shipping USB 3.0 hard drive in delicious 1TB and 1.5TB flavors come late this month, and a 2TB model is in the works. Since one would obviously need a controller as they don't come standard on motherboards just yet, the company is also offering one of NEC's world-firsts: the handy dandy USB 3.0 controller. Together these'll cost you over US$285 at the very least, but sometimes you just have to have shiny pieces of the world's first before anyone else.

The popularity of the blessed curse of the PC industry, the netbooks, just keeps on rising. DisplaySearch has published it latest quarterly report on the state of the notebook market, and conclude that netbook popularity is rising, but at the cost of revenues.