Underground SIG-Labs

AMD based netbook , Why there are always late

It is already well known that AMD has their own bechmark in high end computing product, especially for games and graphical works ( though I think Apple got extra mark on the second). However, they should not just ignore the huge desire from middle and lower rank users, which could contribute narrowing the gap between its competitor, Mr. Intel.

As I always said, AMD should go after the gaping hole between netbooks and thin-and-lights by releasing a low-power platform with solid graphics abilities, and it looks like the company’s finally coming around — AMD’s John Taylor just told us that the chipmaker will be releasing a netbook-class Fusion CPU / GPU hybrid codenamed “Ontario” with integrated DX11 graphics sometime next year. If Ontario sounds familiar, it’s because we’ve seen it leaked in the past — it’s a part of the “Brazos” platform built around the low-power Bobcat core. Of course, AMD has been promising Fusion chips of all stripes for years now without a single shipping part, so saying that a Fusion chip will get it into the netbook game in 2011 is mildly amusing — while AMD’s definitely turned things around, it’s still incredibly late to the low-end party, and Intel’s solidly beaten it to the hybrid CPU / GPU punch with the Core 2010 and Pine Trail Atom chips. Add in the fact that NVIDIA’s Optimus-based Ion 2 chipset seemingly offers the extended battery life of Atom with the performance of a discrete GPU, and we’d say the market niche Ontario is designed to fill may not actually be so niche when it finally arrives. We’ll see what happens — a year is a long, long time.

Hope it wont be like Duron or Sempron….

Tags: AMD based netbook, amd beat intel, AMD netbook, Ontario

Google`s mobile browser ready to smoke Iphone

The new google mobile web browsing engine seems to show their best performance ever in December. Although Android still trails the iPhone in absolute share of the web with just 0.05 percent versus Apple’s 0.44 percent, it grew a much faster 54.8 percent versus just 20.1 percent for Apple’s platform. The BlackBerry too had a better month at 22.2 percent growth while the only major platforms below them are Symbian (19 percent growth) and Java ME (15.6 percent).

In Desktop site also represented a major if symbolic victory for Chrome, which for the first time in the analysis has overtaken Safari for share on the web. The browser jumped exactly 0.7 points to 4.63 percent, or enough to pass Apple; even though it continued to grow, Safari grew only modestly versus November and topped out at 4.46 percent. Firefox saw a rare decline in use to 24.61 percent, while Internet Explorer continued its long descent and reached 62.69 percent.

While the rise of Chrome is explained through both the launch of Chrome for Mac in beta form as well as extensions becoming available for Windows, Android’s efforts are more complex. It was helped both by a wider overall shift to mobile as well as the launch of key phones like the Motorola Droid that have fueled Android market share with runaway sales.

Proof of the downturn for desktop browsing comes through desktop operating system share. Despite sustained availability of Windows 7, Microsoft’s combined OS share dropped to 92.21 percent while the Mac dropped a hundredth of a point to 92.11 percent. Linux was the only desktop platform to see a gain as it edged forward slightly to 1.02 percent. The iPod touch is broken out separately from iPhone share and claims 0.09 percent.

Web bowser share

source : NetApplication study

Tags: android, Apple, blackberry, chrome, computers, Droid, google, industry, iphone, Java, linux, mobile phones, motorola, symbian, windows 7

2010 mobility for Google, keep Apple and Nokia busy

We can say year 2010 gives a significant milestone for Google mobile internet. Just after few days, Google and HTC brought a new mobile for their latest Andorid 2.1, Nexus One. Google Nexus One is believe to become the greatest competitior of Apple Iphone on varous aspects. Featuring a 1 GHz Snapdragon processor and Android 2.1 operating system, Nexus One has a 3.7″ AMOLED display similar to what you find on the Zune HD. As for the software, it now contains live wallpapers, 5 homescreen panels, new weather and news widgets, an all new 3D framework and voice recognition, using which you can skip typing and just dictate text to any field inthe phone. With the newcomers form Google, it is expected to finally give Apple Inc.’s iPhone a run for its money in the smartphone arena. The Nexus phone is as slim as a pencil, weighs about as much as a cigarette lighter (130 grams) and has a surface area similar to a deck of cards.

Android also offers a large application store — similar to Apple’s App Store — called the Android Market. However, unlike Apple, all of the applications made available for Android are free. Google may be entering the consumer hardware biz, thus competing directly with Apple. In other words, just forget about new micrsoft WM7, or Symbian V7.0. or even Blackberry software.

However, if Nokia really want to get involve in the mobile chaos 2010, they should concentrate more on their new triump card, Maemo-based N900. The quality is much more like super mini PC with the laptop-alike screen resolution, super OS, and superc embedded graphic adapter, and just need to upgrade a little bit on memory capacity and CPU. So, if Android can become a champion of internet smatphone, Iphone for their multitouch and “cool” capability, then Maemo-based could become a super-cool phonetop. I guess so….

Technical specification…

Tags: Android 2.1, Google smartphone, Iphone competitor, Maemo, Nexus One, nokia N900

Nokia cheat Sony PS3 with N900

With a little help from a little fella called ‘ Wireless Visual interface”, Nokia is trying to cheat Sony to make its N900 able to control Sony PS3. It may not display the output from your PS3, but it does replace the controller and requires no modding skills. Instead you just need a copy of the BlueMaemo Bluetooth emulator. With the emulator you can trick the PS3 into thinking an N900 is a controller and then use the touchscreen to handle input.

BlueMaemo was developed by Valerio Domingos who says that at the moment it is only good enough for menu navigation and not game control. But this is an emulator being developed so no doubt a future version may allow for complete PS3 control. the emulator it is free and instructions are available on how to set your N900 up for it. The emulator is available in the Extras-Devel repository.

Eventhough it is a little bit lousy, but with further development for sure it turn into a viable controller.

Tags: bluemaemo, Maemo, nokia N900, sony ps3

Beware! your mobile phone might be tapped wirelessly

Call interception through wired line is very common today, but what about wireless line, like GSM or other mobile line? wireless mobile (not WLAN, different frequency) work with encryption. The encryption works by rapidly changing the frequency used by the phone and the base station between 80 different channels. Doing so makes it very difficult for someone to intercept and listen in without very expensive hardware solutions.

Karsten Nohl, a German computer scientist, has now rendered the ability to intercept these calls much easier due to a year of hard work including 24 other people involved in encryption. The end result is the equivalent of the phone book in the form of a large table, but for encryption keys. Rather than very expensive hardware you now just need the table, a high-performance PC, and $3,000 of radio equipment to start listening in to calls. For the more serious user spending $30,000 will get you real-time snooping abilities.

Nohl used the annual hackers meet up called the Chaos Communication Congress held in Berlin to announce the encryption had been hacked. He sees it more as a way of informing users of the vulnerabilities of GSM rather than allowing call monitoring to be easier. The end result he hopes is better encryption for the calls we all make using mobile phone networks.

The GSM Association admits that the cracking of A5/1 is worrying, but also pointed out that a move to the A5/3 algorithm was currently underway and dismissed the crack as, “a long way from being a practical attack on GSM”.

Whenever we deal with technology, security concern should come along as people now are really interested to know what their neighbour is doing. Bu the main point is that, no where is secured, even facebook or YM. So, if you really want to have secured communication, just meet face-to-face, inside the self-built noise proof together with wireless jamming equipment…or just follow Osama style backword compatibility yet still out-of-radar.

nique

Tags: GSM hack, voice tapping, wireless hack

The best technologies of the decade

With only few days left before we enter a new year, a lot of new technologies has been explored by us since last decade. The fastest growing technologies is in ICT. Below are the best of technologies so far that we can consider as the best within years period of time;

AJAX

It’s hard to remember what life was like before Asynchronous JavaScript and XML came along, so I’ll prod your memory. It was boring. Web 1.0 consisted of a lot of static web pages, where every mouse click was a round trip to the web server. If you wanted rich content, you had to embed a Java applet in the page, and pray that the client browser supported it.

Without the advent of AJAX, we wouldn’t have Web 2.0, GMail, or most of the other cloud-based web applications. Flash is still popular, but especially with HTML 5 on the way, even functionality that formerly required a RIA like Flash or Silverlight can now be accomplished with AJAX.

Twitter

When they first started, blogs were just what they said, web logs. In other words, a journal of interesting web sites that the author had encountered. These days, blogs are more like platforms for rants, opinions, essays, and anything else on the writer’s mind. Then along came Twitter. Sure, people like to find out what J-Lo had for dinner, but the real power of the 140 character dynamo is that it has brought about a resurgence of real web logging. The most useful tweets consist of a Tiny URL and a little bit of context. Combine that with the use of Twitter to send out real time notices about everything from breaking news to the current specials at the corner restaurant, and it’s easy to see why Twitter has become a dominant player.

Ubiquitous WiFi

I want you to imagine you’re on the road in the mid-90s. You get to your hotel room, and plop your laptop on the table. Then you get out your handy RJ-11 cord, and check to see if the hotel phone has a data jack (most didn’t), or if you’ll have to unplug the phone entirely. Then you’d look up the local number for your ISP, and have your laptop dial it, so you could suck down your e-mail at an anemic 56K.

Now, of course, WiFi is everywhere. You may end up having to pay for it, but fast Internet connectivity is available everywhere from your local McDonalds to your hotel room to an airport terminal. Of course, this is not without its downsides, since unsecured WiFi access points have led to all sorts of security headaches, and using an open access point is a risky proposition unless your antivirus software is up to date, but on the whole, ubiquitous WiFi has made the world a much more connected place.

Phones Get Smarter

In the late 90s, we started to see the first personal digital assistants emerge, but this has been the decade when the PDA and the cell phone got married and had a baby called the smartphone. Palm got the ball rolling with the Treos about the same time that Windows Mobile started appearing on phones, and RIM’s Blackberry put functional phones in the hands of business, but it was Apple that took the ball and ran for the touchdown with the iPhone. You can argue if the droid is better than the 3GS or the Pre, but the original iPhone was the game-changer that showed what a smartphone really could do, including the business model of the App Store,

The next convergence is likely to be with Netbooks, as more and more of the mini-laptops come with 3G service integrated in them, and VoIP services such as Skype continue to eat into both landline and cellular business.

Open Source Goes Mainstream

Aha..this is what I like most. Quick! Name 5 open source pieces of software you might have had on your computer in 1999. Don’t worry I’ll wait…

How about today? Firefox is an easy candidate, as are Open Office, Chrome, Audacity, Eclipse (if you’re a developer), Blender, VLC, and many others. Many netbooks now ship with Linux as the underlying OS. Open Source has gone from a rebel movement to part of the establishment, and when you combine increasing end user adoption with the massive amounts of FLOSS you find on the server side, it can be argued that it is the 800 pound Gorilla now.

As Gandhi said, “First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.” When even Microsoft is releasing Open Source code, you know that you’re somewhere between the fight and win stages.

Toward giant Resources

56K modems, 20MB hard drives, 640K of RAM, 2 MHz processors. You don’t have to go far back in time for all of these to represent the state of the art. Now, of course, you would have more than that in a good toaster…

Moore’s Law continues to drive technology innovation at a breakneck pace, and it seems that related technologies like storage capacity and bandwidth are trying to follow the same curve. Consider that AT&T users gripe about the iPhone’s 5GB/month bandwidth cap, a limit that would have taken 10 solid days of transferring to achieve with a dialup connection.

A iPhone has 3,200 times the storage of the first hard drive I ever owned, and the graphics card on Mac Pro has 16,000 times the memory of my first computer. We can now do amazing things in the palm of our hands, things that would have seemed like science fiction in 1999.

Tags: AJAX, firefox, great technologies, iphone, linux, MAC pro, microsoft, microsoft open source, smartphone, the best technologies of the decade, twitter

Atom processor has jumped into UMPC, soon for mobile

Talking about UMPC, it is actually the smallest version of full laptop capability (higher than mobile phone) and does not support any GSM or CDMA network for mobile calling. ( who cares anyway, you can use VoIP call using 3G or WiMax). Basically, they were small tablets and even smaller than the latest and hottest 10″ netbook. As for known, UMPCs are a product close to our hearts as their niche status really only gets the hearts of the true geeks racing.

The latest UMPC came with Intel Atom Processor, PsiXpda has shown a significant roadmap to what mobile is going to be in the future. To give you a bit of tease this 4.8″ unit has a Atom Z510 processor – running at 1.1GHz, 800 x 480 screen resolution, as well as wifi, bluetooth & SIM card slot for connectivity , together with 16GB SSD, and we also learned that Windows XP was chosen due to its ease of integration within a corporate environment (though Ubuntu, Mint and a host of other Linux-based operating systems can and will work). May be because the original project come from Microsoft (remember the origami project ?).

Looking at the design , for sure if PsiXpda equipped with light Linux and together with GSM/CDMA enable, it will boom the latest Nokia N900 Maemo based Mobile PDA.However, if we look at the tag price, do we really like to read small menu icon (windows 7) for the price higher than the high end netbook in the market?

Tags: Intel Atom for UMPC, linux, microsoft, nokia N900 competitor, PsiXpda, UMPC

The most admired CPU chassis

Its seems like pentagon is trying to sell their product (not enough money to built Noah`s ship fro 2012, I guest). But, it is just an extraordinary CPU chassis with extraordinary attraction for it. Thermaltake wowed us all with theannouncement of the Level 10, a concept case designed in conjunction with BMW DesignWorks. Rather than a standard aluminum box, the Thermaltake Level 10 would incorporate a central pillar, with individual compartments hanging from it for the motherboard, PSU, optical drives, and hard drives.

As you can see, the production Level 10 is nearly identical to the concept shots we’ve seen earlier. Each compartment on the Level 10 has its own ventilation. The large panels on the lower left cover the motherboard mount, PCI-E cards, GPUs, and so forth. The six slots on the right are hot-swap SATA bays, connected to a large vertical heatsink. The bays have mounts for 3.5-inch and 2.5-inch drives. The top right box holds three optical drives, and the upper left box holds the power supply.

Tags: BMW Designworks, Core i7, intel, level 10, the best cpu chassis, Thermaltake

Future mobile phone will speed up with Intel Atom

Based on the new roadmap of Intel Atom released in IDF 2009, it is not impossible to run the chipset inside the Mobile phone. with the 15nm platform architecture, Intel Atom is ready for the generation of system-on-chip product.

Tags: future mobile phone processor, intel atom, Intel Atom roadmap

Nokia and Symbian will never get devorce

Nokia will stick with Symbian while looking another wife like Maemo or Android to become another partner.

Kallasvuo directly addressed recent blog reports that Nokia is replacing Symbian with the Linux-based Maemo OS on its high-end handsets, leading to speculation about what that means for Symbian’s future.

Using Symbian makes good business sense for Nokia, and allows the company to develop cheap smartphones that will democratise the form factor, said Kallasvuo.

Today, the biggest drawback with Symbian is its user interface, which hasn’t kept up with touch-based user interfaces on devices like the iPhone and phones based on Google’s Android OS.

In the middle of next year, a new version of Symbian will make a first step toward a better user interface, and this time next year the user experience on Symbian will be a non-issue, according to Kallasvuo.

Upcoming versions of Symbian will reduce clutter, decrease the number of clicks to get to features like music and email and offer a much faster user interface, promised Kai Öistämö, executive vice president of devices at Nokia.

Kallasvuo directly addressed recent blog reports that Nokia is replacing Symbian with the Linux-based Maemo OS on its high-end handsets, leading to speculation about what that means for Symbian’s future.

Using Symbian makes good business sense for Nokia, and allows the company to develop cheap smartphones that will democratise the form factor, said Kallasvuo.

Today, the biggest drawback with Symbian is its user interface, which hasn’t kept up with touch-based user interfaces on devices like the iPhone and phones based on Google’s Android OS.

In the middle of next year, a new version of Symbian will make a first step toward a better user interface, and this time next year the user experience on Symbian will be a non-issue, according to Kallasvuo.

Upcoming versions of Symbian will reduce clutter, decrease the number of clicks to get to features like music and email and offer a much faster user interface, promised Kai Öistämö, executive vice president of devices at Nokia.

As per said, Symbian is the great OS especially when we talk about 9300 communicator. People always love it and will have no replacement for them (memoryland).

Tags: android, Maemo, Nokia, symbian