Borders, the bookstore, might be unto something. The word might being the imperative word. Engadget got word that in an online survey about the “Early Read Book Preview program” you get to a question that asks about “Digital Reading Devices” that includes the familiar: Amazon Kindle, Kindle DX, Sony Book Reader, Plastic Logic Reader, Apple iPhone, Blackberry and Palm smartphones. And the unfamiliar: an Apple iPAD and an iTouch.
iPAD Now that’s an interesting name! iPod, iPAD. If the iPAD is true then the name would suggest that you use it to write and draw stuff on. I’m sure multitouch would be a feature that will allow you to manipulate what you wrote and drew in different ways. For instance if you wanted to save a note you’d point at it and drag it to the file drawer. Or something like that. I don’t think you’d see the normal menu bar with drop-down items.
iTouch This name conjures up imaginations different from the iPAD. The iTouch sounds like it’ll be some type of controller device. You’d get an interface to control your music, video, photos, etc. The iTouch would probably have the capability to be used as a keyboard–any keyboard since it would be a multitouch screen.
iPAD + iTouch Could the iPAD and the iTouch names be pointing to the same device? There certainly is that chance. Could the device have two screens? That’s also a possibility. A strong one. OLPC‘s next version might be sporting a similar design. I reckon Apple will continue toward its utopian device where less is more where close to nothing is close to perfect. A quick example would be the trackpad: Apple bucked the trend by applying the single button from the mouse to the trackpad. Dell’s M4400 that I had for a while had three buttons on the trackpad! With the new unibody MacBooks, Apple deleted the button and integrated it into the trackpad itself. I think Apple will continue to reduce the number of components…
Two LCDs Let’s brainstorm a bit more. How beautiful would it be for the many keys on a keyboard to be integrated into a single slab of glass. Heck, absorb the track pad too! Make the display depressable somehow by using a combination of resistive and capacitive touch technologies (RIM’s BlackBerry Storm makes use of these technologies but in a less-than-perfect way). Apple won’t need to offer different keyboard configurations for different languages. You have a single SKU and should reduce manufacturing complexity. The user would benefit too since you can change the keyboard on-the-fly: no more stickers.
iStick, iStick Pro I would also get rid of all the nasty-looking ports on the side and develop some kind of super duper all-encompassing wireless link to an external stick that has all the ports you’d want away from view–the iStick and the iStick Pro (for those who need FireWire)! And when I say get rid of all the ports, that includes the power port too.
iPower: S, M, L With Palms’ really cool Touchstone cordless charging dock that was introduced with the Pre, I think we’ve hit an inflection point where we can possibly see a mass transition to decording power connections. Introducing Apple’s iPower technology that comes in Small, Medium and Large sizes that charges all future iPower-compatible gadgets from Apple including the iPAD or iTouch. Simply lay your iPAD, MacBook or iPhone on iPower and they start recharging. Other positives include closing up the bottom connection on the iPhone: a lot of crap can get in there. The MagSafe connector on the MacBooks is a great idea but go one more step and just get rid of it–0% chance that someone would trip over the wire since there is no wire.
I’d definitely buy something like this for between $700 and $900.
Breakthrough Samsung‘s 9000 series LCD TVs with LED backlights will sport a direct-type LED backlight (not the edge-lit LED on the 8500 series) and still be very thin. This will be a significant breakthrough since a direct-type (in the back) LED backlight typically is quite thick. One main reason is that distance is required to get the light coming out of hundreds if not thousands of LEDs to go out toward the front in a nice uniform manner by using optical films and other technologies. With the 9000 series it seems Samsung has figured out a way to do that with less space. Cool.
8500 Series The 9000 series improves upon the 8500 series. The 8500 series, which as an edge-lite LED backlight, will be available in the US in September and come in two sizes: 46-inch and 55-inch sporting 240Hz frequencies, a dynamic contrast ratio of 7,000,000:1 that means absolutely nothing and a very fast 2ms response time. The 8500 series will have a big matching price too: US$3599.99 for the 46-inch and $4499.99 for the 55-inch. I’m guessing the 9000 series will be even more expensive.
LED TV? Yeah, right! I’ve shared my views on Samsung’s shady practice of calling its LCD TVs with LED backlight “LED TVs”. I can’t count the number of times I’ve had to explain that Samsung’s “LED TVs” are not really LED TVs but LCD TVs with a LED backlight. My friends seem to think that LED TVs are better than LCD TVs. Thanks Samsung for confusing everyone with your shady marketing tactic. According to Samsung the company has shipped 400,000 LCD TVs with LED backlights in the first half of 2009. The goal for 2009 is to ship two million. The second half is typically stronger but the split is usually 40:60 or 30:70. Even if Samsung continues to grow as quickly as it has in the first half, I’m looking at figure that’s around one million. Instead of two.
Press Event According to All Things D, multiple music industry sources are pointing to an Apple press event on September 7. Unsurprisingly there is no confirmation from Apple. Apple usually sends out invitations to select press about a week before the event. Apple in recent years have used the week following Labor Day to introduce new music-related products and services. The iPod Touch was introduced two years. Last year an enhanced iPod Touch and the Genius feature in iTunes were showcased. This year the event will most likely have something to do with music.
Cocktail Format Apple is working on a new music format that bundles full-length albums with album covers and interactive multimedia content. It would be a strain to view this on a smallish iPod Touch and even worse on smaller regular iPods. Apple’s Cocktail format can certainly work on tiny screens but the experience will be less than ideal. Integrate the Cocktail format with the much rumored Apple tablet, iTablet, iBook, or whatever else you might want to call it and you get to a better hardware and software solution that enhance the experience of enjoying music. In my opinion this is where Apple is headed.
iTablet According to Gizmodo, a source that claims to have held a mock up of the iTablet stated the display to be 10-inch in size and looks like a giant iPhone.
We all know that Apple is a very secretive company and uses many methods to thwart people trying to leak information out to the public. One way is to deliberately show prototypes and mock ups of products that are not the actual product. This source might have been given one of those. Other sources contacted The Loop and stated the keynote event will not include the introduction of the iTablet. The Apple tablet would be introduced in early 2010 at the earliest. The September event will be focused on music. And that logic gets us back to the iTablet. From what I can guess the iTablet will primarily be a consumption device, meaning that it will be used to consume music, video, books, magazines, etc.
Steve Jobs Will Jobs appear at this rumored Apple keynote on September 7? We haven’t seen Jobs make a presentation since last October but we also know that Jobs has been back at work since June. I do hope Jobs is well and shows up at the press event.
LED BenQ‘s V2200 is a 21.5-inch LCD monitor with a 1920 x 1080 resolution. Unlike almost 99.9-percent of LCD monitors out there the V2200 sports a LED backlight. LEDs are better than CCFLs (the typical technology used in a LCD backlight for monitors) in many ways: lower power consumption (in this case 36-percent less), more rugged (LEDs are solid state, CCFLs are tubes that can break), longer lasting, no mercury (very important!), and allows for very thin designs when used in an edge-lit configuration.
Thin is In Thin designs can be hit or miss but from a resource point of view thin designs require less material, weighs less, and with a smartly designed box can reduce transportation costs significantly. From the looks of it the V2200 (and the larger 24-inch V2400) makes use of an edge-lit LED backlight because it looks so thin, but I could be wrong.
Green BenQ went a little overboard stating that the dynamic contrast ratio is 5,000,000:1. Yeah right. These numbers don’t mean anything. In Eco mode the V2200 consumes 30-percent less power than in normal mode. The chassis is constructed from 28-percent recycled plastic. So the V2200 and the larger V2400 looks to be the result of some very good work bringing many good ideas to reduce its environmental footprint.
Source: Far East Gizmos via Engadget
Two Better Than One Samsung‘s ST550 is a 12.2 megapixel compact digital camera sporting a touch-enabled 3.5-inch LCD with haptic feedback on the back. The interesting thing about the ST550 (and the slightly lower-end ST500) is a 1.5-inch on the front. I believe this is an industry first and I’m scratching my head and wondering why it took so long. This is a brilliant idea by Samsung!
Serves Two The front LCD can be used for two purposes. One, when you’re trying to take a picture of yourself (and your wife) and you’re the photographer it is almost always a trial and error process. Not if you can see yourself through a LCD on the front. Now you’re self-portraits will always be pretty good. The second purpose would be to use the LCD on the front to help kids focus. You can display “cute animations” to do that. For that split second you need to snap a good picture.
Source: Engadget
I remember back when Windows 3.1 just came out. I was in high school and working on Windows 3.0–simply a GUI on top of DOS. Windows 3.0 was simply terrible and slowed everything down, kind of like Vista. I had to get Windows 3.1 so I together with a couple of my geeky friends, split the cost three ways and purchased Windows 3.1 from Egghead. I was happy with Windows 3.1: it was much faster, the graphics was cooler and all was good in Saratoga. Fast forward about 20 years.
Windows 7 is Microsoft’s fix to Vista. Vista is like Windows 3.0: it slows machines and makes the whole experience of using a computer less exciting. You feel like you’re getting less work done and more work trying to fix the PC to make it work better with Vista. At least that’s what I did for about six months. After failing I went back to Windows XP Pro SP3. Now Windows 7 is out and reviews are saying that it is much faster than Vista. That’s great. Engadget just posted up a review of Windows 7 RTM (Release To Manufacturing). The UI looks quite pretty (thanks to the interesting backgrounds they used) and there really are some great features: quick display switching, Aero snap and shake, etc. But what got me completely discouraged was this:
Our worst experiences, however, were with a clean install to a quite modern netbook. The OS became increasingly unstable over time — Windows Explorer itself seemed to be the main culprit — and the machine eventually failed to boot entirely. Luckily, the Startup Repair utility managed to jump to the rescue and found a System Restore point that booted fine, though we lost the few customizations we’d made up to that point and were face with basically a fresh install again. It was nice of Windows 7 to recover itself so well, but we would obviously have preferred to not run into that issue in the first place.
That means Windows 7 is still Windows where after a long time of using it the system slowly gets worse and worse. Remember after I ditched Vista I went back to XP. And soon after going back to XP I went full blown over to OS X. I want to say that I’ve never looked back but I did. I tried to use Office 2008 on the Mac and I must say that the Mac Business Unit at Microsoft really don’t know what they are doing: Excel for Mac really sucks guys. So I installed XP on top of Parallels to run Excel. You would think it would be slower, but it is actually faster, much faster, than running the Mac version of Excel.
Back to Windows 7: it’s faster and prettier than Vista and has several snazzy features. But it’s the old Windows that eventually die on you. The Mac mini that we have has been running without a cold reboot for months without showing any signs that it is slowing down and about to crawl to a halt. I’ve heard from a friend of mine that there is a guy who has a full-time job at Dell and his main responsibility is to go around all the Windows Servers and hard reboot them after a set number of hours. Truth or fiction, I don’t know.
I wanted to share with you a new feature of DisplayBlog: the DATABASES menu. What do I intend to do? I wish I could tell you everything but I am simply not the best planner in the world. And even if I was due to my enormously lazy body I would be able to fulfill only a small portion of those plans. So with that bit, my current plan is to continue updating the IPS LCD Monitor database and in the longer term introduce other relevant lists that would be helpful to you. If you would like to see a particular database related to the display industry let me know by sending me an email at jin@displayblog.com. In the mean time, click on the DATABASES menu item and look through the IPS LCD Monitor database that I have created. IPS-based LCD monitors are, in my opinion, the best monitors you can buy!
After news that an earthquake that shook Japan disrupted Corning’s Shizuoka-based LCD glass plant shares of LG Display, AU Optronics (AUO), Chi Mei Optoelectronics (CMO) and Nippon Electric Glass (NEG) rose significantly. LG Display, one of the world’s largest LCD manufacturers, increased 2 percent to a one-week high at 11:33am Seoul time according to Bloomberg. AUO and CMO, Taiwan’s two largest LCD suppliers, also rose in Taipei. NEG, a Corning competitor but much smaller in LCD glass substrate manufacturing capacity, saw its shares rise 4.5 percent.
Deepen Glass Shortage The factory disruption at Corning’s Shizuoka plant will have a material impact on the supply of LCD glass substrates needed to manufacture LCD panels that go into netbooks, notebook PCs, LCD monitors and LCD TVs. The impact according to Corning is about a 5 to 10 percent drop in glass volume in the third quarter for its wholly-owned facilities. That also means that its joint venture with Samsung, Samsung Corning Precision (SCP), is not included in that calculation. SCP supplies LCD glass to Samsung and LG Display. LG Display procures LCD glass from SCP as well as suppliers based in Japan such as Asahi Glass Co. and NEG. LCD manufacturers located in Japan may experience more difficulty in procuring all their LCD glass needs. The largest of these companies include Sharp, Panasonic and IPS Alpha.
Production in Japan The Japanese archipelago is located where several continental and oceanic plates meet that causes frequent earthquakes. There are many volcanoes located in Japan as well. Earthquakes that occur below or close to the ocean may cause tsunamis as well. The worst earthquake in Japanese history was in the Great Kanto Earthquake that hit near Tokyo in 1923. Over 10,000 people died. In 1995, the Great Hanshin Earthquake hit Kobe and killed 6,000 and injured 415,000 people. Prior to the 6.5 earthquake on August 11 with the epicenter around the Tokai area there was another slightly larger 7.0 earthquake two days earlier with the Izu Islands as the epicenter. My opinion is that in the long term some manufacturing operations located within Japan will migrate away from Japan to less earthquake-prone countries such as Korea, Taiwan or China.
Earthquake Impact Production Bloomberg reported on August 11 that production at Corning‘s Shizuoka-based LCD glass plant was disrupted due to an earthquake off the coast of Japan’s main island. It is not known when operations will resume. The earthquake was 6.5 magnitude and centered around 96 miles (115 km) southwest of Tokyo. Fortunately no employees were injured based on initial reports but 110 Tokyo residents were injured. Nuclear power reactors were automatically shutdown.
LCD Glass Volume to Drop About a 5 to 10 percent drop in LCD glass production based on volume is expected for the third quarter compared to the second quarter according to CFO James Flaws. The lower production will mean lower sales by about US$65 million according to Corning. Fourth quarter shipments will be impacted. The volume drop will impact LCD manufacturing plants located in Japan including Sharp and Panasonic.
LCD Glass Prices Might Rise I’m not sure I agree with Corning that there will be a direct causation between lower LCD glass substrate shipments and lower revenue in the third quarter. Certainly revenue will decrease but not to the extent that the company is estimating. Also there have been reports where stock prices of LG Display and AU Optronics (AUO) have increased, a result of rising LCD panel price expectations. Yes, LCD panel prices will certainly rise but…[private] so will the cost of making them. LG Display procures its LCD glass demand mostly from Samsung Corning Precision Glass (SCP) located in South Korea and other suppliers of glass in Japan. AU Optronics (AUO) is not served by Japan’s Shizuoka plant at all as local plants in Taiwan serve the LCD supplier’s needs. What will most likely happen is that LCD glass substrate prices will increase somewhat due to slightly lower supply. This has happened as LCD manufacturers are gearing up to serve LCD TV brands who in turn are busily building them, distributing them in order to have them ready at retailer shelves by mid-November. These LCD manufacturers especially Sharp and Panasonic who have already experienced some tightness in LCD glass will certainly pay a premium to secure a more limited supply. As to LCD panel price increases? There will be some but the increases will be offset somewhat by the increase in the price of LCD glass substrates.[/private]
Wired is reporting that the Zune HD can be preordered on Amazon. The 16GB Zune HD goes for US$220 at Amazon. The 32GB is just a bit more at $290. These prices undercut Apple’s iPod Touch by $55 and $80 respectively. These prices are tentative because Microsoft has not officially confirmed pricing or launch date for the Zune HDs.
Here are some posts about the Zune HD:
It is surprising that Microsoft is undercutting the iPod Touch even though its Zune HD media players seem to have technically more capable hardware. Since I’m a display guy, let’s look at the stunning 3.3-inch capacitive multitouch OLED display: certainly this is significantly better than anything that’s on Apple’s portable products. The OLED will have black levels far better than your recently-bought $2000 LCD TV. Seriously.
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