Hasta La Gadget!

The Hindustan Times cover this morning has a generous space dedicated to Google’s exit out of China and related efforts at redirecting mainland users to its Hong Kong hub, but couched cosily inside that story is perhaps an even bigger one. Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh is quoted as saying that Dell is considering taking its $25 billion’s worth of business elsewhere, possibly India:

“This morning I met the chairman of Dell Corporation. He informed me that they are buying equipment and parts worth $25 billion from China. They would like to shift to safer environment with climate conducive to enterprise with security of legal system.”

Michael Dell’s outfit already has one manufacturing plant in India, and the man himself has been on a charm offensive in the country this week meeting and greeting local officials. It could well be, however, that Dell is just seeking to play China and India off one another to get itself the most favorable manufacturing deal, but it’s still interesting to find such a high profile protestation against the supposedly enterprise-choking climate and uncertain legal system in China. It appears that Google’s wrangle with the Middle Kingdom’s leadership has forced consumer electronics execs to reevaluate their strong reliance on China, and the (very) long-term effects could indeed be a shifting, or at least diversification, of manufacturing away from Yao’s homeland.

[Thanks, Piyush]

Dell looking outside of China for ‘safer environments,’ according to Indian PM originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 24 Mar 2010 05:56:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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I’ll admit it: I’m obsessed with power cables and wall-warts of all kinds. Maybe its because nobody made a good one yet, so nowhere can I buy a power-brick that will fit neatly into a strip without crowding out others, that will charge USB devices and switch off when it isn’t needed. I shall keep looking until I find it.

The EcoCHARGE gets pretty close. Its narrow body slots in between bigger, greedier bricks and its tail trails away to either a mini or micro USB plug. A hatch on the block itself swings aside to allow a full-sized USB cable to be plugged in. The “Eco” part of the name comes from the device’s low power draw, and the fact that it switches off completely once charging has done, eliminating vampire draw like AT&T’s Zero Charger. Well, almost. Weirdly, the indicator LED appears to activate when the unit is *not* charging: “When the LED is off, the EcoCHARGE is active”. Still, it wins by pulling one tenth the power of an Energy Star compliant charger.

The EcoCHARGE costs $30 for both mini or micro USB flavors, with an iPhone/iPod version coming in April. Given that you can just plug your iPhone into the USB port, this future iPhone-specific version seems less useful.

EcoCHARGE [Ventev. Thanks, Anna!]

“[The] best companies in the world are collapsing. We don’t know what is going to happen to Samsung too. In the coming 10 years, businesses and products that represent Samsung today will mostly disappear.”

Never mind that analysts are predicting the most profitable year ever for Samsung Electronics. So what’ll it be South Korea: BubiBubi or pitchforks?

Lee Kun-hee returns as chief of Samsung Electronics originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 24 Mar 2010 04:57:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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The name’s Force, SandForce. Corsair’s making it kinda easy on us to spot its first SandForce-controlled SSD, and there’s no reason it should be bashful about it, given that the SF-1500 is currently the fastest SSD processor around. The F100 in question has the SF-1200 onboard, offering a lesser 285MBps read and 275MBps writes (oh, such measly specs!), but that also means you might, might, actually find a way to afford one. The TweakTown crew took one for a spin recently and were happily surprised to find little in the way of performance difference between SandForce’s supposedly enterprise-class SF-1500 and consumer-class SF-1200 — both sped ahead of the Intel X25-M G2 and Indilinx Barefoot-controlled drives. The speed conclusion was clear cut, and with pricing for the 100GB F100 projected to be as low as $400, the value proposition doesn’t look too bad either. The 200GB variant is expected to land somewhere around $700 when Corsair’s Force SSDs make it out to retail in a few days’ time.

Corsair’s 100GB Force SSD scorches the test bench with its blazing speed originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 24 Mar 2010 03:59:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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A brief wrap-up of CNET’s coverage of the CTIA wireless trade show. pOriginally posted at a href=”http://reviews.cnet.com/8301-12261_7-20001046-10356022.html” class=”origPostedBlog”CTIA 2010/a/p