Hasta La Gadget!

Thought Thunderbolt was the only superfast interconnect in town? Well, it is and will be for a little while yet, but the PCI Special Interest Group has just held its annual meeting and developer conference in California, where plans for a 32Gbps PCIe cable were revealed. Details are still fluid on precisely what such a connector would look like and do, but the expectation is that it’ll be built out of copper wire, will be flatter and thinner than Thunderbolt’s rotund construction, and will be able to channel power as well as data through to devices up to 10 feet (3m) away. Targeting consumer applications, and extra skinny tablets and laptops in particular, this cabled variety of PCI Express will start off based on the 3.0 spec in 2013, but will then move on from there to PCI Express 4.0 and, potentially, optical data conveyance. Oh yes, PCIe 4.0 also got announced by the PCI SIG, though that’s at least four years away at this point — no need to sweat about having it in your next motherboard, not yet anyway.

PCI Express cables could take us to 32Gbps speeds by 2013 originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 23 Jun 2011 02:16:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink Electronista  |  EE Times (1), (2)  | Email this | Comments

At first blush, the Nokia N9 is everything I’d ever wanted from the company: a smartphone with a competitive spec sheet, exquisite industrial design, and a touch-centric UI that looks to push things forward with the introduction of its own idiosyncratic ideas. Slick in terms of both responsiveness and appearance, the Harmattan interface is Nokia’s thunderous riposte to all those (myself included) that challenged the company to get with the touchscreen OS program and cast off the shackles of its Symbian legacy. The only traces of Symbian in the MeeGo 1.2-equipped N9 can be found in the iconography, which maintains the rounded look of its forebear, and support for Qt — in all other respects, this is a whole new software proposition (distinct even from its Maemo 5 roots), which has so far elicited a range of emotions in me, including delight, desire, and… despair. You must be wondering why, aside from alliterative convenience, I’d be feeling downcast having enjoyed my brief time with the N9 so much. To learn the answer, read on.

Continue reading Editorial: Dear Nokia, you cannot be serious!

Editorial: Dear Nokia, you cannot be serious! originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 22 Jun 2011 12:00:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink   |   | Email this | Comments

Nokia VP Victor Saeijs has this week disclosed the six launch markets for the vanguard devices born out of the Microsoft-Nokia partnership. France, Germany, Italy, Spain, the Netherlands, and the UK will all count themselves as hosts to Nokia’s Windows Phone debut, but the company’s mother nation of Finland has strangely been left out in the cold. Knowing Nokia, there’s no doubt that once the WP7 handsets are ready they’ll find themselves swiftly available worldwide, but if you care to be among the very first to own one, you’ll be wanting to visit Europe’s western shores — preferably some time before the year’s through, as Mr. Saeijs also reaffirmed that there will indeed be a Nokia Windows Phone coming out in 2011.

Nokia Windows Phones will launch in six European nations first, Finland not among them originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 17 Jun 2011 07:29:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink WMPoweruser  |  All About Phones  | Email this | Comments

Bloomberg Businessweek just published an amazingly thorough piece on Nokia, pre- and post-Elopcalypse. We’ve long wondered how MeeGo, an OS that Stephen Elop himself said “inspires both confidence and excitement” in October 2010, could be cast aside so quickly in favor of Windows Phone, an OS still struggling to find traction in the heated smartphone market. Well, now we know. Bloomberg recounts a January 3rd meeting between Nokia’s Chief Development Officer Kai Oistämö and Nokia’s freshman CEO. After Kai expressed his concern with MeeGo’s ability to effectively respond to Apple’s iOS and Android operating systems, the two decided to interview two dozen “influential employees” about MeeGo, ranging from execs to engineers. Here’s how Bloomberg recounts the events that followed:

Before the first interview, Elop drew out what he knew about the plans for MeeGo on a whiteboard, with a different color marker for the products being developed, their target date for introduction, and the current levels of bugs in each product. Soon the whiteboard was filled with color, and the news was not good: At its current pace, Nokia was on track to introduce only three MeeGo-driven models before 2014-far too slow to keep the company in the game. Elop tried to call Oistämö, but his phone battery was dead. “He must have been trying an Android phone that day,” says Elop. When they finally spoke late on Jan. 4, “It was truly an oh-s–t moment-and really, really painful to realize where we were,” says Oistämö. Months later, Oistämö still struggles to hold back tears. “MeeGo had been the collective hope of the company,” he says, “and we’d come to the conclusion that the emperor had no clothes. It’s not a nice thing.”

Nokia is now on track to release at least one Windows Phone handset in 2011 with a dozen more in 2012.

The ‘oh sh_t’ moment that Nokia decided to abandon MeeGo originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 02 Jun 2011 03:43:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink   |  Bloomberg  | Email this | Comments

As you’ll no doubt be aware, Qualcomm currently enjoys a stranglehold on processing hardware inside Windows Phone handsets. Its Snapdragon chip stars in both Microsoft’s original and updated chassis spec for the platform, but its hegemony may soon be coming to an end. STMicroelectronics (the ST in ST-Ericsson) boss Carlo Bozotti is cited by Forbes as saying that Nokia will use ST-Ericsson hardware to power at least some of its Windows Phones. The dual-core U8500, a long-time Nokia favorite, is touted as the first such system-on-chip to appear, with its successors helping to populate Nokia’s expansive WP lineup in 2012. The only intel we’ve had so far on Nokia’s initial handsets for the new OS revolved around Qualcomm-based devices, so even if ST-Ericsson is indeed going to infiltrate the Windows Phone ecosystem, it doesn’t look likely to be among the very first Nokias out of the gate.

Nokia’s Windows Phones will feature dual-core ST-Ericsson U8500, says STMicroelectronics chief originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 20 May 2011 01:51:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink   |  Forbes  | Email this | Comments