Component Board

Samsung’s Q1 Ultra followup sheds real keyboard for the virtual

The UMPC form-factor has lost much of its appeal as consumers have become so infatuated with netbook computers. It used to be that if you were looking for a computer with a small screen that was very portable, the UMPC was the only ticket in town.

One of the original UMPCs came from Samsung and was called the Q1 Ultra. Samsung has now introduced a follow up to the Q1 Ultra called the Q1EX-71G. That name is certainly a mouthful, and not as elegant as Q1 Ultra, but the machine itself is very slick.

Samsung Q1EX Front

Apple’s pricey latest luxury offerings are showcasing poor graphical integrity

For only $2,799 you can buy yourself an entry level new 17″ MacBook Pro. And according, to recent reports, your purchase may come with a complementary side of failing graphics.

17" MacBook Pro

The pricey new luxury MacBook, which debuted in January at Macworld, features both 9600M and 9400M NVIDIA mobile graphics cards. While Apple clearly thought this to be a clever design, offering both performance and power savings, by switching the 9600M on only in graphically intense situations, it appears to also be making the systems’ graphics fail according to Engadget.
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Meyer says “smart men have foundries”

AMD is struggling with returning to profitability at the same time it is fighting with Intel in the X86 processor market. The struggles have led to some hard decisions at AMD that have included layoffs and pay cuts.

As AMD prepares to shed its foundry operations and spin them into a new company, AMD CEO Dirk Meyer is opening up about the changes. AMD founder Jerry Sander has a maxim he lived by when AMD first started that stated, “Real men have fabs.”

Meyer suggests that while Sander’s was a smart man, the market has changed significantly since AMD was founded. Meyer suggests a new maxim, “Smart men have foundries.” Meyer said during an interview with eWeek, “Jerry was a real smart guy but the industry has changed a lot since that time, so I think, ‘Smart men have foundries,’ is my new quote.”
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Want to raise the next Shakespeare? Have your children text!

Dr. Beverley Plester, the lead author of the report and senior lecturer at Coventry University, states, “The alarm in the media is based on selected anecdotes but actually when we look for examples of text speak in essays we don’t seem to find very many.”

Texting helps children as it exposes them to a variety of words, she says. She continues, “The more exposure you have to the written word the more literate you become and we tend to get better at things that we do for fun. What we think of as misspellings, don’t really break the rules of language and children have a sophisticated understanding of the appropriate use of words.”

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Dell has increased cost savings goals by $1 billion

Dell says that it is looking to cut costs and expand further into markets that are generating revenue today, including netbooks. Netbooks are one of the few categories of the computer industry that is growing impressively during the global economic downturn.

EWeek reports that Dell recently announced poor Q4 financials with revenues dropping by 16% to $13.4 billion. Because of the poor results, Dell is said to be eyeing further cost reduction methods and expansion into other areas. In addition to netbooks, Dell is also looking at the cloud and enterprise solutions area.

The computer maker announced that it was increasing its cost savings goals from $3 billion by 2011 to $4 billion over the same time frame. Finding an additional $1 billion in savings will likely mean Dell will be making more job cuts and possibly closing more facilities.
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