Android 4.0 for Galaxy S II and Galaxy Note in Q1, Samsung Norway Says

Galaxy S II and Galaxy Note, two of the most popular Android-based devices from Samsung at the moment, are set to receive an update to the latest version of Google’s mobile OS before the end of this quarter. 

Samsung Norway has reiterated such plans once more, and posted on its Facebook page that the owners of one of these devices, living in the country, would get a taste of the Ice Cream Sandwich OS flavor in Q1 2012. 

Unfortunately, the company did not offer a specific release date for the new firmware update, yet it might not be too long before additional details on the matter are delivered. 

Norway is only one of the countries where Galaxy S II and Galaxy Note are bound to get a taste of Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich in the coming weeks. Last year, Samsung promised the update for all of its users.

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AMD Launches Radeon HD 7950 Graphics Card

January 31, 2012 is finally here, so Advanced Micro Devices stepped up and made the genuine introduction of the second board from its Radeon HD 7000 series.

The Radeon HD 7950 graphics adapter is powered by the same graphics processing unit as the HD 7970 (the GPU codename is Tahiti).

Based on the 28nm manufacturing process technology, it is the latest and second greatest accomplishment, of the Sunnyvale, California-based company, on the video market.

The specifications are the ones that rumors, reports and early listings clearly spelled out a while ago.

With the GPU operating at 800 MHz, the memory, 3 GB of GDDR5 VRAM, has a clock speed of 5 GHz.

That said, the board features two mini DisplayPort outputs, a DVI connector and, as is common at this point, an HDMI output as well.

Moving on, the hardware developer implemented AMD Graphics Core Next Architecture and the AMD PowerTune and AMD ZeroCore Power technologies.

What's more, HD 7950 supports the PCI Express Gen 3.0 interface and, naturally, CrossFire technology and HD3D as well.

All in all, AMD's card can achieve 2.8 TFLOPs of compute power and up to twice the base performance in dual-GPU configurations.

“With the arrival of the AMD Radeon HD 7950, AMD has set the bar exceedingly high for 28nm graphics technology and performance,” said Matt Skynner, corporate vice president and general manager, GPU Division, AMD. 

“From the wraparound immersion made possible by AMD Eyefinity multi-display technology and the AMD HD3D technology stereo 3D experience, to the incredible realism of today's DirectX 11 capable games, we're delivering an unrivaled experience for gamers. The AMD Radeon HD 7900 series products are in a class of their own.”

Naturally, with this release out of the way, AMD's various partners are revealing their own models, both custom-designed and not. Stay tuned for more.

The official price is $450, but Newegg listings start at $459. The European price should be around 420 Euro.

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Intel Core i7-3960X & i7-3930K C2 Revision CPUs Listed in Japan

Intel has finally started shipping the C2 revision of the Core i7-3960X and Core i7-3930K processors based on the Sandy Bridge-E architecture.

The first country to get them is not so surprisingly Japan, where Akiba-PC has spotted them in the wild listed for Yen 83970 (US $1095) and Yen 48980 (US $639).

For those of you who aren’t up to speed with Intel’s LGA 2011 CPUs, the chips based on this new revision feature the same specs as their predecessors, but Intel has now fixed the VT-d errata present in the C1 stepping, which is definitely good news for its workstation clients.

If you want to go for one of these two C2 processors, you should know that these can be identified using their S-Spec code, which should read either SR0KF or SR0KY.

Sadly, we don’t know when the C2 stepping Sandy Bridge-E parts will arrive in the rest of the world, but make sure to keep an eye out for those S-Spec numbers, if VT-d is important to you.

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Asus Details Workaround for Transformer Prime Android 4.0 Lockup Issues

Asus has recently published a workaround fix for those users who have been experiencing random lockups on their Transformer Prime tablets after upgrading the slate to Android 4.0, aka Ice Cream Sandwich.

This is just one of a series of two solutions to this problem that the company is working on, the second one being expected to arrive in early February.

The workaround was detailed in a post on the XDA Developers forums by Asus US Technical Marketing Manager Gary Key, who wrote:

"One option to try is to revert back to the last Honeycomb image through the manual update process, set the unit power mode to balanced performance and screen brightness manually to 50%, and then manually update to the latest ICS build using these instructions – http://service.asus.com/TF201_fwupdate."

"You will need a fully charged battery and have the system plugged into AC power. This worked on a couple of returned units but not on all units."

In addition to these Android 4.0 random freezes, Asus is also working on a fix for the BT/WiFi fallout issue experienced by some Prime owners, which is also expected to arrive in early February.

Despite the good progress that Asus is apparently making with these two problems, those of you who have been trying to update their Prime to Android 4.0 and have encountered the “serial number not found” issue, seem to be out of luck since Asus still hasn’t found what is causing it.

An experimental fix is available, but this isn’t guaranteed to work. If you find yourself in this situation, Asus recommendation is to contact consumer support.

Made official in mid-November, the Transformer Prime is the first quad-core tablet to arrive to market, but despite this feat, the device has been plagued by a series of issues ranging from availability to software problems.

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Samsung May Launch 11.6-Inch 2560x1600 Tablet at MWC 2012

At this year’s Mobile World Congress (MWC) fair, Samsung is said to unveil a new tablet design that supposedly features an 11.6-inch screen and will run Google’s Android 4.0, aka Ice Cream Sandwich, operating system.

The existence of the tablet was mentioned for the first time in December last year, when BGR claimed the Korean giant planned to unveil the device during MWC 2012.

Now, a new report published by Android and Me comes to support these initial rumors by also claiming that the tablet will be released in Barcelona, Spain, at the Mobile World Congress.

The most striking feature of this new tablet will be its 11.6-inch display that Samsung has paired together with a high-resolution panel pushing out a stunning 2560x1600 pixels.

Despite the 11.6-inch display used, previous reports suggested that Samsung’s upcoming tablet would be barely larger than the current Galaxy Tab 10.1, since it used a much thinner bezel. 

Together with this new and impressive screen, Samsung will also install a 2.0GHz Exynos 5250 system-on-a-chip (SoC) device in its upcoming creation. 

Sporting dual ARM Cortex-A15 cores and a powerful Mali-T604 GPU, the Exynos 5250 is expected to become one of the fastest ARM-based chips around and is scheduled to enter mass production in the second quarter of this year.

Besides this powerful SoC, Samsung’s tablet will also feature Android Beam technology, for syncing media with the Galaxy Nexus and other NFC Android devices, as well as a special wireless docking mode for gaming on HDTVs, effectively turning it into a gaming console.

On the software side, the tablet will arrive with Android 4.0, aka Ice Cream Sandwich, which should become the standard for high-end tablets in 2012.

Other details are not available at this point in time, but we’ll keep you up to date with how things evolve once MWC 2012 opens its gates.

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This iWatch Concept Takes the Air out of the Room

ADR Studio is proud to unveil its latest iWatch concept - a companion to the Steve Jobs-inspired iPhone SJ, also created by the studio’s designers.

The amazing iWatch2 not only looks stunningly beautiful, but also boasts some incredible specs.

The designers envisioned it would have WiFi and Bluetooth, an integrated RSS reader, 32GB of storage (God knows for what), a weather forecast system, the possibility to connect to iPhone / iPad, an LCD projector, and a frontal camera (now that would be cool!).

According to its creators, “iWatch2 is like a jewel, in its black slide-to-open-box, with a new slim design like its brother iPhone SJ.”

The surreal accessory features a polycarbonate main body with an aluminum chassis, a PK2 Kevlar insert, and the bracelet would come in 5 colors with a polycarbonate insert. For those of you thinking there’s even a remote possibility the iWatch2 could come to light, keep dreaming.

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Windows Phone 8 Will Support Windows Phone 7 Apps

Applications built for the Windows Phone 7 operating system will work on the next generation mobile platform from Microsoft, Windows Phone 8. 

The company had announced before that it planned on making all apps built for Windows Phone compatible with future versions of the OS, and it has reiterated it. 

Windows Phone 8 is said to have been built on the Windows 8 kernel, which arose questions regarding the platform’s compatibility with software built for the current version of the mobile OS. 

However, Brandon Watson, director for Windows Phone 7, put these rumors to rest with a recent tweet, in which he reinforced Microsoft’s previous announcement on the matter. 

“We were pretty clear on this. Any app built today will run on next major Windows Phone version,” he stated. 

There are over 60,000 applications available in the Windows Phone Marketplace at the moment, and they will be available on the upcoming platform as well.

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AMD Radeon HD 7970 Graphics Card Now Available from AVADirect

With AMD’s Radeon HD 7970 now available in retail, system builders have started integrating this monster of a graphics card in their systems and one of the latest companies to do so is AVADirect, who has added AMD’s latest creation as an option for its gaming desktops.

Officially introduced in the second part of December 2011, AMD’s Radeon HD 7970 is based on the company’s Graphics Core Next architecture and is the first graphics card to be manufactured using the 28nm production process.

At its heart, the card packs 32 Compute Units for a total of 2048 stream cores that are joined by 128 texture units, 32 ROP units and a 384-bit wide memory bus.

This connects the GPU to 3GB of GDDR5 video buffer, which runs at 1.375GHz (5.5GHz effective), while the graphics core’s operating frequency is set at 925MHz.

In AVADirect’s desktops, the powerful AMD graphics card can be paired with Intel LGA 1155 or LGA 2011 processors, as well as with AMD’s own FX-Series CPUs, which can be either air- or water-cooled.

Furthermore, users can also choose to customize the system with up to 32GB of system memory, high-end power supplies, as well as with a second or third Radeon HD 7970 for CrossFireX operation (available only in select systems). 

Besides offering the Radeon HD 7970 as an upgrade in its custom desktops, AVADirect also sells AMD’s graphics card as a standalone product.

Three models are available right now, from Asus, Sapphire and XFX, with prices ranging from $651.92 to $691.76 (493 to 523 EUR).

AVADirect will continue to add new HD 7970 graphics cards, from various manufacturers, as they become available.

Since December last year, the Radeon HD 7970's have been quite scarce, but according to AMD we will now begin to see more cards make their way into retail in the coming weeks.

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BlackBerry DevCon Europe 2012 Kicks Off Next Week

Next week RIM will hold a new developers conference as part of its DevCon series, namely BlackBerry DevCon Europe 2012. The event is planned to take off on February 7 in Amsterdam and will run for two days. 

The company saw great interest in the event, and announced that BlackBerry DevCon Europe had sold out. 

At the event, developers will be able to learn some more info on what the building of applications for the BlackBerry operating system is all about. 

There will be hundreds of people present at the event, and they will have the chance to collaborate with platform experts from Europe and from other parts of the world. 

There will be various breakout and hands-on lab sessions aimed at focusing on various aspects of the BlackBerry development platform. 

Content categories that will get a spotlight at the event include: 

• Java Development for BlackBerry 7 OS
• WebKit and the BlackBerry WebWorks Platform Development
• BlackBerry PlayBook OS Development, including BlackBerry Native SDK for Tablet OS, Adobe AIR and Adobe Flash, and Android Player
• BlackBerry Application Platform Services and the BBM Social Platform
• Getting ready for the BlackBerry 10 Platform
• Tips and tools to help debug and optimize your apps
• User interface and user experience tools and best practices
• Developing quality enterprise applications
• Marketing and distributing your applications

Canadian mobile phone maker Research In Motion also notes that attendees at BlackBerry DevCon Europe get the opportunity to take advantage of App Express, for fast tracking their apps through porting existing Android software to the BlackBerry PlayBook tablet. 

Moreover, they will also have the possibility to transform existing web applications into full-fledged software for either the BlackBerry PlayBook tablet or the BlackBerry smartphones (OS 5.0 and up), or for both of them. 

Moreover, there will be BlackBerry platform experts present at the event, so that developers could pose questions on various issues they might have met. 

Those who will not attend the conference will be able to stay up to date with it, via the special website that RIM dedicated to the BlackBerry DevCon event in Europe.

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SanDisk Speaks of 19nm Technology, Bets Much on It

Though CPUs are still at the 32nm node, NAND Flash memory is actually further along, something SanDisk intends to make the best of.

SanDisk is one of the better known makers of NAND Flash products, such as memory cards, flash drives and SSDs.

It so happens that the company has begun production of memory based on the 19nm manufacturing process.

Both MLC (multi-level / 2 bits per cell) and TLC (three bits per cell) memory is being made, though the yields were not disclosed.

The company hopes to get more customers in both the consumer and enterprise fields, as the new type of Flash has better performance and lower costs, among other things.

The TLC NAND is going to be used mainly for PC storage, while MLC is good for both PCs and servers / data centers / etc.

"We will be looking at opportunities for 3bpc on the client SSD side. Enterprise SSD, I fully expect that to continue to be on 2bpc, given the high performance, the high reliability requirement of enterprise application," said Sanjay Mehrotra, chief executive officer of SanDisk, during a conversation with financial analysts.

19nm manufacture began back in the fourth quarter of 2011 and will grow in capacity each month during 2012.

“We began production of 19nm technology in Q4, and it will ramp throughout 2012. As we explained previously, NAND scaling is becoming more complex for the industry, resulting in a lower rate of cost reduction from technology transition,” said the CEO.

“The 19nm technology will generate a lower cost reduction rate compared to what we achieved with the 24nm transition.”

It is understandable that SanDisk would try to make the best of this manufacturing technology, even though it surely won't be alone on this node.

Though the mass production has begun recently, the first 19nm NAND Flash memory solution was demonstrated back in April 2011.

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