tequila bomb

An amazing array of magnets, both in the iPad 2 and the Smart Cover, with polarities carefully organised, and each magnet positioned, to ensure that when you snap it on it “Just Works”. Very cool. Very Simple. Pretty much exactly how I assumed it worked. But the amount of R&D and practical experimentation that went into making sure the concept behaved as expected is obvious.

As usual. Excellent work by the guys at iFixit.

Apple 1GHz A5 dual-core Processor with a 200MHz bus and 512 MB of RAM.

The A5 processor has manufacture dates of late January and mid-February 2011. Production was clearly ramping up through the last minute. It looks like the A5 processor is the APL0498, replacing the A4/APL0398 seen in the iPad 1 and iPhones.

Of course what we really want now is the Apple A5 ripped apart in one of their friend’s labs.

Apple blew away the tablet competition yesterday. And suprised me with their update to the iPad 2.

I was expecting the new GPU, and all the other bells and whistles, but not a fully blown Apple A5.

This is the only major iPad update we will see this year. And it rocks!

News.me is a social news reading app that presents the news that the people you follow on Twitter are reading, and filters it based on how many times those stories are shared and clicked on overall. It pulls in data from not only Twitter but also bit.ly, the betaworks company that shortens billions of shared links every month. In contrast, The Daily will produce its own articles and videos with a staff of 100 journalists. It is not clear how many social features will be included in The Daily, but the emphasis seems to be more on the original content. We’ll find out more tomorrow…

From TechCrunch.

My money is on News.me.

ITG Investment Research tracked point-of-sale data from nearly 6,000 wireless stores in the U.S. from the Galaxy Tab’s November debut through Jan. 15 and found the device to have an unusually high return rate. According to its estimates, cumulative return rates for the Galaxy Tab through December of 2010 were about 13 percent. Worse, that percentage is growing as holiday purchases are returned. ITG figures cumulative Galaxy Tab return rates through January 15 were 16 percent. Ugly, considering the return rate for the iPad at Verizon since its debut on the carrier is just 2 percent.

Not good. Google need to get a decent tablet OS out. They are letting Samsung down.

And perhaps the size of the Tab is simply wrong for a tablet. In which case a lot of other tablet hopefuls are in trouble too…

A more practical approach [to increasing the iPad's screen resolution] would simply be doubling the resolution of the current iPad (1024×768) to 2048×1536 at a 260 DPI. While not quite a “Retina” display, it would follow with Apple’s efforts to avoid fragmenting their product line. From a developer’s perspective, the doubling of an existing resolution is much easier to support. Apple similarly doubled the iPhone’s resolution from 480×320 to 960×640 when they introduced the iPhone 4.

Most people hold the iPad further from their face than they do the iPhone, so 260 DPI would appear very close to the quality of the Retina display on the iPhone 4, in real world usage.

[S]ome findings by @StroughtonSmith by way of @Xuzz on Twitter, [seem to show that] Apple is going to take this pixel-doubled approach again for the iPad 2. These icons were also previously found in August.

This was always to be expected.

Based on this information, and persistent rumors of a higher resolution iPad 2, we believe the next iPad will have a 2048×1536 screen resolution. It would also explain why Apple would have to upgrade the GPU on the new devices to drive this higher resolution.

It certainly seems that the stars are aligning for an April iPad 2 launch, rather than late January / early February as I expected. And if Apple is seriously going to quadruple the amount of pixels that the device has to push it seems that we’ll see the PowerVR SGX543 in this new device, which also suggests that it will be based on a dual core ARM SoC which will be bundled as the Apple A5.

The SGX543 is an incredibly capable GPU for a mobile device, even incorporating Open CL capabilities, as well as enabling the use of “higher performance POWERVR SGX cores and multi-processor support”. How much of this Apple will give us remains to be seen.

[H]ints included in the new iOS 4.3 beta seeded to developers earlier this week indicate that Apple may be preparing to move to Imagination Technologies’ next-generation GPU architecture with the SGX543 on future devices.

From MacRumours.

That is kind of like saying the sun will rise tomorrow! Of course Apple are going to move their mobile GPU line up forward with each generation of iOS device. I am just surprised they let this slip out in some beta software if we are not going to see it sooner, rather than later…

Imagination Technologies extends graphics IP core family with POWERVR™ SGX543
POWERVR graphics roadmap continues to outpace competition with debut of POWERVR Series5XT architecture

Las Vegas, 8th January 2008: Imagination Technologies – the leader in semiconductor System on Chip Intellectual Property (SoC IP) – announces POWERVR SGX543, the first graphics processor IP core based on Imagination’s extended POWERVR Series5XT architecture, which enables higher performance POWERVR SGX cores and multi-processor support.

The debut of POWERVR SGX543 takes the POWERVR roadmap to the next level. The SGX family now offers the ultimate scalability, ranging from the world’s smallest OpenGL™ ES 2.0 mobile core through solutions for performance mobile and HDTV, to high-performance gaming and computing solutions, confirming the ultimate scalability of the Series5 POWERVR SGX architecture.

POWERVR SGX543 is the first POWERVR SGX graphics IP core available in both single core and multi-processor solutions. Imagination will release further details of POWERVR SGX543’s multi-processor capabilities at Multicore Expo 2009 in March.

POWERVR SGX543 – the first POWERVR Series5XT architecture IP core
The four pipeline POWERVR SGX543 is the first in a series of new SGX IP cores that utilise the POWERVR Series5XT architecture, which delivers significant enhancements to the Series5 SGX architecture used in previous SGX IP cores.

SGX543’s wide-ranging architectural enhancements include:

USSE2 – extended USSE™ instruction set with comprehensive vector operations and co-issue capability,

Upgraded tile handling to further reduce memory bandwidth and improve performance for setup-bound applications,

Typically 40% faster performance for ‘shader-heavy’ applications,

2x floating point and 2x hidden surface removal performance,

Enhanced triangle setup delivering up to 50% higher throughput,

Improved multi-sampling anti-aliasing performance,

Features for optimised performance when used with POWERVR VXD and VXE video cores,

Advanced colour space handling and gamma correction,

Further optimised OpenVG 1.x support,

Cache and MMU improvements,

The new POWERVR SGX543 delivers real-world performance of 35 million polygons/sec and 1 Gpixels/sec fillrate at 200MHz,* capable of driving HD screens with ultra smooth high definition 3D graphics. Even in a single-core solution POWERVR SGX543’s performance is unprecedented in any GPU, demonstrating Imagination’s pace of innovation and ability to drive the consumer experience in graphics to levels unheard of only a few years ago in anything less than high end specialist platforms.

Tony King-Smith, VP marketing Imagination Technologies says: “With POWERVR SGX543 Imagination continues to extend its leadership and dominance of the embedded graphics acceleration market with a solution capable of delivering blistering 3D, 2D and vector graphics. The Series5XT architecture enables us to continue to extend our dominance in mobile and embedded graphics solutions by addressing the rapidly growing demands for high performance graphics in a wide range of market segments.”

Inside POWERVR SGX543
The POWERVR Series5XT architecture builds on the highly efficient Series5 architecture, which ensures that maximum performance is achieved across a wide range of applications, regardless of whether the content is dominated by polygon throughput, pixel processing, high fill rate or any combination of these. Other architectures that use separate polygon and pixel processing units cannot achieve the sustained throughput or silicon utilisation of POWERVR SGX graphics cores.

USSE2 (Universal Scalable Shader Engine2), the main programmable processing unit within each POWERVR SGX543 pipeline, incorporates a major upgrade of the data path to deliver vastly improved vector processing performance and overall throughput. This datapath upgrade is a key reason why SGX543 delivers on average 40% faster performance for ‘shader-heavy’ applications than earlier POWERVR SGX cores.

USSE2 is a scalable multi-threaded GPU shader processing engine that efficiently processes graphics as well as many other mathematically-intensive tasks. These tasks are automatically broken down into processing packets, which can include parts of shaders, which are then scheduled across a number of hardware multi-threaded execution units for maximum processing efficiency. USSE2 is programmed using the GLSL language that forms part of the OpenGL ES 2.0 API specification from the Khronos Group.

Imagination is also part of the OpenCL Working Group in Khronos defining the new GPGPU processing API, which will enable developers to gain greater access to the full capabilities of USSE2 in a broader range of applications.

From Imagination Technologies.

If I am wrong about the “iPad 2″ being pushed out in the next week or two then this could possibly be the solution to Apple’s fill rate problem on this next model. Most likely this is going to be part of the Apple A5 in the iPhone 5. In any case, when the iPad gets a higher resolution, HD?, screen (either in April or at the end of the year) this will be essential.

The SGX543 also supports OpenCL.

We just got some pretty wild information from one of our Apple sources and while it’s hard to believe at first, it does make sense. We have exclusively been told that the reason Apple just added multitouch gestures for the iPad in the latest iOS 4.3 beta is because the iPad will be losing the home button.

In addition to the home button disappearing from the iPad, we’re told that this change will make its way over to the iPhone as well. Our source said Apple employees are already testing iPads and iPhones with no home buttons on the Apple campus, and it’s possible we will see this new change materialize with the next-generation iPad and iPhone devices set to launch this year.

Remember that I have said I think we’ll see two iPad launches this year.

It has been said that Steve Jobs didn’t want any physical buttons on the original iPhone at first, and it looks like he may soon get his wish.

This is just mad enough to be true. The question is, will Apple run the gauntlet of possible IP conflicts with RIM and their touch sensitive bezels, or will they truly go completely multitouch?

Either way, if this is true, we may perhaps see more screen real estate on iPhones and the iPod Touch, which would be cool.

As it stands, most magazines are charging more for the electronic version than for the print. WIRED, for example, costs $3.99 for every iPad issue, but if you get a subscription to the print version each costs about one dollar.

Other magazines are similarly priced.

The problem with this model is that it’s not “human compatible.” People understand intuitively that a print issue involves the chopping down, trucking and processing of trees, the use of expensive ink and heavy, labor-intensive manufacturing, packaging and distribution.

They also understand that none of these costs are necessary for an electronic edition distributed over the Internet.

Exactly.

It’s the same asinine strategy that record companies, movie moguls and tv execs keep trying to apply to digital downloads. I don’t buy eBooks for the exact same reason. If Amazon want to charge me the price of a physical book for a digital download then I might as well make them send me the damn book! I know that the writer is going to get the same paltry royalty whichever way I go. And I don’t give a damn about Amazon’s profits.

Richard Branson was closer to the right price and overall package with his ‘Virgin Project‘. But you can be sure his Christmas giveaway was not simply because he’s kind hearted.

Murdoch is heading the right way with his $1 ‘Daily’ News Paper idea. But when most newspapers are free with breakfast for travellers when staying in hotels and so forth they’ve still got a difficult market to crack. Perhaps an even cheaper monthly / weekly subscription model might be a better approach. Because ultimately $365 a year for a digital rag is not appealing to me at all – no matter how good it might be.

One thing is for sure. The price needs to be right, and the content needs to be much better than your average online news site, otherwise people will just surf the web in Mobile Safari. That’s what I do.