10-Inch Tablets For $299?

Taiwan’s Micro-Star International unveiled two new Android-based tablets at Computex this week that appear much sleeker than the WindPad tablets it has manufactured in the past.

The WindPad Enjoy 10 and Enjoy 7, which are being shown in a location further away from the show floor, will start shipping to retailers at the end of July, priced at $299 for the 10-inch version and $199 for the 7-inch version, said MSI product manager Rory Chen.

The tablets on show here were running the 2.3 Gingerbread version of Android. MSI hopes to start using the 3.0 Honeycomb Android OS on the tablets later this year, but it’s unlikely to be available with the first devices that go on sale.

The Enjoy 10 isn’t as thin and light as the iPad 2, and a spec sheet shows the new tablets have no 3G option — only Bluetooth and Wi-Fi. It’s also behind the iPad in other areas such as memory and storage. But the Enjoy 10′s $299 price tag makes it considerably cheaper than Apple’s tablet, which starts at $499 for the Wi-Fi-only model.

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Verizon Adds LG’s Revolution

Verizon Wireless announced the Revolution by LG, an LTE-ready smartphone, will become available for sale in stores and online Thursday for $249.99 with a two-year service plan.

The Revolution has a 4.3-in. touch screen and 1 GHz Snapdragon processor. It utilizes the Android 2.2 mobile operating system and comes preloaded with the Netflix application for access to movies and TV shows.

Verizon called the smartphone an “entertainment powerhouse” partly due to the Netflix capability, but the Revolution also runs the Adobe Flash player, provides Dolby Mobile sound and features high-definition video recording and playback.

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Can Intel Tablets Take Business Away From iPads?

Tablets based on Intel’s first dedicated tablet processor may not be a smash hit among consumers like Apple’s iPad, but they could find much better acceptance within enterprises, analysts said this week.

Apple’s iPad is the ‘Golden Child’, but Intel’s Oak Trail processor could bring a fresh crop of tablets that are more closely aligned to security, software and hardware needs of businesses, analysts said. By supporting the Windows 7 OS, Oak Trail tablets will integrate better than the iPad into IT environments relying on Windows.

Tablets with Intel’s 1.5GHz Atom Z670 processor from Fujitsu and Motion Computing went on sale this month and will start shipping in June. Fujitsu is taking orders for the Stylistic Q550 Slate PC tablet, which is priced starting at US$729. Motion Computing is taking orders for the CL900 Tablet PC, which is priced starting at $899. The business tablets come with Microsoft’s Windows 7 OS and include solid-state drive storage. Intel has said 35 devices based on the Oak Trail chip will become available starting in May.

Apple may be spurring consumer tablet innovation, but computing needs are very different in the corporate world, said Stephen Baker, vice president of industry analysis at NPD. Outside the Apple ecosystem, there is a whole world of corporate applications and computing needs driven by Windows, Baker said.

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‘Do Not Track’ Internet Legislation, Advances

California is a moving closer to making  into law the first Do Not Track legislation in the U.S., aimed at protecting Internet users from invasive advertising.

The proposed Senate bill, SB-761, passed a Senate Judiciary Committee vote late Tuesday, but it still has a long road ahead before having a chance of being signed into law. It now moves on to the Appropriations Committee, and must also pass the Senate and State Assembly before being sent to Governor Jerry Brown’s desk.

Still, it’s the first time such a bill has made it out of committee, and that’s a big deal, according to John Simpson, director of Consumer Watchdog’s Privacy Project. “This is the first time that a ‘do not track’ bill has actually had a hearing and been debated and then voted forward in the legislative process,” he said.

The bill would give California consumers a simple way of opting out of data collection systems that keep track of their online activities. “It puts up a no trespassing sign on our device,” Simpson said.

Opponents of the bill, including Google, the Direct Marketing Association, and the wireless industry group CTIA, say it puts an unnecessary burden on online commerce.

Online marketers love this type of data because it helps them fashion highly effective targeted advertising. But many consumers don’t want to hand marketers every detail of what they do on the Web.

Under the proposed law, users would have a way — possibly a through a browser setting — of telling Web sites not to track them. If a company disregarded this and collected data without permission, it could face stiff fines.

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Seagate To Acquire Samsung’s HD Unit

Seagate Technology is to acquire Samsung Electronics  loss-plagued hard disk drive (HDD) business for $1.4 billion as it looks to battle rival Western Digital Corp and curb price wars that continue to damage the industry.

The deal comes a month after Western Digital sought to buy Hitachi Ltd’s hard disk drive division for $4.3 billion, to create a global leader with deep resources.

It is yet to be seen whether Western Digital trump Seagate as the world’s largest hard drive maker after the deals conclude. In 2010, Seagate’s sales was $11.4 billion while Western Digital posted revenue of $9.85 billion.

Toshiba Corp and Fujitsu are the other smaller players in the hard-drive space.

The sale of the HDD business will see Samsung leave the cut-rate industry and focus on its bread-and-butter memory-chip business.

The sector is already battling persistent sales-growth declines and now faces a longer-term threat from wireless tablet devices using more power-efficient flash drives, or solid-state drives (SSD).

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Hackers Breach WordPress Servers

Hackers have gained access to several servers that support WordPress and may have obtained source code, according to the founding developer of Automattic, the company behind the popular blogging platform.
Matt Mullenweg wrote on the WordPress blog that Automattic has been reviewing log records to determine how much information was breached and re-evaluating “avenues to gain access.”

“We presume our source code was exposed and copied,” Mullenweg wrote. “While much of our code is open source, there are sensitive bits of our and our partners’ code. Beyond that, however, it appears information disclosed was limited.”

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Benefits of Cloud Computing

In a nutshell Cloud Computing is the process of having on-demand hosted computing services provided outside your own network environment through a vendor’s Public or Private Data Center. Cloud Computing can be broken into three distinct categories. They are SaaS (Software as a Service), IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service), and PaaS (Platform as a Service).

Even though the concepts of Cloud Computing have been around for years, it still remains in its infancy. However, its adoption rate has been rather explosive lately, due in part to its seamlessness and ease of information integration.Cloud Computing has many benefits for medium and small businesses by way of collaboration and Productivity. For instance users will have the ability to work on the same projects in real-time from any location whether it’s the office, at home or an overseas location, at any time. The office never closes.

Another reason Cloud Computing has become so enticing is businesses can cut expenses on hardware and IT staffing to support the very same services as if they were on-site (Break/Fix issues are resolved by the vendor and the customer is never aware since services are redundant). Security is also enhanced because leading vendors adhere to higher levels of security features that are cost prohibitive to most medium and small businesses. In these days of high profile data breaches added security is must have.

Businesses should also consider their IT teams will not have a steep learning curve adapting to Cloud based services, since most user environment applications are similar in design to those they are accustomed to using today. Another added convenience is that Cloud Computing rids businesses of the old and costly software licensing requirement for every application/user. Cloud Computing allows the business to buy services on a time/usage metric.

If your business is looking to stay agile and save money, Cloud Computing may be the right direction to move.

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