AllThingsD » memory

Fusion-io Brings Flash Madness to Workstations and Movies Like "Hugo"

Arik Hesseldahl — Thu, 12 Apr 2012 14:35:02 +0000

After working mostly in the realm of servers, Fusion-io — the founding member of the AllThingsD Flash Madness Club and last summer’s hot IPO — said today that it is bringing its flash technology to workstations. It is calling the product ioFX.

One early customer is Rob Legato, the visual effects supervisor who won an Academy Award for his work on the Martin Scorsese-directed hit motion picture “Hugo.” Legato will be talking about ioFX with Fusion-io chief scientist and Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak at a conference in Las Vegas next week.

Fusion does some cool stuff with flash memory. Here’s the part where I roll out the old metaphor that has served me so well: In pretty much any computer, you can think of the processor as a fast-moving, highly efficient, type-A personality, constantly in a hurry, and always waiting impatiently for the rest of the system to give it more work to do. The slowpoke in the deal is the hard drive, which, though it’s already spinning at a super fast rate, just can’t get data to the processor fast enough. So the processor sits around, tapping its foot and looking at its watch, waiting for the other parts of the system that feed it data to work to keep up.

In high-performance computing, where there’s more data to be crunched than in most average computing situations, this is sort of a big deal. You want the processor to be as busy as possible — mainly because the systems are so expensive, and you want to get your money’s worth out of them — but also because jobs get done faster.

So Fusion-io’s stock in trade is a series of insert cards that bring flash memory right up next to the processor. The flash chips grab great big armloads of data and hold on to it, handing it off to the processor in a way that keeps it happy and busy and not impatiently waiting — at least not so much.

We’ve seen the technology brought to bear at places like Credit Suisse, which added Fusion’s flash cards to its trading systems. And its technology is also used in data centers belonging to Facebook and Apple.

On top of that, Fusion has relationships with all the big server vendors: Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Dell and SuperMicro all sell systems with Fusion-io on board.

Workstations are essentially heavily tricked-out PCs that are used primarily in two professions: Animation and special-effects work for movies and TV and computer-assisted design and modeling, used by folks who design buildings and cars and planes and pretty much anything else you can think of. They have the same problem that servers have — agitated processors constantly waiting for the rest of the system to catch up with them.

At this point, none of the workstation vendors are offering the card as an option, but if you’ve got a professional workstation — like, say, an Apple Mac Pro, which has three PCI Express slots — you might add one of these cards and speed up your work. In the meantime, the company is working with workstation vendors to get the ioFX insert cards certified. My guess is there will be more than a few visual artists who won’t bother to wait.

Fusion-io shares are up almost 11 percent — or $2.64 — to $27.30, as of 11 am ET; not so much on this news — workstations are kind of a low-volume market — but on an analyst report from Piper Jaffray suggesting that Cisco Systems may be close to a deal to add Fusion-io’s flash technology to its Unified Computing System platform.

The report goes on to suggest that Cisco could, over the next three or four quarters, become one of Fusion’s bigger customers, along with Facebook and Apple, and could account for more than 10 percent of Fusion’s business — which could, in turn, lead to a doubling of revenue this year. For the record, sales were $197.2 million in Fusion’s fiscal 2011. Do the math.

HP Envy Spectre 14: A Premium Ultrabook, at a Premium Price

Lauren Goode — Mon, 02 Apr 2012 13:00:04 +0000

Over the past six months in the personal computing world, there has been much ado about Ultrabooks — thin, lightweight laptops with Intel-determined technical specifications that compete with Apple’s MacBook Air. Windows PC makers like Dell, Lenovo, Asus and Acer have all introduced Ultrabooks, and Hewlett-Packard, the world’s largest computer maker, has gotten into the game as well.

This week, I’ve been testing the HP Envy Spectre 14, a glass-covered laptop that falls into the Ultrabook category. The Envy Spectre hit the market in February, and the base model currently retails for $1,400.

I liked the Envy Spectre. It’s eye-catching, lighter than the laptop I usually carry, and zippy in terms of its processing power. But compared to other Ultrabooks, it’s heavier and more expensive. It’s really more of a premium product, rather than an ultra-light laptop. Also, there were a couple elements of its design, such as the fact that it wasn’t tapered and the lid was hard to open, that might prevent it from being my main laptop squeeze.

[ See post to watch video ]

The Envy Spectre 14 is 20 millimeters thick — just over 0.79 inches — and has a 13.3-inch-wide body with a 14-inch-diagonal LED-backlit display. It weighs just shy of four pounds. In comparison, the Dell XPS 13, which AllThingsD’s Walt Mossberg recently reviewed, is, at its largest point, 0.71 inches thick and just under three pounds. The 13-inch MacBook Air, which at its largest point is 0.68 inches thick, also weighs in at 2.96 pounds.

Despite its thickness, the HP Envy Spectre 14 is an attractive laptop. Its aluminum body is covered with Gorilla Glass, the thin, chemically-strengthened glass that makes up the displays of many smartphones and tablets. The glass is layered over three areas of the laptop: The lid, the 1600 by 900 pixel display screen and the palm rest. The trackpad is coated with chemically etched glass, which gives it slightly more traction than the cool-to-the-touch, super glossy Gorilla Glass.

The glass is scratch-resistant — I threw my keys into my laptop bag a few times, and the laptop wasn’t scratched — but it’s definitely not smudge-resistant. As with my smartphone and iPad, it was only a matter of time before the Spectre was covered with cloudy fingerprints. Fortunately, HP has included a protective case with the laptop.

The Spectre comes with a 128 gigabyte solid-state drive, 4GB of memory, runs Windows 7 and is powered by an Intel Core i5 processor, with the option to upgrade to a faster i7 processor for an extra $200. For an additional $300, you can also get a 256GB solid-state drive.

When I fired up the Envy Spectre for the first time, I noticed how quickly it booted up and how fast it was compared to my regular laptop, a fully loaded MacBook Pro. I downloaded iTunes, purchased a new album, installed a new Web browser and ran multiple Web pages at once, including a video-streaming site; even with all that going on, the Envy Spectre didn’t seem to slow down at all.

HP claims 9.5 hours of battery life with the Envy Spectre, provided that the user has the laptop set to HP’s recommended power-saving settings. In my test of the Spectre, which involved turning off power savers and setting the display to full brightness, connecting to Wi-Fi, playing an iTunes playlist nonstop and running an email application, the battery lasted just over five hours. With more normal usage, I estimate you’ll get about an hour more.

After a week with the Envy Spectre, there were a couple of elements of its design that bugged me. The first is that it’s actually difficult to open. There’s a barely-there lip on the lid of the laptop, and every time the device was shut, I had to dig my nails around the edges to pry it open.

I also noticed that the Envy Spectre’s screen doesn’t recline as far back as some other laptop screens do. This laptop has a dropped hinge so the bottom of its display butts up against the keyboard, physically preventing it from going back further. I compared the Spectre to an Asus Ultrabook and even a MacBook Pro, and both laptops opened up wider than the Spectre does. For users who prefer a wide range of motion with their laptop screens, this could be a drawback.

But there were aspects of the hardware that I liked. The LED-backlit keyboard is a nice touch, and the keys had a velvety feel to them. The keys also have proximity sensors that sense when the user has stepped away from the laptop for an extended period, dimming the backlighting and acting as a minor battery-saving mechanism. While some people are used to function keys performing common shortcuts — such as F5 for refreshing a Web page — I liked that the Spectre’s function keys adjusted display brightness and controlled music playing.

There’s an easy-to-access volume-control wheel on the right-hand side of the keyboard. This is part of HP’s Beats product, offered in select computers, which is supposed to produce better-sounding audio. While Beats audio isn’t going to replace the sound system in your home or apartment anytime soon, the music tracks I listened to through the laptop sounded fuller with Beats, especially when heard through headphones.

Unlike the MacBook Air, the Envy Spectre comes with an expandable built-in Ethernet port, along with two USB ports, an HDMI port and a Mini Display port.

There are also some other sweeteners that HP threw in with the Envy Spectre 14, including Adobe Photoshop Elements and Premiere Elements (which photo and video hounds will appreciate), a two-year warranty for the price of one year and a two-year Norton AntiVirus software package.

I would recommend the HP Envy Spectre 14 — but as a premium laptop, not as an Ultrabook. For consumers who want a super slim, lightweight laptop, there are options with similar technical specifications that weigh in at under three pounds and cost less.

Micron Names Durcan CEO; Switz Chairman, After Appleton's Death in Plane Crash

Ina Fried — Sun, 05 Feb 2012 02:15:40 +0000

Memory-chip maker Micron Technology on Saturday named D. Mark Durcan as CEO and Robert E. Switz as chairman, following the death of Steven Appleton, who had long held those positions. Appleton died Friday in a plane crash in Boise. Sales executive Mark W. Adams was named president.

Fusion-io Shares Whacked, but the Flash Madness Club Has a New Member

Arik Hesseldahl — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 00:37:51 +0000

Shares of Fusion-io, the newly public company whose flash memory technology transforms typical servers into super-fast ones that get more work done, are getting hammered in after-hours trading following an earnings report that appears to have freaked investors out.

Shares are down more than $4, or about 13 percent. The freakout appears to be coming from gross margins that shrank to 51 percent from almost 59 percent in the prior quarter, and despite the fact that sales more than doubled sequentially to $84 million from $31 million before.

CEO David Flynn called me up a little while ago to talk about the results, and he reminded me that Fusion launched its new IO Drive 2. It’s a transition to a new product line that’s proving tricky. New products built on new technologies are always a little more costly to build up front, and that’s compounded by the fact that early adopters, when they buy the new stuff, take the lower-end version and not the more expensive and more profitable one.

Also, enterprise customers who buy the new stuff are always conservative and take longer to decide whether they want to buy it or not, he says. Even so, the company has sold 10,000 of the new drives.

But? There’s a new customer of record: Salesforce.com is now a Fusion-io customer, and has joined the likes of Apple and Facebook, which is using the flash-based chips in the servers running in its data centers around the world.

And Salesforce isn’t buying it directly from Fusion, but rather through one its OEM partners, which include Hewlett-Packard, IBM and Dell, though Flynn wouldn’t tell me which one it is.

Salesforce is one of six customers who bought more than a million dollars worth of Fusion’s stuff this quarter and of those, four were repeat customers, Flynn told me.

The Salesforce win is also important, Flynn says, because some have wondered whether Fusion’s technology, while popular with high-end enterprises like banks and Facebook, would make sense for applications that tend to be used in mid-tier businesses, which Salesforce’s mainline CRM application often is. The lower end of the enterprise software market is moving toward cloud-based software, which is often referred to as Software as a Service, or SAAS. “By helping those companies, we are indirectly driving business in the mid-range of the market. Apple and Facebook are in the SAAS business too, it’s just that their customers are consumers.”

One interesting fact that Flynn shared with me: His first job out of college was working for Oracle. His boss at the time? One-time Oracle exec and now Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff. A small world it is, indeed.

The World Is Overflowing With Memory Chips

Arik Hesseldahl — Thu, 05 Jan 2012 23:00:03 +0000

If you haven’t had your fill of gloomy indicators for the state of the tech ecosystem in the new year, here’s another: DRAM chips are oversupplied.

This is, of course, bad news if you’re in the business of making the commodity Dynamic Random Access Memory chips that go into PCs, servers and smartphones. A state of oversupply coupled with weak demand means the chips command lower prices than they otherwise would. The situation can be good, however, if you’re buying computers, because memory upgrades get cheaper.

The problem, as related by the research firm IHS iSuppli, is a rise in inventories of chips that its analyst Mike Howard describes as “alarming.”

ISuppli measures how much unsold inventory the chipmakers themselves have in their warehouses — which include Micron Technology in the U.S., Elpida in Japan, and the South Korean pair of Samsung and Hynix. The higher the number is, the more intense the downward price pressure becomes.

The stockpile of DRAM chips as of the end of the third quarter of 2011 stood at 12.8 weeks, which is nearly a third higher than it had been three months earlier and double what it was in early 2010. It’s also a lot higher than the typical average of 9.2 weeks.

There are a lot of factors creating the glut. Tablets like the iPad and Kindle Fire are eating into notebook sales, and don’t require nearly as much DRAM as notebooks do. And new operating systems don’t require the incremental boost in onboard memory as had been typical.

Nor is the economic uncertainty caused by the sovereign debt crisis in Europe helping. Flooding in Thailand has also disrupted the supply of hard drives which has in turn affected the overall demand for PCs and servers. Computer makers who can’t get hard drives simply won’t build as many computers, and thus won’t be buying the DRAM they otherwise would be.

Something similar happened in 2008 when the global recession sapped computer demand and caused a pileup of DRAM chips that lasted nine quarters. This cycle could turn out to be worse, iSuppli says.

Overall, iSuppli reckons the market for DRAM chips was worth about $6 billion in the fourth quarter of 2011, down by 11 percent from the prior quarter, and it’s only heading further south. The worst, Howard says, is apparently yet to come.

If the economy turns upward, or even is perceived to be on the mend, the glut can work its way down pretty quickly. In 2009 the stockpile dropped by more than half over three quarters.

And if it seems obvious that these chip companies should just stop making DRAM and let demand catch up with supply, it’s actually not that easy. Chip factories, or fabs, contain billions of dollars worth of manufacturing equipment running processes that are difficult to stop and start. Also, it’s more expensive to have them sitting there doing nothing but depreciating than turning out a product that brings in revenue, even if it’s running at break-even or a slight loss.

A Guide for PC Buyers Not Looking for a Tablet

Walter S. Mossberg — Thu, 10 Nov 2011 02:02:27 +0000

If you’re shopping for a laptop this autumn, you’ll find most of the capabilities and prices in the sluggish market unchanged. You’ll still likely be considering whether it’s time to get a tablet instead of a new laptop.

[ See post to watch video ]

But if you’re focused on a Windows machine, and you look carefully, you’ll see that a new class of portable PC is beginning to appear. It’s called the “ultrabook,” and is essentially the Windows version of Apple’s popular, nearly four-year old MacBook Air—an ultraskinny, light, speedy, versatile laptop with long battery life.

The arrival of the ultrabook is a welcome development, not only because it spices up the market, but because I consider the MacBook Air the best all-around consumer laptop available, and anything that emulates it is a good idea, if done well.

There are only a few ultrabooks available this season and they aren’t for everybody. Most have limited storage and, like the MacBook Air, are priced near the $1,000 range—rich territory in a tight economy where Apple buyers seem comfortable, though not many others. Still, this new class of Windows laptop is the only fundamentally fresh choice in the laptop market.

If the price is too high, you should be able to get a capable major-brand laptop for between $500 and $800, with plenty of storage and memory.

My annual fall laptop buyers’ guide today offers tips for wading through the technobabble in computer ads, and in online and physical stores. As always, these tips are for average consumers doing common tasks, such as email, Web browsing, social networking, general office productivity, photos, music, videos and simple games. This guide isn’t meant for corporate buyers, or for hard-core gamers or serious media producers.

The recently unveiled Asus Zenbook

The tablet question: Tablets like Apple’s iPad 2 and Samsung’s Galaxy Tab 10.1 can perform many, though not all, of the functions of a laptop. Most tablet lovers find themselves reaching for their laptops less often to do things like email. If your budget is limited and you’re thinking of shelling out $500 for a full-size tablet, consider whether you can put off getting a new laptop this year instead of buying both.

Future Windows: If you’re shopping for a Windows laptop, be aware that in 2012, Microsoft will offer a new version of Windows, called Windows 8, with a radical new multitouch interface that makes use of a touch screen. The software giant stresses that Windows 8 won’t require such a screen, and will still work with a mouse or touch pad. But unless you have a laptop with a multi-touch screen, you won’t be able to take advantage of the Windows 8 touch-screen features.

Ultrabooks: Four companies make this class of laptop: Acer, Lenovo, Asus and, shortly, Toshiba. These machines are under 0.8 inch thick, weigh less than three pounds, and generally claim long battery life and almost-instant startup times. All run Windows 7; none has a touch screen. Like the MacBook Air, they use solid-state drives (though some combine these with standard hard disks) and have screens of either 11 inches or 13 inches. Prices generally run from around $900 to $1,100.

Windows vs. Mac: Mac laptops cost more and offer less variety than Windows laptops. The least expensive Mac laptop is $999, while a few stripped-down Windows portables can be had for under $300. Well-equipped Windows laptops start at $500 to $600. But Apple laptops combine beauty, ruggedness and long battery life with good customer service. Macs also come with better built-in software, including the new Lion operating system, which includes some tablet-like features. And they can run Windows, at extra cost.

Finally, Mac users don’t fear viruses and other malicious software, because virtually none work on the Mac.

Memory: Get at least 4 gigabytes of memory, or RAM, on a new Windows computer. On a Mac, most consumers can get away with 2 gigabytes.

Processors: Intel’s latest chips are the i3, i5, and i7 Core models. But a laptop with chips from rival AMD, or older Intel dual-core chips, also is OK.

Graphics: Usually less expensive machines have wimpier graphics hardware, and costlier ones have more powerful graphics. Better graphics can make your whole machine faster, because more and more software is designed to offload general processing tasks onto the graphics chips.

Hard disks: A 320-gigabyte hard disk should be the minimum on most PCs. Solid-state disks, like those in the new ultrabooks or the MacBook Air, generally come in sizes of 128 GB or 256 GB. They omit moving parts and use flash memory to store your files, as on a smartphone or tablet. They are costlier, but faster, and use less power.

Ports: Many PCs now come with a port called HDMI, which makes linking to a high-definition TV easy. There is a new, much faster USB port, called USB 3.0, but few peripheral devices can use it. And Apple has introduced yet another high-speed connector that has little practical use so far, called Thunderbolt.

As always, be wary of sales pitches and don’t buy more laptop than you need.

Email Walt at mossberg@wsj.com.

Apple's iPhone 4S Cracked Open, Money Spills Out

Arik Hesseldahl — Wed, 19 Oct 2011 20:57:35 +0000

From the outside, Apple’s iPhone 4S looks an awful lot like its predecessor, the iPhone 4. Apple fans and investors were initially so disappointed when the phone turned out not to be a more revolutionary iPhone 5, the company’s shares fell on October 4, the day it was announced, by more than $20 before recovering.

Inside, the phone is similar too, but there have been some strategic changes from one generation to the next that have important implications for Apple’s many suppliers. According to a teardown analysis conducted by the research firm IHS iSuppli, chipmaker Intel, which last year acquired the wireless operations of the German chip concern Infineon, has been almost entirely bounced out of the 4S in favor of a set of chips from Qualcomm. The shift to Qualcomm had been rumored as far back as last September.

Before Intel acquired its wireless unit, Infineon had previously supplied Apple with a chip known as a baseband processor that Apple had used in combination with chips from Skyworks and Triquint to work with wireless phone networks. “Qualcomm is the big winner here,” says Andrew Rassweiler, an analyst with IHS iSuppli who conducted the teardown. “It is selling Apple a whole suite of chips that adds up to about $14 to $15 per iPhone.”

Intel spent $1.4 billion to acquire Infineon’s wireless chip operations last year in a move seen as meant to shore up its presence in the wireless phone industry overall. It has struggled to win business for its Atom line of microprocessors, which are aimed at mobile devices like smartphones and tablets.

Infineon still has a small chip in the iPhone, but Rassweiler says it’s far less significant and a lot less costly than the one it supplied Apple before. “It’s almost like Apple threw them a bone with a 50-cent part after they lost a much more high profile chip that cost about $10,” he says. Intel had no comment.

ISuppli regularly conducts teardown studies of wireless phones and other consumer electronics devices in order to find out who a manufacturer’s vendors are — like most manufacturers, Apple prevents its suppliers from identifying themselves, much as they’d love to — but also to determine what each part costs. The combined cost of components — analysts check on the list prices of each part — is known as a bill-of-materials (BOM) estimate that gives a fair idea how much a manufacturer, in this case Apple, makes in gross margin on each device sold. Apple doesn’t disclose its gross margin on a per-product basis but when it reported its quarterly results yesterday it said its overall gross margin was 40.3 percent.

In the case of the iPhone 4S, Rassweiler estimates that the BOM cost ranges from $188 for the 16 gigabyte version of the iPhone 4S to $207 for the 32GB version and $245 for the 64GB version. Apple and its carrier partners sell the phones for $199, $299 and $399 respectively, typically with a two-year contract for wireless service that carriers use to subsidize the cost they pay Apple.

The costliest components are the ones that determine the price: Memory chips. Apple has been known in the past to rely mostly upon South Korea’s Samsung Electronics, the world’s largest supplier of memory, and from Japan’s Toshiba. In the phone that Rassweiler’s team tore down, the memory chips came from Samsung rival Hynix Semiconductor. “That struck us as a bit of a surprise,” Rassweiler says. It’s hard not to wonder if adding Hynix to the stable of iPhone memory suppliers is a partial response by Apple to the complicated patent fight it is waging with Samsung in courtrooms around the world.

Even so, Samsung appears to be have maintained its role as the manufacturer of the Apple-designed A5 processor that provides the iPhone 4S, and also the iPad 2, with most of its computing horsepower. Some published reports in recent months had suggested that because of the patent fight, Apple might end a relationship that dates back to the original iPhone and move its chip manufacturing contract to Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., the huge chip manufacturing foundry. Rassweiler says there’s no sign on the latest A5 chips that that has occurred. “The markings are the same as what we saw in the iPad 2,” he says. The estimated cost for the A5 chip is $15 each, he says.

Apple started designing its own chips for the iPhone and iPad products beginning in 2010 with the release of the first iPad. The chip is thought to have been designed by teams from PA Semi and Intrinsity, two privately held chip design firms that Apple acquired in 2008 and 2010 respectively.

However, it’s also clear that the A5 chip is taking on more of the heavy computing lifting inside the device than the previous A4 chip, Rassweiler says. For example: The iPhone 4 contains a chip from privately held Audience Semiconductor, based in Mountain View, Calif., that handled noise cancellation. There’s no such chip inside the iPhone 4S, Rassweiler says, so it appears that noise-cancellation duties may have been moved to the beefier A5 chip itself.

Triquint Semiconductor provided a set of chips that make up a wireless transmit module that works with the wireless phone networks. Triquint has traditionally been an iPhone supplier, Rassweiler says, but the value of what it supplies to Apple appears to have dropped. One wireless chip company that has seen the value of what it supplies to Apple increase is Avago Technologies. Like Triquint, it too has been an iPhone supplier, but the overall value of the chips it supplies has gone up in the 4S.

STMicroelectronics, the European chipmaker, maintained its role as the supplier of gyroscope chips that help determine the phone’s position and rotate the screen for playing games and displaying pictures and videos. AKM Semiconductor again supplied the compass chip. Texas Instruments continued in its role supplying the chip that controls the iPhone’s display, and an audio chip.

One vendor could not be identified. Rassweiler says that Apple appears to have taken pains to hide the identity of the company that supplies the parts that power the iPhone 4S’s highly regarded 8 megapixel camera. This is not new, and the candidates include Largan Precision Co., a Taiwanese supplier of camera modules to wireless phone companies, and Omnivision. “We don’t know exactly who makes it,” Rassweiler told me. Whoever the supplier is, Rassweiler estimates the camera added $17.60 to the cost to build the iPhone. And they’re likely to make a lot on the deal. IHS iSuppli is forecasting that Apple will sell 81 million iPhone 4Ss around the world next year.

Update: A few of you have written in saying that it was Sony who supplied the camera. Maybe. The folks at Chipworks dissected the camera module and found a Sony-made CMOS image sensor inside it. That doesn’t make the whole module a Sony’s however. It could be a Sony camera or it could be that whoever made the camera used a Sony sensor. And last week Barron’s reported on some debate among analysts over whether or not Apple has split the camera supply contract 50-50 between Omnivision and Sony.

Who Would Buy Hewlett-Packard's PC Business?

Arik Hesseldahl — Wed, 24 Aug 2011 13:30:45 +0000

Now that Hewlett-Packard is “considering strategic options” for its Personal Systems Group — a.k.a. its PC business — a logical list of potential buyers is starting to take shape.

While for tax reasons it’s probably more likely that HP will spin the unit out as an independent company — there are no taxes when assets are distributed to shareholders — Sterne Agee analyst Shaw Wu, in a note to clients issued this morning, breaks down the possible suitors should HP opt instead for a sale.

Topping the list is Samsung, which you might have guessed already. Samsung would make sense, Wu argues, given its “large size and global ambitions.” Samsung has been trying to build a PC business since 1997, when it acquired AST Research, but hasn’t gotten anywhere. But it is the world’s biggest manufacturer of DRAM memory chips, used in PCs; and the largest supplier of NAND flash memory, which forms the basis of solid-state drives that are increasingly built into notebook PCs. It’s also a big maker of LCD displays and notebook batteries. All that vertical integration, combined with HP’s consumer PC footprint — it’s the biggest supplier to Best Buy — would make Samsung the worldwide player it has always aspired to be.

Don’t ignore the other players, though. Acer, Lenovo, Sony and even Dell could all conceivably show up with a bid, Wu writes. But it will all come down to HP’s asking price, and what parts of the business are included. Wu pegs HP’s PC business as being worth $8 billion, or about $3.66 per HP share. To calculate that valuation, he assumes a premium of five times profit of $1.6 billion on $40 billion in revenue; a five percent operating margin and a 22 percent tax rate.

One potential issue to watch in a possible Samsung bid: Whether the South Korean giant asks HP to include its webOS software. Samsung is also a huge supplier of smartphones around the world, and would probably like to rely less on Google’s Android than it does now — and would want to own its own operating system. Having decided to kill the webOS hardware business, HP has indicated that it has plans to keep the software alive in some form, though enough cash from Samsung might change HP’s mind.

Wu also argues that the market has gotten too negative on the PC business in general. While it’s true that Apple’s iPad has left a historically significant mark on the PC universe, PCs aren’t dead yet — just ask Intel. Give them iPad-like touchscreens and flash drives for instant-on capability, and the market might rebound, he says. “We believe longer-term tablets and PCs are the same market. Ironically, we view Apple’s MacBook Air as the first generation of these future hybrid PCs.”

Update at 9:38 AM PDT / 12:38 PM EDT: Samsung just issued a brief statement saying it’s not interested in HP’s PC business. Such rumors are “not true,” the company says. Well it’s really not a rumor exactly, but speculation really. Somehow I don’t believe it’s the last word on the subject.

(Image, obviously, is from the sheet music of the number “Who Will Buy?” from the musical “Oliver!” Hear it below.)

More Flash Madness: Violin Memory Is Bulking Up Its Team

Arik Hesseldahl — Wed, 03 Aug 2011 10:30:20 +0000

In June I started using the phrase “flash madness” to describe the fundamental shift taking place inside data centers toward the use of flash memory to speed up servers.

That was around that time of the initial public offering of Fusion-io, the Utah-based start-up that speeds up servers and storage networks. Having opened trading at $25.30 a share on June 9, its first day of trading, its share price has held steady since, and it closed Tuesday at $28.35. It will report quarterly earnings for the first time as a public company on Thursday.

The summer is proving equally interesting for Violin Memory, another company with flash memory based technology that is intended to replace the traditional hard drive based storage arrays that allow enterprise applications like those made by Oracle to run fast. Having raised a $40 million Series C funding round from Toshiba and Juniper Networks at an implied valuation of $440 million in June, the company has been bulking up its staff.

Today Violin will announce that it has named Jonathan Goldick — the former CTO of OnStor, now a unit of chipmaker LSI — as its CTO of Software. Goldick has been knocking around the computing industry for about two decades as an expert on file systems and storage, and his resume includes stints at IBM and Microsoft.

So what does it mean to be CTO of Software at a chip company? Goldick’s job will focus on solving problems related to data management that go beyond the speeding-up that Violin’s technology offers. Once hard drives (which, for all the progress they’ve made in five decades, are still essentially platters of glass; even when spinning at the speed of sound, they are subject to errors and inefficiencies that make them still too slow for the fastest computers) are out of the picture, new problems arise.

“The early adopters, they care about speed because they’re in application hell. But once you get past that, the problem becomes one of data management,” Goldick told me. “Once you make anything 100 times faster or cheaper, you have to revisit how you manage data.”

It’s a big enough problem that Goldick was being heavily recruited by other companies working on bringing flash technology to their own hardware. Goldick wouldn’t name the companies directly, but the hints he dropped suggest he turned down offers from both EMC and Oracle.

Goldick is Violin’s second recent hire. Last month it quietly hired Garry Veale, a former vice president at Hewlett-Packard’s StorageWorks division, as its new managing director for the EMEA region.

There’s a reason that Violin is bulking up its team: The opportunity is potentially huge. Remember, if you will, the December day that Oracle CEO declared that its SPARC T3-4 Supercluster had achieved something of a land speed record of more than 30 million transactions per minute. This was the same speech in which Ellison, in one of his numerous bits of trash-talking, likened HP’s competing product to a turtle. It’s often called “the turtle speech.”

That speech got Violin CEO Don Basile all excited. One of the things that made that Oracle machine so fast was that it was packed with a couple hundred terabytes worth of flash memory. As Basile told me last week: “We loved that speech because they proved us right. It was a big validation for what we want to do.” It also means there’s no end in sight to the flash madness.

Russia to Invest in U.S. Memory Chip Firm

Don Clark — Mon, 16 May 2011 20:21:06 +0000

A Silicon Valley chip start-up is teaming up with a Russian government investment fund on a $300 million manufacturing venture, a boost for a novel memory technology and the country’s efforts to become a center of electronics production.

Crocus Technology, a closely held company founded in 2006, is among a number of companies hoping to commercialize chips based on a technology called MRAM, for magnetoresistive random-access memory. The start-up and a state-owned entity known as Rusnano on Tuesday are expected to discuss plans to set up a company to build a factory in Russia that would make advanced versions of the MRAM chips.

The Sunnyvale, Calif., company, which had previously raised about $60 million, said its existing venture-capital investors will put up an additional $55 million as part of the project. Rusnano will provide most of the remaining $245 million.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

Five Held in Huge Chip Theft

Don Clark — Thu, 14 Apr 2011 15:18:29 +0000

Law-enforcement officials said Wednesday that they cracked a massive semiconductor-theft case, which involved an armed robbery at a Silicon Valley company that netted chips valued at $37 million.

Thirteen to 15 masked thieves took part in the Feb. 27 robbery at Unigen Corp., a closely held company known for making devices called memory modules and manufacturing products for other companies.

The chips had been expected to be used in building products for Google Inc., said Mike Sterner, director of a task force of local, state and federal officials that has been investigating the theft.

Five suspects have been arrested and 98% of the stolen chips were recovered, officials said.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

The Nintendo 3DS Appears Pretty Profitable, Judging by the Teardown

Arik Hesseldahl — Mon, 28 Mar 2011 13:30:05 +0000

Nintendo’s latest handheld gaming device has hit the market in Europe and North America and as so often happens, before the weekend was over my in-box contained a detailed teardown report from the team at IHS iSuppli.

As usual, the idea behind the teardown is not only to figure out who Nintendo’s component suppliers are and what parts are being used, but to estimate how much all the components cost to help guess how much of a profit margin Nintendo is making on each unit. And it looks like a decent margin. ISuppli says the cost of all the parts in the device itself plus what’s in the box amount to $103.25 for a device that’s selling at retail for $249. The cost works out to an increase of about $25 over the Nintendo DSi, the most recent Nintendo handheld, released in 2009, which cost about $78, when iSuppli tore it apart that year.

While most of the components come from Japan, it’s not entirely clear if the supply of any of the parts used come from areas affected by the earthquake and tsunami, says Andrew Rassweiler, an iSuppli analyst who supervised the teardown. “Many of these component should have a greater risk exposure to supply chain problems, though we don’t know about any specific disruptions at this point,” he said.

The most expensive component, as is often the case with consumer electronics, is the displays. The 3DS uses two Sharp displays that cost a combined $33.80. The headliner is the top screen 3D. It’s a 3.5-inch 800-by-240 pixel display that uses an LCD-based parallax barrier panel sandwiched to the back of the color LCD which alternates between the left and right images at a high rate of speed to produce the 3D effect. “It looks like a conventional LCD from the outside, but when you open the display you see that on one side of the glass is essentially the conventional color element, and on the other side of the glass is a monochrome element,” Rassweiler told me. “It’s a clever bit of display engineering.”

The handheld’s main chip is an applications processor. It’s a custom ARM-based chip manufactured by Sharp, that at a cost of $10.02 is only slightly more expensive than the chip in the previous Nintendo DSi. However, Nintendo has quadrupled the amount of flash memory in the 3DS versus the DSi to 16 gigabytes, and Samsung, the world’s largest manufacturer of flash, supplied it. Fujitsu supplied another type of memory known as fast-cycle RAM. Rassweiler says for this particular type of memory, Nintendo has used a type of chip that’s only made by Fujitsu, which is odd because FCRAM is widely available, and its unusual for consumer electronics manufacturers to “single source”–that is, rely upon a single supplier for an important component. The combined cost of memory on the 3DS worked out to $8.36, more than twice the cost of the memory found on the DSi.

Three chips related to the user interface cost a combined $6.81: an accelerometer from STMicroelectroncis, a gyroscope from Invensense, and an audio chip from Texas Instruments. Atheros, the Wi-Fi chipmaker that’s being acquired by Qualcomm, supplied a $5 Wi-Fi chip. TI and NEC supplied power management chips that cost $3.63. The 3DS contains three cameras, and though it’s not clear who supplied them–camera suppliers have gone to great lengths to hide their identities in recent years–iSuppli reckons their combined cost at $4.70.

Since I often get asked this question, let me say that iSuppli’s analysis focuses strictly on the materials used and doesn’t account for the cost to develop software or to license any patents. Nor does it account for the cost of any shipping or distribution or marketing. It’s just the raw cost of the hardware.

Motorola's Xoom Starts Tablet Wars With iPad

Walter S. Mossberg — Thu, 24 Feb 2011 02:01:36 +0000

After months of speculation, the tablet wars begin in earnest this week. Motorola is releasing its Xoom tablet on Feb. 24, and I consider it the first truly comparable competitor to Apple’s hit iPad. That is partly because it is the first iPad challenger to run Honeycomb, an elegant new version of Google’s Android operating system designed especially for tablets.

[ See post to watch video ]

Both Motorola’s hardware and Google’s new software are impressive and, after testing it for about a week, I believe the Xoom beats the first-generation iPad in certain respects, though it lags in others. Like the iPad, the Xoom has a roomy 10-inch screen, and it’s about the same thickness and weight as the iPad, albeit narrower and longer. And, like the iPad’s operating system, Honeycomb gives software the ability to make good use of that screen real estate, with apps that are more computer-like than those on a smartphone.

The Xoom has a more potent processor than the current iPad; front and rear cameras versus none for the iPad; better speakers; and higher screen resolution. It also can be upgraded free later this year to support Verizon’s faster 4G cellular data network (though monthly fees may rise.)

Motorola is taking aim at the iPad just as Apple is expected to announce, next week, a second-generation of its tablet. Little is known about this second iPad, but it’s widely expected to take away at least one of the Xoom’s advantages over the original iPad—cameras—and is rumored to be thinner and lighter, since weight was one of the most common complaints about the generally praised first iPad.

The iPad has way more tablet-specific apps—around 60,000 versus a handful—and, in my tests, much better battery life. Plus, whatever the specs say, it’s a fast device with a beautiful screen that delights people daily. But, overall, the Xoom with Honeycomb is a strong alternative to the original iPad, and one that will only improve over time.

The Xoom’s screen is long and narrow, good for widescreen video.

Unfortunately for consumers looking for iPad alternatives, the Xoom has an Achilles’ heel: price. While iPads come in a range of models priced all the way up to $829—none of which requires a cellphone contract—Apple’s entry price for the iPad is just $499. By contrast, the base price of a Xoom without a cellphone contract is $800—60% more. And even with a Verizon two-year contract at $20 to $80 a month—depending on the data limit you choose—the least you can pay for a Xoom is $600, or 20% more before counting the contract costs.

In fairness, the iPad model with the same memory as the Xoom and a 3G cellular modem like the Xoom’s is $729, which is a closer comparison. But it is still less than $800, and consumers still focus on that $499 iPad entry price (for a Wi-Fi-only model.)

As much as I like the Xoom and Honeycomb, I’d advise consumers to wait to see what Apple has up its sleeve next before committing to a higher price for the Motorola product.

Meanwhile, here’s what I found in testing the Xoom.

Hardware

Though it works fine in portrait, or vertical, mode, the Xoom is mainly designed as a landscape, or horizontal, device. The screen is long and narrow, proportioned to best fit widescreen video. The HD screen boasts a resolution of 1280 by 800, versus 1024 by 768 for the iPad.

It felt heavier than the iPad, though the weight of 1.6 pounds is the same as on the cellular version of the Apple product. Overall, it has a solid, high-quality feel. There aren’t any physical buttons except for an on-off switch at the rear and volume controls on an edge. The common Android home, back and other buttons are rendered in the software. The glass on the front is surrounded by a relatively thin black border.

I found it generally comfortable to hold, except when I was reading for long periods in vertical mode, where the long, thin shape and weight made it feel a bit unbalanced.

I performed the same battery test on the Xoom as I have on other tablets. I played video constantly with the connectivity turned on and the screen at almost full brightness until the battery died. Alas, while the Xoom claims up to 10 hours of video playback, I got just 7 hours and 32 minutes. By contrast, on the same test, the iPad, which also claims 10 hours, logged 11.5 hours, or four hours more.

I also tested the Xoom’s front-facing 2-megapixel camera by performing a video chat with a Motorola employee using Google Talk software. The chat broke up or froze several times over Verizon’s network, but we eventually got it to work pretty well on Wi-Fi.

The Xoom’s battery is sealed, and it only comes with 32 gigabytes of memory, versus a range of between 16 and 64 GB for various models of the iPad. However, it has a slot for a memory card that Motorola says will work after a software upgrade to add more memory. There is also a removable back and a SIM card slot that would be used only if you chose to upgrade to 4G in the second quarter of this year.

Software

Perhaps even more impressive than the hardware is the Honeycomb software, which, for now, Google won’t offer on cellphones, only tablets, of which the Xoom is the first.

I’ve always felt that Android had a rough-around-the edges, geeky feel, with too many steps to do things and too much reliance on menus. But Honeycomb eliminates much of that. Actions like composing emails, or changing settings are much more obvious and quicker. The smart but cluttered notification bar has been moved to the lower right and simplified. A tap on it pops up relevant information.

There is still a separate email app for Gmail, as opposed to other email services you may use. But, now, as on the iPad, email is presented in multiple columns and is more attractive and easier to use.

The browser is especially impressive, with PC-like features, such as visible tabs for open pages and the ability to open a private browsing session. Apps like Maps and YouTube have 3-D views. There’s a movie-editing app and live widgets for the home screens that show email previews or video frames.

There are some downsides. The ability to play Flash video—a big Android selling point—won’t work on the Xoom at launch. It will take some weeks to appear. And I found numerous apps in the Android Market that wouldn’t work with the Xoom. I couldn’t locate a working video download or rental service, though Google says these will be available soon.

Some apps for phones, like the popular game Angry Birds, filled the screen beautifully and worked fine.

Bottom line: The Xoom and Honeycomb are a promising pair that should give the iPad its stiffest competition. But price will be an obstacle, and Apple isn’t standing still.

Find all of Walt Mossberg’s columns and videos at the All Things Digital website, walt.allthingsd.com. Email him at mossberg@wsj.com.

Atrix 4G: Faux Laptop With a Phone For Brains

Walter S. Mossberg — Wed, 16 Feb 2011 22:37:55 +0000

Today’s best smartphones are really hand-held computers. They run a vast variety of applications, from productivity programs to games, that mimic what laptops do. Their biggest limitations for serious work, gaming, Web surfing and multimedia are their small screens, cramped keyboards and tinny speakers.

[ See post to watch video ]

So, what if you could use the brains and connectivity of such a hand-held computer to drive a laptop-size screen, keyboard and speakers, thus overcoming these limitations? Well, Motorola Mobility has devised a new phone and accessory that aim to do just that: to make the phone the only computer you need.

I’ve been testing this new phone, the Atrix 4G, an Android device that will cost $200 with a two-year contract and will run on AT&T’s network. It’s slated to be available by March 6. I’ve also been testing its unusual and clever accessory called the laptop dock, which looks like a large netbook, with an 11.6-inch screen, full keyboard, touch pad, and stereo speakers. This dock, the price of which depends on when you buy it, has no processor, no file storage and no connectivity of its own. It’s dormant until you plug the Atrix into a slot behind the screen.

When you dock the phone, the faux laptop comes alive. It duplicates the phone’s screen on its larger display and lets you use its connectivity and apps. It also contains a battery that charges the phone. The image of the phone’s screen, and any of its apps you run, can be actual size or blown up to use the dock’s larger screen.

With Motorola’s Atrix 4G smartphone, the laptop is the accessory. The phone shown docked to the laptop dock.

Full-Screen Firefox

Even more interestingly, the dock gives you access to a full, and full-screen, PC version of the Firefox Web browser. Firefox is tucked away inside the Atrix but is available only when the phone is plugged into the laptop dock or a second, smaller dock that’s meant to connect to a TV or desktop monitor. The smaller dock lacks a built-in keyboard, battery or screen.

The laptop dock costs $500, but AT&T will knock the price down to $300, after rebates, if you buy it at the same time you buy the phone. That brings the combined price of both devices to $500—the same as the separate price for the dock. The smaller dock, called the multimedia dock, costs $190.

In my tests, the Atrix and the laptop dock performed mostly as advertised. The phone had no trouble driving the larger screen or the full Firefox browser.

I was even able to insert a flash drive into one of the dock’s two USB ports and copy songs, photos, videos and documents into the phone’s internal memory using the keyboard and touch pad. I edited and wrote text in an app called Quickoffice on the phone using the laptop dock’s keyboard, and ran various other apps, including the popular game Angry Birds, on the larger screen.

The Firefox browser worked as normal, using either the phone’s cellular or Wi-Fi connections to access the Internet. And both the phone itself and Firefox can run Flash videos, which mostly played fine.

But the combination of the phone and dock wasn’t as fast, smooth or versatile as having a real laptop, even though to use them you’re essentially carrying around a light laptop (the dock weighs 2.4 pounds). Many apps on the phone aren’t as polished or powerful as typical PC apps, and I found them clumsier to use with the keyboard and touch pad, as opposed to the touch screen for which they were designed.

Installation Issue

Also, other than Firefox, you can’t install PC programs. You can use Web apps inside Firefox, such as Google Docs or the stripped-down Web versions of Microsoft’s Office apps. For email, you can either use the program based in the phone or any Web-based program via the Firefox browser, such as Gmail or Yahoo Mail. But you can’t, say, install iTunes, or PC-based games, or the full versions of Outlook or Microsoft Word.

And there is only a primitive file system, limited to the capacity of the phone, which is just 16 gigabytes, with an option to expand to 48 gigabytes.

The dock’s screen required a lot of scrolling when using Firefox, partly because the browser has a lot of menus and toolbars. To address this, Motorola lets you convert Web pages to versions with the Firefox controls stripped out, so you just see the content.

There’s another problem with the laptop dock. When you make or receive a voice call while the phone is docked, you must rely on the phone’s microphone and speakers, hidden behind the screen of the dock. As a result, calls sounded muffled on both ends, even though the phone automatically switches into speakerphone mode. Motorola says it is working on this issue.

Despite the drawbacks, some folks will surely be attracted to this innovative combination.

If you mostly do your computing tasks on a phone or a PC Web browser, storing files in the cloud and using phone or Web-based apps, Motorola has you covered. And the fact that the dock can charge the phone is a big plus.

Motorola’s Atrix 4G

The Phone Side

What about the phone itself?

Well, it’s one of the nicest smartphones I’ve tested. Its processor makes it fast, and it has a 4-inch, high-resolution screen—almost as high as the iPhone 4′s, though not quite as sharp to my eye. It runs an older version of Android, but Motorola is promising an upgrade.

The phone also has good battery life. It lasted a full day while I was testing it and Motorola claims up to nine hours of talk time. Photos and videos I took with the phone were sharp, and it has a front camera for video calls.

The Atrix also has two other notable features. First, it can take advantage of AT&T’s souped-up 3G network, which the carrier calls 4G because it can supposedly achieve 4G data speeds.

In my tests, in the D.C. and New York areas, the speed wasn’t especially impressive, averaging just a bit better than 3G speeds on other AT&T phones I’d tested.

There is also a fingerprint sensor built into the phone, which you can use instead of a pass code to secure the phone. It worked fine for me.

Overall, this is a very nice Android phone that can imitate a limited version of a laptop. That may be enough for some folks, but fall short for others.

Write to Walter S. Mossberg at walt.mossberg@wsj.com

1000Memories Funded by Greylock, Angels

Liz Gannes — Wed, 16 Feb 2011 12:00:49 +0000

1000Memories, the social media site for friends and family to memorialize loved ones who’ve passed away, is disclosing today it has raised $3 million worth of funding, including a Series A round led by Greylock Partners.

The money was actually raised last fall in two rounds after the company completed the Y Combinator program, but for whatever reason it’s been kept under wraps. NetworkEffect took the opportunity to talk with co-founder Rudy Adler about his year-old start-up this week.

“The Internet was missing a past tense,” is Adler’s quip to explain the motivation for 1000Memories. The site offers a central place for mourners to contribute pictures, stories and the like, with the promise of becoming a permanent collaborative obituary and eulogy.

Sites like Facebook don’t have a great way of dealing with people who pass away, because they are designed for living participants, Adler said. Creating accounts for dead people can be awkward, but perhaps less so on a dedicated, nicely designed site.

Future premium products for 1000Memories may include custom domains, physical memory books, personalized designs and additional storage, Adler said. The company currently helps its users do things like rip and post DVDs, in part because they are often much older and less tech savvy than the average social media user.

1000Memories recently launched a groups feature that was used to memorialize those killed in the Egyptian protests. It went viral, with more than 400,000 page views, Adler said.

In addition to Greylock, participants in the $2.5 million Series A round included Caterina Fake, Ron Conway, Keith Rabois, Mike Maples, Paul Buchheit and Chris Sacca. It came through just a couple of months after 1000Memories had raised an angel round worth $500,000.

Former Apple and PopCap Engineer Launches App to Make iPhone Camera Useful

Liz Gannes — Wed, 09 Feb 2011 17:12:23 +0000

A new app called VisualList offers a simple but natural extension of the iPhone’s camera, allowing users to organize and remember things by taking a picture of them.

Many of us already pull out our smartphone to take a quick photo to document a shopping list, the diagrams on a whiteboard or the contents of a moving box. It’s just quicker and more informative than writing things down.

VisualList isn’t some massive feat of engineering; there’s no image recognition or anything like that. And it’s a lot simpler than other personal memory apps out there, like Evernote. What the iPhone app does is organize photos into checklists and let users tag items through the touchscreen, then formats the lists into emails and Facebook albums for sharing.

The app was created by Martin Gannholm, who worked at Apple on projects like the Newton for 10 years ending in 1995, then founded the hosted enterprise software company Allegis, and more recently worked on engineering projects at Microsoft and PopCap. The self-funded two-person company behind the app is called Way2Clever.

Gannholm is charging $2.99 for VisualList and anticipates selling future thematic versions–for instance, a wedding-themed app for users to take pictures of the dresses they try on or the centerpiece arrangements they want to re-create, or what have you.

Three bucks seems a bit much for something users can nearly do without an app, but perhaps not in the context of a big, expensive or ongoing project that’s helped by thinking visually–say, remodeling a home.

Having played around with the app, I’ll say it seems like the kind of thing Apple and other smartphone makers could think about making part of their own camera software.

Update: As of Feb. 10, VisualList’s price has been lowered to $0.99.

Apple Using Cash to Secure Cache of Components

John Paczkowski — Mon, 24 Jan 2011 12:55:56 +0000

Asked last October about Apple’s plans for the nearly $60 billion in cash it had on hand, CEO Steve Jobs suggested the company intended to allocate some to future big-ticket purchases.

“We strongly believe that one or more very strategic opportunities may come along, that we are in a unique position to take advantage of because of our strong cash position,” he said. “You know, we’ve demonstrated a strong track record of being very disciplined with the use of our cash. We don’t let it burn a hole in our pocket, we don’t allow it to motivate us to do stupid acquisitions. And so I think that we’d like to continue to keep our powder dry, because we do feel that there are one or more strategic opportunities in the future. That’s the biggest reason.”

That remark spurred all sorts of speculation about what sensible large-scale acquisitions Apple might make. And while it was certainly reasonable to conclude from Jobs’s remarks that Apple is preparing itself for some big M&A plays in the future, there was another equally plausible conclusion: What if by “strategic opportunities,” Jobs was referring to supply chain investments–money spent to overcome impediments to growth? Apple has done this before, most notably in 2005, when it arranged to purchase up to 40 percent of Samsung Electronics’ holiday NAND flash output for use in it iPods. It inked a similar iPhone-related deal in 2008, forcing Samsung to reduce its supply to other customers to fulfill its obligation to Apple. And there was another half-billion-dollar deal with Toshiba is 2009.

And according to COO Tim Cook, Apple just did it again–but on a much grander scale. During the first-quarter earnings call last week, Cook said the company had invested $3.9 billion to secure component supplies and capacity.

“We’ve historically entered into certain agreements with different people to secure supply and other benefits,” he said. “And the largest one in the recent past has been we signed a deal with several flash suppliers back at the end of 2005 that totaled over $1 billion because we anticipated that flash would become increasingly important across our entire product line and increasingly important to the industry. And so we wanted to secure supply for the company, and we think that, that was an absolutely fantastic use of Apple’s cash. And we constantly look for more of these. And so in the past several quarters we’ve identified another area and come to some recent agreements that [CFO Peter Oppenheimer] talked about in his opening comments, in that these payments consist of prepayments and capital for process equipment and tooling. And similar to the flash agreements, they’re focused in that area we feel is very strategic. And so I’d prefer not to go into more detail about what specific area it’s in, but it’s the same kind of thinking that led us to those deals that led us to the flash deal.”

For what particular components, he wouldn’t say. There are some likely candidates, though: The high-res LCDs used in the iPhone 4 and iPad; solid-state drives like the ones in the new MacBook Air, which are presumably headed to other portions of the MacBook line as well; or perhaps some new system on a chip that will infuse the next-generation iPad and iPhone with significant performance gains. I’m sure there are others as well. And all fit quite nicely into Jobs’s vision of “strategic opportunities.”

Accel's Ping Li Compares the Cloud to the Mainframe

Arik Hesseldahl — Tue, 18 Jan 2011 15:00:04 +0000

Ping Li has a theory about cloud computing in the enterprise. Every time a new computing platform emerges, all the basic building blocks that made the first mainframe computer systems successful have to be there. He refers to this idea as the “cloudframe,” and it’s something he’s been thinking about a great deal in his role as a partner at the venture capital firm Accel Partners. Known best for its investments in Facebook and, more recently, Groupon, Li has been involved in several of Accel’s investments in enterprise-focused companies. Among them are Cloudera, the company that’s popularizing the use of the open-source software Hadoop to handle big database applications, and, more recently, Nimbula, which is building private clouds. He also sits on the board of Lookout, a mobile security firm that Accel invested in last year.

I caught up with Li last week to talk about the way he sees the cloud shaping up in the enterprise, and where he’s seeing opportunity as it develops. If cloud computing turns out to be the fundamentally new computing platform that many think it is, then there’s a lot of different pieces–Li refers to these as layers–that have to be assembled to make it work. And it’s in those layers where he looks for opportunities.

NewEnterprise: So what do you mean when you talk about the “cloudframe”?

Li: “I keep telling everyone that every time there’s a new computing platform, you basically have to re-create all the pieces of the mainframe. The basic building blocks of computing don’t change. You still need provisioning, management, security, and you need networking. The pieces may change, and different layers get merged into others. I’ve been calling it the cloudframe, for lack of a better word, which allows you to redefine all the layers, from the data layer to the storage layer to the provisioning management layer. Some of the layers that may have been separate before are being merged into one. So I’m spending my time figuring which are the layers that you can build a company around and which are the ones that become features rather than products.

So what are you finding?

There are two layers I’ve spent a lot of time time on, and where we’ve made investments. One is the data layer, and one of the companies I’ve spent a lot of time on is Cloudera, which is built around the Hadoop ecosystem. With the new types of data and applications that are out there, it’s really challenging the idea about whether the relational database is the right data management solution of the future. If you look at the big Internet data centers, say at Google or Facebook, the answer is no. There are no Oracle databases running those applications. Instead they’re using things like Hadoop and MapReduce and distributed file systems on commodity hardware. So I think the whole data structure is moving because the types and volumes of data are changing so much. The data is a lot more complex, and there’s a lot more of it.

There’s been a lot of suspicion and resistance in the enterprise toward letting critical data and applications out the door to run on someone else’s hardware. Is that changing?

I’m less rigid with my definition of the cloud. It doesn’t have to all run on Amazon or something like that. This cloudframe idea is really about extracting applications and services from underlying hardware and resources. It’s about having things available to you anywhere, and having them scale up quickly. They can exist on both sides of the firewall. When we launched Cloudera we thought everyone was going to want to run things on Amazon’s cloud. But most enterprise customers are running large installations of Hadoop on their own servers.

So the data layer is clearly one place where you think businesses can be built. What are some of the others?

Once you have the data layer set, there will be a lot of innovation on the storage side. We’re doing a lot of things around flash memory storage. We’ve invested in Fusion-io, which uses flash memory to build high-performance storage systems. Before, you had to have a storage area network to get the performance and availability you needed to run a big database application. Adding flash memory to your storage lets you expand a lot and do it efficiently. If you look at a lot of the cloud data centers, there’s not a lot of EMC and NetApps gear running in them. There’s a lot of commodity white boxes with Fusion-io starting to get deployed in them.

Last year you joined the board of Nimbula after Accel made an investment in it. That must be part of another layer you like, right?

That’s the application layer. Nimbula is from the guys who first built Amazon EC2. Now they’re actually building a private version of EC2, for the enterprises who for one reason or another can’t go to the public cloud. If an IT manager wants to deploy an app these days they have to put in a request and then he may get servers in six months. With EC2, if you want to deploy something for testing or whatever, all you need is a credit card and you can get it going right away. The Nimbula guys are building a technology that provisions and manages cloud services out of your own IT resources. A lot of enterprise IT guys I talk to say their bosses point to Amazon EC2 and ask, “Why can’t you build me one of those?” Now they can.

All the layers are all getting reinvented. Some will be a service, some will be on-premise. For a new platform to emerge, a lot of things need to come together, and I think a lot of things have been in the making for a while. The environment feels as ripe as it ever has.

Memory Chips Are About to Get Cheaper

Arik Hesseldahl — Thu, 13 Jan 2011 16:28:00 +0000

Market research firm iSuppli says it expects a “huge drop” in the selling price of computer memory chips this year. After a run-up of more than 77 percent in price for DRAM chips during 2010, it expects a drop of nearly 12 percent this year.

DRAM is the ultimate commodity chip market, and its boom-or-bust cycles are legendary. When demand picks up, manufacturers like Samsung, Hynix and Micron always rush to add manufacturing capacity–prices pick up; chips become scarce.

Everything seemed to be going well for the chip companies until the third quarter of 2010. After five straight quarters where the average price for a DRAM chip increased, it suddenly turned south as demand for notebook PCs slacked. That’s in line with what Gartner and IDC reported yesterday about the PC market.

There’s good news for consumers, however. All that stacked-up inventory has to go somewhere. If you’re planning to buy a notebook this year, the base models will now start shipping with four gigabytes of memory instead of two. And for those who bought a machine with only two in the last year or so, upgrades will be more affordable.

The one bright spot for the memory companies? You got it: Smartphones and tablets. Memory content in phones is expected to increase by nearly two-thirds. And the 57 million tablets that iSuppli expects will ship this year will also need some DRAM. More details here from iSuppli.

Weathering the Storm, RIM Makes Its Business Case in Boston

Ina Fried — Thu, 13 Jan 2011 15:11:48 +0000

Mobilized is trudging through the snow in Beantown Thursday to hear Research In Motion talk about its plans for the enterprise. RIM is set to talk about why businesses should bet on both the BlackBerry and the forthcoming PlayBook tablet.

The event, at the Marriott Copley Place downtown, is just getting under way. I won’t bore you with every detail, but will post whenever things get interesting.

In the meantime, enjoy this take on Angry Birds for the BlackBerry.

Update, 10:17 am ET: The intro is still going on. RIM Vice President Alec Taylor is talking about the Cuban Missile Crisis for some reason. However, RIM was nice enough to pass out slides for the whole day. Here are some of the highlights:

BlackBerry Mobile Voice System
Launching in early 2011, this is an update to RIM’s effort to unify the desk and mobile phone, offering a single identity, voiceover Wi-Fi calling, a single voicemail box, dialing office extensions and more. RIM says the new version will support more types of business phone systems.

Other features coming later this year include automatic hand-off from Wi-Fi to mobile networks, a “move call from desk” feature and more.

BlackBerry Balance
A new effort to support mixing personal and corporate data on the BlackBerry. RIM is adding features such as the ability for IT to choose to wipe only corporate information from a device or to limit users from cutting work data and pasting it into a personal application or email. Other features include warnings when sending emails or calendar invites outside of the organization, the ability to encrypt media cards and options for preventing access to work data by third-party applications.

BlackBerry client for Microsoft SharePoint
Launching in early 2011, this will bring data from Microsoft’s portal software directly to BlackBerry handhelds. It will work with both the 2007 and 2010 versions of SharePoint and integrates into a number of BlackBerry programs, including E-mail, calendar, Documents To Go and the browser.

PlayBook
As for the forthcoming tablet, RIM says it will ship with 1GB of memory, have 16GB, 32GB or 64GB of flash memory, include a 3-megapixel front-facing and 5-megapixel rear-facing camera and have micro USB and Micro HDMI ports. (I can’t remember if they have said all of that before.) The slides say only that it will ship this quarter and will be “competitively priced,” reiterating past company positioning.

According to the slides, the company also plans to talk about cloud-based device management and changes to allow one BlackBerry server to support multiple corporations.

10:35 am ET: The Cuban Missile Crisis is apparently over, and VP Pete Devenyi is now outlining the company’s business product road map and making the pitch for its strategy.

“We really do have a great story,” he says, noting that the enterprise is different from the “arms race” of the consumer market.

“It’s not just about the number of apps in App world,” he says, noting that businesses can and are building programs just for use within the corporation. Some businesses, he says, have hundreds of internal apps, none of which show up in the public storefront. BlackBerry, he says, also allows businesses better control than rivals over what programs are on a worker’s device. For example, Devenyi says, when workers change groups within a company, the programs they have access to can be updated automatically with programs deleted and added from their devices.

“That kind of power is power that no one else has,” he says. “We don’t read about that much.”

10:43 am: In addition to both the paid BlackBerry Enterprise Server and the slimmed-down free “Express” version of the server, RIM plans to launch an email system aimed directly at small-to-midsize businesses–MDaemon Messaging Server, BlackBerry Edition. The idea is to give smaller businesses a full email server that has full BlackBerry support. The product stems from an acquisition RIM made a year or two ago and offers what RIM says are features similar to Microsoft’s Exchange Server but at a fraction of the price.

The company is also launching “very, very soon” a modest update to its flagship server product, BlackBerry Enterprise Server 5.0.3. It will add more support for employee-owned devices (including the BlackBerry Balance feature described earlier), support for encrypted attachments and certification for Microsoft’s Office Communications Server 2007 R2 and the latest version, known as Lync 2010.

11:18 am: RIM is launching yet another server this year, known as the BlackBerry Enterprise Application Middleware (BEAM). BEAM, which companies would have to buy in addition to their BlackBerry email server, aims to streamline enterprise content for use on a BlackBerry. ‘What that results in is a much more efficient application than you would otherwise have,” Devenyi says. It’s in beta now, he adds.

11:25 am: BlackBerry is launching its equivalent of Find My Phone, known as BlackBerry Protect, which will allow individuals to remotely wipe or post a message if a device is lost. Protect will launch later this year, Devenyi says.

Finally, the company is talking about a number of changes it is making to the core BlackBerry Enterprise Server so that it can run via the cloud. Launching later this year, RIM will have the ability for its server product to be remotely hosted and support more than one business. It’s not clear yet if this will be RIM offering BlackBerry as a cloud-based service or if this is a product for hosting partners, though it sounds more like the latter.

11:32 am: Devenyi told Mobilized that the company is just showing the architectural changes it is making, not saying how it will bring the cloud-based capabilities to market. “We’re still working through a number of those details ourselves.” Devenyi said. “It could be both, but we are not announcing.”

11:42 am: On to the PlayBook finally. Senior Product manager Ryan Bidan gives the spiel. He says there is a lot that the company isn’t ready to share. Addressing concerns around battery life, Bidan notes the PlayBook has a 5300-miliamp battery, but doesn’t give specifics on how much battery life that will translate to.

“We’ll have good battery life,” he says. “Don’t worry about the battery life.”

Other details:
Software updates will be pushed down to the device on an ongoing basis. There will be a version of App World on the device for downloading developer-created programs.

And with that, the formal part of the event is over.

IT Trends in 2011 and Beyond: More Cloud, Flash and Virtualization

Arik Hesseldahl — Fri, 31 Dec 2010 18:38:13 +0000

Gleacher analyst Brian Marshall is out with a short research note this morning summarizing a few trends he thinks will be important in IT in 2011. Companies he covers, which include VMware, NetApp, EMC, IBM, Dell, Hewlett-Packard and Apple collectively saw their shares grow by 40 percent this year, beating the S&P 500, which grew 13 percent. With enterprise IT companies roughly six quarters into a recovery period following the disaster that was 2009, he says 2010 is going to prove to be a difficult year to follow.

For 2011, he expects a continuation of a lot of trends you’ve already been hearing about. You probably already knew about the direction of the general trends, but Marshall has included some interesting figures around the size of various opportunities.

Cloud computing, he says, currently consumes only two percent of the global enterprise storage budget today, and he expects that to grow to between 15 and 20 percent within five years.

He says solid-state storage–which uses flash memory to enhance storage in servers by breaking up the bottlenecks that exist between processors that do the number crunching and hard drives that store the data–is “at a nascent stage,” and that solid-state use in enterprise applications will only get more important in 2011.

Finally, expect more virtualization in the data center. Currently, corporations virtualize about 30 percent of their servers and storage machines. Marshall thinks over five years, that will grow to about 70 percent, and if the conditions are right, 2011 could be a year where the growth rate could accelerate significantly.

WakeMate Finally Ships–Will You Sleep Better Now That It's Watching You?

Voices — Wed, 22 Dec 2010 21:58:02 +0000

Let’s get this out of the way right now–WakeMate co-founder Arun Gupta said the start-up is finally shipping all pre-orders of the long-awaited sleep tracking gadget.

Gupta said, “Our goal is to fill all pre-orders by Christmas.”

And I can even verify that the unit exists, since I have been using one for a week now.

So why all the skepticism?

Because WakeMate–which began as an idea for a smart alarm clock back in 2006 and graduated out of the Y Combinator incubator in summer of 2009–has had more than a few delays in delivering product.

To be fair, the tiny company might have bit off a fair amount to chew. WakeMate chose a solution to the sleep-tracking problem that required it to build original hardware, a main Web application, as well as apps for Apple’s iPhone, Google’s Android and Research in Motion’s BlackBerry.

Thus, Gupta describes the first version of its product as “really, a public beta.”

And, WakeMate is indeed a little rough around the edges.

For example, the unit itself–with its semi-exposed electronics and shrink-tube wrapper–looks a little more like something hacked together on top of one of the mini DIY Arduino boards than it does a finished consumer electronics device.

But if you have any experience programming microcontrollers, you might appreciate the sort of sophistication that goes into coordinating this sleepy symphony of data gathering.

(Pardon us for a minute, while I get a little über-geeky and explain how the WakeMate wristband works. If this doesn’t concern you, feel free to fast-forward a few paragraphs to get to Gupta’s predictions for WakeMate’s future.)

When you flick the small switch on the WakeMate wristband, just prior to going to sleep, the device connects via Bluetooth to your iOS, Android or BlackBerry device.

You then open the WakeMate app and enter a 20-minute window during which you’d like to be woken.

The app talks to the wristband and transmits that time information. Then, both app and device enter a sort of low-power state. At this stage, the WakeMate becomes little more than a data logger.

There is a fairly standard, solid-state, three-axis accelerometer on board, much like the one that allows you to “shake to shuffle” your iPhone.

WakeMate then spits out three fields of data–X,Y and Z axis readings–40 times per second, which are stored in its flash memory all night.

That means an eight-hour sleep cycle will produce about 3.5 million unique data points, not including metadata.

The onboard clock–for the computer, not for human time-telling–waits until your pre-selected 20-minute window and then figures out, based on frequency and severity of wrist movement, when you are closest to being awake on your own.

When that moment comes, it wakes the Bluetooth connection, connects to the phone, sounds the alarm and starts uploading the data it collected all night directly to the phone and immediately sends the information to WakeMate’s servers.

And, not to worry, if the WakeMate dies mid-sleep, the phone knows to sound the alarm anyway.

It is quite a concert that needs to be played flawlessly for connectivity and battery life to remain intact.

Impressive data tricks aside, the world in which WakeMate was conceived looked a little different from the one into which it has been born, and that means a different set of competitive realities.

When WakeMate left Y Combinator, the world of iOS device-connected movement sensors was limited to the Nike Fit, which links running performance via a shoe-attached device.

It was also a world without Fitbit, another popular activity and health tracker.

And, unlike now, there were no sleep apps claiming to do what WakeMate does.

But now, even with all the new rivals, Gupta believes WakeMate still has the edge.

He explained: “In the early days of sleep-tracking studies, doctors decided to monitor non-dominant wrist movement as part of the data collected to determine sleep state. That continues today, so there is a ton of research that has been collected over the years on correlating wrist movement with sleep cycle.”

He added that WakeMate has built an algorithm that fits the data collected by its wristband to these medically relevant sleep-cycle models and spits out graphs mapping your sleep states, your waking moments and even times when you were in deepest sleep.

“All the competing tools out there aren’t at all based on any kind of accepted research–no one is studying pillow movement or waistband movement or anything,” Gupta said. “But we know how you are sleeping when you move your wrist.”

The major questions facing WakeMate as a company revolve around what one might expect from a start-up with such a complex beta product.

Gupta said it will focus on innovating and revising its wristband, as well as doing more interesting things with the data it will collect.

“On the macro level, we’re really doing the biggest sleep study that has ever been done,” he said. “We’ll be able to tell you how people are sleeping in San Francisco versus New York, based on seasons and all kinds of things.”

Gupta added that while he doesn’t know what the next step is, WakeMate is prototyping ideas where it could correlate sleep data with other metrics about health, occupation and stress to provide a more complete tool set.

But as more companies work on the problem of digitizing the analog data of human life, the harder questions to answer are really in front of the consumer.

Gupta said he doesn’t know what a world would look like if a health insurance company could access your sleep data, or when information about your apparent insomnia is grabbed by some hacker.

What WakeMate hopes for, he said, is a world where more people have access to the kind of medical data collection that has previously only been collectable by trained technicians in controlled settings.

But more data is better, as far as WakeMate is concerned–it is hoping that its vision puts its products at the center of an all-day biometric data collection future.

2010 Was a Boom Year in Chip Sales

Arik Hesseldahl — Fri, 17 Dec 2010 16:56:19 +0000

When 2010 ends, worldwide sales of chips will have grown by their largest single-year increase ever, the market research firm iSuppli says in its latest survey of the global semiconductor market. Chip sales grew to $304 billion, up from $229.5 billion in 2009, the most significant year-to-year increase on a dollar basis ever, and at 32.5 percent, the second-largest on a percentage basis.

Memory chips, both DRAM and Flash memory, had a lot to do with this. DRAM sales grew by 80 percent, and Flash memory grew by 40 percent. But every market segment save for one saw double-digit growth. Good news for Samsung, Micron and Hynix.

The one thing I’ve learned in watching chip markets over a dozen years or so is that booms don’t last. ISuppli is predicting a much slower growth rate of 5 percent for 2011.

A Device Does Everything But Sing

Katherine Boehret — Tue, 14 Dec 2010 23:02:13 +0000

Just when you think you can’t fit anything else into an all-in-one device that already prints, copies, scans, and faxes, HP ups the ante. The HP Photosmart eStation e-All-in-One performs all those tasks and includes a seven-inch, touch-screen tablet computer that doubles as a display when snapped onto the printer. This tablet lets users do things like check email, Facebook or weather, but I can’t imagine using it much as a stand-alone tablet, at least in its current version. And people who just want basic printer functions may grow tired of the tablet’s extra features.

Over the years, printers have progressively shifted from PC accessories to devices that can work independent of PCs. They started small, as dedicated 4×6 printers that had built-in memory-card readers and used basic photo-editing capabilities, and have matured into models like last year’s HP Photosmart Premium All-in-One with Touch-Smart Web that offered apps for printable things like maps, coloring book pages and recipes.

[ See post to watch video ]

The $400 HP e-All-in-One (http://3.ly/DP8b) takes this concept a step further by enabling even more independence from the PC because its tablet—named the Zeen—is more robust and can browse the Web, check email in a dedicated email program and run a limited selection of apps. It also works as a stand-alone tablet when detached from the e-All-in-One, though it only connects to the Internet via Wi-Fi rather than a cellular connection. It runs on the Android 2.1 operating system, but can only access certain apps rather than any app in the Android Market.

Perhaps an even more important new feature is that this all-in-one will print anything emailed to it from any device connected to the Internet, thanks to ePrint, a cloud-based printing system. This system assigns an email address to the e-All-in-One during its set-up and almost anything sent to that email address will print out, including attachments, no matter where the email is coming from.

One catch is that you must only send the document to the e-All-in-One’s email address and can’t CC anyone else or add another address to the “to” line of the email. A spokesman for HP said that this is done to prevent spam print-outs because batches sent to several people won’t print.

HP also has an exclusive relationship with products running Apple’s latest iOS 4.2 operating system for hand-held devices. Apple’s iPads, iPhones, and iPod touches now have a built-in feature called AirPrint which allows them to print anything directly to HP’s new ePrint printers as long as these devices and the printer are connected to the same Wi-Fi network. I tested this several times using an iPhone and it worked, printing Web pages, emails and photos. I liked the ease of using ePrint and AirPrint. Printouts looked sharp and printed quickly.

But I found the concept behind the e-All-in-One’s detachable tablet screen to be both alluring and confusing. It’s great to be able to do more with the printer’s touch screen and apps—but you don’t want to stand at a desk looking down at this screen, so it makes sense that the tablet is detachable. On the other hand, tablets often work in place of printed paper. I use my iPad for things like finding a recipe online, standing the iPad on my kitchen counter and cooking from that on-screen recipe. If I used the eStation All-in-One like that, I would ultimately print less often, which seems to defeat the purpose of having this big thing in your home. The HP eStation All-in-One measures about 18 inches wide and about 14 inches deep.

HP’s Zeen tablet can be detached from the e-station, but its uses as a stand-alone are questionable.

In order to save energy, the eStation All-in-One goes to sleep when it hasn’t been used for 15 minutes. This is a fine idea for environmental reasons, but in sleep mode, it also turns off its connection to the local Wi-Fi network. This means that if documents are emailed to its assigned address it may not print if it’s not awake and online. An HP spokesman said the company recently issued a fix for this problem that wakes up the printer when something is sent to it, but not all printers have been updated.

The Zeen tablet’s battery recharges every time it’s docked in the eStation All-in-One’s base, and HP estimates that its battery life is around four to six hours with Wi-Fi turned on. Hard buttons for volume and power are hidden on the Zeen’s back edge, as are speakers. A spokesman for HP said that eStation All-in-Ones will be updated early next year to run Android 2.2, which is faster and plays Flash videos.

The Zeen’s four gigabytes of internal memory hold roughly 100 apps, 35 of which come pre-loaded on the tablet. These include apps for MapQuest, Disney, Facebook and the Barnes and Noble bookstore, from which digital books, magazines and newspapers can be purchased and downloaded. Photos, videos, music and other files must be stored on an SD card in the Zeen’s SD card slot.

All documents sent to the e-All-in-One using HP’s ePrint can be seen online at hp.com/go/ePrintCenter as long as users register their printer and set up an account, which I did in about two minutes. Here, too, users can add or remove apps from their printer. I preferred adding and removing apps directly from my Zeen tablet’s screen, but it takes some digging to find the Add More icon for adding apps. Over a dozen HP products support ePrint; they range from $100 to $450.

The concept of ePrint is a smart one, but the printer’s tendency to go into sleep mode to save energy is a problem. I like that the Zeen tablet detaches from the e-All-in-One, but its functionality as a tablet with limited apps and capabilities isn’t very sensible.

Edited by Walter S. Mossberg

Write to Katherine Boehret at mossbergsolution@wsj.com

Digital Cameras Improve Zooms, HD Function

Katherine Boehret — Tue, 09 Nov 2010 22:26:27 +0000

With Thanksgiving fast approaching, so, too, comes the start of the holiday shopping mayhem. Once again, digital cameras are rocketing to the top of wish lists, and once again, shoppers are tentatively entering electronics stores with bewildered looks on their faces.

[ See post to watch video ]

To alleviate some of that shopping stress, I’ve compiled a buyer’s guide for different camera categories with prices and pointers to innovation. This year, manufacturers have improved photo-location tagging and are offering artistic photo alteration and clever ways to label images for future sharing on social networks.

Let’s Get Physical

Consumers are starting to understand that better sensors make it possible to do things like taking photos in low light, which can really make a difference in photo quality. Some high-quality sensors are making their way into affordable models, like the CMOS sensor in Nikon’s $300 Coolpix S8100. High megapixel counts aren’t overly important, though more megapixels per photo still make it easier to zoom in while editing and give higher resolution in a larger photo or poster. A 14-megapixel camera like the Olympus FE-47 costs just $100, but a recent Consumer Reports review gave it low marks in handling shake and liquid-crystal-display screen quality. Optical zoom, or the physically manipulated distance between the camera and a subject, is still more important than digital zoom, and it’s easy to find many models with 7x optical zoom or better. LCD screens on digicams are so large that they leave little room for optical viewfinders, thus making built-in image stabilization all the more important. Image stabilization comes on nearly all new cameras. And more digicams than ever are capable of recording high-definition videos.

Breaking It Down

Digital cameras can be divided into four broad categories: pocket-size, point-and-shoot, super- or mega-zooms and digital single-lens reflexes (D-SLRs). I’ll leave SLRs out of the discussion, since they’re still primarily aimed at hobbyists who don’t mind the cost and effort of buying additional lenses, filters, flashes and other accessories.

Most pocket-size digital cameras cost between $100 and $300, weigh no more than seven ounces and lack optical viewfinders, forcing users to look at LCD screens to compose pictures. Most of these LCD viewing screens measure between 2.6 inches and 3.5 inches diagonally. Samsung, however, has an even bigger touch-screen LCD, at 3.7 inches, on its CL80 camera priced at $350.

These small but powerful machines capture images with 10, 12 or 14 megapixels and their optical zoom lenses usually range from 3x to 7x, though a handful of manufacturers are boosting their cameras’ optical zooms. The $170 Casio Exilim EX-H5, for example, is equipped with a 10x optical zoom lens.

Today’s point-and-shoot digital cameras are sleeker and more stylish than they used to be, though they remain somewhat bulkier than their pocket-size relatives. The point-and-shoot size can allow for better optical zoom lenses, and these models sometimes cost less than the pocket sizes. The $300 Canon PowerShot SX210 IS and $280 Panasonic Lumix DMC-ZS5 are equipped with 14x and 12x optical zoom lenses, respectively.

Super-zoom or mega-zoom digital cameras satisfy people who want the power of a great zoom and optional manual settings without the hassle and expense of an SLR. At a glance, you might mistake these models for SLRs due to their bulkier bodies, and, in some cases, detachable (or hot-shoe) flashes. Nikon’s $400 Coolpix P100 offers a 26x wide-angle optical zoom, and Olympus’s $350 SP-800UZ is the smallest camera with a 30x wide-angle optical zoom. Both cameras have built-in flashes, but the Nikon includes an optical viewfinder while the Olympus offers only an LCD screen for viewing and capturing photos.

Shaking It Up

Camera manufacturers are adding creative new features to these devices. Starting the week of Thanksgiving, Casio will provide Hybrid GPS on its $350 EX-H20G, which geotags (adds digital location information to) images indoors where GPS satellite signals can’t reach. This works using a combined GPS radio and motion sensor to measure the direction in which the camera has moved, and how fast. When you’re back in satellite range, the camera corrects the geotag by cross-referencing its own estimates with satellite-provided latitude and longitude.

Olympus now has art filters, which let you view your subject with special effects before capturing the photo. Some filters supply gentle sepia, soft focus or grainy film. There is also a drawing filter, which makes a subject instantly appear as a sketch.

Samsung’s $150 PL90 model has a pop-out USB arm that reminds me a lot of the pop-out USB connector on Cisco’s popular Flip camcorders. Samsung’s USB arm eliminates the need for messy wires, or the removal of a memory card to transfer photos from a digicam to a PC.

Many cameras have and continue to supply guides that appear on screen as a photo is being captured. Sony’s NEX-5 offers this, and the Olympus Live Guide let you preview photo adjustments—like brightness or color saturation—on the screen as you make them. Nikon’s Scene Auto Selector, found in the Coolpix P7000, Coolpix S8100 and Coolpix S80, will automatically adjust the camera’s settings so users can stop worrying about scrolling through menus to select the right scene from a list.

Fujifilm offers the only true (not simulated) three-dimensional digital camera in its $500 FinePix REAL 3D W3, which I reviewed in August. These 3D images can be seen through the camera’s LCD viewing screen but not on laptops or television sets unless they’re 3D-capable and you’re wearing 3D glasses.

Kodak is trying to encourage sharing with its cameras by including a Share button that, when pressed, digitally tags images and videos with labels for Facebook, Flickr, YouTube, Kodak Gallery or email, then automatically sends the photos to those places when you next plug the camera into a PC.

One last warning: Don’t be seduced by lower prices or better technology alone. Be sure you try a camera in the store before buying it. The way it feels or works for you is just as important as any technological specification.

Email Katherine Boehret at mossbergsolution@wsj.com.

Edited by Walter S. Mossberg