If I upload my music collection to Apple’s iTunes Match cloud service, is it deleted from my computer? I ask because I wouldn’t want to lose my music if the service was killed or suffered some massive failure.

A:

No. Any songs that currently are stored on your computer’s hard disk remain there, so even if iTunes Match is discontinued, your music is safe. However, you will gain access from the cloud to additional songs that live on other computers or Apple devices you own, but now are also stored in your iTunes Match account.

Q:

I am considering buying the 10″ Toshiba Thrive tablet you reviewed a while back. It comes in three memory configurations. Other than the amount of internal memory, do the three models have the same internal hardware?

A:

Yes. A glance at the Thrive website suggests that all other key components, such as the screen, the processor, the ports, the sensors and the cameras are the same. For more, see http://bit.ly/vvy2rM.

Q:

I just got an iPad 3G with Verizon. I want an all-in-one printer, but it seems I need a Wi-Fi connection to use a printer. Is something available that would work with my Verizon connection?

A:

There are some iPad apps that claim to print over 3G. Just go to the app store, search on “print,” and study the descriptions.

But it doesn’t matter, because every iPad, including those like yours that come with 3G, also includes Wi-Fi, and can print to compatible printers. The Verizon 3G is an added, alternate connection capability—not a replacement for Wi-Fi. Just make sure when you buy your printer that it’s compatible with Apple’s AirPrint technology. More information is at http://bit.ly/r2A5VG.

Tomorrow, Hewlett-Packard is launching the newest version of its HP Envy 17 with 3-D capabilities, alongside the new HP Envy 15 and Envy 17 notebook PCs, available through HP Direct.

For gamers, a 3-D PC offers different kinds of gaming options, and on a larger screen than a handheld device has. But do consumers — hardcore gamers aside — really want a 3-D PC? Let’s take a look at some of the technical specifics and other factors to consider when it comes to computers with 3-D options:

Hardware and glasses:
As the technology gets more advanced, more 3-D laptops are expected to come to market with autostereoscopic (glasses-free) screens. Toshiba, for example, recently introduced the Qosmio F750 (in Europe) and Qosmio F755 (North America); both laptops run Windows 7 and feature a 15.6-inch Toshiba TruBrite 1080p autostereoscopic 3-D display.

But most 3-D laptops — such as the Sony VAIO F 3D, the Origin EON15 3D, the Dell Alienware M17x R3 and the Dell XPS 17 with optional 3-D screen — currently have stereoscopic screens, which means users have to wear glasses to experience the 3-D effect.

Nvidia’s 3D Vision kit is commonly bundled with these laptops and includes a pair of the necessary glasses, as well as a 3-D vision USB controller/emitter.

The kinds of glasses consumers are supposed to wear vary, as well: There’s the “active” kind versus the “passive” kind. Nvidia’s 3-D glasses, for example, are active-shutter lenses (read: battery-operated) that create the 3-D image by rapidly shuttering the left eye and then the right eye. Passive — a.k.a. polarized — 3-D glasses are cheaper, look a lot like sunglasses, and work by allowing different levels of light into each eye. Note that these are different from the anaglyph cardboard glasses you might have worn at the movies as a kid.

So, if the 3-D viewing doesn’t give you a headache, the lack of standardization in this industry just might.

Content: It’s the chicken-or-the-egg problem: Hardware makers can’t sell 3-D products well without enough 3-D content for people to watch and play; content creators are hesitant to invest in making 3-D material when the format hasn’t yet been adopted on a mass scale.

But games may indeed be the shining star when it comes to 3-D on PCs. Game developers have been creating games with inherent 3-D capabilities for many years now; consumers just didn’t have the display options they now have to view the games. And 3-D PCs often include super-fast graphics cards that are optimal for game viewing.

In terms of content volume, Nvidia says its 3D Vision Kit includes software that converts “hundreds” of standard 2-D games to 3-D, including popular titles like Call of Duty: Black Ops, Batman: Arkham Asylum and Battlefield 3.

Price points: Despite the fact that slowing demand for PCs has been pushing netbook and notebook prices down for consumers, 3-D laptop pricing still ranges on the high side. Dell’s Alienware M17x R3 and XPS 17 (with 3-D screen), Toshiba’s Qosmio F755 and the Sony VAIO F 3D all currently retail for around $1,500.

The bottom line: laptops with 3-D capabilities tend to be more expensive at a base price. Add in the cost of active-shutter glasses when they’re not bundled in — anywhere from $40 to $150 — and consumers are paying even more.

Where does the new HP Envy 17 3D fit in?: The new HP Envy 17 3D does have some nice features, such as a 17.3-inch 3-D, LED Radiance display with full 1080p HD viewing, backlit keys, an upgraded touchpad and a Blu-ray and 12.7mm DVD-RW slot. It runs Windows 7, has an Intel Core i5-2340M processor, and its list price is $1,599.99, which includes one pair of 3-D glasses (it does not work with the Nvidia 3D Vision kit). Hopefully, battery life will show improvement from the last Envy 17 3D, which some reviewers complained was short-lived.

Readers, what do you think: Would you buy a 3-D laptop?

And things are actually worse than that. Topping the list compiled by NPD was Hewlett-Packard, which only sold that many tablets thanks to a billion dollar fire sale.

HP accounted for 17 percent of those tablets, just ahead of Samsung, which had 16 percent of the market, followed by Asus, Motorola and Acer, which each had around a 9 or 10 percent share.

Of course, that means things were even more dismal for the other companies vying for tablet share, a list that includes HTC, Toshiba, Research In Motion and Dell, to name just a few.

NPD analyst Stephen Baker sees the very small glass as half full.

“If you look at the tablet market without Apple there are a number of high-profile brands vying for that number two spot,” Baker said in a statement, adding that three quarters of those who bought a tablet were not even considering an iPad, which he said is “an indication that a large group of consumers are looking for alternatives, and an opportunity for the rest of the market to grow their business.”

And of course, things are getting more interesting thanks to Amazon and its Kindle Fire.

But Baker also notes that the market is awfully crowded and there is not much left to go around.

As The Wall Street Journal reported today, Lenovo’s profits rose by 88 percent, and it eclipsed Dell as the world’s No. 2 manufacturer, behind Hewlett-Packard. The company has been growing in part through acquisitions — it recently paid 465 million euros (about $640 million) for the German PC outfit Medion — but also by playing well in markets where people are still buying their first PCs, says Peter Hortensius, the president of Lenovo’s Global Product Group.

Lenovo’s results did good things for shares of rival HP, which last week announced that it will keep the PC unit it had previously considered spinning off. Its shares rose 1.8 percent to $26.06. Shares in Dell rose more than 1 percent to $15.29, while Intel fell 17 cents, or less than 1 percent.

Hortensius told me that much of Lenovo’s strength comes from being the top vendor in the world’s leading market, China, and also in its No. 3 market, Japan. In the world’s No. 2 market, the U.S. — not so much. Lenovo is fifth there, but that’s an improvement from prior periods, he says.

Another strength he noted is in emerging markets like Brazil, where lots of people are still buying their first device and just getting their first Internet connection and not ready to think about buying tablets or smartphones just yet. But Lenovo’s a big player there, too, and sells Android based smartphones and tablets in China. It also plans to sell tablets running Windows 8 when it’s released. And as part of a four-screen strategy, he said, the company will have more to say on the subject of smart TVs soon.

What it doesn’t have, at least in the U.S. yet, is a strong brand presence. And so it has crafted a marketing campaign around “people who do.” So what do you do when you need to get attention for a less-well known PC brand? You drop a laptop out of a plane, naturally. Of course there was a technical reason for doing it: Proving that the machine could boot up in time to deploy a parachute and land safely, though I have to wonder just how soft that landing was in reality. I embedded the spot below just because it looks cool.

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.

In a research note to clients today, Goldman said that while most tech companies should report results in line with their forecasts, the forward guidance they give will be less than optimistic. “While we expect most of the September quarter companies to be able to meet expectations for the quarter, we also expect an increasingly cautious tone from all of the companies, and we continue to see risk to 2012 consensus estimates for nearly all of the names in our space.”

To that end, Goldman revised its PC unit sales forecast downward. Following the latest PC market data from the research firm IDC, Goldman says the demand environment for PCs is “even more difficult than we had previously envisioned.”

Slower spending, the end of a PC refresh cycle and cannibalization by the tablet market — which we all know is really just an iPad market — has prompted Goldman to slash its PC unit sales growth forecast to 2.1 percent for 2011; 4.3 percent in 2012; and 6.9 percent in 2013. The iPad 3, already said to be in production and expected early next year, won’t give the PC makers any help.

One key problem PC makers face is pricing: In order to avoid being stuck with unsold inventory, manufacturers, resellers and retailers will be forced to slash their prices to the bone and then some, which will hurt their already-thin profit margins. This is why Goldman rates Dell — now the No. 3 PC maker, behind Hewlett-Packard and Lenovo — a “sell” right now. Goldman expects the average selling price on PCs to drop nearly 3 percent in 2011, and more than 9 percent in 2012.

The exception to its tech pessimism? Apple, naturally. Reporting its results on Oct. 18, Apple isn’t suffering from the economic headwinds. Goldman expects Apple to sell 13 million iPads in the quarter, which would represent growth of 211 percent year over year.

Goldman expects Apple to report earnings of $7.30 per share on $28.7 billion in sales, but admits that could be conservative, because who knows how good today’s launch of the iPhone 4S will turn out? As Goldman puts it: “Indeed, if iPhone units are flat sequentially, this would support earnings per share of approximately $8.00 for the quarter.”

If you are familiar with the 10-inch model, the seven-inch Thrive is largely the same. Its biggest selling point is probably its easy connectivity to other devices. It boasts the same connections as its big sibling — USB, SD card and HDMI — though the bigger model packs full-size slots ; the new device uses a mini-USB and microversions of the HDMI and SD cards.

The smaller-screen version, which is due to ship in December, will come in 16 gigabyte and 32GB varieties, both featuring a 1280-pixel-by-800-pixel display, Android 3.2 and a Tegra 2 processor.

The company isn’t saying yet what it plans to charge, but it recently cut the price on the 10-inch model. Toshiba executives said the pricing moves were not unexpected in a competitive market, and insist that the product has done well, though they declined to release any sales figures.

Toshiba is not the only one hoping to find a hit with smaller Android tablets, with Acer and others offering seven-inch models. One of the main benefits of the Android 3.2 update is its support for smaller-screen devices, and a number of diminutive tablets are on shelves or on the way, including Samsung’s Galaxy Tab 8.9, which is due to go on sale Oct. 2, with a 32GB version selling for $569 and a 16GB model priced at $469.

One phone is the 4.7-inch Titan — the largest-screen Windows Phone device yet — while the Radar is a 3.8-inch device crafted from a single piece of aluminum.

The Radar has a 1 gigahertz Qualcomm processor and a 5 megapixel rear camera, while the Titan sports a 1.5GHz chip and an 8 megapixel rear camera.

With the announcement, Microsoft VP Joe Belfiore said he can now confirm that Mango supports the additional front-facing camera, something about which Microsoft had been cagey.

“A lot of you have asked us whether Mango will support front-facing cameras — and now that these HTC phones have been formally announced, I can confirm officially that Mango does support these,” Belfiore wrote in a blog post. The post mentions video chat as among the features, but doesn’t specifically mention Skype, which Microsoft is in the process of acquiring.

Fujitsu-Toshiba has already launched a waterproof Windows Phone Mango device in Japan, while Nokia is also basing its first Windows Phone on the Mango software release.

Among the features being added with the update are improved browsing, better multitasking and integrated Twitter support. Microsoft finalized the software update in July.

From left, Toshiba Chief Executive Norio Sasaki, Hitachi President Hiroaki Nakanishi and Sony Executive Deputy President Hiroshi Yoshioka in Tokyo on Wednesday. The companies are forging an LCD joint venture.

The investment by Innovation Network Corp. of Japan will pool the small-panel liquid-crystal-display businesses run by Toshiba Corp., Hitachi Ltd. and Sony Corp. The new entity, to be known as Japan Display K.K., is likely to hold at least 20 percent of the fast-growing global market for panels used in smartphones and other digital gadgets.
The three companies and the government-backed investment fund, or INCJ, said Wednesday that the merger is to be completed in the spring of 2012.

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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.

However, the numbers illustrate just how much sales have continued to grow. Sales have risen from three million or four million units per quarter in the first two quarters of iPad shipments to 9.25 million last quarter. That’s more than the company sold in last year’s holiday quarter and appears to be vastly more than any rival has sold in total. Even Android phone owners tend to buy iPads, rather than an Android tablet.

This lends credence to the philosophy that there isn’t a large tablet market nearly so much as there is a large iPad market. While some expect (and may yet be right) that the iPad will lose share over time, just as the iPhone did to Android, others see the iPad as more akin to the iPod. It was a luxury item, as opposed to a phone, which is something of a necessity in the modern world. And when an item is a luxury, more people are likely to go for the luxury brand, if they decide they want the product at all.

There are other parallels to the early days of the iPod. Remember that when Apple’s iPod came out it was not the first hard-drive-based music player. Indeed, there were devices like the Nomad Jukebox. However, Apple did have the early exclusive on Toshiba’s tiny 1.8-inch hard drive, the component that gave the iPod its significantly smaller shape.

While Apple doesn’t have a stranglehold on any one component with the iPad, it does seem to have shored up enough supply, and at favorable enough prices, that competitors can’t really compete much on price. To match or slightly beat Apple’s price, it would seem hardware makers already have to forsake profit margins.

Nonetheless, one recent study did show that Apple may be losing some of its total command of the tablet market.

However, as Daring Fireball points out, those numbers reflect shipments into the channel. One of the key questions that will only be answered in the coming months is whether any of the competitive tablets can continue to sell well beyond their initial shipments needed to fill retail shelves and inventory.

Plus, the field of Android tablets is growing ever more crowded, presumably putting pressure on prices as well as on device makers to continually upgrade their models. While Motorola had the first Honeycomb tablet with the Xoom, it has since been followed by ones from LG, Acer, Toshiba and Samsung, to name but a few. Meanwhile, Lenovo just announced two new models and Sony is offering up two Honeycomb tablets of its own later this year.

And HP and Research In Motion are hoping to grab share with tablets based on their own operating systems.

Then, of course, there is the question of apps. Apple has surpassed 100,000 programs that are optimized for its tablet. The number of apps for Android appears in the hundreds. Neither HP nor Research In Motion are anywhere close to the iPad when it comes to breadth and depth of tablet-specific apps.

The biggest wild card could be Amazon. Unlike Apple’s other rivals, Amazon doesn’t have an announced tablet in the market. But also unlike the others, Amazon has some of the assets needed to compete, including its own music and video storefronts as well as its own app store, not to mention the Kindle book business. The company also has a track record of knowing how to use content to subsidize hardware, something no one in the industry has really been able to successfully do in their effort to take on Apple.

Unlike other well-known tablets on the market, the new Toshiba Thrive, a 10-inch Android model available this month, sports a full-sized USB port that works with a wide variety of devices and files; a removable battery; and a file manager application like those on PCs. It also includes a full-sized SD slot for flash memory cards and a full-sized connector, called an HDMI port, that can use a standard cable for linking to a high-definition TV.

Some tablets, such as Acer’s Iconia, have a few of these features, but I haven’t previously tested a tablet with all of them. And they aren’t built into the tablet that dominates the market, Apple’s iPad.

Like Acer, Toshiba is trying to differentiate the Thrive from the iPad with a lower price. The base model of the Thrive will cost $430, which is $69 less than the entry-level iPad 2. However, there’s a catch: It only has half the memory, 8 gigabytes, versus the base $499 iPad 2′s 16 gigabytes. A Thrive model with 16 gigabytes of memory will cost $480, or just $19 less than the comparable iPad 2.

This first tablet from Toshiba is Wi-Fi only. But the company plans a model with cellular connectivity in the fourth quarter.

I’ve been testing the Thrive for about a week, and found it to be a mixed bag. Its laptop-like features, especially the USB port, worked very well and will be welcomed by users who have yearned for an easier, more standard way of getting files into and out of a tablet.

Like many laptops, the Thrive, above, has full-size USB and HDMI ports.

Like most tablets introduced this year, it is thick and heavy compared with the iPad. Like all Android tablets, it offers only a tiny fraction of the tablet-optimized apps available for the iPad, which claims 100,000 such programs.

And in my standard tablet battery test, its performance was weak, only a bit more than half of the iPad 2′s.

Design

The Thrive, which has rounded edges, weighs in at 1.6 pounds. It’s 0.62 inch thick, and about 11″ long by 7″ wide—shaped to optimize viewing of widescreen videos. That means it’s best used in landscape mode. Its back, which is rubbery and ribbed, feels comfortable, and snaps off, to provide access to the removable battery.

Extra batteries cost $80 each, and the company offers a variety of colorful replacement backs for $20 each.

The edges offer an array of switches and ports—some hidden behind little covers—including a mini-USB port for connecting to a PC or Mac. There’s a proprietary connector for attaching the Thrive to two optional docks. The device includes front and rear cameras.

The standard case, above, is very bulky.

There are also a couple of optional cases. I found the standard case to be very bulky. Also very bulky is the included AC adapter, for charging the Thrive, that’s the size of a small laptop charger.

USB

I focused a lot of my testing on the USB port, which worked very well. In my tests, I was able to successfully connect a variety of small flash drives and access their files, or copy them to the internal memory, using the File Manager app. Toshiba also includes a Media Player, which handles music, photos and videos, regardless of whether they are in internal memory or external storage.

I was also able to easily connect a variety of other devices to the USB port, including a camera, a wired keyboard and mouse. The USB port handled an external hard drive as well, once I converted it on a computer to the only hard-disk format the Thrive recognizes, which is called exFAT.

I was even able to simultaneously use a flash drive and a wired mouse with the Thrive by plugging in a small USB hub—a gadget that’s like a power strip for USB devices.

SD Card and HDMI Port

The Thrive can handle SD cards up to 128 gigabytes in capacity—though the largest of these currently cost around $300. In fact, Toshiba justifies the low internal memory on its base model Thrive by noting that users can add memory via SD cards. In my tests of several SD cards, all worked fine.

I connected my HDTV to the Thrive via a plain-vanilla HDMI cable and it played videos, photos and music through the TV without any problems.

Battery Life

The Thrive fared poorly in my standard tablet battery test, in which I set the screen brightness at 75%, leave the Wi-Fi connected and collecting emails in the background, and play videos back to back until the juice is gone. It managed just 5½ hours before shutting down, compared with slightly over 10 hours for the iPad 2 during the same test.

Toshiba claims the Thrive’s battery will last up to 11 hours in more general and varied use, and, while I couldn’t test such a vague claim, I was able to go a couple of days between charges while doing intermittent Web surfing, emails, social networking, book reading and game playing. But the screen— which sucks power on all tablets—was off for hours at a time during this period.

Performance

In general, the Thrive performed crisply, handling almost everything I tried and running numerous programs at once.

However, it crashed multiple times. The tablet spontaneously rebooted once when I removed a flash drive and the popular game “Words With Friends” crashed twice. Several other apps also crashed.

Unlike the iPad, the Thrive will play Adobe Flash videos and websites, but, as with other Android tablets, this capability varies unpredictably. Some Flash videos played well, others poorly or not at all. A couple crashed the browser. And the beautiful Picnik photo-editing website, which depends on Flash, wouldn’t work at all.

Cameras and Sound

Both cameras worked OK for stills and videos. But the sound, which Toshiba says is superior to that on other tablets, was tinny on several songs compared with the sound on the iPad.

Trial Software

One more similarity, alas, that the Thrive has to laptops is that it comes pre-loaded with craplets, limited or trial apps you may not want. Its bundled version of QuickOffice, a productivity program for viewing and editing Microsoft Office documents, can only view files, not edit them. A security program works only for 30 days before you must pay for it. A printing program will only print five pages before payment is required.

Bottom Line

The Thrive is a good alternative to the iPad for people who place high value on having standard ports, especially a USB port, and a removable battery. While it suffers from many of the downsides of other non-Apple tablets, it is closer to a laptop, and that will please people looking for laptop features in a tablet.

Email mossberg@wsj.com.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110713/tablet-strives-to-plug-into-laptops-port-abilities/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110414/apple-sorry-about-that-whole-shrinking-pc-market-thing-well-not-really/ http://allthingsd.com/20110414/apple-sorry-about-that-whole-shrinking-pc-market-thing-well-not-really/#comments Thu, 14 Apr 2011 12:45:42 +0000 Arik Hesseldahl http://newenterprise.allthingsd.com/?p=5071 Gartner and IDC are out with their quarterly look at the state of the PC market and the results are not pretty–that is, unless you’re Apple.

In a repeat of a trend seen last quarter, both firms report that the market shrank in the first quarter of the year. This would constitute the first market contraction in six quarters, and the first since the onset of the recession. They differ, however, on the size of that contraction: IDC pegs it at 3.2 percent since the first quarter of 2010; Gartner at 1.1 percent.

To be fair, let’s remember that the first quarter of the year is always seasonably slow for PC purchases because two things tend to happen in the fourth quarter: Consumers splurge on gifts for family and frankly for themselves too, and take advantage of crazy deals offered by retailers desperate to clear out their inventory. On the business side, some CIOs take the opportunity to use up unspent funds in their budgets, and get employees starting off the new year with a fresh new machine at their desks. However, this tendency is just as often offset by the start of a new budget year. Whichever way you slice it, the first quarter is always weak on consumer sales though a bit stronger on the enterprise side.

So what happened? The iPad 2, for one thing. “With the launch of the iPad 2 in February, more consumers either switched to buying an alternative device, or simply held back from buying PCs,” is how Mikako Kitagawa, principal analyst at Gartner, put it. “We’re investigating whether this trend is likely to have a long-term effect on the PC market.” Ya think?

Bob O’Donnell, IDC’s vice president for Clients and Displays, wasn’t quite as willing to blame the iPad: “Slower than expected commercial growth in the first quarter failed to offset the ongoing challenges in the consumer market,” he said in a statement. “While it’s tempting to blame the decline completely on the growth of media tablets, we believe other factors, including extended PC lifetimes and the lack of compelling new PC experiences, played equally significant roles.”

Jay Chou, another IDC analyst put it much more succinctly: “‘Good-enough computing’ has become a firm reality.”

The picture gets no better when you look at regional results. IDC says shipments declined in the U.S. by 10 percent. Gartner pegged it at 6 percent. It was, Gartner noted, the third consecutive quarter for year-on-year declines in U.S. notebook sales. Shipments in Europe contracted too, and Japan, which was already expected to be a weak market this quarter, has other things on its mind since the devastating earthquake and tsunami. Asia was the only bright spot, where shipments increased by 5.6 percent in IDC’s forecast and 4.1 percent in Gartner’s. China, IDC noted, failed to reach double-digit growth, and consumers in India, Gartner says, were distracted by the Cricket World Cup. Okay, then.

So how do the numbers look? Since IDC’s forecast is the most dire, I’ll start there:

The worldwide demand for PCs was 80.6 million units. Hewlett-Packard sold 15.2 million; Dell, which just made it back to second place, shipped 10.3 million; Acer 9 million; Lenovo 8.2 million; Toshiba 4.8 million; while “others” clocked 33 million. All vendors except for Lenovo saw declines. The worst decline was Acer’s, whose shipments fell nearly 16 percent. (Now we know why its CEO Gianfranco Lanci lost his job.) Lenovo, on the other hand, saw its shipments improve by more than 16 percent.

Demand in the U.S. was 16.1 million. HP led with 4.3 million, Dell 3.7 million, Toshiba 1.6 million, Apple 1.4 million and Acer 1.3 million. Unnamed others sold 3.7 million. Acer saw its shipments fall by an alarming 42 percent. Apple and Toshiba posted gains of 9.6 and 10.4 percent respectively. HP and Dell both saw declines.

Now let’s look at Gartner’s numbers (remember that each firm tracks the market a little differently):

Gartner pegged the worldwide market at 84.2 million units. It says HP sold 14.8 million, Acer 10.9 million, Dell 10 million, Lenovo 8.2 million, Toshiba 4.8 million. (Clearly there’s a difference in how they see Acer and Lenovo’s performances.)

In the U.S., Gartner estimated the market at 16.1 million units. By its reckoning, HP sold 4.2 million, Dell 3.6 million, Acer 1.8 million, Toshiba 1.7 million, Apple 1.5 million, others 3.3 million.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110414/apple-sorry-about-that-whole-shrinking-pc-market-thing-well-not-really/feed/ 21 http://allthingsd.com/20110330/verizons-lte-network-for-voice/ http://allthingsd.com/20110330/verizons-lte-network-for-voice/#comments Thu, 31 Mar 2011 01:11:53 +0000 Walter S. Mossberg http://mailbox.allthingsd.com/?p=883 Q:

I live in an area where the cellular voice service is very poor. I was going to buy the Verizon ThunderBolt LTE phone since the network map indicates I am in the LTE (4G) coverage area, so I thought my call problems would be over with. But based on your article, it sounds like my voice calls would remain the same. Do you have any insight as to when voice will move to LTE?

A:

As I noted in the column, Verizon is using its fast new LTE 4G network for data only. It still routes voice calls over its older networks, which are highly rated for voice, but work poorly for you.

International standards for voice calling over LTE are still being developed. Verizon only made its first test voice call over LTE in February. The company says it hopes to offer LTE voice calling sometime next year.

Q:

I am interested in using the iPad for photo viewing and do not wish to download photos directly from the camera. My camera uses a CF memory card. Can the iPad camera connection kit be used with this card, or might a thumb drive be used for data downloads through this additional hardware?

A:

Apple’s $29 iPad camera connection kit can handle either direct USB transfer of photos via a cable from the camera, or photo transfers from an SD memory card. To my knowledge, it isn’t compatible with the CF type of memory card.

And although it does have a USB port, Apple has limited that port to handling cameras. In my tests, it wouldn’t work with thumb drives, though a reader recently wrote me saying you can make it work with such drives, at least for photos, if you use a techie workaround—a powered USB hub. I haven’t tested this.

Q:

Can I use my Toshiba laptop to connect an iPad and an iPhone?

A:

It depends on what you mean by “connect.” If you mean somehow linking or merging the two Apple devices, the answer is no. If you mean connecting each separately to the Toshiba for syncing and backup with iTunes, the answer is yes.

Whether you are using a Windows PC or a Mac, the same copy of iTunes can be used to manage multiple iPhones, iPads and iPods, and you can have different content on each.

You can find Mossberg’s Mailbox, and my other columns at the All Things Digital website, http://walt.allthingsd.com. Email mossberg@wsj.com

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110330/verizons-lte-network-for-voice/feed/ 2 http://allthingsd.com/20110313/days-after-its-release-the-ipad-2-gets-the-teardown-treatment/ http://allthingsd.com/20110313/days-after-its-release-the-ipad-2-gets-the-teardown-treatment/#comments Sun, 13 Mar 2011 14:59:22 +0000 Arik Hesseldahl http://newenterprise.allthingsd.com/?p=3943 Part of the tradition of an Apple product release is the teardown. Usually within hours of the first sales, pictures begin to emerge from the odd people who delight in taking the new gadgets apart to see what’s going on inside. The days following Friday’s release of the iPad 2 have been no different. I’ve seen two different teardowns already.

But the teardown that Wall Street and the investment community is waiting on is the one from the market research firm IHS iSuppli, whose team spent all day Saturday in a furious effort to dissemble a 32-gigabyte iPad 2 and estimate the cost that Apple paid for every component. They gave me an exclusive early look at their findings.

The point is to form a partial picture of the gross profit margin on every unit, a figure that Apple generally keeps to itself. This information is useful to investors and analysts who then factor the findings in with other assumptions they use to predict how much of a profit Apple is going to report over the next few quarters.

The headline of iSuppli’s teardown researcher is always the estimated bill-of-materials cost, which is the sum cost that it thinks Apple has paid for all the hardware inside the iPad 2. It doesn’t take into account the cost to develop software, or other things like packaging, shipping and distribution, or manufacturing.

In this case the estimates are for the 32-gigabyte, 3G version of the iPad which sells for $729, and there are two estimates, one for the AT&T version–$326.60, and one for the Verizon Wireless version–$323.35. Some of the wireless chips used in the AT&T version are a little more expensive or require an extra part. For example, on the Verizon version, GPS is integrated with the Qualcomm-made wireless baseband chip. On the AT&T version, an extra GPS chip had to be added along with the Broadcom-made Bluteooth and Wi-Fi chips, adding an extra cost of $1.50 per unit.

The baseband wireless chips were naturally different because AT&T and Verizon use different wireless technologies. Intel, the new owner of the former wireless chip division of Infineon, supplied the main wireless chip in the AT&T version, with supporting chips coming from TriQuint Semiconductor and Skyworks for a combined cost of $18.70.

Qualcomm supplied the main wireless chip Verizon version, with supporting chips coming from Skyworks, Avago Technologies, and Murata for a combined cost of $16.35. While there had been some speculation that Apple had used a Qualcomm chip in both versions, but it turned out not to be the case.

Aside from the wireless chips, the components are otherwise identical across both versions. Both sport Apple’s A5 chip, and iSuppli says that Samsung is still manufacturing it for Apple at a cost of $14. While there had been some talk in recent weeks that Apple was moving its chip manufacturing contract to Tawain Semiconductor Manufacturing Corp, there’s no evidence that it has made such a move, at least not yet.

The most expensive component by far is the touch-sensitive display, coming at $127. ISuppli says that the LCD portion the unit they tore apart was built by LG Display, but Apple is known to use other sources for displays, including Samsung, and possibly ChiMei Innolux. The glass assembly covering the display is thought to come from TPK or WinTek. ISuppli says costs on the display are going up because manufacturing yields on LCDs have been lower. Apple is also thought to be using a more expensive glue to improve the efficiency of the process of bonding a new thinner type of Gorilla glass to the display.

Samsung supplied Apple with the NAND flash memory used in the iSuppli sample, holding on to a relationship that goes back several years to the days of the first iPod nano, though Toshiba is also known to supply Apple with flash. It is the world biggest consumer of flash memory, after all. Elpida supplied the DRAM memory. ISuppli estimates the combined cost of memory, both flash and DRAM plus a Micron-made MCP memory chip at $65.70.

Then there’s a set of components seen in the iPad 1 that remained the same in the iPad 2. STMicroelectronics supplied the gyroscope and the accelerometer, and AKM Semiconductor supplied the electronic compass. Broadcom supplied touch interface chips, while Texas Instruments supplied a touch screen driver chip. Analog Devices supplied a capacitive touch controller.

Finally there are the two cameras. ISuppli hasn’t yet named the suppliers there, though the usual candidate is Aptina, the former camera unit of Micron, though it’s possible that Apple sources them from more than one place.

ISuppli’s estimates are a lot higher than the findings of another teardown shop, UBM Techinsights. The Wall Street Journal reported that UBM’s cost estimate is about $270, but that estimate was made before it conducted its actual teardown, and didn’t change once it had.

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