Need 16GB of RAM for your new MacBook Pro?

All the 2011 MacBook Pro models come with 4GB of 1333MHz DDR3 memory as standard, which should be fine for most applications. But if you're a power user dealing with video editing, high resolution images or the like, then shelling out an extra US$200 to bump the RAM up to 8GB can be a wise investment – and sourcing the RAM from someone other than Apple can bring the price down to almost half that.Anyone in the market for one of Apple's new Thunderbolt-equipped 2011 MacBook Pros would be forgiven for thinking the machines only support up to 8GB (2 x 4GB) of RAM since that's what's listed on the tech specs and is the maximum build-to-order option available through Apple. However online store OWC says the new 2011 MacBook Pro models can actually support up to 16GB (2 x 8GB) and is selling the 8GB sticks you'll need to make it happen. The only catch is the price, which is more than the asking price for either of the two 2011 13-inch MacBook Pro models currently available.

But if at 8GB you're still thirsting for yet more speed, then OWC is happy to oblige with a 16GB (2 x 8GB) DDR3 1333MHz Memory Upgrade Kit that sells for US$1599.99, with the high price tag attributable to the scarcity of 8GB modules. However, at this price you'd have to do a serious cost/benefit analysis and ask yourself whether you actually need what, for most users, would probably amount to a minimal speed increase. For the slightly more budget conscious OWC also sells a 12GB (8GB + 4GB) Upgrade Kit for $879.99.

Affordable, thin and light Lenovo S Series notebooks break cover

Measuring 21.9 mm (just under an inch) and weighing in at 1.8kg (less than four pounds), these systems are firmly in the thin and light category. The design is reminiscent of the company's current U410 Ultrabook and will be available in several colors including red, silver and “cotton-candy pink”.Lenovo has announced a new line of affordable notebook PCs that combine a thin and light construction with Intel's 3rd generation Core i3 and i5 processors. The IdeaPad S Series notebooks are designed to be an affordable alternative to high-end Ultrabooks, while offering more computing power and features than the lowly netbook.

The line consists of three new systems, featuring a variety of customization options. The S300 and S400 models will be powered by Intel's 3rd generation Core i3 and i5 processors, while the S405 will feature an AMD A8 quad-core APU. AMD's APU offerings are traditionally less powerful than the Intel equivalent. The A6 processor found in HP's thin and light Sleekbook system was somewhat underwhelming in the power department.

Lenovo has highlighted the systems' updated intelligent touchpads, which are reportedly designed with the Windows 8 in mind, providing improved scrolling and zooming functionality. In addition to the improved scrolling and zoom functionality, users will also get access to the company's Quick Start “instant on” feature. All S Series systems will ship with Windows 7, but will be eligible for the Windows 8 Upgrade Offer.

Storage options go up to a 1TB HDD in the S405, and 500GB for the other two models. Users can also select an optional 32GB solid state drive on the S400 and S405, a measure that will significantly improve speed boot times and the general responsiveness of the system. There's also HDMI output, stereo speakers, and up to 14 inches of full HD goodness.

The S Series systems are pegged to start at around €500 (US$625 at the time of writing), but concrete details on the internals and price tag of each model make it difficult to make an early assessment of how the systems will fare against the competition.

The notebooks are entering a somewhat crowded market space, with systems such as Asus's X501 series offering, which couple capable processors with thin and light designs for compellingly low prices.

However, the combination of affordable price point (as promised by Lenovo) and the inclusion of certain high-end features such as quad-core CPUs and full HD displays, may go some way towards setting the S Series notebooks apart from the competition

Prepare your Mac for Mountain Lion

With Mountain Lion set for a July release, Gizmag offers some tips on backing up, cleaning up and optimizing your Mac to make the upgrade process go as smoothly as can be for those wishing to adopt Apple's latest "big cat."

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The OS X upgrade process has been refined over the years and is now so simple as to only require a visit to the Mac App Store to purchase, download and install Mountain Lion. However, it's still advisable to ensure your Mac is fully updated and backed-up before upgrading an operating system, just in case.

Remember that some applications could cease to work, or become unstable, with a new iteration of OS X. The Mac App Store has sped up the process for developers who wish to update their apps, but many non-Mac App Store apps will still lag behind, so before proceeding, check out this handy compatibility table by Roaring Apps and make sure your most important apps are ready for Mountain Lion.

Backing up

Time Machine is an excellent backup utility which has shipped with Mac OS X since Leopard. However, in addition to using Time Machine, it can be beneficial to consider making a clone of one's hard drive.

By making use of a utility such as the shareware application Carbon Copy Cloner, we can copy the entire contents of our hard drive onto an external hard drive. This will give us the ability to boot from that backup and find everything as we left it if something catastrophic happens to the original data. Indeed, even if the original computer is lost, you can still boot into your external hard drive, providing you can find a similar model Mac to your own.

Carbon Copy Cloner lacks Time Machine's sheen and ease of use, but its basic cloning feature is still fairly simple to use: just navigate to the relevantdownload page and install the app, then ensure you have an empty hard drive partition to copy the data to. Once this is done, select the correct source and destination, then wait while Carbon Copy Cloner does its thing. Be warned that, if using an external USB hard drive and a lot of data, this can take some time.

Spring cleaning

There's no need to remove applications or files just because an operating system upgrade is looming. However, we often collect unwanted apps and media files over the years, so Mountain Lion's imminent release is as an opportune time to clear out any clutter.

There is already a handy storage utility built into OS X Lion and to make use of it navigate to:

About This Mac, More Info, and then click on the Storage tab.

This will bring up the above information screen, from which we can see an overview of the kind of files which reside on our hard drive and decide whether or not those four seasons of The Sopranos are really worth the extra space they take up.

Mac users tend to delete their applications by simply performing a drag-and-drop to the Trash. There's nothing at all wrong with this method but it can leave behind harmless hidden files which can, on occasion, rise to hundreds of megabytes in size. To prevent this, we can use a very lightweight, unobtrusive and free application called AppTrap which will bring up a prompt every time a user attempts to delete a file, asking if the user would like those additional hidden files to also be removed.

In addition, OS X makes use of cache files to speed up applications and over time these cache files can grow in size, taking up valuable room. There are two widely-recommended apps which help in the process of removing such cache files: Onyx and CleanMyMac. Both applications are very useful and do largely the same thing, but though Onyx is free it's perhaps a little less intuitive than its competitor.

Creating a Mountain Lion DVD or external install drive

The arrival of OS X Lion heralded a new digital-only era of operating system delivery for Apple, but not everybody is comfortable ditching an install drive and there are still several situations where it comes in useful, such as when upgrading several Macs at once or performing a clean install of OS X.

First, a disclaimer: we're getting this out to you ahead of time, and though we think it's unlikely, it's perfectly possible that Apple could change the Mountain Lion installation process so that the following instructions no longer work. That said...

Burn a Mountain Lion DVD

Begin by visiting the Mac App Store and purchasing Mountain Lion. Let Mountain Lion download but before installing the operating system, navigate to your Applications folder and right-click on Mountain Lion’s installer.

Now choose "Show Package Contents" from the right-click menu and open the folder titled "Shared Support". Within this folder there should be an image titled "InstallESD.dmg" or something very similar. This .dmg file is the Mountain Lion disc image, so copy it onto the Desktop folder and create a DVD by right-clicking the .dmg file then selecting "Burn" from the menu.

Create a Mountain Lion external install drive

If you'd prefer to create a Mountain Lion external install drive with an external hard drive or USB stick, follow the above instructions to get the .dmg image file on the Desktop and then rename the .dmg image to (without quotes) "Mountain Lion.dmg". Double click the Mountain Lion.dmg image to mount it.

Before proceeding any further, we'll need to prepare an external hard drive or USB stick with roughly 8 GB of free space. Providing this is available and plugged into the Mac, continue onward.

Open Disk Utility and select Mountain Lion.dmg file from the left hand pane. Select “Restore” from the right hand pane and ensure that the “Destination” box contains the desired hard drive or USB which is to become the install drive, and that the “Erase destination” box is ticked.

Drag the image file titled Mountain Lion.dmg over from the left pane to the “Source” box. It will now be named "Mac OS X Install ESD". Make sure everything looks correct, matching up with the screenshot above and click “Restore”.

After some minutes you should now have a Mountain Lion install drive. To boot from this drive, switch on your Mac while holding down the "alt" key, then choose it from the prompt which will then appear. Now you may install Mountain Lion normally.

Upgrading your Mac hardware

The minimum specifications which a Mac needs to meet in order to run Mountain Lion are relatively low and most Macs will either already meet those needs or else be shut out by Apple's contentious decision to cut off support to older Macs. That said, if you would like to take the opportunity of Mountain Lion’s impending launch to upgrade your Mac, here’s a couple of common-sense hardware upgrades.

RAM

Random-access memory (RAM) is the working memory which OS X makes use of in order to run several applications at once. If you’re running any resource-heavy applications such as Adobe Photoshop, you’re likely to notice an increase in performance following an upgrade.

Unfortunately, MacBook Air users are unable to upgrade, because in the bid to make the ultra-portable notebook as slim as possible, Apple soldered the Air's RAM to the motherboard, rendering it non-upgradeable. For the rest of us, however, RAM is an easy and (relatively) cheap upgrade. Crucial Memory makes it easy to choose which kind of RAM you need, though there are many other places which sell RAM too. Detailed instructions on installation can be found at the informative iFixit.

SSD

While RAM can give you a noticeable performance boost for relatively little money, a solid-state drive (SSD) will really make your Mac fly. Applications will load quicker, your Mac will boot in seconds and everything will simply feel faster overall. As opposed to classic hard drives, SSDs contain no moving parts and use Flash memory, making them silent and very fast. The cost of SSD’s has fallen significantly, but it can still be an expensive or impractical proposition if you have a lot of media to store.

There are many SSDs to choose from and your own choice will depend on personal preferences and budget, but two recommended models include the latest Crucial Memory SSD offering and the Samsung 830 Series. Installing an SSD into any Mac (besides the MacBook Air) should be a simple process and, again, iFixit has instructions for doing so.

If you’d like to copy all your existing data to an SSD then you can use Carbon Copy Cloner to clone your hard drive, then copy that data onto the new SSD. Just be sure to read Carbon Copy Cloner's help text for more information before getting started.

Five Samsung Windows 8 "Ativ" devices break cover

With Windows 8 due to be officially launched in October, Samsung has pulled back the curtain on their ATIV suite of devices based on Microsoft's OS, including two hybrid tablets, at the IFA trade show in Berlin. The Smart PC and Smart PC Pro hybrid tablet/laptops, the Tab tablet, and the S smartphone were all shown off, with the fifth, a Windows 8-flavored refresh of the Notebook Series 9, also getting some air time.

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The name ATIV apparently was derived from a reversal of vita (Spanish for life). Doing things backwards is not usually a good thing if you're a technology company, but this new series of devices certainly shows Samsung is trying to diversify and break new ground.

ATIV Smart PC and Smart PC Pro

The most intriguing of these devices for many will no doubt be the hybrids. The Smart PCs are designed to tackle the issue of being productive on a tablet without a keyboard, while still maintaining the elegance and portability of the tablet form factor. With Microsoft so focused on making Windows 8 equally at home on a desktop or tablet, these devices will be Samsung’s opportunity to show us if that will actually work.

The devices both come with a magnetically attachable keyboard, so you can swap it in or out when needed. The devices also come with the new S Pen, for jobs that finger nor key can deal with adequately.

The main differences between the two flavors are in raw processing power —vanilla is driven by a low-power Atom processor, while the Pro sports an i5 CPU for that extra grunt.

They come with 2 or 4 GB of RAM respectively, which will prove more than adequate for everyday use, while the Pro sports a full 1080p display, compared to the regular unit’s more modest 1366x768 resolution. Both come equipped with Wi-Fi and 3G/4G transceivers.

All this adds up to some physical heft, though. The Smart PCs will weigh about 1.5 kilos (3.3 pounds) when equipped with their keyboards, while shedding a little less than half that when detached. Hands on time will show us what that weight actually means in terms of use on the go.

Aside from the keyboard, perhaps the most intriguing addition is one that geeks have been clamoring for on tablets since day 1: USB ports. The Pro will sport USB 3.0 input, over and above the vanilla iteration’s 2.0 slots, with Samsung UK GM David Cusick saying the ports were there because “we think they’re important.” No doubt an ever-so-subtle dig at a certain well known hardware manufacturer.

ATIV TAB

Perhaps even more importantly, the USB ports will come on the keyboard-free ATIV Tab, a more direct, Windows 8-themed competitor to the iPad. Given the recent patent troubles, most notably with the Galaxy Tab, the arrival of the ATIV Tab is probably well timed for Samsung, at least from a business perspective.

The 10.1 inch, 570-g (20-oz) device eschews Intel’s x86 CPU architecture, instead running a 1.5-GHz dual-core ARM processor, running the RT version of Windows 8. This will likely mean battery life will be enhanced, though by how much is not yeat clear. No one has tested the device on that front yet, and Samsung ain’t talking.

The 1366x768 screen resolution (that’s 155 ppi) is the same as on the Smart PC, and isn’t a patch on the iPad’s retina display. For comparison, the smaller 7 inch Nexus 7 tablet from Asus has a 1200x800 (216 ppi) screen that looks very crisp without being amazingly sharp. The Tab’s display won’t be as defined as that.

It’s also worth noting that the device doesn’t have an inbuilt GPS, but then again, if you also have a smartphone, it's probably not going to be a problem.

Dell gets its swivel on, adds three devices to XPS range

Dell released three new additions to its XPS range at this year's IFA in Berlin: the XPS One 27 all-in-one and the XPS 10 and XPS Duo 12 laptop/tablet hybrids. Dell's Sam Burd; VP, Global Product Operations at Dell demo'd the One 27's 'Quad HD' touchscreen, saying that Dell disagrees with the idea that you "don't touch a screen this good." The swiveling mechanism of the XPS Duo 12 was the real talking point, however.

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XPS One 27 All-In-One

All-in-ones (AIO) aren't new, especially the XPS One 27. As Burd pointed out, with the release of Windows 8, this new version invites you to touch its 27-inch Wide Quad HD Display.

Dell has aimed this device at "creative professionals." While it's banking on the XPS One 27's display to draw them in it has also included Infinity Premium speakers and Waves MaxxAudio 4 audio technology with an expanded stereo field for entertainment.

XPS Duo 12 Ultrabook

The XPS Duo 12 is one of the more fun-looking laptop/tablet hybrids. Its flip hinge touchscreen display not only looks good but cries out to be flipped from laptop to tablet over and over again.

It's designed to take advantage of the forthcoming Window 8's touchscreen functionality and features a Full HD screen providing 97 percent more pixels than a standard HD display. The XPS Duo 12 has also taken into account the beating most portable devices take and is crafted from machined aluminum and carbon fiber and Corning Gorilla Glass.

XPS 10

Dell cites the Bring Your Own Device to the workplace movement as its motivation for the 10-inch XPS 10 hybrid. The ARM processor-based tablet offers the full functionality of an ultraportable laptop with a keyboard and mobile keyboard dock plus the convenience of a tablet. The keyboard completely detaches from the device when a tablet is preferred. There's nothing worse than lugging heavy powerpacks around so Dell has promised up to 20-hours of battery life. It has also designed the XPS 10 to run Windows RT.

It's all about working smarter and playing harder at this year's IFA and tablets and ultraportable devices are the ticket to the arena. Exact specs for the devices will only be released with the official launch of Microsoft's Windows 8. The three devices will be available at the end of October 2012.

Inside the iPhone 5

With anticipation for Apple's iPhone 5 (or whatever branding is ultimately used) extremely high, most of the focus has been, not surprisingly, on design and timing. But what will make the iPhone 5 tick? That's the question I asked a couple of experts. 
The upcoming phone is expected to pack Apple's latest and greatest A5 silicon, a Qualcomm 3G chip, and circuits that support a higher-resolution camera. 

  Apple's A5 chip is used in the iPad 2 and appears destined for the next version of the iPhone.

(Credit: Apple)

 

A5 chip: The Apple A5 houses the main processor--or so-called application processor--that will power the phone. The A5 (technically a system-on-a-chip or SoC) is the same chip that currently powers the iPad 2. The A5 distinguishes itself from the older A4, used in the iPhone 4, by having two processor cores (the A4 has one) and faster graphics circuits. Two cores allow the device--like the iPad 2--to multitask better than a single-core phone.
"It's liable to be the A5," said Will Strauss, president of Forward Concepts, a company that tracks the phone chip market. But Strauss expects the chip to be a variation of the A5 in the iPad 2. "It's a geometric shrink of the A5. The geometries (size of the chip) will be smaller," he said. Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) is expected to manufacture the chip, not Samsung, the longtime supplier of iPhone chips, added Strauss.
A shrink of an existing chip typically results in better performance and/or lower power consumption.
Linley Gwennap, principal analyst at The Linley Group, a chip consulting firm, agrees that it will be an A5. "Presumably, dual-core A5...I haven't heard anything different," he said in response to an e-mail query.
But getting a dual-core chip into a small device like a smartphone--as opposed to the larger iPad--means that chip must excel at effectively managing how much power it uses. "The secret is the power management. It's got dynamic power management. So, the chip can lower the [speed] depending on the workload," Strauss said.
3G or LTE? One of the burning questions about the next version of the iPhone is whether it will have LTE (Long Term Evolution), a faster broadband technology sometimes referred to as 4G. "I don't think LTE is going to be in it. That won't happen until the April announcement (of a future iPhone)," Strauss said.
Qualcomm: Which brings us to the 3G chip. "Verizon has already said it's going to be a world phone. So, it has to be able to handle WCDMA and CDMA. And, of course, that's Verizon. We've not heard anything out of AT&T. But if it's going to be the identical device, it has to be Qualcomm as far as the baseband (3G) goes," said Strauss.
"Qualcomm baseband would enable one iPhone model that works on all networks," said Gwennap.
Strauss' and Gwennap's assessments are echoed by other analysts , who have said that Qualcomm will supply the baseband chip, allowing "Apple to streamline production of the iPhone for various countries."
Camera: OmniVision is rumored to be supplying the 8-megapixel CMOS sensor that comprises the circuitry for the iPhone 5's camera. That would be a step up from the 5-megapixel camera in the iPhone 4. Sony will also supply CMOS sensors, reportedly.

Only about half of smartphone owners use phone's GPS for directions

Only 55% of U.S. smartphone owners have used their phone's GPS to help get local directions

 

 

 

Virtually all smartphones now include a built-in GPS receiver to enable location tracking, but only 55% of U.S. smartphone owners have used their phone's GPS to help get local directions or recommendations.
That's according to new research from the Pew Internet and American Life Project. Only about 35% of U.S. mobile phones are smartphones, and the survey found that overall, just 28% of U.S. adults actively take advantage of location-enabled services on their phones.
Pew examined three basic types of location-augmented activities: general location based services, such as getting maps, directions, or recommendations based on your current location; geosocial services, such as Foursquare or Gowalla, where you "check in" to a location; and social media that allow you to automatically add your location when you post a status update, such as Twitter or Facebook.
According to Pew, "Taken together, 28% of U.S. adults do at least one of these activities either online or using their mobile phones -- and many users do several of them."
Earlier Pew Research found that U.S. Hispanics are especially likely to do advanced activities with their smartphones. This new study shows that for locative services, Hispanics are both ahead of and behind this curve.
Pew found that 25% of U.S. Hispanics use geosocial services such as Foursquare -- a strong lead compared to 17% of blacks and 7% of whites. But for getting local directions and recommendations, whites were in the lead (59%), compared to 53% of blacks and 44% of Hispanics.
Social media that rely on "check-ins" such as Foursquare and Gowalla still are not hugely popular. According to Pew, only 12% of smartphone owners have used such services.
Such slow market gains may be why Facebook recently discontinued Facebook Places, a check-in service launched just last year. (Facebook users can now opt to tag status updates with their location, a feature Twitter also offers.)
Pew also found that 14% of people who use social media have set up their account to automatically include their location in their posts. Considerably more men (19%) do this than women (10%). And surprisingly, a slightly higher percentage of social media users aged 50 to 65 (16%) do this than those aged 18 to 29 (13%).
Who is most likely to automatically geotag their social media updates? Hispanics (31%), people with an annual household income of less than $30,000 (25%), and people whose education went no further than high school (23%).
I was intrigued that only 55% of U.S. smartphone owners have used their phone's GPS to help get directions (through apps like Google Maps or Bing) or recommendations (through services like Yelp).
So what about that other 45%?
Pew did not speculate, but it's odd that nearly half of people who shell out the considerable extra up-front and monthly cash that owning a smartphone requires would never use such basic locative features at all.
One partial explanation might be that most smartphones have pretty bad battery life -- so a common way for smartphone users to stretch out their power usage is to leave GPS turned off when it's not specifically needed.
For example, I typically leave my Droid Incredible's GPS off unless I'm using maps or turn-by-turn navigation. Even though I often use Yelp to get local recommendations, I find that cell phone tower triangulation (which does not require GPS) is generally sufficient to find what I'm seeking nearby.

Nexus 7 Sales Volume: Estimate Based on Supply Chain Data

How many Nexus 7 units have Google & Asus sold so far and how many do they expect to sell this year? Those are the questions everyone wants an answer to and I'm going to attempt to do just that. Digitimes recently reported that suppliers will be shipping 4 million touch (OGS) panels for the Nexus 7 in Q3 2012. Based on this, and some other data we already have, we can make an educated estimate of the Nexus 7's sales volume.

Q3 2011 Production & Sales

Production Volume

From the Digitimes report above, TPK Holding & Wintek are the suppliers for the Nexus 7's OGS panels. The two companies shipped one million units in June and 1.4 million units in July. Including the 1.4 million units in July, they have received orders for 4 million panels in Q3 2012. These figures should be equal to the number of Nexus 7 units going into production in each of those months/quarters. We also know that the initial shipment volume delivered to Google was 600,000 units in June. We also know that Google had initially estimated sales of 3 million units by the end of the year. This means that after looking at initial demand, Google & Asus may have roughly doubled their estimates and cranked up the production volume.

Using these figures with Little's Law gives us a cycle time of 2.5 weeks, i.e. it takes 2.5 weeks to produce and deliver a Nexus 7 unit to Google. Since monthly production volume stays at roughly 1-1.5 million units, production capacity is unlikely to be a constraint. Therefore, we can assume a constant cycle time and calculate the total Nexus 7 orders delivered to Google at the end of each month.

Sales Estimate

Once we have the Nexus 7 units available with Google, all we need to do is calculate the initial "sell-through rate" to get an estimate Nexus 7 sales so far. The Nexus 7 went up for sale in mid-July and the 16GB units were sold out in a week and we heard initial reports of sell outs of the 8GB version in 3 weeks. Since we know the size of the first production batch was one million units, it is a reasonable estimate for sales volume at that time to be the same. Also, since we know that Google had ordered more 8GB units (as compared to 16GB units) the "sell-through rate" would be about 2-3 weeks. In order to normalize the sell-through rate for demand fluctuations throughout the year, we can assume a conservative sell-through rate of 4 weeks throughout the forecast period, i.e. any batch of Nexus 7 units delivered to Google take about 4 weeks to be sold (either online or to stores). 

Based on this, we can derive the following sales estimate for Q3 2012: