Revolutionary: Fusion-io SAN Drive, The Power of SAN on PCIe

This is definitely worth mentioning.

DEMOfall '07 housed one of the most revolutionary announcements that I have seen in a long time that could very well change the way we all store our information in the very near future. Fusion-io CEO David Flinn demonstrated their company's wave-of-the-future SAN drive, the 'ioDrive' which reportedly combines hundreds of gigabytes of flash storage on a small computer card that can fit in your shirt pocket. The device will connect through PCIe, and will have capacities up to 640GB!!! And that's only the start, the company is hoping to roll out a 1.2TB card in the not-too-distant future.

The impressive part to me is the data transfer rates. Flynn stated that the card has 160 parallel pipelines that can read data at 800 megabytes per second and write at 600 MB/sec.
Which in marketing terms means the ioDrive can perform "nearly a thousand times faster than any existing disk drive," and it can reportedly be integrated into existing data centers or workstations without any alterations to your infrastructure. This could play a huge role down the road in slimmer portable devices whose size limitations have had to do with the need for an internal Hard Drive.

Any guesses when Apple will jump on the bandwagon? I'd love to have some of these hooked up to a MacPro!

The devices will start showing up on the market next Quarter for professional Servers at $30 per GB, starting at 40 and 80GB, with 320 and 640GB models rolling out some time next year. Fusion also hopes to develop a 1.2TB version by the end of 2008.

Videos of the unveiling can be seen here.

[via TG Daily]

Cybook Gen3 eBook Reader

And so continues my fascination with Electronic Ink / Paper.

The French based company Bookeen has developed the Cybook Gen3, an amazing E-Book reader that uses Electronic Ink / Electronic Paper tehcnology. The reader was originally set to be released this month, but the company announced today that the released date has been pushed back until sometime next month. But the good news is that when it does come out, it will support the PDF format which is pretty cool in my opinion.

This past Tuesday, the company posted a YouTube video showing the reader in action. Just watching the video blows me away, the contrast looks unbelievable, and I love how small it is. I guess when I see the pictures, I just imagine it being more like the size of a Tablet PC, and not so much the size of my iPhone.

I really want these eInk eBook readers to come my way because I want one, plain and simple, I want one!

My iPhone Almost Didn't Make It Through The 1.1.1 Update

Earlier this week when I read Apple's notice about unlocked and hacked iPhones possibly rendering iPhones inoperable, I decided to go ahead and remove every 3rd party application from my phone by doing a software restore before the update came out. Despite having done this, I was still very nervous about doing the update, even though I didn't really need to be... or so I thought. I started the process, and was greeted by the now familiar update window with the warning that the update might make iPhones permanently inoperable.

The download was bigger than I was expecting at 152.3MB, and took about 4 minutes to download, and did so seamlessly.



After downloading and extracting the update, it went through the normal steps of extracting the update, and then a message popped up that said "Preparing iPhone For Software Update". All good, right? My iPhone was in its state of suspended animation waiting for the new software to start loading onto it, and then I got a message that I did not want to see:


With my iPhone still in its catatonic state, I did my best not to panic. I unplugged my phone, and tried to turn it on and got the Restore Mode icon on my screen:



I began to pray at this point that connecting to iTunes would actually work, and that my iPhone wasn't broken. The only thing I could think to do was to plug it back in. When I did, I got this warning:

I walked through the steps to recover my phone, and it worked. Tragedy avoided. I was afraid I was going to have to risk voiding my warranty. And while I know that might sound ignorant, when it's your phone at stake, see what goes through your head.

TV On The Go

For as long as I can remember, I have had a fascination with the idea of "Portable TV". From playing with my Dad's black & white hand-held TV to the time when my parents got me my first hand-held Casio TV when I was around 12, I would persistently attempt to pick up any and every TV station that I could, despite our remote location out in the middle-of-nowhere East Texas.

Then, as time passed my fascinations seemed to pass from new laptops that could play DVDs to portable DVD players, all of which kind of pushed the idea of hand-held TVs into the "Old School" area of my mind. And then, a few years back I had my first run-in with an Archos portable media player... my childhood fascinations came back with a fury. Within months, everyone was announcing their portable media devices: Cell Phones with video, iPod Video, PDAs with video, Smart Phones with Video... and the list went on. It seemed that every corner I turned, there was a new multi-media device popping up capable of not only playing your TV shows, but your movies as well! But even in the midst of all of this, I remember asking myself, "Why would anyone want to watch TV on their Cell Phone?" It never even dawned on me that I had always secretly wanted was finally here!

My fascination with this was sparked again when I learned about two new ways not only to get TV shows and movies on the go, but actual live TV. The first comes from Sony with their A910 Walkman with TV recording. [Thanks to MacNN] It's the third model in Sony's video-capable Walkman line, and comes with a built-in 1Seg tuner and an electronic programming guide allowing it to not only receive, but also play digital over-the-air broadcast TV on its 2.4-inch LCD and encode the shows on the go as permanent copies stored in the device's internal memory. Sony reports that up to 100 hours of footage can be saved on a 16GB player. The player also has a built-in noise canceling feature which reportedly eliminates background sound while watching TV or listening to music. It looks like the new Walkman will come in three sizes: 4GB, 8GB and 16GB, and is capable of playing all the pre-recorded formats of Sony's latest players, including H.264 and MPEG-4 video as well as AAC, MP3 and WMA music. On the downside, it's only going to be available in Japan with the possiblity of a U.S. release sometime next year. The question will be whether or not the 1Seg will be included when it comes to our side of the world. It would be unfortunate if it was removed.

The second device that caught my attention is announcement of a new Application for BlackBerry phones. [Thanks toSlingPlayer Mobile Engadget] There's no timetable on when this will be released, but I love the idea of being able to control and watch my home TV while I'm out and about. SlingPlayer Mobile also supports Palm and both the Smartphone and Pocket PC versions of Windows Mobile.

My hopes are high, and fingers crossed for a capability like this for my iPhone. While watching my TV shows and movies on my phone is cool, I would love the ability to watch live. If for no other reason, just to be able to do it.

French Newspaper to Debut Electronic Newspaper

I have this never ending obsession with Electronic Ink and E-Paper.

A press release on their site dated September 12, 2007 states that French Newspaper Les Echos, the French leading newspaper in electronic newspaper is partnering with Dutch based iRex Technologies to release the Les Echos Electronic Paper Edition on the iRex iLiad available for French readers sometime this month.

Two different editions will be offered to readers, and will be updated every hour from 7am - 9pm on Monday - Friday via a WiFi delivery system that will allow updates without the need to connect to a PC.

Pilippe Jannet of Les Echos states, "This will introduce a new era of newspaper publishing. It is a tradition of Les Echos to be the first to bring innovative solutions to their readers. With the subscription our readers will get an attractive offer of a year subscription of Les Echos with multiple editions, two free e-paper editions (one dedicated to Personal Finance information and one to Stock Exchange information), an extra AFP edition, some free e-books and the electronic paper device at a great bargain."

As to when newspapers in the United States will begin offering a service similar to this is yet unknown, but I hope it's not too far down the road.

For more info about the e-paper offer at Les Echos, you can visit: http://www.lesechos.fr/epaper/inscription.htm, or just read the press release

RUMOR: The Return Of The Newton?

Kasper Jade over at AppleInsider.com is reporting a possible return of the Newton to Apple's line of Multi-Touch products, something I highly speculate but am not completely putting off at this time. Who knows what Apple has up their sleeve?

According to the site, "the mutil-touch PDA has been described by sources as an ultra-thin "slate" akin to the iPhone, about 1.5 times the size and sporting an approximate 720x480 high-resolution display that comprises almost the entire surface of the unit. The device is further believed to leverage multi-touch concepts which have yet to gain widespread adoption in Apple's existing multi-touch products -- the iPhone and iPod touch -- like drag-and-drop and copy-and-paste.

What might the device look like? Here's an artist's rendition of the rumored PDA:


Part of the rumor is fueled by a comment made by Steve Jobs back in 2004 at the Wall Street Journal's D: All Things Digital conference where in a Q&A he apparently made reference to an Apple PDA that the company had decided not to ship.

I guess only time will be the tell on this one, but as for me I'm hoping that the same features rumored to be on this new "PDA" will also come in future updates to my iPhone.

BIZARRE: Steve Jobs Hired OJ Simpson as a Hitman?

I found this last night, and think it's absolutely hilarious! Apparently some nut-case inmate in South Carolina is accusing Apple CEO Steve Jobs of hiring OJ Simpson as a "hitman" for the past 20 years, along with a hoard of other offenses. Here's a link to the article on AppleInsider.com

What will they come up with next?