Mini Amilo on the way.

With all the hype around the Ultra Mobile sector it’s no surprise that every man and his rusty dog is jumping on the band wagon. UMPC’s sales are predicted to eclipse those of laptops and PC’s combind by 2011 - that’s a whole lot of hardware.

So, into the fray steps Fujitsu Siemens Computers with a mini Amilo offering. The new device will be unveiled at the IFA consumer electronics show in Berlin later this month.

The mini Amilo will be powered by Intel’s Atom processor and run Windows XP (I don’t which version yet but hopefully not Home Edition). Prices of about £300 are being touted so it should easily be within the budget of most buyers. Users will be able to choose a number of differently coloured clip-on casings - a pretty crap idea if you ask me but in reality feature has been added to keep prices down.

More details will be disclosed at IFA.

There’ll be some info available over here at this UMPC news site.

Popularity: 10% [?]

Monster rising from the depths!

About 6 years ago I used to get excited about 2Gb hard disks. Talk about the dark ages! Seagate have announced a beast of a hard disk -  the Barrcuda 7200 1.5Tb, aimed at the desktop market.

The 1.5TB capacity Barracuda 7200.11 drive has four platters and uses a Sata 3Gbps interface with a sustained data rate of up to 120MBps. The 3.5-inch drive is also offered in capacities of 1TB, 750GB, 640GB, 500GB, 320GB and 160GB with cache options of 32MB and 16MB.

Expect to this beast ripping up the tarmac sometime next month.

Popularity: 12% [?]

…hardware market to defy the economy.

I said it yesterday and now Gartner have confirmed it (I feel really good when things like this happen).

The predictions came out of the Gartner IT Hardware Insights forum, which was held at the company’s UK headquarters in Egham, Surrey.

Senior research analyst Errol Rasit said the period from 2008 to 2009 will be marked by a split in the market for hardware. “At the high end and the very low end, we have two very large groups who are spending,” he said. Linux-based systems are a beneficiary of this trend, thanks to the move away from high-end Unix systems to x86-based systems.

It looks like IBM are going to benefit as well. There is renewed interest in the zSeries mainframe as companies seek to achieve economies of scale through the purchase of larger systems. That said, the server market is still dominated by Sun which is good news. I’m a huge Open Source fan and Sun are the number one contributors which makes me very happy.

Popularity: 11% [?]

Trailing the US by a long chalk!

Same old story; the US leads the way in yet another area. The business world is being driven by an information explosion which would have easily swamped traditional methods of computing. The virtualised world provided companies with the ability to side step issues associated with power requirements, physical space and virtualised storage. But the uptake in Europe is slow.

Recent independent surveys conducted in both the United States and Europe indicate that the majority of businesses surveyed in bothregions believe that their existing storage solutions will only be able to scale for the next one to two years.

It is widely recognised that storage virtualisation is the best way to provide a alleviate many current but only 27% of European  respondents are actually implementing
storage virtualisation today as compared with 35% in the US.

73% of US respondents reported that they currently operate a virtualised server environment, and 67% answered that they are considering deploying virtualised storage in their data centres.

In the US, 45% of businesses surveyed stated that they would realise
operational cost savings between 20-40%, which is the main driver of
storage adoption. In Europe that figure was near identical on 48%.

Other significant results from the survey include:

• 59% of respondents believe that at the current growth rate, their existing storage solution will be able to scale for only one totwo years; way ahead of the European market, which was on 40%

• Half of US respondents believe that simplifying management is the most important consideration when choosing a storage virtualisationsolution. In Europe the figure was far higher on 60% of the sample.

• 45% of US respondents consider 20-40% operational cost savings to be the number one motivation to switch from their current file storage solution to virtualised storage. In Europe the figure was comparable at 48%.

I guess it’s time for European countries to get their act in order; we wouldn’t to fall behind the US, would we?

Popularity: 11% [?]

Healthy sales this year.

I freely admit to liking new toys. Admittedly, my Sharp Zaurus is getting on but it’s one thing that I’m loathe to get rid of but my desktops are regularly replaced (let me just add that my old PC’s are recycled). So are yours according to a report by iSuppli.

The research shows global PC sales have been increasing at a steady rate - growing by 12.1 per cent over the last year. The significant point here is this: the figure is identical to the first quarter growth rates recorded over the last five years. This suggests that, regardless of the world economic state, home users and businesses feel the need to keep up with the latest tech (or at least have half a chance of supporting Vista the resource hog).

HP headed up the sales league with more than 13 million PC shipments, a 23% increase and 18.9 per cent of the total market. The success of HP’s notebook lines and a strong sales channel is credited as a significant factor in the companies rising sales figures.

Dell was second on the list with a 20% growth over last year. The company shipped more than ten million PCs attaining a 15.4% share of the market.

Acer, Lenovo and Toshiba rounded out the top five, posting market shares of 9.7 per cent, 6.9 per cent and 4.4 per cent, respectively.

Analysts are rather surprised by the figures, having expected the numbers to be far lower on the basis of the flagging world economie - then again, we’re only just starting to feel the effects now so let’s see what the future holds.

Popularity: 11% [?]

MS Hyper-V gets official launch

Microsofts answer to VMWare, Hyper-V, has been launched 6 weeks ahead of schedule. The technology is expected to appeal to small businesses who can’t afford, or don’t need, the capabilities offered by VMWare.

The software will be available free to licensed user of Windows 2008 or as a standalone product which will be priced at $28 - that’s a huge price saving over VMWare. But be aware, Hyper-V is nowhere near as advanced as the VMWare software - Hyper-V is probably not the software of choice for mission critical applications.

Popularity: 11% [?]

About bloody time!

Windows users, businesses in particular, having been banging the desk for some time now over Microsofts plans to end-of-life XP. It looks like the Redmond giant has finally taken the ear plugs out!

Earlier this month we reported that Microsoft would continue to allow the sale XP on ULCPC’s. Microsoft has now sent a letter to customers stating that critical support for XP will be extended until 2014. A full three years longer than usually seen.

OEM will be allow to supply preloaded XP until 2009.

Why the change of heart? It’s all about Vista. The bottom line is that many users aren’t happy with the latest incarnation of Windows. In particular, many businesses are deferring Operating System upgrades until the launch of Windows 7 in 2010 citing issues such as hardware support and the Vista knack of hogging resources.

Now Microsoft needs to make sure that they get the next release right

Popularity: 10% [?]

Sub-notebooks galore.

In an apparent attempt to boost flaggins sales Acer has announced the launch of its ‘netbook’. Basically, the Ultra Mobile PC has been designed to compete with the Eee PC and HP2133 in a market that is reported to become the next big thing in hardware sales.

The Aspire One is a Linux based device offering WiFi and an 8Gb Solid State Disk - not great storage features but likely an attempt to keep the price low. WiMax and 3G models are expected to follow shortly after the initial launch.

The Aspire One should make its debut on 10th July 2008. Prices range from £199 for the Linux variant, featuring  an 8Gb SSD, to £249 for the Windows XP model with an 80Gb platter disk. Hmm, I can’t wait to try this out when it hits the market.

Popularity: 12% [?]

Server hardware on steroids.

The latest additions to Sun’s range of64-bit and x86 servers has been announced. The Sun Fire and Sun Blade will be powered by AMD Opteron quad-core processors. And you get a choice of OS: Solaris 10, OpenSolaris, Linux AND Windows. Ok, nothing new on the MS announcement but it’s good to see Sun catering for all. Maybe some other companies should take a leaf out of Sun’s book.

The new x64 systems with quad-core AMD Opteron processors should offer increased performance, scalability and energy efficiency. All this adds up to - more value…theoretically. I haven’t seen the prices yet. That said, there are indications that consumers are already more than happy with Sun’s offerings with statistics showing that Opteron-based Sun Fire servers has been deployed by more than 12,000 customers at over 31,000 locations.

The quad-care Opteron Sun Fire X2200 M2, Sun Fire X4100 M2, Sun Fire X4140, Sun Fire X4200 M2, Sun Fire X4240 and Sun Fire X4440 servers are available now.

The quad-core Opteron Sun Fire X4600 M2 and Sun Blade X8440 servers are expected by the end of the quarter.

Popularity: 14% [?]

The word according to PC Tools.

Yes, you read it right. It looks like Vista is more susceptible to malware than it’s younger version, Windows 2000.  Not good news for Microsoft.

Using ThreatFire security service, PC Tools found that Vista lets through 639 threats per 1,000 compared to 586 for Windows 2000. Windows 2003 comes in even lower with 487 but XP does not fair well: 1,021 - I’m not sure how that works based on a figure of 1,000 analysed threats! Working on those figures, 64% of the Vista installation base is infected and 100% of XP - can’t be right, I’m clean (I think).

Microsoft bites back.

What else would you expect? According to a spokesman from MS, statistics from the Malicious Software Removal Tool show the figures to be far lower - but didn’t give any figures. MSRT ran on around 400 million Windows machines in November 2007 and, apparently, the figures returned do not show the same level of vulnerabilities found by PC Tools.

Just to be safe, I’m going to fire up my Ubuntu laptop.

Popularity: 16% [?]