July 4th, 2011
If you're looking for a Windows Phone 7 handset that's almost the size of a tablet then HTC has you covered. Look no further than the freshly leaked HTC Eternity, sporting a 4.7-inch screen and a 1.5GHz CPU. Well, actually, you might just want to hold off, as even though it seems great at first, you want to dig a little bit deeper into the specifications before you make a purchasing decision. If the leaked details prove to be the final spec, then the Eternity isn't exactly going to last an eternity, as it has a last-gen single core Qualcomm MSM8255 Snapdragon SoC at its core, albeit at the fastest speed we've seen this chip running at without being overclocked. Furthermore the 4.7-inch SLCD screen is only sporting WVGA or 800x480 resolution, which is hardly that impressive today with plenty of qHD (960x540) devices in the market.
Published by: VR-Zone
Source: HTCInside
Apple's Thunderbolt cable torn asunder, didn't contain magic Source: http://vr-zone.com/articles/apple-s-thunderbolt-cable-tornasunder-didn-t-contain-magic/12817.html July 4th, 2011
What can we say, we adore iFixit and its teardowns of all things, well, electronic. However, we were a little bit surprised that they decided to tear open a cable, as we wouldn't have thought there was much to a cable. How wrong we were, as it seems like Apple's Thunderbolt cables are quite special after all, although there was no trace of magic or unicorns. What can we say, we adore iFixit and its teardowns of all things, well, electronic. However, we were a little bit surprised that they decided to tear open a cable, as we wouldn't have thought there was much to a cable. How wrong we were, as it seems like Apple's Thunderbolt cables are quite special after all, although there was no trace of magic or unicorns.
On a more positive note, HTC has finally figured out that its customers want plenty of built in storage space and the Eternity packs 16GB of eMMC memory. The 512MB of RAM should be sufficient as well, although it's not quite as good as some of HTC's other devices. It also has an 8Megapixel camera with auto focusing and a pair of LED lights that is capable of shooting 720p video. There's also a front facing camera for video calls. Other features include 802.11b/g/n Wi-Fi, DLNA support, Bluetooth 2.1+EDR, aGPS, a digital compass, an FM radio, dual microphones and SRS surround sound. At nearly 131x71x10mm this is a chunky phone and even more so when you take into consideration that it weighs in at 170g. This is a WDCMDA/HSPA handset and it supports HSDPA speeds of up to 14.4Mbit/s and HSUPA speeds of up to 5.76Mbit/s. Part of the reason for the aging hardware is actually the OS, as Windows Phone 7 only runs on fairly limited hardware at the moment and until Microsoft decides to offer support for something better, we're going to be stuck with fairly old Snapdragon processors from Qualcomm. The same goes for the screen resolution, as for now the OS doesn't support qHD displays. That said, HTC has done its best to offer a highly specced handset based on the software limitations. There was no mention at the source of when the HTC Eternity would launch or how much it'll cost.
At US$49.99 a pop, Thunderbolt cables aren't cheap and you'd be forgiven for thinking it's just a mini DisplayPort cable, as that's what we thought at first. It turns out that things are a little bit more complicated than that, as 10Gbit/s bi-directional data transfers over a handful of copper wires isn't done as easily as you'd think. In fact, Apple's Thunderbolt cables are active cables stuffed full of little chips.
As such the Thunderbolt cables contain among other things a pair of Gennum GN2033 active-cable transceivers, one in each end. These transceivers have been designed to cope hand the high data speeds over what the company call “thingauge” cables, although the actual wires insdie the cables are extremely thin. The transceivers are there to maintain lowlatency and prevent transmission errors. One potential downside here – beyond cost – is that the cable length is hampered and Gennum mentions 2-5 meters as the limitation. That said, as you can (hopefully) daisy-chain Thunderbolt devices, this shouldn't be an issue for most users of the interface. Now we just have to wait and see what the various Thunderbolt devices will cost and of course see if
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