LG unveils flexible plastic e-paper display, aims for European launch next month

LG has made no secret of its fondness for flexible e-paper, but those dreams became a reality today, with the announcement of a six-inch display that promises to “revolutionize the e-book market.” The malleable plastic display sports a resolution of 1024 x 768 and can bend at an angle of up to 40 degrees. At just 0.7 millimeters thick, it’s about one-third thinner than similarly-specced glass displays, and weighs in at 14 grams — about half the weight of its glassy competition. LG also claims that the display is super durable, as evidenced by a series of successful drop tests from a height of 1.5 meters. The plan going forward is to supply the display to ODMs in China, in the hopes of bringing final products to Europe by “the beginning of next month.” For more details, check out the full press release after the break.

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iPhone to get 4.6-inch Retina display, report says

Apple is said to have yet another product in the pipeline with a Retina display, and this time it’s an iPhone with a really big screen, according to a report from Reuters.

Apple is purportedly already placing orders with suppliers for a 4.6-inch iPhone Retina display, Reuters said today, citing a report in South Korea’s Maeil Business Newspaper. The phone is due in the second quarter, according to the report.

If accurate, that would be Apple’s third device with a Retina display. The others include the just-released 9.7-inch iPad and the 3.5-inch iPhone 4S.

The 960-by-640-pixel Retina display on the iPhone packs in 326 pixels per inch while the new iPad’s 2,048-by-1,536-pixel screen squeezes in 264 pixels per inch.

A relatively massive–for a smartphone, that is–4.6-inch glass screen would be a big step for Apple from the 3.5-inch iPhone. A larger phone may also allow Apple to include updated chips such as the A5X. That chip’s marquee feature is quad-core graphics.

Source: cnet

Windows 8 to Debut in October 2012

Microsoft will start selling Windows 8, the next major Windows OS software and installed on laptops around in October, 2012 whereas the work around to finalize the product will get finish in summer.
Microsoft has plan to launch Windows 8 on ARM based computers accompanied with Intel machines, as before the Windows 7 OS only runs over Intel integrated chips systems.

It means Windows 8 would be a versatile upcoming operating system as compare to its predecessors.

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Breakthrough Opens Door for 60TB Hard Drives

Seagate just shattered the record for storage density on hard drives by using a novel recording method to stuff 1 terabit into a square inch. That’s nearly twice the old record. Hard drives are about to get huge.

Seagate squeezed all of that data into that tiny space by using “heat-assisted magnetic recording” instead of perpendicular recording to write data to disk. ExtremeTech reports:

HAMR, which was originally demonstrated by Fujitsu in 2006, adds a laser to the hard drive head. The head seeks as normal, but whenever it wants to write data the laser turns on. Reading data is done in the conventional way. Just so you understand how small the magnetic bits are in a HAMR drive, one terabit per square inch equates to two million bits per linear inch; in other words, each site is just 12.7 nanometers long – or about a dozen atoms.

In the short term the technology will result in new 6TB 3.5-inch desktop drives and 2TB 2.5-inch laptop drives. Currently the largest capacity drives are 1TB and 3TB respectively for laptops and desktops. That’s already an impressive boost in capacity.

In theory, though, HAMR should allow hard drives to write up to 10TB per square inch, which means that in the future you could potentially cram about 60TB onto a 3.5-inch drive. [Seagate via ExtremeTech]

Apple Quantifies Their iPad “Record Weekend”: 3 Million Sold In 3 Days

Earlier today, AT&T announced record sales and activation numbers for the new iPad. During the Apple dividend/buyback call, Apple CEO Tim Cook spoke of a “record weekend” for the new iPad. Unfortunately, neither had actual numbers to share. And that was odd since normally when Apple has a new record number to crow about, crow they do. This was more of an Amazon maneuver where “records” are set by products selling 4x of another unstated number.

Turns out Tim Cook just didn’t want to spoil the surprise. Apple has just issued a release with their actual sales numbers for the first weekend of the new iPad. And the numbers are big. Very big. Three million iPads sold in the first three days big.

So how does that stack up to the previous versions of the iPad? Well, Apple didn’t officially announce first weekend sales for the iPad 2, likely because they were very constrained. Analyst estimates pegged the number sold somewhere between 500,000 to somewhere just north of 1 million. So even using the bullish numbers, this iPad launch was roughly 3x as large as the launch last year.

Two years ago, Apple sold 300,000 iPads on the first day of sales. Again, the pace here seems to be about 3x that. For comparisons sake, Apple sold 4 million units of the iPhone 4S in its first weekend late last year.

Over the weekend, a few analysts were jumping over one another to be the first to predict timid sales of the new iPad. Those analysts, once again, now look like huge assclowns.

The quote part of the release below:

“The new iPad is a blockbuster with three million sold―the strongest iPad launch yet,” said Philip Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of Worldwide Marketing. “Customers are loving the incredible new features of iPad, including the stunning Retina display, and we can’t wait to get it into the hands of even more customers around the world this Friday.”

Source: techcrunch

PSA: Apple offering up to $320 if you trade in your iPad 2 in reuse and recycling program

Eyeing the iPad 3, but have yet to take the pre-order plunge? Per The Next Web, your patience is about to be rewarded as Apple’s updated its Reuse and Recycling program, which means owners of iPad 2s in “good condition” can sling them back to their maker in exchange for an Apple Store gift card. How much the mothership will subsequently send back naturally varies on what iPad 2 you’ve got — ranging anywhere from $205 for the base 16GB WiFi model, all the way to $320 for the most capacious 64GB WiFi + 3G variant. Or you could try your luck with similar programs such as eBay’s Instant Sale or the one from Cupertino’s tablet rival to the north. And would you look at that, we’ve even gone ahead and put links to all three just below.

Source: The Next Web

Western Digital MyBook Thunderbolt Duo is available now starting at $600

Back at Macworld, we laid our peepers on Western Digital’s MyBook Thunderbolt Duo and were able to take a demo setup for a quick spin. Now, the dual-wielding external HDDs are officially on the market. You can snag 4TB (2x 2TB) and 6TB (2x 3TB) versions of this “über-fast” MyBook for $599 and $699, respectively. Don’t forget: you can daisy chain up to six of these bad boys via the dual Thunderbolt ports on the kit’s backside (if you have quite the piggy bank, of course) — just like the four-unit set we encountered sporting 700MB/sec read and 500MB/sec write speeds in RAID 0. WD also says the storage devices are Time Machine compatible as soon as you can unpack ‘em. If you’re anxious to grab one of your own, hit the source link below to part with your funds. And for a quick refresher, take a gander at the gallery below.

Source: Western Digital

Apple iPad 3 Specifications, and Price

Apple has announced iPad 3, the New iPad at iPad media event at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco. In following you can find the iPad 3 specifications, iPad 3 prices, and preorders information.
iPad 3 Specifications

• A5X processor
• Retina display, 2048 x 1536 resolution
• 44% greater saturation
• iSight 5 megapixel camera, with 1080p video recording
• HSPA+, LTE support
• Battery life 10 hours
• 3G, 4G, LTE

iPad 3 Price

• 16GB $499
• 32GB $599
• 64GB $699
• 16GB$629 (4G)
• 32GB $729 (4G)
• 64GB $829 (4G)

iPad 3 preorders will start today.

iPad 3 Launch Photos

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Windows 8 Consumer Preview hits 1 million downloads in one day

Microsoft’s Windows 8 Consumer Preview software was downloaded 1 million times in the first 24 hours. (Microsoft Corp. / Twitter Inc. / March 1, 2012)

Microsoft’s Windows 8 Consumer Preview, in its first 24 hours after being released, was downloaded 1 million times.

Not too bad for an operating system still in beta, not finished and not ready for a consumer retail shelf. But then again, the software was made available as a free download.

The Windows 8 development team announced the massive number on Twitter on Thursday in a tweet that said, simply, “One day later … one million downloads of the consumer preview.”

The Consumer Preview release, like the Developer Preview released in September, is a step toward bringing Windows 8 and its touch-compatible user interface to tablets, laptops and desktops later this year.

Microsoft is releasing the software partly to get developers to start using the new operating system and build apps that work on touch-centric devices, as well as with the traditional keyboard, mouse and trackpad.

But while developers are no doubt a focal point for Microsoft, anyone can download the new software for free — app builder or not.

Samsung Galaxy S III To Launch In April?

While not launching the next Samsung flagship at MWC in Barcelona was probably the right choice for Samsung, that doesn’t change the fact that we’re itching with anticipation over when the Galaxy S III will show its pretty little edge-to-edge face.

We know most of the specs (well, rumored ones at least), which means we know we’ll see a 4.8-inch Super AMOLED Plus display, a quad-core Samsung Exynos CPU running at 1.5GHz, and a little 4G LTE icon. What we don’t know, however, is when we’ll see any of this.

But reports are now leaking out of Korea, citing Samsung’s global marketing and advertising agency Cheil Worldwide, claiming that the phone we hate to wait for should show up in April. Things don’t get any more specific than that unfortunately, but this still gives us plenty to work with.

For one thing, we already knew that launch date rumors were circling around the March/April time frame. Secondly, Samsung itself confirmed that the phone would arrive “before Summer,” which leads us to believe that narrowing the launch period down to April seems correct.

We’ve also heard that the S III will launch simultaneously in over 50 major markets, rather than seeing an incremental roll-out like the S II. This means that whatever launch date is given will likely apply to us in the States, instead of Samsung’s home team getting early access.

Source: techcrunch