MODDING: blogs

A hat tip to Andrew Seftel for spotting the Nokia 5230 on Vodafone pay-as-you-go in the UK for £99. This, as far as we know, is the first instance of a non-contract S60 5th Edition smartphone coming in at under £100, a staggering price point. And incredible value given that the 5230 is one of the Ovi Maps Free Navigation handsets. So 3.2″ display-equipped touchscreen smartphone and worldwide free navigation all for under a ton, with no contract, no obligations. What do you think?

A hat tip to Andrew Seftel for spotting the Nokia 5230 on Vodafone pay-as-you-go in the UK for £99. This, as far as we know, is the first instance of a non-contract S60 5th Edition smartphone coming in at under £100, a staggering price point. And incredible value given that the 5230 is one of the Ovi Maps Free Navigation handsets. So 3.2″ display-equipped touchscreen smartphone and worldwide free navigation all for under a ton, with no contract, no obligations. What do you think?

Just a note that Phones Show 101, out now, has an interesting interview with the CEO of Vlingo, the email/text/search voice recognition system for Symbian, talking about how it works on the likes of the Nokia N97 and the future for voice. There’s also my extended take on the hottest new competition for Nokia and Symbian, the Google Nexus One. Can Android 2.1 make up for the hardware shortcomings?

It is being reported that Intel and Micron plan to unveil a family of new 25-nanometer flash memory chips via their IM Flash Technologies joint venture early next week. This gives both Intel and Micron the upper hand and lead in NAND flash devices and products. The first 25-nm NAND device is a multi-level-cell (MLC), 8-GB device, which is said to reduce IC count by 50 percent over previous products.

At a die size of 167mm a 300mm fab should be able to manufacture just over 400 dice per wafer. This gives a manufacturing cost of about $4.00 per chip, or $0.50/GB. Compare this to a more common 45nm MLC NAND on a 300mm line which should cost about $1.75/GB. Since the price of NAND flash has been hovering around $2.00/GB for the past year, and seems poised to continue at that price through 2010, the 25nm process will give the companies a significant margin boost over their current 34nm chip whose cost we estimate at $1.00/GB.

The companies made it very clear that they do not plan to drive prices down to follow cost. Instead, we can expect for Micron and Intel to continue to charge market prices and simply pocket larger margins than can their competition.

We live in interesting times. Nokia and Symbian (in particular) are regularly savaged in the tech press, yet managed to turn in (on Thursday) a surprisingly positive set of results, with over a billion Euros profit in Q4 2009 and with their smartphone market share up (not down, as the analysts would have you believe) 5%, worldwide. Read on for my thoughts on how Nokia has managed this particular feat and on why Symbian’s market share is also not going away anytime soon - it’s all a question of RANGE.

Are you in Kuala Lumpur in early February? Or are you planning to be there? Asri al-Baker is organising the first KLSS (Kuala Lumpur Symbian Stammtisch) and would like to call all Symbian enthusiasts in Kuala Lumpur and the nearby places to attend. Full details below. Oh, and in case you were wondering, Stammtisch is apparently German for ‘regular get together’ or ‘pub meet’, and is a term you’ll start to see quite a bit in the Symbian Foundation’s activities.

Most people would hardly be surprised to hear that bans on cell phone use in cars have been ineffective on reducing accident rates. Maybe it's because most people disobey the ban as casually they do the speed limit? The difficulty in enforcement and meager punishments are likely key components as well.

As of January 2010, 19 states along with Washington, D.C., have banned texting while driving. But now the Highway Loss Data Institute (HLDI) — a project sponsored by insurance companies, of all entities — claims that despite anti-texting-while-driving laws, crash rates are not affected. Wait, what?

Standing up in front of the world’s press, or quietly letting the numbers be published and just nudging people to draw their own conclusions? In their own ways, both Apple and Nokia this week laid claim to be the “the biggest company in mobile devices.” Steve took the stage, and Olli-Pekka left it to the annual results. And they were both right. Read on.

Looks like an online e-tailer called DATEKS over in Latvia is selling the MSI Radeon HD 5450 graphics card on their website before the card has even been announced! They don't list much information other than the ATI Radeon HD 5450 features 1024 MB of GDDR5-1600 memory, a clock speed of 650 MHz and a model number of R5450-MD1GH. They do have a picture for you to look at though and if you look close you can see that the card features a DVI, VGA and what looks like a DisplayPort or HDMI connection. If that is DisplayPort that means this card can support ATI Eyefinity.

Information Listed on the DATEKS website for this model: MSI Radeon HD5450, 1GB, 64Bit, HD 5450, 1024 MB, 650 MHz, GDDR5-1600, 64 bit

The Diamond Radeon HD 5750, with the configuration of 720 stream processors and 1GB of GDDR5 memory offers users access to the same new generation technology, and full DirectX 11 support found on the more expensive models at a lower price point. The Diamond Radeon HD 5750 is special as comes overclocked from the factory and features an Arctic Cooling GPU cooler in order to reduce noise and temperatures.

Today we have the opportunity to look at the Diamond Radeon HD5750 OC video card. There are a few features about this card that break away from the reference design. The first thing I noticed when looking at the card is that it uses a bright red PCB. Possibly the most important feature, though, is the speed of the card. It comes overclocked from the factory. It also uses a third party cooler in order to reduce noise and temperatures.