Linkapalooza – Tech

How Do You Like THEM Apples? — MacRumors.com is spreading the story that Wal-Mart is about to start selling Apple iPhones for $99. They will carry a 4GB version of the second-generation 3G iPhone, and the phone will still come with the mandatory 2-year contract with AT&T Wireless. When the iPhone first came out in 2007, there was a 4GB version, but it was discontinued with the feature bump in the 3G models. The model Wal-Mart will have is NOT the original 4GB version, but rather the current version with less storage. Speaking as someone who owns and loves a 4GB iPod Touch, I would be plenty happy with 4 gigs on an iPhone, and the $99 price tag is going to make this a serious consideration for me, even if I do have to sign up with AT&T Wireless. MacRumors says that they are expected to show up on the shelves immediately AFTER Christmas — so if you get some crappy Wal-Mart gift for Christmas, you can return it to the store in exchange for a shiny new iPhone.

Measure For Measure — Back in October, I mentioned to any readers who live in Eastern Massachusetts that Comcast was pushing the DOCSIS 3.0 firmware to our cable modems to increase bandwidth. There was no big public announcement from Comcast when this happened, so knowledge of it came through blogs and news reports and such. It appears that they’ve finished with the rollout, though, because late last week I got an e-mail from Comcast trumpeting the “free” increase. They’re also bringing out several tiers of service levels for people who want even more throughput. Though the DOCSIS 3.0 upgrade has been in the works for a while anyway, much of the marketing around their new services comes from the brouhaha about their other announcement earlier in the fall to impose usage caps. The basic tier has a 250GB/mo. cap, which is a very generous amount to most of their customers and only seriously impacts people engaged in very heavy BitTorrent or other P2P uses. The new tiers offer the options of paying for bigger caps. There was also some criticism that most customers have absolutely no clue how much bandwidth they use and thus would not know if they were pushing that 250GB barrier or not; Comcast did not immediately have a response, but now they are about to roll out a “bandwidth meter” that will let customers keep track of their usage. I predict that non-tech-savvy users will discover that they are using hardly anywhere near 250GB and there will be some calls for Comcast to offer even cheaper tiers with reduced bandwidth and throughput caps…or, it will be the side door through which the much-dreaded per-use billing will arrive.

Blu-Ray For Hollywood! — Despite the intense marketing and all those side-by-side comparison demos you see at electronics stores showing just how much better the video quality of a Blu-Ray disc is than a conventional DVD, AND the surrender of the HD-DVD format a few months ago, it seems like retailers are still having to twist arms to get people to buy standalone Blu-Ray players. One thing that might help player sales is the coming bump in storage capacity without sacrificing compatibility with existing players. Pioneer has publicly demoed a 16-layer, 400GB Blu-Ray disc that they expect to start shipping in 2010. The current 2-layer media “only” holds 50GB, so this is an 8x increase in storage (and a 100x increase over the original single-layer 4GB DVD). Imagine having an entire season of your favorite TV series or an entire movie series on a single disc instead of a box set. Then, in 2013, we have 1-terabyte Blu-Ray discs to look forward to. The only problem I can foresee is that by 2013 people may abandon disc players entirely for streaming downloads and set-top boxes selling on-demand services.

That’s Life — A team of Korean researchers have published their results on developing a new material for use in LiON batteries that could increase the length of time a charge lasts by 1000%. A typical Lithium-Ion battery in a laptop, for example, is good for a max of about four hours under ideal conditions. With this new technology, you might not have to recharge that battery for almost six months of continual use. The work they are doing involves using a variation of graphite using porous silicon. The pores increase the surface area in the graphite, which massively increases the number of lithium ions that can cling to the material, and also help the graphite hold up structurally for a longer time under repeated use. This technology might also become a critical innovation for electric cars, significantly extending the range of an electric vehicle on a single charge, which in turn would make it much less expensive to build networks of recharging stations.