Toshiba will soon start production of 2 new interesting products which may find their way into future mobile/portable devices.

First are the new SATA SSD (Solid State Drive) drives on 1.8' and 2.5' formats. According Engadget 32, 64 and 128 GB will be available. Speed announced is read 100 MB/s while reading and 40 MB/sec writting.

With such capacity, traditional mechanical hard disk will slowly disappear from portable devices. With no moving parts, a solid state drive largely eliminates seek time, latency and other electro-mechanical delays and failures associated with a conventional hard disk drive.

The second interesting product announced by Toshiba is the so called "Super Charge ion Battery" (SCiB) which is at this stage not intended for portable devices but for industrial systems and electric vehicles.

SCiB Major Characteristics

• Safety : SCiB adopts a new negative-electrode material that offers a high level of thermal stability and a high flash point electrolyte. Its structure is resistant to internal short circuiting and thermal runaway

• Long-life cycle : Capacity loss after 3,000 cycles of rapid charge and discharge is less than 10%. SCiB batteries are able to repeat the charge-discharge cycle over 5,000 times which is equivalent to more than 10 years with a once-a-day recharge-discharge cycle.
• Rapidly rechargeable : Safety characteristics of SCiB allow recharge with a current as large as 50 amperes (A), allowing the SCiB Cell and SCiB Standard Module to recharge to 90% of full capacity in only five minutes.
• High power (practical capacity) : The SCiB has an input-output performance equivalent to that of an electric double layer capacitor.
• Temperature : Extreme temperatures supported with sufficient discharge at temperatures as low as -30°C.

SCiB batteries will first be available on the market in March 2008 with the following specifications:

• Nominal voltage  : 24VDC
• Nominal capacity : 4.2 Ah
• Size : 10×30x5 cm
• Weight : 2 kg

Perhaps these batteries will also find other field of application,  but for portable devices they will need to become lighter and slimmer..but batteries that get charges in  five minutes are definitively very attractive for mobile users. 

What do you think ?  

Sources: Engadget Toshiba 

People affected by California wildfires get and send firsthand information using micro-blogging service Twitter. Usually during emergencies, all telecommunications networks get overloaded due to huge communication flow increase in all affected areas.

2004 Tsunami taught us that when telephone landlines do not work anymore, mobile network is overloaded, short-messages (SMS) were still going through, but often with up to a hour delivery delay (better than no communication).

One of the most critical problem to solve during emergencies is how to spread information on both directions (from affected people to emergency services and from helpers to victims). In addition, affected people and their relatives are in need to get in touch.

In California, the American Red Cross, among others, have open 2 Twitters threads. One is made to push information out (e.g evacuation routes) and the 2nd one is "Safe and Well" which provides a way for affected people to register as “safe and well.” using a list of standard messages.

Concerned relatives can search the list of those who have registered themselves as “safe and well.” directly on American Red Cross website.

Among many sources: Stephenson Strategies, Wired, KPBS and Occam Razr.

A report from Burton Group suggests that new emerging standard of wireless network (WLAN / WiFi) 802.11n (Mimo) will start replacing wired Ethernet 802.3 networks within the next 2-3 years as it improves throughput and range compared to actual 802.11 b/g.

IT senior analyst Paul DeBasi goes even further and says "IT professionals should start thinking now about how they will deploy, maintain and benefit from an all-wireless LAN."

This is a joke isn't it ? Even if I'm a fervent of wireless technology, I simply cannot imagine how wireless networks will replace actual wired networks. Here are the main reasons:

• Bandwidth: With 802.11n the maximum theoretical throughput (using 2 steams) will be 248 Mbps meanwhile Ethernet 802.3an (2006) already provides 10Gbps and next IEEE study group target is 802.3ba with both 40 and 100Gbps. I don't even speak about signal attenuation releated to distance and obstacles.

• Frequency spectum 2.4 GHz & 5GHz are very narrow and number of available channels are limited. So maintaining high speed links, large number of clients without facing frequency overlaps and other electro-magnetic interferences seems very unlikely.
• Electro-smog: With 802.11n the range covered will be larger but this will have undoubtedly have a negative impact on performance and signal strength specially when using ISM 2.4 GHz spectrum in a wireless crowed environment.
• VoWLAN capacity: Several studies have been done to determine, how many simultaneous calls one AP can handle. The number of simultaneous calls is 15 before observed speech quality is lowered via increased delay. (I assume the study also get rid of telephone wires).
• A "wireless only" corporate office means that PBX system also have to rely on wireless network, otherwise it would be complete non-sense to pull wire only for telephone and use wireless connectivity for computers.

Is this report a hoax or do they, at the Burton Group, have some enlighten prophets?

Source: ZDNet
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