GoodBye 2009, Welcome 2010. In 2009, we have posted many stories and articles ranging from mainboards to graphics card, from netbooks to mobile handsets. We also attended a number of events held locally and abroad.
In 2009, we see a trend of new innovations. For the mainboards, we see companies innovating new features on board. SATA3 first appeared in the form of an upgrade card on ASRock boards, eSATA also gets powered and can be shared with USB. Gigabyte came on with USB3 add on for their motherboard series. ASUS also joined in by offering an upgrade card for it’s P7P55 series of boards. It offered a USB3 and SATA3 support for the mainboard in the form of a PCIe card. MSI has one touch button overclocking. DFI joined in the fray with a Hybrid board. These are all very innovative ideas.
In 2010, the first wave would come from the Intel H55 series of mainboards to be announced in around a week’s time. The difference between the earlier G45 is that H55 now has the graphics core integrated into the processor itself. There is also hardware decoding of Full HD putting itself in direct competition with AMD and NVIDIA’s solutions using a separate chipset.
Graphics card wise, we see a lot more action from the AMD camp. There were lots of press releases flying around but you never get to see the cards. This is especially true for the AMD Radeon HD 5870, 5890. Retailers also jack up the prices to make more profits due to shortages. On the NVIDIA camp, it seems to be quieter as they’re preparing the next wave , the Fermi. It was orginally scheduled for Nov 2009 but is later pushed back to JAN 2010. There was a piece of news from Digitimes claiming that it is again postponed for a March launch. On the other hand, Intel’s long awaited graphics card project seems to be shelved. A lot of rumours were flying around claiming the the Intel’s architecture has reached it’s peak and can’t outperform the AMD and NVIDIA. Will Intel make a come back in 2010 ? Maybe maybe not.
This year, we also see more PC manufacturers making 1 litre desktop PCs. Some are powered by the vanilla Intel 945GC with ATOM 1.6 while some chose to use the NVIDIA ION 330 to help out in the graphics department. ASRock ION330HT BD is such a small bluray powered device which is definitely worth the penny that buying a bluray player. It can function as a desktop PC while ION taking the load for decoding the H.264 1080p movies.
In the mobile front, more and more people tends to go for Android powered phones lately. Readers seemed to be anticipating the launch of Motorola Milestone (known as Droid in US). HTC on the other hand has been busy with their Android power devices and the latest Windows Mobile 6.5 HD2 which created so much fuss on the net. Nokia on the other hand has been quiet while preparing their own derivatives of Linux and consolidating their next move. Sony Ericsson has Satio but most people are waiting for the Xperia X10 instead. Samsung still concentrates on it’s Omnia series but is also opening up it’s platform known as bada. LG on the hand launched feature phone LG BL40 which surprised the market with it’s 4″ large screen with multi touch feature.
On other news, we also covered the war between the telcos with it’s price war for Apple iPhone in Singapore. For those who are not aware, the iPhone 3G/3GS only had a sole distributor carrying it for over a year before it is available on two other telcos. The two other telcos upped the offerings almost every other day and the 3 telcos starts to outdo one another in terms of price, bundled offers and total cost of ownership. The other most important developing in Pay TV is that the highly sought after EPL broadcast rights and ESPN went to Singtel mio tv. As sports programmes are now split on two different platform, cable (starhub) and iptv (singtel). There was great discontent among football lovers as they would need to subscribe to two providers and two set top boxes. In the end, it would be more expensive. Both operators started reducing prices and bundling more goodies to attract subscribers.
2009 is an exciting year and 2010 should be another year with more announcements in Jan with the NexusOne, the google phone from Google themselves. Intel’s Clarkdale is slated for Jan launch too. So stay tuned to OCWORKBENCH and Join in our forums to discuss. We are planning some give away for year 2010 too. So, join in the forum today.
For a list of our news and articles, you can go to the link below. Other news can also be found on search engines.
Articles and Reviews in year 2009