If one is being honest about things, Motorola Mobility’s Xoom tablet has to be called a flop. It didn’t have to be this way, of course. When Xoom debuted last January it made a big splash, even taking “Best of CES” at CES 2011. Unfortunately, Motorola Mobility failed to grasp the realities of the market and when it released Xoom in stores in February with an absurd $799.00 price tag for the Xoom 3G (over Rm2,000 by Maxis), it was utterly trounced by iPad 2.

By the end of Q2, iPad 2 had sold more than 9 million copies to Xoom’s 450,000, likely the leading cause of Xoom’s $200.00 price drop in July 2011. This brought it more in line with iPad, but given Apple’s market dominance, it didn’t do much to reverse flagging sales.

It looks like Motorola Mobility isn’t giving up, and production on the “fun” and “portable” smaller-screen tablet that CEO Sanjay Jha spoke on last February does indeed appear to be continuing apace. This Is My Next got their hands on photo and video proof of a new Motorola tablet and took a very detailed look at the as-yet unknown quantity.

The device appears to have what looks like an 8-inch (the original Motorola Xoom is a 10-inch tablet by the way), 16:9 ratio screen and both micro-USB and micro-HDMI ports. Literally nothing else can be factually stated, but one can speculate that it will run Honeycomb and, with Google’s announcement last month that they plan to buy Motorola Mobility for 12 billion, this might become Google’s attempt at an iPad killer.

Naturally, the overwhelming success of Google Buzz and Google Plus makes this a solid plan.

According to the ACSI, Apple scored 87 points, ahead of HP with a result of 78, Dell with 77, Acer also with 77 and Compaq with 75. All other manufacturers averaged 77. Apple holds the highest score on record for the eighth consecutive year.

“In the eight years that Apple has led the PC industry in customer satisfaction, its stock price has increased by 2300%,” remarks Claes Fornell, founder of the ACSI and author of The Satisfied Customer: Winners and Losers in the Battle for Buyer Preference. “Apple’s winning combination of innovation and product diversification—including spinning off technologies into entirely new directions—has kept the company consistently at the leading edge.”

Only one other PC vendor was able to hit a score in the eighties besides Apple – HP in 1995. Thanks to Apple, the average satisfactions core for the PC market has been increasing. The industry hit a low of 69 in 2001 and has been improving in every year since then.

SOURCE via ACSI

OCZ has announced the release of its new Synapse Cache 2.5″ SATA 6 GB/s SSDs designed specifically for SSD/HDD hybrid storage. The new Synapse SSDs are optimized for caching applications. It uses the Dataplex caching software to dynamically manage the Synapse SSD in conjunction with standard hard disk drives to provide users with SSD-level performance across the entire capacity of the HDDs. The SATA 6.0 Gb/s 2.5-inch utilizes SandForce 2281 MLC NAND flash memory chips. The drive comes in capacities of 60 GB and 128 GB with a MTBF of 2 million hours and three-year warranty.

As part of its Product Data Sheet, OCZ shows the benefit of the Synapse SSD drive on three runs of PC Mark Vantage – HDD Test Suite. You can see from the below chart, the HDD only runs at around 6,000 for the Overall Score on HDD Test Suite. The initial use of the Synapse jumps the HDD up to 8,000 on the Overall Score but once the second test is run, the SSD/HDD hybrid storage jumps to around 40,000 on the Overall Score and maintains its performance. This combination creates an environment where the most frequently used “hot” data stays on the faster SSD, while the “cold” data remains on the larger capacity HDD.

“The industry has shown that it craves the performance advantages that SSDs provide, however, many users still value the high capacities associated with HDDs,” said Tobias Brinkmann, Director of Product Management, OCZ Technology Group. “We see the Synapse Cache SSDs integrated with Dataplex software as a big win for a large number of customers who value SSD performance but still require HDD capacity. We are proud to be the first to offer this no-compromise approach to enabling high-performance and high-capacity storage for virtually any PC platform.”

Read more on OCZ’s Synapse Cache SATA III 2.5″ SSD on its product page.

Plenty of folks were less than thrilled by the release of Apple’s rebuilt Final Cut Pro — in fact, words like “disgruntled” come to mind when describing the response to the new version of the video editing software. Take heart, however, the massive backlash hasn’t gone unnoticed. The company has released version 10.0.1 of Final Cut Pro X, which offers up some new features, including support for rich XML and Xsan, Lion full-screen view and Media Stem export. Apple has even offered up a rare moment of humility, acknowledging that the additions are an attempt at “answering those concerns” of “very vocal customers.” The company is also looking to push back against some of the negative press by offering up a 30 day demo of the software to wary users afraid to take the plunge. More updates, including multi-camera support and broadcast-quality video monitoring are promised for early next year.

SOURCE via Apple

Well, it looks like Canon won’t be the lone company making a big camera announcement on November 3rd. RED CEO Jim Jannard has now confirmed that it will also be officially announcing its “new” RED Scarlet camera on the very same day (no coincidence, it seems), at which point it will detail “all the changes” the company has made to it. Unfortunately, that’s about all the company is saying right now, although Jannard promises that “when we announce the changes, we will be ready to ship.”

SOURCE via Reduser.net

I am not aware of any 3D GUI that has had sticking power and made an impact on the way we use a traditional computer today. Google, however, is apparently playing with an idea that would enable Chrome to work as a 3D environment, most likely in a version of Chrome OS.

The idea is based on Offscreen Tabs, which allows a user to display and interact with multiple open tabs at the same time, even if they are not in the immediate visible field. Imagine a scenario in which tabbed pages are displayed as actual pages, similar to a New Tab page in Chrome. In this case, however, those static pages would be active. Chrome developers recently added texture API and WebGL support to Offscreen Tabs, which allows the creation of 3D interfaces with distorted pages that are shown perspective or animated perspectives. For example, Google is showcasing the idea as a book whose pages consist of active web pages. Users would be able to flip those dynamic pages, while they are displaying, for example, a video.

The Offscreen Tabs code is live in the current Chromium 16 developer builds, but there is no application or new tab page that takes advantage of this capability yet.

SOURCE via ConceivablyTech