Nokia has said a defective component in its microphones, coupled with high demand, have hampered the availability of its flagship business phone, the E90 Communicator.

Background noise during phone calls, which raised customer complaints, was caused by a defective component in the microphone, said Theresa Parenteau, a spokeswoman for Nokia’s Enterprise Solutions unit, on Tuesday.

“Although the issue is now rectified, it has resulted in more limited availability than originally anticipated in some markets,” she said.

When Nokia unveiled the phone in February 2007 it said it would start selling it in the second quarter in selected markets, with volume shipments coming in the July-September quarter.

Customers have also reported scratches on the phone screen caused by some keyboard keys touching the screen.

(Full article ‘Flaw hampers Nokia’s business-phone rollout’)

A week after adding its budget-priced Inspiron laptops to the all launched in late June along with the M1330 — can be ordered in eight hues, including basic black or white, as well as brown, red, blue, green, pink or yellow. Dell has tagged the line with the marketing slogan “Yours is Here.”

“Producing smaller quantities is not the issue — it’s mainly an issue of scale,” Menchaca said, echoing what Senior Vice President Alex Gruzen said about the XPS laptop three weeks ago. “We’ll continue to work directly with suppliers to ultimately increase our production on color notebooks,” he added.

Another bottleneck for Dell: LCDs. “Some screen sizes are in short supply,” said Menchaca. Earlier this month, Gruzen also called out screens, specifically backlit LED displays, as contributing to the slow delivery of M1330 orders.

(Full article ‘Dell paints Inspiron with delay brush’)

London (England) - The Inquirer has posted a potential preview of what AMD's Barcelona logo might look like.  Sporting the traditional Opteron name, Barcelona is expect to ship at 1.9 GHz and 2.0 GHz exactly two weeks from today on September 10, 2007.  Barcelona is the code-name for AMD's native quad-core processor which, with new BIOS and motherboard support, will be able to independently clock CPU cores within its single package, thereby reducing power consumption.  Barcelona is also AMD's latest core redesign with internal changes to achieve greater compute parity with Intel's Core 2 architecture.

The new logo is black with a variously shaded green/yellowish circle shown in semi-translucent 3D perspective.  It has a type of gear looking appearance in that the inner portion of the circle has four "teeth."  If the logo proves authentic, it will be one of the few practical things we know about Barcelona due to an unusually tight-lipped AMD.  Generally speaking, the two-week before launch timeframe usually sees several leaked benchmarks and pictures of the Barcelona in operation by third parties.  So far with this launch the pre-reviews and views have been rather thin.

AMD has had troubled times with their 65nm process technology, Dirk Meyer revealed during the Technology Analyst Day 2007 event.  AMD is working through these issues which have taken longer than expected to resolve.  Barcelona was expected to hit the streets at 2.5 GHz.  Due to the delays and problems with their 65nm technology, we will only see 1.9 GHz and 2.0 GHz part at lauch with 2.3 GHz special edition models expected by the end of the this year.  AMD's 65nm technology has also caused their current AMD65 architecture to also see clock issues.  The fastest current AMD64 chip on 65nm technology is the 5000+ at 2.6 GHz and a 512 KB L2 cache per core.  The 90nm CPUs are clocking as high as 3.2 GHz with the 6400+ and 1 MB L2 cache per core.

Much concern is growing over AMD's ability to succeed with Barcelona.  Many analysts are revisiting the significance of the native quad-core design which, unlike Intel's current quad-core offering which uses two dual-core dies in a single package, offers a single die with four cores.  There is little doubt that AMD needs Barcelona to succeed.  And whereas a fancy new logo will not do it for them, the ability to follow-through on their architectural promises would.  If AMD can continue to work out the issues with their 65nm process technology, achieving the originally planned 2.5 GHz clock speeds (which were initially due out several months before now), then Barcelona might just be the chip to carry them through.

Barcelona respresents AMD's first major redesign of their AMD64 core since the original Opteron was released.  It includes Independent Dynamic Core Technology and CoolCore support, which allows each processor to be clocked independently of the other cores and reduce power consumption/heat.  Its power saving featuers also allow a dual-plane power system for its on-board memory controller and cores.  It sports an additional HyperTransport channel allowing for 16-way glueless multi-processor support, a new 128-bit floating point support engine (up from previous 80-bits) which does require a source code recompile to use, support for advanced virtualization like Nested Paging and Tagged Translation Lookaside Buffers, as well as new shared L3 cache.  Additional cache and memory architectural changes are also present for speed and throughput.

Intel's quad-core processor was first released in November, 2006.  AMD followed-up quickly with their QuadFX design, which was actually a dual-processor, dual-core system which achieved quad-core computing via a "Coherent HyperTransport" bus.  Barcelona's launch on September 10, 2007 will be AMD's first true quad-core product.  At 1.9 GHz and 2.0 GHz there is much speculation about how well it will be able to compete with Intel's current products, as well as those 45nm products which Intel will ship later this year.

Trouble Ticket At issue: A department is letting some staffers use wireless laptops. Action plan: Pull them back, explain why, and get on the stick to address security concerns. Security can sometimes come crashing up against productivity, and when it does, security must prevail. That’s because my state agency is a maintainer of records covered by HIPAA rules. One blunder, and we’re front-page news. Not on my watch, thanks. Given the consequences of jeopardizing client data, I think my obsession with security is good for the agency. But for our users, it can seem as if we’re living in the Dark Ages. Many technologies that are commonplace in the corporate world and even in other government agencies haven’t won my approval yet, and they won’t until I am thoroughly convinced that they won’t undermine our security efforts.

(Full article ‘Security Crashes Into Productivity’)

European Commission has send a statement of objections (SO) to Rambus, a leading developer of memory and interconnection technologies, accusing it of infringing European antitrust laws, claiming unreasonable royalties from industry players due to so called В“patent ambushВ”.

Rambus claims it owns patents on key-technologies used in modern dynamic random access memory that is deployed in every single computer sold. The company is trying to force all makers of dynamic random access memory (DRAM) to pay royalties to Rambus for every single SDRAM, DDR SDRAM and DDR2 SDRAM chip sold. However, DRAM makers believe that Rambus obtained the patents by deceiving JEDEC organization.

The SO outlines the CommissionВ’s preliminary view that Rambus engaged in intentional deceptive conduct in the context of the standard-setting process, for example by not disclosing the existence of the patents which it later claimed were relevant to the adopted standard.

(Full article ‘European Commission Accuses Rambus of “Patent Ambush”‘)