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LG overwhelmed by iPad display orders

2010-07-26T02:20:00.000-07:00

Apple sold 3.27 million iPads in the first three months and has had trouble keeping up with demand.

(Credit: James Martin/CNET)

Apple isn't the only one caught off guard by the demand for its iPad. The company that makes the displays for the touch-screen tablet is too.

On Thursday, LG's CEO Kwon Young-Soo said his company is having trouble filling orders for iPad displays, even though his factories are running at "full capacity."

"Demand (from Apple) keeps growing and we can't meet it all," Kwon said, during a call to report the company's quarterly earnings.

LG last year secured a $500 million contract to supply Apple's LCD displays.

Apple has sold almost 3.3 million iPads since early April, and units have been back-ordered for most customers almost from the first day of sales. Apple says it was surprised by consumers' interest, particularly consumers who aren't usually early adopters of technology, in the iPad.

"Both (the iPad) and the iPhone 4, we had backlogged at end of last quarter," Apple COO Tim Cook said Tuesdayduring its earnings call. "We are selling both of those products as fast as we can make them."

Cook did not mention that display supply was as tight as it apparently is. LG's Kwon said he is considering increasing production of iPad displays, but that LG won't be able to make enough until early 2011.

The volume of early iPad sales seems to be surprising everyone. After Apple reported the sales numbers, several tech analyst firms said they had to drastically adjust their forecasts for touch-screen tablet sales for the year as a result.

Apple attacks Droid X antenna

2010-07-26T02:16:00.000-07:00

This is turning into one of those charming cage matches in which wrestlers desperately try to maim each other with chains and chairs and blows to very private regions.

In a new video, posted to both its own Web site and to YouTube, Apple attempts to show that the dazzling new Motorola Droid X, which many seem to rather appreciate, also has something of an issue when it comes to being held in the Death Grip.

You know, the grip where you wrap your fingers round your cell phone, and the onscreen signal bars drop like a swooning '50s starlet?

Naturally, I'd be extremely keen to hear from Droid X users who are, or, indeed, aren't experiencing such a problem.

I'd also rather enjoy hearing from those who have begun to hold their cell phones, of whatever brand, like the English hold their teacups, with little finger floating in midair and fourth finger barely touching the object.

Many, on seeing this video (and one posted earlier this week featuring the Nokia N97 Mini), will wonder whether Apple is beginning to insist too much.

Underlining that all phones are a little bit wonky when it comes to reception may, indeed, state a truth. But posting videos featuring every competing manufacturer, when, as yet, there seems to be little outcry from those manufacturers' customers, suggests severe annoyance. It also feels a little defensive for a company that so rarely feels the need to be.

It's not as if anyone buys a smartphone to make phone calls anyway, so one wonders if all the fuss will really be worth it. Still, as anyone who enjoys a good cage match will tell you, the fun is in the fighting, not the result.

HP: WebOS phones only, no Win Phone 7

2010-07-26T02:10:00.000-07:00

Hewlett-Packard confirmed Friday that it will not build phones with Microsoft's latest mobile software.

HP Senior Executive Todd Bradley told CNBC that the company will use WebOS, the mobile operating system acquired when it purchased Palm, on smartphones. HP will not be selling any Windows Phone 7-based devices, Bradley said.

It's not a huge surprise that HP wants to push its own software over Microsoft's after it spent $1.2 billion to get it. But, HP is Microsoft's biggest customer, and it's somewhat of a setback for Microsoft not to have the full backing of the largest tech company on the planet for the launch of its new mobile software later this year.

It's rumored that Microsoft does have other big names in smartphones signed up: Dell, Asus, LG, HTC, and Samsung. But it's clear that between Android and WebOS, Microsoft's offering for mobile isn't nearly as attractive to hardware makers as it once was.

HP still has plans to take advantage of its relationship with Microsoft in other ways. There's been a lot of confusion about whether HP still plans to ship the HP Slate with Windows 7 that it introduced at CES. But Bradley told CNBC Friday that HP will build a tablet PC with Windows 7 after all.

Previously, HP had said that it plans to build tablets with WebOS, which still appear to be coming in the future. Most recently, HP was granted a trademark on the term "PalmPad," which some have surmised to be the name of a future iPad-like device running the Palm software.

Google ethos speeds up Chrome release cycle

2010-07-26T01:39:00.000-07:00

What's better: short trains that leave frequently or longer trains that leave less often?

Given Google programmers' philosophy of releasing products early then iterating often, it's no surprise that higher frequency is their preference: thus the announcement Thursday that Google will speed up the release cycle of its Chrome browser.

New stable versions of Chrome today arrive about every three months, but Google wants to double that pace, said Chrome Program Manager Anthony LaForge.

"Under the old model, when we faced a deadline with an incomplete feature, we had three options, all undesirable: (1) Engineers had to rush or work overtime to complete the feature by the deadline, (2) We delayed the release to complete that feature (which affected other unrelated features), or (3) The feature was disabled and had to wait approximately 3 months for the next release. With the new schedule, if a given feature is not complete, it will simply ride on the the next release train when it's ready," he said in the blog.

That could mean, for example that some features such as print preview that Google punted from Chrome 6 to Chrome 7 could arrive in mainstream Chrome users' hands earlier.

Browser rival Mozilla is working on the same idea of more frequent releases. As with Chrome, though, it doesn't mean the pace of advancement doubles, only that new features arrive in smaller doses but more often.

For decades, distribution was a difficult matter for the software industry. AT&T and UC Berkeley Unix programmers mailed tapes to one another. And when personal computers caught on, floppy disks and later CDs also relied on the postal service. Software that dates from this era--Microsoft Office, Adobe Photoshop, Civilization--tends toward major updates released years apart.

Google, of course, grew up in the Internet era, when the network could be used to send software. Google likes its software to be updated silently, behind the scenes, and with no user intervention--in short, the way Google updates its search engine algorithm.

Of course, there's still a lot of overhead in releasing software, even as an online update. New versions must be debugged, tested, packaged up, and sent over the wire. It's often easier to handle one bigger train than two small ones. But Google believes its new release process, to be implemented in coming months, will also make project management easier in many ways.

It remains to be seen how amenable Google's philosophy will be to IT organizations accustomed to testing software and controlling its release. Certainly many employees rely constantly on Google's ever-changing search engine, which corporate IT doesn't get to test. But software that runs on a company's computers brings security risks and compatibility challenges not present when visiting a Web site.

Realistically, a release cycle of six weeks rather than three months won't make too much difference to corporate IT geared for cycles many times that duration, so Google's move to turn the crank faster probably won't change things much.

A broader issue also is involved: how fast can people keep up? User interface changes can leave people clicking around in menus and dialog boxes for commands they once knew how to find.

As Chrome spreads beyond the early-adopter crowd, change gets harder. But that might not sound as much at odds with a faster release cycle as one might think. Many Chrome changes are under the hood, such as improvements to JavaScript processing speed, and many others enable Web programmers to exercise new options.

In other words, Chrome is a window on the Web, and it will often be up to Web site owners to worry about making sure people don't suffer future shock.