27'' Dell : for visually impaired wealthy clients? AMD to release ''Better by Design'' label

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27'' Dell : for visually impaired wealthy clients?   Posted on 10/01/2007 at 16:56 by Vincent - source: Dell

	This is official, Dell will release soon a 27" monitor in accordance with our description in the 26" Nec LCD2690WUXi article and similar to the monitor announced a few days ago by Samsung. The main characteristics are: panel with 6 ms response time, 1000:1 contrast ratio, and brightness of 400 cd/m². The monitor resolution is the same as 24" monitors: 1920 x 1200 pixels. Even if it isn't specified by Dell, we can reasonably think that the panel is a PVA like the Samsung. Amongst the attractive points, there are as usual for Dell the great design and ergonomics (adjustable height and depth, pivot, USB hub, memory card player…) and numerous video inputs (VGA, DVI+HDCP, YUV, Composite, S-Video). Two points, however, draw our attention: - the monitor pitch is 0.303 mm. The characters on screen will be BIG - the price: $1,399. This has to be compared to the $999 of the future Samsung SyncMaster 275T and to the Dell 30": $1,275. This is strange and the only explanation we see could be the regular exceptional discounts that they usually do with other monitors. It isn't unusual to see monitors sold 20% below their initial price.

AMD to release ''Better by Design'' label   Posted on 10/01/2007 at 01:43 by Nicolas - source: AMD

	At CES, AMD announced the program "Better by Design" officially designed to help computer manufacturers like Acer, Dell, Gateway, HP, Lenovo, NEC and Tongfang to sell optimum configurations for Windows Vista. This initiative, even if it is designed to counter Intel's strategy of platform promotion rather than processors and that the number 2 of the CPU market isn't able to invest huge sum of money in marketing initiatives, shows a real willingness for the manufacturer to improve its image especially for laptops and general public configurations. In practice, computers featuring the "Better by Design" label will have to be equipped with dual core energy efficient AMD64 processors and wireless components will have to be selected amongst those produced by Airgo, Atheros and Broadcom. About graphic circuits (often integrated to the chipsets with OEM computers), AMD, of course, favours ATI's solutions but also recommend using NVIDIA's. This also means that computer manufacturers will be urged not to choose VIA or SIS chipset. Their recent models haven't' successfully obtained the Vista Premium certification despite the support of DirectX 9 We feel that it would be harsh to blame AMD for trying to improve its image and have a better selection of its partners while keeping an option to build open platforms. For laptops, however, the power of integrated graphic circuits in chipsets is the only domain where a "Better by Design" laptop can easily compete with the Intel equivalent (and that isn't an exploit by itself). It is unfortunate that AMD hasn't pushed the concept further for laptops by adding for example criterions like the battery autonomy…