The University of Michigan released its annual ACSI scores Tuesday for the PC industry, and Apple took top honors for the fifth straight year. Apple was the only company in the PC industry other than Dell to post an increase in customer satisfaction in 2008 compared to last year, said Claes Fornell, a professor at the university and head of the ACSI.

The ACSI scores measure a consumer’s overall satisfaction with a company, which includes product quality, value, customer service, and essentially anything else that impresses or annoys a customer of a particular company. Apple scored an 85 on the index, its highest score ever and a full ten points higher than second place finisher Dell.

Fornell attributed Apple’s score to the clear success the Mac has had among the U.S. public, but also pointed out that dissatisfaction with Windows Vista might have hurt the scores for the other companies, such as Hewlett-Packard and Gateway. HP, the market leader in PCs, is measured by its two PC brands–HP and Compaq–and both brands saw about 4 percent drops in satisfaction compared to last year.

The scores were assembled during the second quarter through thousands of interviews, and so therefore don’t reflect the launch of the iPhone 3G and MobileMe, two black eyes for Apple’s customer service this year. Fornell said he would expect Apple’s score to level off next year in any event, as “we have never seen a gap between the leader and the rest of the pack this big. If we are correct in that it has something to do with the launch of Vista, the other guys will of course correct that and come back a little bit.”

Source : CNET News.com

The thinking in Redmond is that releasing a bunch of new extenders with support for the codecs will lead to more people adopting Windows Media Centre as the hub of their digital home entertainment systems.

Currently, if you want to operate your Media Centre PC remotely and stream video to a television you need an Xbox. The new devices, being built by the likes of Linksys and D-Link, will give consumers some more options.

It’s a little unusual for Microsoft to pre-announce such products but the move shows just how fiercely competitive the home entertainment sector is becoming. No firm date has yet been given for when the new devices will hit the shelves.

Microsoft says the new boxes are the first examples of its Extenders for Windows Media Centre platform and promises more devices will appear over time. Other features to be supported initially include High Definition television and wireless networking.

Media Centre has so far failed to set the world on fire, primarily because there is considerable consumer resistance to having a dedicated PC sitting in the lounge room. Extenders overcome this by allowing people to stream content from another room.

The announcement follows the recent release-to-manufacturing of Microsoft’s Home Server operating system, however the company is quick to point out that the two products complement rather than compete with each other.

In Microsoft’s vision for home entertainment nirvana, television will be recorded onto a Media Centre PC, with archived content – movies, music and photos – being stored on the home server and fed to the media centre as required. Extenders will then feed all the content to TVs around the house.

It remains to be seen whether this latest extender strategy leads to such a vision appearing in more homes any time soon.

Ironically, the DivX format was originally an underground, pirated version of a beta Microsoft MPEG-4 version 3 CODEC. It has since been rewritten and legitimised.

Source : APCMag.com

Nintendo was next in line with its press conference, and its limp software line-up was as satisfying to the hardcore E3 crowd as a glass of turps is to somebody suffering from dehydration. At least its hardware news wasn’t quite so hard to swallow, with the big announcement being an enhancement to the Wii’s controls. Building on the success of its motion-sensing remote and nunchuk is the MotionPlus. The matchbox-sized cube clips on to the bottom of the remote control, and contains additional accelerometers allowing for finer 1 to 1 motion sensing. Currently there’s only one game announced for the MotionPlus, Nintendo’s Wii Sports Resort. No mention of price though; here’s hoping it’s cheap, as the cost of kitting out a family with Wii peripherals already approaches the GDP of a small European nation.

The other Ninty announcement wasn’t quite as exciting, but long overdue. Wii gamers will finally be able to use voice chat during online games thanks to the new WiiSpeak microphone. In an effort to be less intimidating than the head-mounted Sony and Microsoft competitors, the WiiSpeak is meant to be left on the TV or coffee table. We’ll be interested to see how it deals with feedback in this situation.

Unfortunately that was it for Nintendo, with no other major hardware announcements for the show. At least Aussie Nintendo fans have something to look forward to, whereas Aussie Sony PS3 owners looking for some E3 excitement have been left high and dry.

If you’re an American PS3 owner, you’re probably very happy with Sony right now. The new video store mentioned at Sony’s conference is live right now, allowing you to download SD and HD movies direct to your PS3 from the likes of Sony Pictures, Fox Film and TV, MGM, Lion’s Gate, Warner, Disney, Paramount, Turner and Funimation. You’re probably loving the fact that you can start watching a movie a minute after it starts downloading, provided you’ve got the necessary pipe into your living room. You could even be on the bus watching the latest Spidey flick on your PSP, as the store allows you to transfer flicks to your PSP.

However, if you’re stuck in the mini-mart that is Australia rather than the superstore of the US, you’re probably a bit peeved right now. That’s because Sony also announced that the service won’t be hitting any PAL regions in Australia, with no mention of Australia’s fate. Given our bitter experience with Microsoft’s Live Marketplace, we wouldn’t hold our breaths for it to arrive on our sunburnt shores.

So that wraps up E3 for another year. Considering it wasn’t a launch year for a new generation, the relative lack of major announcements wasn’t surprising. Having said that, it’s obvious that Microsoft emerged as the clear winner of E3, at least as far as the hardcore audience is concerned. Pity that the love it showed the 360 didn’t extend as far its Game For Windows program…

Source : APCMag.com

The Z-P140 comes in 2, 4, 8 and 16GB models and weighs just 0.6 grams – about the same as a drop of water. Samples are in the maket already and full production is expected to begin early next year.
The new drives are part of Intel’s Menlow chipset which has been designed from the ground up for use in mobile internet devices. Such devices have traditionally been limited by factors such as power consumption and storage capacities. Switching to SSDs addresses both these challenges.

The Z-P140 uses an industry-standard PATA interface and is significantly smaller than a hard drive with similar storage capacity. With no moving parts it is well suited to applications where devices can expect to receive their fair share of bumps and jolts during use.

Intel quotes read times of 40 megabytes per second and write times of 30 MB/s for the drives. Power consumption is rated at a miserly 1.1 miliwatts when idle and 300 mW when operating.

No pricing has yet been announced for the drives.

Source : APCMag.com