LG shows first LTE chip for 4G phones

LG this morning said it has developed the world's first practical chip for 4G-grade cellular access using Long Term Evolution (LTE) as its standard. The 13mm square (0.51in) modem is small enough to fit in a cellphone but is capable of the theoretical peak speeds of LTE, which LG says tops out at 100Mbps downstream and at 50Mbps for uploads. A testbed Windows Mobile device has successfully reached bandwidth of 60Mbps down and 20Mbps up in a real-world example and should lead to slim cellphones with fast data performance, according to LG.

The speed is deemed a breakthrough and should result in phones with Internet performance rivaling better landline connections today. Assuming peak speeds, a 700MB video file would download in less than a minute; four 1080p HD movies could also stream simultaneously, the company says. Separately, LTE is also known to generate much lower latency than most existing forms of 3G and has been deemed more practical for two-way video calling and multiplayer online gaming.

LG doesn't outline its exact plans but expects the first phones based on LTE to ship in 2010 and also intends to launch a notebook adapter card for the standard in the future. The public availability of either will depend heavily on access to LTE networks, though these are expected to be relatively easy to deploy for existing 3G carriers and, in North America, are known to be available sometime in 2010 from carriers such as Bell, Telus and Verizon and will likely include AT&T and Rogers.

BlackBerry Storm for Telus in limited shipping

Telus today officially became the first Canadian carrier to start selling the BlackBerry Storm. The carrier notes that "limited" numbers of the touchscreen smartphone should be in its stores today and will sell for the promised $250 on a three-year plan and $600 when contract-free. Telus' version clings to the reference version's 3.2-megapixel camera, hybrid CDMA/GSM with matching 3G, and 1GB of internal memory. Telus' version is more conspicuously pitched against the iPhone and comes with an 8GB microSDHC card preloaded with music from the Arts & Crafts label.

The launch however reinforces concerns of a stalled Canadian launch, according to tips from BGR. Telus is reported to have just 2,500 phones for all of Canada as part of the launch and accordingly will only have larger quantities by January, effectively shutting the company out of any significant holiday sales and handing sales of touchscreen phones to Rogers' adaptation of the iPhone 3G. A collection of promos on the touchscreen LG Dare as well as the BlackBerry Curve and Pearl are believed to exist to shore up sales.

Bell Canada has yet to announce a ship date of its own for the Storm and may not begin its own sales until January as well.

The delays have resulted in both carriers launching the Storm at least a full two months after their respective original announcements and is believed to stem in part from the rough state of the launch firmware for Verizon and Vodafone, both of which have had to issue rushed firmware updates to fix issues with lag and crashes.

New MacBook Pro faced with NVIDIA defect?

Apple's latest-generation MacBook Pro systems may face the same material defect in their dedicated graphics hardware as encountered by earlier models, according to an investigation by the Inquirer. A dissection of the GeForce 9600M chip shows the part using the same non-eutectic (higher melting point) soldered contact bumps as the GeForce 8600M, suggesting the graphics hardware is prone to the same long-term heat damage risk as the GeForce 8400M and 8600M series chips, producing the blank screens and other video errors that have triggered recalls of previous MacBook Pro revisions as well as wider-still recalls by Dell, HP and others.

The integrated GeForce 9400M chipset, which is used across all of Apple's new MacBooks as well as a handful of newer Windows systems, is shown to use proper eutectic (low melting point) bumps and so shouldn't be prone to the same issues. The related 9300M and the low-end 6400 lineup should also be reliable.

It's unclear whether the issue affects all MacBook Pros, though the sample used to reach the findings was a retail example from just after the official launch in mid-October. Numerous reports have surfaced in Apple's support forums of screens going black in graphics-intensive games and of excessive heat in other conditions, though NVIDIA is already understood to be transitioning over to the true eutectic bumps for all its video hardware.

The discovery contradicts statements by NVIDIA investor relations head Michael Hara, who told the investigators in October that the 9600M was using the newer material. Presented with the newer findings, he now says the particular material mix is different and thus that the dedicated part still shouldn't be prone to the same failures as the earlier 8M hardware, though he doesn't explicitly deny the use of non-eutectic content.

If consistent, the revelation would suggest continued problems for NVIDIA, which posted a $120 million loss earlier this year related specifically to the graphics defects and which has been repeatedly pushed to acknowledge that more of its video chipsets have been affected by the choice of non-eutectic material. At first, the company only acknowledged that a small number of HP notebooks were affected.