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.

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.

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.