Samsung Launches New Galaxy iPad

South Korea's Samsung Electronics Co launched an upgraded version of its Galaxy tablet in its lucrative home market on Wednesday, seeking to stem the runaway success of Apple Inc's iPad. The Galaxy Tab 10.1, the sequel of the 7-inch Tab introduced in October, is the latest push by the company to challenge the iPad. Apple's iPad sold 14 million units in the first half of this year, compared with analysts' sales estimates of about 7.5 million for the Tab for 2011, the iPad's biggest competitor. "As our smartphone business grew very fast within a very short period of time, I believe it's just a matter of time for our tablet business to improve," J.K. Shin, head of Samsung' mobile division, told reporters. Samsung has emerged as Apple's nearest rival in the booming mobile device industry as it leverages its cost competitiveness and access to chips and core tablet components. It has sharply narrowed the gap with Apple in the smartphone market, but however remains a distant second in the tablet market, which Garner forecasts will surge to 108 million devices next year from an estimated 70 million in 2011. The sale of the Tab in Korea is Samsung's fifth global launch after its U.S. debut a month ago and its sales kickoff in Indonesia, where the company says it commands a 65 percent market share. It has also launched the device in Italy and Sweden. Pricing for the new product, slightly thinner and lighter than iPad 2, starts from $500 in the U.S. market, the same price as the iPad 2. Blockbuster sales of the iPhone, iPad and strong Asian business again helped Apple crush Wall Street's expectations for its third-quarter results on Tuesday. Apple said concern over iPad 2 supply constraints eased and demand was still overstripping supply in some markets. Samsung reiterated on Wednesday it aimed to boost tablet sales by more than five fold this year. It didn't provide specific numbers but analysts expect the company to have sold about 1.5 million units last year.

Generation Of Computers

A study has provided new insight into spintronics, which has been hailed as the successor to the transistor.
According to the Cavendish Laboratory, the University of Cambridge's Department of Physics, spintronics, which exploits the electron's tiny magnetic moment, or "spin", could radically change computing due to its potential of high-speed, high-density and low-power consumption.
Spintronics research attempts to develop a spin-based electronic technology that will replace the charge-based technology of semiconductors.
While conventional technology relies on harnessing the charge of electrons, the field of spintronics depends instead on the manipulation of electrons' spin.
One of the unique properties in spintronics is that spins can be transferred without the flow of electric charge currents.
This is called "spin current" and unlike other concepts of harnessing electrons, the spin current can transfer information without generating heat in electric devices.
The major remaining obstacle to a viable spin current technology is the difficulty of creating a volume of spin current large enough to support current and future electronic devices.
However, the new Cambridge researchers in close collaboration with Professor Sergej Demokritov group at the University of Muenster, Germany, have, in part, addressed this issue.
In order to create enhanced spin currents, the researchers used the collective motion of spins called spin waves (the wave property of spins). By bringing spin waves into interaction, they have demonstrated a new, more efficient way of generating spin current.
"You can find lots of different waves in nature, and one of the fascinating things is that waves often interact with each other. Likewise, there are a number of different interactions in spin waves," Dr Hidekazu Kurebayashi, from the Microelectronics Group at the Cavendish Laboratory, said.
"Our idea was to use such spin wave interactions for generating efficient spin currents," Kurebayashi explained.
According to their findings, one of the spin wave interactions (called three-magnon splitting) generates spin current ten times more efficiently than using pre-interacting spin waves.
Additionally, the findings link the two major research fields in spintronics, namely the spin current and the spin wave interaction.