Communications Technology

Samsung’s Apple iPad rival and worst kept secret after it was spotted on a Sydney train, the Samsung Galaxy Tab, was last night unveiled officially by the South Korean company.

Samsung’s Australian vice president, telecommunications division, Tyler McGee, told this website that Samsung Australia planned to release the tablet in Australia in the fourth quarter.

It would be available before Christmas, he said.

The tablet features a 7-inch LCD display and will run the latest Google Android 2.2 operating system, Froyo, at launch. It will be able to store up to 16 gigabytes of data internally and has a microSD slot that allows for an additional 32 gigabyte SD card.

The Samsung Galaxy Tab will also make use of both Wi-Fi and 3G technologies, allowing for internet access on the go. It will also feature a front and rear-facing camera.

The rear-facing camera, which utilises an LED flash and auto-focus, is 3 megapixels, while the front-facing camera, used for video calling, is of a lower quality - 1.3 megapixels.

The tablet will come in one model and weigh 380 grams, half that of its rival, the Apple iPad 3G with Wi-Fi.

No pricing has been announced and it’s not yet known if it will be sold outright as opposed to being tied to a telecommunications company like Telstra or Optus on a subsidised plan.

McGee said the pricing would be “competitive” to Apple’s iPad.

“At this point in time the [telcos] are still reviewing how we’re going to bring it to market,” McGee said. “In four weeks time we hope that [telcos] will have settled down with their plans and we should have something else to share then.”

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Google can sift through more than a trillion web links in a matter of seconds, but can the internet search leader help people wade through their overflowing email?

That’s the challenge Google will try to tackle with the introduction of a tool called “Priority Inbox” in its Gmail service.

The feature relies on formulas devised by Google engineers to automatically figure out and highlight which incoming messages are likely to be the most important to each Gmail user.

Users who opt to turn on the Priority Inbox will see their messages separated into three categories. “Important and unread” emails will be at the top followed by messages that have been previously stamped with a star by an account holder. Everything else appears at the bottom.

Switching back to the standard view of the inbox can be done with a click on a link along the left side of the web page.

Google’s email analysis is based on a variety of factors, including a person’s most frequent contacts and how many other people are getting the same message. The content of the email also is factored into the equation.

Although it might unnerve some people, the notion of Google’s computers scanning through the content of individual emails isn’t new. Google has been doing it for years to determine what kinds of ads to show to the right of emails and to block junk email commonly known as “spam”.

With more than 100 daily emails pouring into some inboxes now, people now need help to identify “the bacon and baloney” along with the spam, said Keith Coleman, Gmail’s product director.

Google helped create the information clutter six years ago when it introduced its free Gmail service with a then-unheard of 1 gigabyte of storage per account. Other email services quickly expanded their capacity limits to remain competitive, and now most inboxes can store multiple gigabytes of information.

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One of the country’s fastest supercomputers will take up residence at WA’s Murdoch University later this year.

The $5 million Hewlett Packard supercomputer will be housed in its own temperature-controlled “Performance Optimised Datacentre”, a unit that looks similar to a shipping container from the outside, when it arrives at the university in October.

It is made up of a staggering 9600 central processing units and the machine will rival the cutting-edge machines used by internet giants such as Google.

It will be built in Sydney and the POD transported from Scotland, before the machine is brought to Perth to support the state’s $80 million Pawsey Centre, which was established last year to host high performance computing facilities and Square Kilometre Array research.

It is similar to supercomputers used by technology giants Google, Yahoo and Microsoft.

When complete in 2013, the centre will rival the 20 best computers in the world and will allow Western Australia’s bid to be among a global network of Square Kilometre Array radio telescopes that will shed light on the birth and eventual death of the cosmos.

Murdoch University’s Director of the Centre for Comparative Genomics, Professor Matthew Bellgard, said the machine would be connected via a 10 gigabits-per-second network, have 500 terabytes of storage and have its own energy-efficient cooling system.

“The new supercomputer makes a quantum leap in terms of the speed at which researchers will be able to process data,” Professor Bellgard said.

It will be used to analyse data from scientists across the country working on radioastronomy, nanoscience, geoscience and life science projects.

“It’s really to support the increases in high-end scientific research from all areas that generate very large amounts of data,” Professor Bellgard said.

The supercomputer will be connected to the iVEC network, which consists of the CSIRO, Curtin University of Technology, Edith Cowan University, Murdoch University and the University of Western Australia.

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