Manufacturing giant Foxconn are preparing to build the new Apple Television. According to China Daily company chief Terry Gou said that they are preparing to build the new Apple Television.

Gou held a news conference in Shanghai regarding their plans for the future. During the chat he let it slip that Foxconn are ready to start producing the Apple television which Steve Jobs mentioned before his death. China Daily added that “development or manufacturing has yet to begin”.

Gou would have insider knowledge of the development of such a critical product for Apple, but it is surprising that he would mention it in a conference as Apple are normally very strict about details of unreleased products. Apple have yet to even acknowledge the television.

Rumours have been circulating now for months that the upcoming high definition television will feature a camera for FaceTime and even have support for SIRI, the Apple assistant. Latest rumours would suggest that the set will have access to the Apple Store. Perhaps indicating internal storage.

Jobs spoke to Walter Isaacson in his biography saying “I’d like to create an integrated television set that is completely easy to use. It would be seamlessly synched with all of your devices and with iCloud. It will have the simplest user interface you could imagine. I finally cracked it.”

Tecnobitssays: There are no indications when production will start, although some sources claim it will be 2013.

Have you experienced the annoyance of booking into a hotel room only to find that it has one network socket in the corner of the room? Many people have probably already chosen their next hotel based on wireless internet connection support in all rooms. If you are one of these people then a portable wireless router device could be a good investment.

The Tenda W300M is a portable wireless router which can act as an access point allowing you to connect several wireless devices to the internet, or as a wireless repeater extending  the range of the weak hotel wireless signal.

There are also three other functions which are combinations and variations of the previous two. This allows you to make use of this device in many different environments, whether at school, university, work, or conference halls.

Specifications

Dropbox may have taken a temporary dip in the popularity polls with both Skydrive and Google Drive offering a better value proposition, so how do you keep your customers? Easy, change the subject. Yesterday the company took the lid off Dropquest 2012, its annual virtual scavenger hunt which awards those who manage to make it all the way to the end with an extra 1GB bump in their storage quota.

Dropquest is a series of puzzles that the company claims were inspired by MIT’s mystery hunt, and it turns out to be more than a little challenging. It’s by no means impossible, but it certainly will eat up more than a few hours. Asking for help on the company support forums will lead to instant disqualification, however if you find yourself stumped I don’t think they can do much about the tons of great Google Doc answer sheets popping up.  

If you find yourself in desperate need of an extra gigabyte of online storage may we suggest you check out Skydrive or Google Drive? If on the otherhand you just get a kick out of puzzles, as least this one comes with a reward.  

Changes are a-coming to chkdsk and NTFS health in Windows 8, and unlike the controversial Metro interface, these tweaks should make everyone happy. As hard drives get bigger, the Windows 7 chkdsk times get longer (and longer, and longer…) when hard disk errors occur, as infrequent as they are. In a worse-case scenario, attempting to boot a corrupt drive can take hours. The new system changes all that.

The Windows 8 improvements will let NTFS try to identify corruptions on-the-fly and make an instant fix in the background, no usage interruptions required. If that doesn’t work, Windows 8 will conduct a “spot verification scan” to determine if the corruption is genuine or just a brief memory glitch.

Genuine errors will be reported to the user and the OS will start scan the system during idle CPU/storage times and log the location of the problems. When the scan is done, Windows 8 will prompt the user to reboot the PC at his convenience. Chkdsk will then use the information NTFS logged about the errors to fix the corruptions quickly.

“The restart is quick (adding just a few additional seconds) and the PC is returned to a healthy state,” core manager Kim Bangalore writes on the Building Windows 8 blog. Hopefully it really is that quick and simple! For all the nitty gritty details and a helpful FAQ, hit the link.

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While Citrix’s moves ahead with CloudStack and its abandonment of the OpenStack cloud computing platform dominated the news recently, let’s not forget that OpenStack has enormous backing and a well-funded foundation forming around it. In our post "OpenStack’s Partnerships Give it a Leg Up in the Cloud Race," we detailed some of the many tech companies that are developing around the OpenStack platform.

Hewlett-Packard, for example, has announced its Converged Cloud services and platform tools, based on a "hardened" version of OpenStack. And now, HP is ready to deliver the public beta version of its HP Cloud Services, which could mean a lot for the struggling company.

HP has delivered public, open beta versions of three OpenStack-based services: Cloud Compute, Cloud Object Storage and Cloud Content Delivery Network. Users will pay only for the services they consume, and while HP has gone out of its way to position its services as different from Amazon’s you can bet that HP will be competing closely with Amazon Web Services (AWS) in the cloud.

Along with HP’s announcement, there are many partners and supporters making related announcements. Opscode, which specializes in cloud infrastructure automation, has announced integration with HP Cloud Services. And Standing Cloud, a provider of cloud application management solutions, has announced support. Standing Cloud offers a simple way to deploy, manage and distribute applications in the cloud. You can find the full details on HP’s partner community here.

HP’s pricing is very fully disclosed everything will come down to support. Many of the companies "backing" OpenStack are contributing code or pursuing other forms of community contribution, but a unified, robust support effort is what will really make a difference.

HP Cloud Support is up and running, and you can find more details on it here.  Can HP become a major player in the cloud by betting on a flexible, open source platform? We’re about to see, and this should be interesting to watch.