Month: August 2006

“Cal-comp & Kinpo presented its new pocket pc phone ‘Saturn SP90’ at TAITRONICS Bangkok. The Saturn SP90 is a pocket pc phone with QWERTY keyboard and it is a winner of 2006 reddot design for its sleek industrial design. It supports tri-band GSM/GPRS 900/1800/1900 MHz and runs on Windows Mobile 5.0 Pocket PC Phone Edition.” via aving.net

“The game begins with a wonderfully rich introduction that includes some credits but, more importantly, introduces you to the game and what is going on. It lasts almost three full minutes but, as I watched the wonderful cinematics, I couldn’t help but wonder if the graphics and sound for the game would be as rich. (On a side note, don’t think that your display has wigged out on you when the intro starts up because the first 15-20 seconds contain no video – just audio. While I was initially disappointed by this, I think it increases your anticipation for the graphics so that, when they do appear, you are properly blown away by them….)” Read this review at clieuk.co.uk

TOKYO—Toshiba Corporation today announced that it has brought logical block addressing (LBA) to NAND Flash memory, and that it would launch LBA-NAND, a new line-up of high-capacity devices integrating the new addressing method. LBA-NAND are designed for use in mobile consumer products, such as digital audio players and personal media players, and will support manufacturers in developing products that can take full advantage of advances in NAND Flash memory capacity while minimizing development costs. Toshiba will start to release samples of the new NAND Flash from August 2006. Read the full press release here:

“Actually, Nokia’s cheating on its classic concept of series 6000 exactly with Nokia 6233 is not a coincidence. One of the motivations was the desire for making up vertical line-ups, where phones would have in common not only indexes or the brand in general, but also looks. Such products will be aimed at similar audiences, but will segment the market even further. Let’s see how this is going to work out by the example of Nokia 8800 and Nokia 6233. The resemblance of these models is emphasized with a stainless framing found on the latter handsets, yet the former phone costs thrice as much. Reasoning from the price, you could say that the audiences of these two are never going to fuse or influence each other – indeed, a man who’s bought the 8800 isn’t likely to replace it with the 6233. But the positive image of Nokia 8800 as a luxury-product – that’s what this all about. This move is quite simple and at the same time very efficient – more capable models get released earlier and start building up the name for other phones having somewhat similar design, which will be released earlier. In Nokia 6233’s case, the negative effect cause by the model being different from other handsets of the series gets reduced to the minimum.” Read more at mobile-review.com

“Archos is a big player in the portable media player market, and they just keep releasing new units on the market that may not get you drooling, but they certainly make you want one. The company’s latest offering is the Archos 404, sporting a design that isn’t terribly foreign and a spec sheet to match.The 3.5-inch LCD display isn’t exactly huge, but I’d say it’s adequate for most of your on-the-go video watching needs. Other key features include a 30GB hard drive, built-in speaker (presumably in addition to a headphone jack), and a voice recorder. In addition to a wide range of media formats — MP3, WMA, WAV, JPEG, BMP, PNG, MPEG4 ASP (Level 5), XviD, DivX 4, DivX 5, and WMV9 — the Archos 404 also lets you tackle those PDF files you have kicking around as well. Battery life is reported at 15 hours of audio, or 4 hours of video. No pricing or availability information is available at this time, though Archos does mention that they plan on adding a DVR station, line-in recorder, USB host module, and camera to the optional accessories list.” via mobilemag.com

“E-TEN Information Systems has introduced an update of its GPS-communicator E-TEN G500, which was released this spring. The new version is called E-TEN G500+. It has twice as much flash Rom onboard – 256 MB instead of 128 MB (RAM size remained the same – 64 MB), FM-radio with RDS and Direct Push technology.I’d remind you main specs. The G500 was positioned as the first PDA-enabled phone with TMC (Traffic Message Channel0 function to get regular reports on road traffic condition, traffic jams and road works. The communicator is powered by Windows Mobile 5.0 Pocket PC running on Samsung S3C2440 400 MHz processor.It is designed for quad-band GSM networks and supports GPRS. Its LCD features a 2.8” diagonal, QVGA (240×320 pixel) resolution, 65K colors. There is an integrated 1.3-megapixel camera, an expansion slot for miniSD cards and Bluetooth 2.0. The G500+ measures 119x62x23 mm and weighs 191 g.” More here: via mobile-review.com

“MILPITAS, CA, JULY 31, 2006 – SanDisk Corporation (NASDAQ:SNDK) today introduced a 2-gigabyte (GB) microSD card – the largest capacity of the world’s smallest removable flash memory card – to meet demand for a new generation of MP3 music phones, including the forthcoming Verizon Wireless Chocolate by LG mobile phone. Using the SanDisk microSD card, the Verizon Wireless phone can store up to 1,000 digital songs downloaded from the company’s V CAST music service. The card, which is sold with an adapter that enables it to fit into a standard-size SD slot of other devices, will debut in the U.S. exclusively at 1,900 Verizon Wireless stores for the next 60 days. Internationally, it will be sold by a variety of mobile retailers.”Read more at photosnews.com

“As with just about any news coming out of Apple (or Microsoft) these days, you should take this report with a little grain of salt (with a dash of excitement to taste). It seems that Apple CFO Peter Oppenheimer has gone on the record to at least indicate that the company is working on an iPhone-like device; he suggested that “Apple is definitely working [on a] portable music player with communication capabilities.”Of course, this could just mean that the next-gen iPod could pack in some WiFi capabilities a la the Microsoft Zune or MusicGremlin MP3 player. However, if all the stars are aligned and what we think is true actually is, then we could very well have an iPhone on the way.Oppenheimer does, after all, go on to say that “we do not think that the [cell] phones that are available today make the best music players. We think the iPod is. But over time, that is likely to change.” Of course, he doesn’t go much further than that, saying that although “we are very excited about what we have in the product pipeline… I cannot comment on that.” ” via mobilemag.com

“Palm today announced the election of Bill Coleman, founder, chairman and chief executive officer of Cassatt, Corp., to its board of directors. Coleman also was a co-founder and first chief executive officer of BEA Systems, Inc., a world-leading infrastructure-software company. Prior to BEA, Coleman held various management positions at Sun Microsystems, Inc., including vice president and general manager of Sun Professional Services; vice president of system software, overseeing the Sun operating system, Solaris; and co-founder of the Sun Federal Division. He is a member of the board of directors of Symantec Corp. and the Silicon Valley Leadership Group and a member of the Trilateral Commission, a group formed in 1973 by private citizens of Japan, European Union countries, the United States and Canada to foster closer cooperation among core democratic industrialized areas of the world. He also is president of the Coleman Colorado Foundation, which supports the University of Colorado Coleman Institute for Cognitive Disabilities. He holds a bachelor’s degree in computer science from the U.S. Air Force Academy and master’s degrees in computer science and computer engineering from Stanford University. “Bill is an experienced technology entrepreneur, CEO, and director,” said Eric Benhamou, chairman of the board of Palm. “He has been associated with many successful growth companies throughout his career. He has also earned a deserved reputation as a generous philanthropist. The Palm board is fortunate to be able to benefit from his wisdom and counsel.” ” via palminfocenter.com