As many of us are aware, 3 is one of the best network providers in the UK market that boasts of varied deals to suit the requirements of different categories of users. Fun loving people with preference for live Mobile TV, full length audio and video music tracks, multiplayer games, mobile broadband, face to face [...]
Nokia has mobile phones in entry-level for the mass as well as they have their highly distinguished Vertu brand for the class. Nokia mobile phones have placed themselves in all technologies and innovations. Not to forget their counterparts like Samsung phones, Lg phones, Sony Ericsson phones etc. Even they have well established themselves in different [...]
Blu-ray players are generally fatties but Samsung has thrown its latest 5th-gen player, the BD-P2500 on a treadmill while cramming in everything but the kitchen sink.
The new player was unveiled today at the IFA 2008 show in Berlin and the minimalist styling looks tasty indeed. It’s compatible ‘out-of-the-box’ with the latest Blu-ray interactive features like BD Live (Profile 2.0), Bonus View (Profile 1.1) and uses the award-winning Hollywood Quality Video (HQV) chip for processing video, while supporting 7.1-channel sound systems.
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Samsung thinks Apple shouldn’t get all the limelight when it comes to skinny laptops and it’s planning to win the Size 0 contest next month with its beautiful looking x360.
Despite sounding like a certain games console, Samsung has managed to bring its X360 in at 1.27Kg, a little under the Apple MacBook Air offering, while managing to equal or better what’s under the hood.
It sports a 13.3in LED display capable of 1280 x 800 pixel resolution and is powered by an Ultra Low Voltage Centrino 2 processor with up to 4GB of Ram.
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In the present times, mobile phones have turned in to highly functional gadgets, which can perform more than one task in a simplified manner. It has come a long way since the times, when these were used only for conversing or exchanging messages. Nowadays, you can do very many things with a mobile phone handset. [...]
Ericsson is putting its wireless microchip business into a joint venture with its Franco-Italian rival STMicroelectronics as the companies look to expand their customer base in the face of slowing mobile phone sales.
The new business, which will be jointly run by the two firms, will be number three in the mobile chip industry behind the US leaders Qualcomm and Texas Instruments. Based in Geneva, the as yet unnamed venture will employ nearly 8,000 people in a unit that last year would have generated $3.6bn (£1.9bn) in revenues.
The deal was warmly welcomed by Nokia, one of the venture’s key customers, as “a positive move” that would create a “strong industry player”. Analysts, however, pointed out that the Finnish firm, which makes four out of every 10 handsets sold worldwide, is no fan of Qualcomm, having been embroiled in bitter legal disputes with the US firm, and a stronger European rival would suit the company.
Ericsson is putting its mobile platforms business, which specialises in modems and designing multimedia phones, and $1.1bn in cash into the venture. STMicroelectronics, created just last month through the merger of STMicro’s mobile phone chip business with NXP Semiconductors of the Netherlands, will put in its wireless chip-design business, worth an estimated $1.2bn.
The venture will supply chips for handsets ranging from bottom-of-the-range pre-pay phones to the next generation of internet-enabled multimedia devices. As well as Nokia, the new venture will count SonyEricsson, Samsung, LG and Sharp as its major customers. The only one of the top five handset makers the venture does not supply is the US-based Motorola.
Ericsson’s chief executive, Carl-Henric Svanberg, will be chairman of the board of the business and STMicroelectronics’ chief executive, Carlo Bozotti, will be vice-chairman.
The deal comes as sales of mobile phones begin to show some signs of slowing down and there is consolidation in other parts of the industry. Last month, for instance, Nokia took control of the British mobile phone software company Symbian. Nokia helped create the business, with the UK-based Psion, 10 years ago.
Yesterday’s deal will allow Ericsson to focus on its telecoms networks business, which has suffered as the credit crunch bites and operators rein in spending.
Analysts warned that the venture could be bad news for the UK-based Arm Holdings, which designs processor chips for mobiles. Nick James at Panmure Gordon said the deal - along with STMicro’s acquisition of NXP - represents “a pretty intense wave of consolidation”.
Though the deal does not directly challenge Arm’s position as the dominant processor architecture for mobile phones, he said, “it does reduce the number of potential licensees and may put further pressure on Arm’s licensing revenue.”
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The next generation of Micron Solid State Drives (SSDs) are going to be super-fast compared to the already very fast SSDs out there.
The company has announced that the new P200 RealSSD (servers) and RealSSD C200 (laptops) drives will offer read speeds of up to 250MB/sec. Write speed for the server-oriented P200, which uses single-level cell (SLC) NAND technology, is rated at ‘up to 250MB/sec’ too.
Even so, the read/write speeds of 250MB/sec and 100MB/sec for the laptop C200 drives are blistering considering, for instance, that the 128GB SSDs recently announced by Samsung boast read/write speeds of 90MB/sec and 70MB/sec, respectively.
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While I can appreciate innovative and stylish-looking storage devices [LG Chocolate Portable HDD], I’m usually more interested in how many gigabytes the thing has under the shiny hood.
However, not everyone thinks practicality first and fashion second, which is why designer Joongoo Lee has created this slick Samsung storage device concept for women, which wouldn’t look out of place in among the rest of the makeup clutter.
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Cheap Solid State Drives (SSD)s is what we all want and Samsung is aiming to make them bigger and cheaper this year by green-lighting the mass production of 128GB SSDs.
Samsung has already upped the capacity ante this year by announcing its 2.5in 256GB SSD.
Samsung said yesterday that it has started mass producing both 1.8in and 2.5in laptop and desktop drives claiming they will offer the usual SSD benefits alongside low power requirements of approximately 0.2 watts in standby and 0.5 watts when in use.
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Looking at digital SLR cameras, most appear to use xD cards. I already use SD cards. What is the difference?
Maurice
JS: The SD (Secure Digital) card standard was developed by Panasonic, SanDisk and Toshiba to provide a small protected storage format for devices such as PDAs, MP3 players and mobile phones. There are now miniSD and microSD versions, plus SDHC cards.
The SDHC cards look the same but are generally incompatible with older devices that lack SDHC support, so this is the main point to watch. Digital SLRs that use SD cards are available from Nikon, Canon, Pentax, Panasonic and Samsung.
The xD (extreme Digital) storage format is similar, but was introduced later by Olympus and Fujifilm. This now has variants called Type M and Type H, so again, watch out for compatibility problems. Since xD is less popular that SD, prices are usually higher and cards will fit fewer devices. Frankly, I can’t see any reason for choosing xD rather than SD or CompactFlash - an older but very reliable format that uses a much bigger card - and I avoid the numerous Sony Memory Stick cards for the same reasons. If you have multiple devices, then it should be cheaper and more convenient to stick to a couple of popular formats, instead of having a different type of card in each device.
I like Outlook Express but cannot use spellcheck with my new laptop because it has only French spelling.
GP Ray
JS: Funnily enough, this is a common complaint, because Microsoft Office 2007 installs English, Spanish and German files that are incompatible with Outlook Express 6. This is a problem because OE does not actually have a spellchecker: it borrows one from Microsoft Office or Microsoft Works. Microsoft’s Help Centre article offers a solution. It says: “There are a variety of third-party free spell-checking programs available on the Internet”. One popular option is Vampirefo’s Spell Checker For OE, which is also available from SnapFiles. You could also use the inline spellchecker in Firefox 2 or Internet Explorer 7 with IE7Pro. If you really want to try to fix the problem, however, Tech-Pro.net has an article on How To: Fix spell checking in Outlook Express 6.
For several years I have been very satisfied with Microsoft’s Picture It! program. However, having changed my computer, it is no longer available.
JH Prentice
JS: Microsoft’s Picture It! was included in the Microsoft Works suite and subsumed into the Microsoft Digital Image Suite. Microsoft discontinued it after adding most of the features to Windows Vista. However, your old CD could work: according to web reports, Picture It! 9 and 10 will work in Vista if you run it in XP compatibility mode and check the box “As Administrator”. Sadly, the very easy photo retouching features were not added to Vista, and I don’t know of any other program that takes the same non-geeky approach. The closest may be an online Flash-based picture editor, Picnik. Otherwise, Paint.net is a good free picture editor for Windows, though it’s in the traditional mould.
One of my three anti-spyware programmes keeps reporting a Trojan backdoor in the internat.exe Windows file. This has a large query as its icon, and properties describes it as a Keyboard Language Indicator Applet. If I let the program remove it, or if I delete it myself, then it promptly reappears.
Richard Parish
JS: Try running a search for internat.exe, the name of the software that detects it and “false alarm”, because that’s what it probably is. There are at least two versions of internat.exe, one of which puts a small blue square in the SysTray to let you change languages. Most UK users don’t need this feature and don’t run it. This has a question mark icon and is about 20K. The Trojan version is about four times larger and has a zip file icon. If it also says “Hello. I’m NetSnake” on startup, then it’s definitely a virus. For more information, see Symantec’s write-up.
· Bill Taylor has come up with “a very simple typo that causes a Word document to be closed without saving” - which was Stafford Linsley’s problem. It’s “Ctrl+W - an unadvertised keyboard shortcut for Close”. He says he learned the hard way by typing “When” and hitting Ctrl instead of the shift key. I’ve previously recommended Ctrl-W as a quick way of closing unwanted popups and browser windows.
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