64GB SSD from Samsung

Samsung electronics has developed a 1.8 inch 64GB flash memory based solid state drive. The product will be launched in second half of year 2007.

According to Samsung, the new flash-SSD is based on an eight gigabit (Gb) single-level-cell (SLC) NAND, which provides significantly higher performance over conventional SSDs.

The performance of the new SLC flash-SSD have been increased by 20 percent for read and 60 percent for write over the 32GB flash-SSD Samsung introduced last year, that means the new SSD’s ability to outperform conventional rotating-media hard drives is even greater than had been anticipated.

Reading at 64MB/s and writing at 45MB/s, the new drive is significantly outperforms the traditional hard discs which give 15MB/s and 7MB/s for read, write speeds respectively. Power consumption is also less compared to hard disc drives at 0.5 Watts against 1.5 Watts.

Philips Mobiles with long battery life

Mobile phone that gives you 40 days and 40 nights standby time and 10 hours of talk time, that's how you can describe the Philips Xenium cellphone range.

Now they have added battery backup with a slot for AAA battery in case you feel that kind of long battery life not sufficient for you. But isn't it really useful in the scenes when you forgot or don't have charging facility around.

At least, I am really in need of that long battery backup, as I often forget to recharge my cell phones.

SanDisk announces 2.5 inch SSD

SanDisk is introducing a 2.5 inch popular form factor SSD with SATA interface, which will make it a drop-in replacement for the hard disk based drives in laptops and notebook computers. The announcement is followed up after the launch of 1.8 inch SSD by SanDisk, but the 2.5 SSD cheaper and is available for $350 for volume buyers.

Company says the price, per gigabyte, of SSD storage will continue to go down while capacities shoot upwards once consumers realize they can opt out of rotating disk drives for the "superior experience of SSDs."

Company claims it is there 5th generation SSD, SanDisk SSD SATA 5000 2.5" is based on technology that has been field-proven for over a decade in the harshest of environments. It uses NAND flash enhanced by our patented TrueFFS® flash management technology. SanDisk SSD delivers an outstanding two million hour mean time between failure (MTBF)1. This superior level results in reduced tangible costs, such as IT labor costs, while also decreasing intangible costs associated with inaccessible data.

With no moving parts, SanDisk SSD SATA 5000 2.5" does not need to spin up into action or to seek files in the way that conventional hard disk drives do, while also eliminating the limitations of random seek performance. These characteristics, combined with SanDisk advanced flash management technology, enable SanDisk SSD to achieve performance that is approximately twice as fast as the hard disk drive. SanDisk SSD SATA 5000 2.5" achieves a sustained read rate of 67-megabyte (MB)*/sec and a random read rate of 7000 inputs/outputs per second (IOPS) for a 512-byte transfer.

SanDisk is claiming that it can boot Microsoft Windows Vista Enterprise in as little as 30 seconds and can access files at an average speed of 0.11 milliseconds—compared to the 48 seconds it would take to boot and 17 milliseconds to access files on a notebook using a hard disk drive.

A new digital photo format from Microsoft : HD Photo

A new digital photo format that offers higher-quality images with better compression will soon submit to an international standards organization according to Microsoft.

The format, named HD Photo was previously known as 'Windows Media Photo' will rival the industry standard JPEG format, a 15-year-old technology widely used in digital cameras and image applications.

Both JPEG and HD Photo formats take images and use compression to make the file sizes smaller so more photos can fitted in lesser size on disk or memory card. Trade of to this is quality loss. But, Microsoft claims HD Photo's lightweight algorithm causes less damage to photos during compression, with higher-quality images that are half the size of a JPEG.

The format can also accommodate "lossless" and "lossy" compression, two methods of compressing photo data with different effects on image quality. Microsoft said adjustments can be made to color balance and exposure settings that won't discard or truncate data that occurs with other bit-map formats.

Intel's phase-change memories

Intel is working on new type of memories called phase-change memory technology, called PRAM by Intel and PCM. This technology is set to sample in the first half of this year. They plan to ship the first PRAM modules as a straight-ahead NOR flash replacement, so that they can test the design before trying to move it up the ladder in the memory hierarchy.

The memories are claimed to have much higher number of read-write cycles (100 million) than flash, as well as a potential 10 years' worth of data retention. NOR flash is typically used as program storage memory for mobile devices like cell phones, while more durable but slower (for random read access, but not sequential bursts) NAND flash is used for mass storage in devices like the iPod nano.

The phase-change memories claimed to be potential flash-killer are actively researched by Intel, IBM, Samsung, Hitachi and many others. PCM's advantages over flash are numerous, and in fact the technology gets us closer to the Holy Grail of computer memory, i.e., a nonvolatile medium with a small cell size and fast access times, sort of like DRAM but without the volatility and the refresh circuitry. However, PRAM doesn't quite get us all the way there.

Competing technology from Hitachi boasts a 20ns read latency. This is much better than the 50ns to 90ns read latency typical of flash memory, but it's not even close to DDR2's ~3ns latency. If Intel's PRAM is in the same ballpark as Samsung's technology, then it won't be used as the main memory on your computer anytime soon.

Samsung has already demonstrated a 512Mbit PRAM chip, and has announced plans to offer a full lineup of PRAM products sometime in 2008. The company began sampling 256Mbit and 512Mbit parts produced on a 90nm process to mobile phone manufacturers at the end of last month.

Sony Ericsson W950i

Sony Ericsson W950i is a stylish 4GB music and video player that fits into your pocket, surfs the Web, syncs your calendar and contacts, and even checks your e-mail. No its not the iPhone, the Sony Ericsson W950i is available now, and it's a great choice for music lovers, as long as they don't care about fast Internet access.



Chocolate brown with orange accents colored W950i is a beautiful piece of work. It is rock solid gadget in your hand, yet light enough in handling. A large, 320-by-240 touch screen with a completely flat phone keypad below it. Little raised dots on the pad make a feeble attempt at helping you distinguish between pressing the "3" and the "6" keys. Volume and play/pause buttons are on one side. On the other side there's a back button, a scroll wheel, and a slot for a narrow, easy-to-hold stylus.

This is a real smartphone, running the Symbian operating system with the simple-to-use UIQ 3.0 interface, and it works just like an ordinary music phone.

MP3 patents dispute

As the federal jury's $1.52 billion patent infringement award goes against the Microsoft and its allies and in favor of Alcatel-Lucent for the two patents they hold, many questions remains unanswered.

It's difficult to say which companies will be affected by Thursday's award. MP3 users have traditionally been subject to two sets of rules for using the codec, one for encoding, and another for playback after decoding. If the two patents upheld by the jury today apply only to products that encode audio into MP3s, the ruling would affect only companies such as Microsoft, Apple, Yahoo and others offering software that lets consumers make their own MP3 files or MP3 encoding software.

If it covers playback too, every company involved even tangentially with MP3 stands to lose big. Microsoft's licensing bill for Thomson/Fraunhofer was only $16 million -- about 1 percent of what it now owes Alcatel-Lucent. A significant number of the companies who offer MP3 encoders and/or players could face a similar judgment, with many being driven out of business.

Although Thomson is widely accepted as the licensor of Fraunhofer's MP3 codec, Alcatel-Lucent holds two MP3-related patents upheld by a jury.

Sony's super Zoom digital cameras

Sony has introduced its new 8-megapixel DSC-H9 and DSC-H7 models. These cameras introduce Sony’s new advanced sports shooting mode. This mode combines high shutter speed shooting and intelligent continuous auto-focusing.



The cameras can quickly focus on fast-moving subjects by predicting where those subjects will be in the frame. This predictive technology also helps to reduce shutter lag, the time it takes for the camera to focus and shoot.

Both cameras feature powerful Carl Zeiss® 15x optical zoom lenses for up-close shots of big plays on the field with new face detection technology you can get closer to the players face. It can identify up to eight faces in the camera’s LCD frame, and automatically adjust white balance and flash as well as focus and exposure for correctly exposed, sharp photos.

Firefox 2.0 and 1.5 updated

The Mozilla Foundation has updated Firefox versions 2.0 and 1.5 with some important security fixes. The update brings the new version numbers 2.0.0.2 and 1.5.10 respectively. New updates addresses issues with AutoComplete and changes the way “Save” dialog box displays for known file extensions.

They have also fixed a bug where a mouse’s scroll wheel would stop working. It also corrects two memory leaks which would lead to system slowdowns and sluggish performance.

Download the latest versions from firefox homepage.