June 26, 2006

At 6.9mm, the Samsung X820, also called the Ultra Edition 6.9, is the thinnest cell phone on the market. Among the features are a 2 megapixel camera and an MP3 music player. The two other announced phones, the D830 and the D900 are also extremely thin. The D900 even has a 3 megapixel camera.

August 17, 2005

Sony has introduced new DVD burners capable of 8X burn speeds on dual layer DVD+R DL media. The internal DRU-810A and external DRX-810UL will be available in stores in two months. The drives also feature 4X DVD-R DL, 16X DVD+/-R, 8X DVD+RW, 6X DVD-RW, 48X CD-R and 32X CD-RW recording.

June 15, 2005

DivX Networks today released the DivX 6 video encoding format, featuring enhanced performance, video quality, and editing capabilities. DivX was originally designed for computer video but is now being used more and more for consumer electronics. The most visible new feature of DivX 6 allows video editors to create enhanced menu pages and chapter titles.

June 15, 2005

REAL Software has released the latest version of its REALbasic cross-platform application development tool. REALbasic 2005 supports development of GUI software that can be compiled for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux. REALbasic has a high degree of compatibility with Microsoft's Visual Basic language, and has other features as well, including an SQLite-based database engine. The Mac version also supports Mac OS X 10.4's Spotlight search system. In addition, REAL will soon be offering the Standard Edition of REALbasic 2005 on the Linux platform free of charge.

June 15, 2005

JVC announced the launch of new Everio G camcorders featuring 20 GB and 30 GB internal hard disks. The new Everio GZ-MG20 and Everio GZ-MG50 camcorders are able to record up to 7 or 10.5 hours of high-quality video, respectively. Movies are recorded using the MPEG-2 format, which makes DVD burning of recorded video that much easier. The devices are also able to function as 1.33 megapixel digital cameras.

June 13, 2005

Intel has started shipping seven new Pentium 4 processors. They include the 521, 531, 541, 551, 561, and 571 processors using 64-bit EM64T technology and 1 MB of L2 cache, as well as the new 3.8 GHz 670 processor, with 64-bit EM64T technology, 2 MB of L2 cache, and enhanced SpeedStep power-conservation features.

June 13, 2005

Today both Nokia and Sony Ericsson announced a dozen new cell phones. Nokia announced seven mobile phones, including the 6280 3G slide phone with 2-megapixel camera, the 6270 quadband slide phone with 2-megapixel camera, the 6111 camera slide phone, the 6060 GSM clamshell phone, the 6265 CDMA 2-megapixel camera slide phone, the 2255 clamshell phone, and the 2125 candy bar-shaped phone. Meanwhile, Sony Ericsson announced five new phones, including the sleek K608 3G UMTS media phone, the W600 Walkman phone, the S600 super play phone, the Z520 clamshell phone, and the J210 basic messaging phone.

June 13, 2005

Red Hat today released Fedora Core 4, the latest version of their free Linux distribution. Among the major improvements in Fedora Core 4 are GNOME 2.10 and KDE 3.4, the Evince multi-format document viewer, OpenOffice.org 2.0, Eclipse 3.1, PowerPC CPU support, improved SELinux security functionality, Global File System (GFS) storage clustering technology, Xen virtualization, GCC 4.0, and much more.

June 9, 2005

Seagate Technologies has announced ten new hard drives, part of their new Momentus line, including the first drive to use perpendicular recording storage technology. The drives include a 8 GB one-inch drive for portable media players and a 500 GB drive for servers and home entertainment systems. Another new Seagate drive, the Momentus 5400 FDE (Full Disc Encryption), features transparent hardware-based encryption for protecting data in case of notebook theft. Perhaps the most intruiging of these new drives is the Momentus 5400.3, a 2.5" notebook drive that stores 160 GB of data using perpendicular recording.

June 7, 2005

AnandTech, MacDevCenter and CNET have provided detailed coverage of Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC 2005). Among the news items discussed are Apple's move to Intel processors starting in 2006, iTunes 4.9 with support for Podcasting, QuickTime 7 with H.264 for Windows, Xcode 2.1 with universal binary support for both Intel and PowerPC chips, the Rosetta binary translator for running PowerPC applications on Intel CPUs, hints about Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard), the business side of the Apple/Intel partnership, and more. In addition, a streaming video of Steve Jobs' keynote is available in QuickTime format from Apple's site.

June 2, 2005

AnandTech and Phoronix continue with Day 3 coverage of the Computex 2005 trade show from Taiwan. This time they take a look at a number of new hardware products including new graphics cards and motherboards from Albatron, the Sapphire liquid metal cooled graphics card, new motherboards and small form factor PCs from Biostar, the FIC and Intel Mac mini-like PC clone, new BTX form factor motherboards from a number of manufacturers, new RAID 3 and RAID 6 storage solutions, as well as LCD displays from BenQ, Sampo, and AG Neovo.

June 1, 2005

Tom's Hardware, Phoronix, and AnandTech have published Day 2 coverage of the Computex 2005 trade show in Taiwan. New hardware covered includes the Gigabyte i-RAM card, the new ULi M1695 chipset for the Athlon 64, even more information on the NVIDIA G70, more details on ATI CrossFire and R520 graphics technology, the new Shuttle XPC SN26P small form factor PC with SLI capability, new water cooling subsystems, dozens of new motherboards, the Cypress CSC-200 HDTV scaler/deinterlacer, the NetBox PC from Foxconn, the IWill DPMax2 dual Opteron small form factor PC, the Momitsu HD DVD player, the PQI mPack portable multimedia player, Sapphire liquid metal cooled video cards, the Shuttle M1000 personal video recorder and multimedia center, and more.

May 31, 2005

Several tech review sites have posted coverage of the first day at the Computex 2005 trade show in Taiwan. New hardware covered includes BTX Athlon 64 motherboards, the NVIDIA G70 GPU, affordable SLI motherboards, dual NVIDIA 6800 Ultra GPU graphics cards from Gigabyte and ASUS, the ATI R520 GPU with hardware H.264 video decoding, ATI CrossFire multi-GPU technology, new nForce4 motherboards, the Athlon 64 X2 dual-core CPU, IWill's new H8502 8-way / 16-core AMD Opteron servers, the Intel 945 and 955 chipsets, new small form factor (SFF) PCs with SLI support, the ECS PF88 motherboard (which supports Pentium 4, Pentium D, Pentium M, Athlon 64, X2 and Turion 64 CPUs), Mio GPS devices, Turion 64 notebook PCs, the RX800 combination AGP and PCI Express graphics card, TwinHan HDTV tuner cards, XGI Volari 8300 and Volari 8600 graphics cards, and more.

May 27, 2005

Computer manufacturer Iwill is showing off an eight way, 16 core AMD Opteron system at this week's Computex trade show. The server, the H8502, uses Iwill's eight-way HTX technology to link 8 dual-core Opterons within the server. The server supports up to 128 GB of memory. Some benchmarks for the H8502 have also been published.

May 25, 2005

Nokia is introducting the Nokia 770, a compact internet tablet based on the Linux operating system. Features include a 65,000 color 800x480 pixel display, a TI-OMAP CPU with DSP, 64 MB of RAM, 128 MB of Flash Memory, an RS-MMC slot, USB, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 1.2, Linux kernel 2.6, X11 server, GTK+ user interface, and a weight of 230 grams. Applications included on the device: Web Browser with Flash Player, Email Client, Internet Radio, News Reader, Media Player, Image Viewer, PDF Viewer, File Manager, and Games. File formats supported by the device: MP3, Real Audio, MPEG4, AAC, WAV, AMR, MP2, JPEG, GIF, BMP, TIFF, PNG, Animated GIF format, SVG-tiny, ICO, MPEG1 video, MPEG4 video, Real Video, H.263, AVI, 3GP.

May 19, 2005

The OpenBSD project has released version 3.7 of OpenBSD, a free and highly secure open source operating system. New features in this release include support for Zaurus and SGI platforms, enhanced 64-bit CPU support, driver support for new hardware (especially networking and wireless cards), a new OSPFD service, improved TCP performance, kernel based PPPoE, enhanced NTPD and BGPD functionality, improved pf firewall functionality and performance, enhanced IPSEC functionality, support for OpenSSH 4.1 and X.Org 6.8.2, hundreds of bug fixes, and even stronger security. BSD DevCenter has published an interview with some of the OpenBSD 3.7 developers, who explain all the new features and improvements. NewsForge has also published a review of OpenBSD 3.7.

May 18, 2005

Nintendo unveiled their new Game Boy Micro at E3 on Tuesday. The game device is about the size of an iPod mini, plays all the same games as the Game Boy Advance SP, but is lighter and has a much brighter screen than previous devices. In addition, the Game Boy Micro also supports standard headphones. According to Nintendo, the Game Boy Micro will be available in the Fall of 2005.

May 16, 2005

Check Point Software Technologies is announcing NGX, a new unified management platform for its network perimeter, intrusion-detection and Web application security devices. The company is also releasing upgraded versions of its VPN-1 firewall and virtual private networking software.

May 11, 2005

AOL is introducing a free Web mail service for all users of AIM instant messaging. The new mail service will offer 2 GB of storage and compete with Google's GMail, Yahoo Mail, and Microsoft's Hotmail. In addition, the new AIM Mail service allows access by third-party mail clients via IMAP and includes server side anti-virus protection from McAfee.

May 10, 2005

Today at the Microsoft Mobile & Embedded Developers Conference (MEDC 2005) in Las Vegas, Bill Gates announced the launch of Windows Mobile 5.0 (previously referred to as Windows Mobile 2005 or Magneto). Enhancements include new network support for 3G, Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth, as well as one-handed operation, persistent memory storage, improved Microsoft Office functionality, new security features, Windows Media Player 10 Mobile, new hard disk support, and more. In related news, CNET has published an interview with Bill Gates about Windows Mobile 5.0.