Thread: Mobile News

Candy Technology has introduced its memory card C-СА of CompactFlash standard. The company eliminates speed performance of the new card: 40x, 80x, 90x.


The model is designed for 100000 read/write operations. The durability makes up 10000 insertion/removal cycles.

Other specs of the C-CF:

Capacity - 128 MB, 256 MB, 512 MB, 1 GB or 2 GB optionally
Op. Voltage – 3.5 V or 5 V
Dimensions – 12.8x32.5x3.9 mm
Weight – 8.5 g.

IBM and Sanyo Electric said they will collaborate to develop a fuel cell battery proto for notebooks.

The companies claim that the fuel cell system proto can provide 8 hours of power on a single methanol cartridge.

Many other companies work their way in this direction and have already introduced some protos that involve methanol oxidation to generate power. The proto by Sanyo and IBM differs from its predecessors in the following way, it combines micro direct methanol fuel cell developments with ordinary Li-Ion batteries. According to Mitsuru Homma, president of Sanyo Mobile Energy Company, a hybrid fuel cell system prototype will allow users efficiently work as long as with fuel cells only.

Unlike other prototypes the new system is ready to work with most IBM's ThinkPad notebooks, and it doesn’t require to be changed.

IBM withholds comments on the release of fuel cell to the mass market. Sanyo has the proto of the system, which is far from the final product so far. The system by Sanyo looks like a docking station for a notebook.

The docking system weighs 2.2 kg that includes a fuel cell and a built-in Li-Ion. The fuel cell cartridge provides a 12-watt output or up to 72 watts with the built-in battery. DC output voltage is 16 V. One cartridge provides about 8 hours of power.

Freescale Semiconductor has created a new platform for monitoring, recognition and control systems. The company claims that the new platform is the first in the world that supports ZigBee technology, the specification of which was approved only in mid December 2004. TUV Rheinland, the North American company that ran the tests, confirmed that the Freescale platform complies with IEEE 802.15.4 standard and ZigBee specification.

The solution by Freescale has a high scalability level that allows decreasing costs for development of final systems. Due to ZigBee technology the new platform is good for creating systems that require long battery life, efficiency and simple use.

Today in the morning palmOne officially introduced its new handheld PC Tungsten E2. The new product comes to retail networks today, the recommended price by the manufacturer makes up $249. We’ve mentioned details on preparations for the mass shipments in our news block before, now let’s list key specs.


The specs of palmOne Tungsten E2:

Screen: transreflective 320x320 sensor TFT screen supporting 65K colors
Bluetooth interface
Memory: 32 MB, user’s area - 26 MB
DataViz Documents To Go utility to work with Word, Excel, PowerPoint documents and read Adobe PDF
Battery: Li-Ion
Fast Sync to update Outlook info
Expansions slots: SD/SDIO, MultiMediaCard
Processor: 200 MHz Intel XScale (ARM kernel)
Operating system: Palm OS Garnet (v5.4)
5-way navigation pad
Headphones jack
Built-in MP3 player
There is a detailed review of the new handheld in our article The new PDAs by palmOne. Besides palmOne has also announced the cut of recommended price for the Zire 31 by $20 - to $129.

The Swedish company Neonode has implemented the Internet access support via WLAN networks to mobile phones. In autumn 2004 Neonode started cooperation with Philips Semiconductors to develop a mobile phone with low power consumption and support of WLAN. The release of the new handset N1 is scheduled at the second half of 2005.

The new phone will allow users making calls, access Internet, chat, download and transfer files faster and cheaper than from an ordinary mobile phone. The data transfer speed will initially reach 11 Mbps, that’s much faster compared with the 3 generation standard and Bluetooth. The company intends to built up data transfer speeds gradually up to 100 Mbps.

If the phone has no access to WLAN network, it’ll use GSM network as an ordinary mobile phone. The N1 will support VoIP. The company claims that the phone will have considerable advantages against PC to access VoIP services, as PC with the phone function is far from the ideal.

The N1 series has an optical sensitive screen zForce and a user’s interface Neno, developed by Neonode. The smartphone will be powered by Microsoft Windows CE .Net.

The American Academy of Neurology has published the results on the study of the use of cell phones and increased risk of brain tumors. The researchers interviewed 427 people with brain tumors and 822 without tumors, asking about their use of cell phones.

The study found no correlation between the development of brain tumors and how frequently mobile phones were used or the length of use. Nor did they find any evidence that brain tumors were more likely to occur on the side of the head most used with cell phones.

The results do not contradict to other studies, says Dr. Christoffer Johansen. “There have been a few studies that found an increased risk of brain tumors with cell phone use, but those studies have been criticized for problems with the study design”.

For example, the study conducted in 2002 found some indication that long-time users of analog cell phones had a greater tendency to develop a specific type of tumor on the side of the head most often used for making calls. The new study involved very few people who used cell phones for 10 or more years. For this reason, we shouldn’t make any firm conclusions.

Dr. Johansen also confirms that using a hands-free system for cell phone use will eliminate any dangers.

Very soon the South Korean operator KTF plans to start shipments of a new original EV-DO PDA-enabled phone KTF-U1500 equipped with a 2-megapixel camera.


According to the Korea press KTF-U1500 features a large 2.4” LCD TFT QVGA screen displaying 262K colors, and the digital camera with a 2-megapixel CCD sensor is said to play MP3 and VOD files and support video recording. Windows Mobile that powers the device implies the support of the key MS Office applications with editing function.

Other features of KTF-U1500 include 64-tones polyphony, slot for MiniSD cards and support of Digital Ink technology.

The Japanese mobile service provider NTT DoCoMo intends to start sales of a new universal W-CDMA-GSM/GPRS handset FOMA M1000 produced by Motorola. The device stands out for a large screen and the support of some specific functions. The operator positions the model for the business segment.


The FOMA M1000 is equipped with an integrated digital camera with a 1.3-megapixel CMOS sensor and a 2.9” 208x320x65K color TFT sensor screen. Typically for this class the model supports e-mail client with POP and IMAP; Word, Excel and PDF documents and not very custom browser – the full version of Opera 7.5.

There are integrated Wireless LAN (IEEE802.11b), Bluetooth and USB 2.0 interfaces and a slot for TransFlash cards. The FOMA M1000 measures 117x59.5x21.5 mm and weighs some 168 g, it will be released in BlackSilver/DarkSilver color solutions. At the moment there is no more info available on this handset.

Motorola V190 is expected to appear in July at some $135-$140

SK Teletech, a subsidiary company of SK Telecom, has introduced the IMB-1000 supporting satellite DMB technology. The IMB-1000 is meant for CDMA2000 1x EV-DO standard. A peculiar thing about this handset is the sensor screen.


The form-factor represents an original slider, the “sliding” runs perpendicular to the usual direction. Its TFT-screen features a QVGA resolution on 2.4 inches, 262K colors. By sides there are two stereo columns. The phone has an integrated 2-megapixel CCD-camera and an MP3-player. The phone support VOD (video on demand) service. There are 100 MB of memory.