Phonesnews.com

“Kingston Technology Company, Inc., the independent world leader in memory products, announced it is expanding its line of CompactFlash Elite Pro cards with the addition of a new 8-GB card. The card is an ideal storage choice for studio, catalog and portrait photographers who need to produce large files for catalog reproduction and other commercial purposes. The addition of the 8-GB CompactFlash Elite Pro card completes one of the most comprehensive lines of Flash memory card solutions in the industry — including 512 MB, 1-GB, 2-GB and 4-GB CompactFlash cards. Kingston’s Elite Pro line meets the increased demands of today’s professional photographers by delivering reliability and dependability and providing a memory solution to suit their specific capacity needs.” Read more at photosnews.com

“It’s not just weapons, medicine and classroom pointers that utilize lasers anymore. Now, they are being used to make a kind of paper.Epson has unveiled a technology to create electronic paper using lasers. The requisite acronym is SUFTLA, which stands for surface-free technology by laser annealing. The process employed a super-thin film transistor LCD manufactured at a very low temperature to transfer data from its source to plastic film. The result is something that looks just like a piece of paper superimposed on an LCD. The resultion is 428×238.It is the latest development in a years-long effort by Epson to develop what it calls “e-paper,” which can be rolled up and folded. Efforts in this regard began back in 2004, and the company hopes to have a full version of the e-paper ready for common consumption a few years from now.” via mobilemag.com

“Nokia’s open source Maemo project has released a beta version of its next-generation SDK (software developer kit). The Mistral SDK beta aims to help developers port applications to Maemo 2.0 prior to the debut of Tablet OS 2006 for the Nokia 770 later this quarter.Today’s beta tools release also offers industrious developers, testers, and users an early glimpse of Tablet OS 2006. When installed on an x86 development system with a working scratchbox installation, the rootstrap included in this release can be used to cross-compile a beta version of Tablet OS 2006, albeit one lacking the VoIP capabilities most users are likely to care about the most. Specifically, today’s release does not include telepathy and farsight, the open source real-time communications applications that form the basis of Tablet OS 2006’s VoIP capabilities. For developers, the biggest changes in Tablet OS 2006 are a new EABI (embedded application binary interface) toolchain and several API changes that will require all Maemo 1.1 applications to be ported to Maemo 2.0. Today’s release aims to provide the necessary tools, documentation, binary rootstraps, and porting instructions to help developers port their applications.Nokia announced its Tablet OS 2006 release in mid-May. In addition to VoIP capabilities — the top feature request from early users, Nokia said — Tablet OS 2006 promises better memory performance and a “refreshed look,” along with a Google Talk client, and a full-screen “finger” keyboard.” Thanks to linuxdevices.com for this one.

“Getting to grips with GPS navigation is an exquisitely simple affair; press a button, and up pops VDO Dayton Mobile. The 2.2-inch, high-resolution QVGA display is highly legible and more than sufficiently bright, but expectedly has problems displaying more than basic information due to its small size. The numerical keypad – although decent in its own right – is hardly ideal for inputting addresses, however, rendering the ability to store favourites even more handy than usual. Meanwhile, the points of interest (POI) database seems to be reasonably up-to-date, automatic recalculation is supported and users can tweak calculation by parameters such as shortest/fastest, allow/avoid toll roads and more.” Read more here:

“Among the zillions of VoIP phones we came across, there are a few interesting ones, like the AMEX i-Talk Nano… Well guess what… if there are any similarities in the name or the design with a very famous MP3 player, that’s just pure coincidence… Anyway this quite good looking VoIP phone will work with almost any VoIP Software.” via akihabaranews.com

“A much faster version of Bluetooth is on the way, and officials with the Bluetooth Special Interest Group say products using the wireless protocol may be on the market as early as 2007. The next-generation Bluetooth is said to operate at similar distances (around 30 feet, best case) to today’s Bluetooth 2.0 but is a lot faster, capable of wireless transfers at a rate of 480Mbps. That’s 60MB per second, fast enough for high definition videoconferencing or moving files around at a fairly rapid clip. That kind of speed blows the doors off Bluetooth 2.0, which pokes along at a mere 721Kbps 2.1 Mbps. The new Bluetooth gets its exponentially faster speed by teaming up with ultra wideband technology (UWB). But there are other contenders using similar tech such as Wireless USB (also 480Mbps), and it’s hard to tell how these various protocols will compete with each other. The way we see it, Bluetooth is for near-distance, or personal area networking and Wireless USB has farther reach. But with the increased distance of Wireless USB, what would be the point of a shorter-distance protocol such as Bluetooth? Looks like we might have a horserace on our hands.” via gizmodo.com

“The cellphone — or, more accurately, the device formerly known as the cellphone — is getting to be more and more like a little portable computer. High-end models, known as smartphones, can handle large volumes of email, complete with attachments; surf the Web at high speed; view and edit Microsoft Office documents; take decent pictures; and play back music and videos.To manage these laptop-like tasks, they come equipped with faster and faster processors; more and more internal memory; expansion slots for increasingly spacious memory cards; and small, but usable, keyboards, instead of mere phone keypads.We’ve been testing two new such phones. One, from Palm Inc., is an improved model of the Treo, which has long been our favorite smartphone. The other, an entirely new design from Motorola Inc., manages to pack most of the Treo’s functionality into a much thinner and lighter body, at half the Treo’s price.” Read this nice comparison review here:

“Xplodus is a classic action title for those who yearn for solid arcade gaming and like mindlessly blowing things up!Aliens are attacking, you know the drill, and the only available soldier left is Private Pete from the reserves.Take control of Private Pete and help him eliminate the aliens with the power of massive explosives… before he accidentally blows himself up!Features Classic Arcade Action. Colorful artwork, detailing Private Pete’s adventures on the battlefield. Variety of tasty alien species to blow up! Dynamically generated levels with increasing difficulty allows for endless gameplay. Bonus Items to increase your firepower from deadly mines to devastating nukes! High Score list to keep track of your destruction, and brag to your comrades. Explosive Visual Effects make the mayhem come alive. Incredible Audio and Sound Effects for those whose ears aren’t already ringing!” Check it here:

“Safa is just another one of those Korean DAP companies struggling to keep its head above the waterline. They’ve introduced a few notable units in the past, like the Q1x0 series – a concept recently equipped with a “money chip” (T-1000), by the way.Safa’s latest addition to their line-up of flash DAP is this one; the SS100. “SS” presumably stands for something like “Super Slim”, whereas the “100” could represent the number of sales. But let’s try to remain optimistic here, and elaborate a bit about the SS100’s spec list.Well, all we can say is… have a look at the Maxfield Max-Sin. It might look different (especially the controls section), but it’s basically the same thing. This means it’s small/slim indeed (87 x 42 x 7.4mm 35 grams), fit with a 65k color OLED screen and able to deal with video playback and whatnot.If there’s anything going for the Safa version, then it’s probably the fact that they’ve got their own Theme Park over there: SafaLand. Screw Disneyworld, I wanna ride the giant headlights-equipped Safa gastropod-thing again!” via dapreview.net

“The aspects of personal information security are always of increased interest in every society. A priority of every person is to protect his private information and keep that information from dissemination. Consequently there is always a category of people who has interested in that confidential information. Within day to day life there are often gossips and rumors in circulation which may be troublesome but not critical for people who are influential in society (either commercially or politically). The dissemination of such confidential information can often be disastrous either in a direct or figurative sense. Therefore certain members of society are concerned about the preservation of confidentiality while others do their best to get the necessary information for whatever reason or use. It is certainly not a secret that the most vulnerable aspect of providing secrecy is the process of data transmission. Since this review focuses on the security of voice traffic transmitted via cellular communication and does not concern itself with systems of secret observation, we will take a look at the program which allows the preservation of confidentiality when talking on a cell phone, namely SecureGSM Pro.” Read this review here: