Connectivity & Cloud - Page 22

Samsung is apparently working on a new handset with integrated GPS as part of its new line up of handsets that are expected to arrive late this year or early next year. The unofficial model name is i550 and it will also be using the Symbian S60 operating system. This is not the first time Samsung has developed a phone with Symbian as its OS, although it's not Samsungs main choice of OS for its handsets, unlike Nokia that almost exclusively uses Symbian.

The i550 is also meant to be a 3.5G handset with HSDPA, although it only supports speeds of up to 3.6Mbit. It's meant to have a 2.6-inch display which will hopefully have better than 240x320 resolution, 128MB of RAM and 150MB of ROM. The built in memory can be expanded via a microSD card slot and the phone features a mini USB connector.

Samsung Electronics has revealed the first display to feature the new DisplayPort interface that it has developed together with Intel, AMD, Nvidia, HP, Dell, Lenovo, Philips and others. DisplayPort is also sanctioned by VESA and it's the next generation display interface on computers, set to replace DVI, LVDS and D-sub.

However, there's a little while before you can go out and buy one of these, as they won't be available until Q2 2008. The demo display measures 30-inches and it has WQXGA (don't you just love acronyms?) resolution, which to most of us means 2,560x1,600 pixels.

Sandisk has announced that it is working closely with Ducati in a sponsorship deal that allows Sandisk to use the Ducati brand for its products. The Ducati Moto GP motorcycles will carry Sandisk branding as part of the agreement.

Sandisk launched three new Sandisk Extreme Ducati Edition products, of which the first is the Ducati Edition USB flash drive. It's been designed to resemble the Duacti Moto GP motorcycle and it comes with 4GB of capacity. It has a read and write speed of 20MB/s according to Sandisk, which makes it their fastest USB flash drive.

Ratoc Systems International, a to us unfamiliar company has launched the REX-USBDVI external graphics card. Although it seems like it's only available in Japan at the moment, it's likely that the company will launch it in other markets in de time. Ratoc seems to specialize in PDA graphics solutions and various notebook upgrades.

The REX-USBDVI supports resolutions of up to 1,600x1,200 or 1,680x1,050. It's not going to be powerful enough for playing games with, but you can attach multiple units to your PC or notebook for some multi display action. This isn't the first such device, but it's the first one we've seen with a DVI connector.

Palit has just announced its Radeon HD 2600Pro Sonic, which features a built in HDMI connector, making it easier to connect the card to HDMI enabled displays and HD TV's. The card retains one DVI and get a D-Sub connector as well, although it's missing a TV-out connector, but if your TV already has HDMI, why bother with analogue?
The card itself looks quite generic and it features a fairly standard cooler. The HD 2600Pro Sonic has 256MB of GDDR3 memory clocked at 1.4GHz and the GPU is clocked at 650MHz. This is the first Radeon HD 2600 Pro card to feature GDDR3 memory and it should allow for a performance boost against the competition.

A to us unknown console accessory company called XCM is listing a new product that should appeal to owners of older Xbox 360 consoles, as they claim they're working on an HDMI cable that will work with them.

What exactly this cable does isn't clear at this time, as the only reference on the site is that it enables HMDI and 1080P output from the regular white Xbox 360. Our guess is that it combines the VGA or component video signal with the digital audio in the round little box on the middle of the cable and then outputs this as some kind of pseudo HDMI signal.