Search Results for: samsung

Anticipated for delivery in October, Samsung's first ever netbook is likely to offer five hours of battery life. It will be priced at the equivalent of $550 USD. If you'd like to buy one of these devices in the US, however, don't hold your breath.

While an official announcement still awaits, Samsung is expected to step into the netbook (or sub-laptop) fray during October in Korea, the United Kingdom and some other markets, although not initially in the United States.

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The company that holds patent rights for a breakthrough flash memory technology is apparently discussing the possibility of being acquired by the world's biggest flash producer. It's come down to this.

Flash card manufacturer SanDisk issued a statement early this morning, essentially using a bull-horn with trumpet accompaniment to awaken the world to the news that it does not comment on rumor and speculation. That speculation, it said, concerns news emerging from the Korean business press this week, indicating that it and leading flash memory producer Samsung are in merger talks.

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An official with one of the format's principal supporting companies gives it a rather short life span, saying another technology would replace it.

If Samsung UK consumer electronics chief Andy Griffiths is correct, the format would have spent only seven years as a commercially viable format. Compare this to DVD, which has been available to consumers for well over a decade.

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Samsung has agreed to sell its stake in Symbian to Nokia for a reported $410 million this week, pushing Nokia ever closer to total ownership.

In early 2003, Symbian announced that Samsung had joined the likes of Ericsson, Matsushita, Motorola, Nokia, Psion, and Siemens as a 5% shareholder in the company and its eponymous mobile operating system. At the time of Samsung's entry as a shareholder and on Symbian's supervisory board, Nokia held a 19% stake in the company, equal to Ericsson and Motorola.

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Thumb drives and portable music players may continue their rapid capacity increase, thanks to #2 flash supplier Toshiba introducing 32 gigabit chips this fall. It's a big gamble, though, for a catch-up player in a declining market.

Just 16 months after the company said it was ready to begin sampling 16 gigabit (Gb) NAND flash memory for embedded devices, using its 56-nanometer lithography process, Toshiba announced late this morning that it would begin sampling 32 Gb embedded flash devices using its 43-nm process in October.

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Best Buy announced this week that the Samsung Instinct from Sprint has become the retailer's best selling handset of the last two years, apparently outselling all 95 other phones the retailer carries.

It's quite an understandable feat, though, since Best Buy is the device's exclusive non-Sprint retail provider.

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Although Dell now offers Samsung's solid-state drives across 18 different notebook PC models, Samsung still views SSDs overall as just a "complement" to its HDD line-up.

NEW YORK CITY (BetaNews) - At a press conference this week hosted by Samsung, Dell Storage Director Hubbert Smith told reporters that while flash memory-based solid-state disk drives (SSDs) offer performance benefits across many notebook PCs, enterprise servers, and other applications, he believes Samsung will also keep relying on lower-cost, high density HDs to meet users' capacity needs.

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Driven by applications ranging from cell phones, videocams, and embedded pens to PCs and servers, NAND memory is now set for a big resurgence, according to a Samsung vice president this week.

NEW YORK CITY (BetaNews) - Ultimately, the NAND flash cards already used in mobile devices and digital photography might even replace CDs, contended Jim Elliott, Samsung's VP of memory management, in a presentation at a Samsung press event on Wednesday.

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A slimmer version of Samsung's series of optical disc drives, due next July, will connect directly to digital cameras and will enable faster burns of multimedia content than internal PC drives, the manufacturer told BetaNews today.

NEW YORK CITY (BetaNews) -- In an interview with BetaNews during an invitees-only press event here today, Richard Aguilera, Samsung's national sales manager for optical storage, told us that the company's next round of external TruDirect drives (model SE-T084M) will let consumers burn videos, photos, and music in a fraction of the time it would take for them to burn content onto a PC's hard drive.

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Samsung officials told reporters it will ship a Blu-ray write-capable PC drive in the first half of next year, preceded by a combo drive in the fourth quarter of this year.

NEW YORK CITY (BetaNews) -- At an invitees-only press event here this morning, representatives from Samsung told BetaNews they're looking to catch up with Hitachi in the Blu-ray PC drive market.

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As some see it, Samsung's forthcoming Windows Mobile 6.1-based Omnia smartphone will act as a retort of sorts to Apple's new 3G iPhone. Although the Omnia isn't slated for full rollout until June 17, Samsung prereleased some details today.

Samsung's new Ommia will indeed offer new features not available on Samsung's existing Instinct smartphone. Both the Omnia and Instinct provide digital video and audio recording, along with 3G wireless, an FM radio, and GPS. Unlike the Instinct, though, the Omnia will offer Wi-Fi. Moreover, Samsung has boosted smartphone camera capabilities to 5 megapixels from the 2 megapixel camera in the Instinct.

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Announced last week, Samsung's L870 Symbian S60 3.2 Smartphone will be the first handset other than Apple's iconic iPhone to come equipped with Safari as its native mobile browser.

The S60 default browser is based upon the same WebKit browser engine as Safari, so having Safari on board instead may not necessarily be a great technological leap. Like Safari, the S60 browser currently boasts desktop-quality browsing, and has generally been viewed as an excellent application in its own right.

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The Korean electronics maker showed off its biggest and fastest SSD in the 2.5" category, bringing its solid state hard drives ever closer to its HDDs in capacity.

Samples of the drive will go out to Samsung's clients in September, with release targeted for the end of the year. Also in development is a 1.8-inch version of the same drive, which is slated for fourth quarter 2008 availability.

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At a major display technology symposium this week, Samsung showed off a future HDTV with four times the resolution of a current 1080p screen, plus the first of its "Blue Phase" high-refresh displays.

During the Society for Information Display 2008 International Symposium currently taking place in Los Angeles, Samsung introduced several new products aimed more at grabbing headlines than striking bargains. First was its new 82-inch LCD TV panel that offers an impressive 3840 x 2160 pixel resolution and a 120 Hz refresh rate, though whose price and launch date are still unknown.

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Samsung's family line of succession has been broken -- at least temporarily -- in a shakeup that could pave the way for some reform at the scandal-ridden conglomerate.

With the now finalized exit of Samsung Chairman and co-CEO Lee Kun-hee, Lee's son -- long-time heir apparent Lee Jae-yong -- will be sent off to "humble working conditions" overseas instead of jumping into his father's shoes.

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