Today’s Wall Street Journal has an article entitled ” The Top 10 Trends in 10 Industries “, wherein they discuss “10 important industries and tell you the most important buzz in each”. Some of the categories seem somewhat pedantic e.g. “Accounting”, “Agriculture” and “Furniture”, however, in the area of “Consumer Electronics”, they say that [...]

Olympus Singapore announced their R1000 series of PDAs a few days ago. The units meet IP54 specifications on dust and water splash resistance, and are branded as the Tough Digital Assistant (TDA) – the series of handhelds.

The main selling points are:

Strength - withstands a 4 ft drop, with an Ingress Protection rating of 54

Small [...]

Vodafone today announced two new mobile phones with integrated analog TV tuners and with motion-recognition:- the V603SH from Sharp, and the V603T from Toshiba.

The main marketing features for both phones are summarized below:-

Motion Control Sensor for performing mobile handset operations

Integrated TV Tuner and Electronic Program Guide + FM tuner

Auto focus 2.02 megapixel CCD camera with [...]

WiMAX, that much-hyped, longer-range, Intel-centric, version of Wi-Fi is having its parade rained on, by an article in the current issue of The Economist entitled “The prospects for WiMax technology have been hugely overhyped“.

Many, if not most, people believe that WiMAX, which implements broadband wireless networks based on the IEEE 802.16 standard, will [...]

A survey by Brandchannel shows that Apple has beat out Google as the world’s top brand. The top 10 are now:

While Sony was first in the Asia-Pacific sub-category, I was surprised to see that it had only placed 11th globally.

Security Analysis of a Cryptographically-Enabled RFID Device is the bland-sounding title of an article describing how to crack the security behind the Speedpass payment system, and some of those RFID-based immobilizer key fobs used by auto makers. The article caught my attention because I’m a user of both devices.
The authors describe some of the [...]

Silent Communication’s ‘Talking Without Talking’ product allows mobile phone users to conduct and answer voice calls while remaining silent.
The TWT user interface displays a set of pre-customized voice recordings that can be played back in response to an incoming call, or the user can type an SMS message that will be converted to speech … [...]

We got our hands on an Audiovox SMT5600 today. Its a very nice compact tri-band Windows Mobile 2003 Smartphone, with Bluetooth, a VGA camera, and a good battery life. The screen at 2.2 inch and 176 x 220 pixels looks sharp.

While the unit handled nicely and worked well, some of the buttons felt a [...]

The Mio 269 Handheld GPS was announced a while ago, but is just now becoming available.

Th 269 is marketed mainly as “All of Western Europe, fitting neatly in your pocket “. Technologically, its a 3½ in QVGA with a 2½ GB Hard Disk Drive and a SiRFStarII high-performance GPS core running on Windows [...]

The January 2005 issue of Nikkei Electronics Asia has a cover story called “SED: Rising Star in TV Market? “. The article outlines a joint venture between Canon and Toshiba to start producing Surface-conduction Electron-emitter Display (SED) TV panels in August 2005. Some of the advantages of SED panels include: the displays are only [...]