HighM.A.T. Technology: new CD format from Microsoft and Panasonic
ATI launches new marketing program: old card turn-in
Samsung Electronics announces 4MB FRAM chips
Acer announces TravelMate C100 tablet
ôotebook TFT LCD prices continue to drop in October
HighM.A.T. Technology: new CD format from Microsoft and Panasonic
Matsushita Electric and Microsoft announced the new optical recording format — HighM.A.T. (High-performance Media Access Technology) — to simplify data exchange between a PC and various consumer electronics like CD players, DVD systems, and car players.
HighM.A.T. discs will be fully compatible with the current optical drives.
The idea of this development is that creating and recording photo, audio, and video collections, users can´t use them with consumer CD/DVD players. There´s still no standard for identifying playlists, music metadata and video/photo folders, that vary from a player to player. Besides, DVD or CD players sometimes need minutes to find the desired file.
HighM.A.T. technology is solve this compatibility problem by simplifying file identification and search. HighM.A.T. discs are compatible with ISO 9660 Joliet.
Microsoft plans to implement HighM.A.T. support into the final Windows Media Player 9 and future Windows Movie Maker for Windows XP. Panasonic will support HighM.A.T. in new CD/DVD players from 2003. Fujifilm will also support HighM.A.T. in new products and will join this venture.
HighM.A.T. specs will be posted at www.HighMAT.com for licensing.
ATI launches new marketing program: old card turn-in
ATI announced a new marketing program for USA and Canada. Now anyone can turn in an old ATI card and purchase a novelty with a discount:
- RADEON 9700 PRO
- RADEON 9000 PRO
- ALL-IN-WONDER RADEON 8500
- RADEON 7000 MAC EDITION
- RADEON 8500 MAC EDITION
All the details are posted here, and in this FAQ.
Samsung Electronics announces 4MB FRAM chips
Samsung Electronics announced special 4MB FRAM (Ferroelectric Random Access Memory) chips for mobile devices. New chips utilize the technology, announced early this year, used for 32MB FRAM chip production, with some improvements to reduce the cost price.
FRAM cells are smaller than SRAM (0.94 sq. micrometer) and require less power than DRAM (3V). Access time makes about 80 ms.
Acer announces TravelMate C100 tablet
Early in December Acer is to sell (at least in Japan) its universal TravelMate C100, showcased at Microsoft´s stand at WPC EXPO 2002.
Acer TravelMate C100, controlled by Windows XP Tablet PC Edition, is an original combination of a Tablet PC with usual notebook functionality. The model features 10.4-inch 1024x768 (XGA) sensor LCD, rotating up to 180°, 800 MHz Mobile Pentium III-M, 256MB RAM, 30GB HDD, SMI Lynx 3DM+ graphics, 3 IEEE 802.11b ports, external display connector and other interfaces. Battery operation time makes 3-4 hours.
The dimensions of Acer TravelMate C100 are 251x208x25.4 mm, weight — 1.5 kg. With an external 24x CD-ROM it will cost about 250,000 yens (about $2100).
Source: PC Watch
ôotebook TFT LCD prices continue to drop in October
The weakness of global LCD monitor and notebook market resulted in even faster ntoebook TFT LCD prices decrease. Moreover, according to Nikkei Sangyo Shimbun, vendors´ pressure on makers may prolong the price drop until the year-end.
These are average notebook TFT LCD prices for the last three months:
| |
August |
September |
October |
| 15 inches |
$290 — $300 |
$275 — $285 |
$230 — $240 |
| 14.1 inches |
$232.5 — $242.5 |
$220 — $230 |
$200 — $210 |
Source: The DigiTimes
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