Zspire Mouse: Cats Beware...

Plastic Logic Fabricates Largest Plastic Active-Matrix Display

ICANN Approves .Asia Domain, Discusses Non-English Web Addresses

Panasonic Starts Pilot Production 50GB Blu-Ray Discs

ATI Introduces Mobility Radeon X1600

Zspire Mouse: Cats Beware...

...and modders behappy. Such an unusually looking accessory was introduced by Zspire - a wireless Bluetooth mouse encased into a metal body with a rather aggressive look (also resembling empire ships from Star Wars).

Sized 76x114x28mm, the mouse weighs 165g. The sensor has 800 dpi resolution. Of course, there is some plastic, otherwise signals would not pass through.

Zspire mouse costs about $120 (without a Bluetooth receiver), while the Zspire Copper Edition costs even more - about $150.

Source: Zspire

Plastic Logic Fabricates Largest Plastic Active-Matrix Display

Plastic Logic announced today that it has developed the largest flexible organic active matrix display. The display consists of a flexible, high-resolution, printed active-matrix backplane driving an electronic paper frontplane from US-based E Ink Corporation. The display will be shown at the 12th International Displays Workshop in Takamatsu, Japan from December 6/9.

The displays are 10" diagonal SVGA (600 by 800) with 100ppi resolution and 4 levels of greyscale. The thickness of the display when laminated with E Ink Imaging Film is less than 0.4mm. The backplane substrate is made from low temperature PET supplied by DuPont Teijin Films which is more flexible and easier to handle than alternatives such as thin glass or steel foil.

E Ink Imaging Film is an electrophoretic display material that looks like printed ink-on-paper and has been designed for use in paper-like electronic displays. Like paper, the material can be flexed and rolled. The film only consumes battery power while the image is updated.

The displays were fabricated using Plastic Logic's new 350mm by 350mm Prototype Line and its proprietary printed electronics process that is scalable for large area, high volume and low cost. Plastic Logic will partner with manufacturers to bring the process to mass production.

Plastic Logic

ICANN Approves .Asia Domain, Discusses Non-English Web Addresses

ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) approved a ".asia" Web domain to unify the Asia-Pacific community (but delayed the ".xxx" zone for pornography sites.)

The new ".asia." domain would supplement suffixes available for individual countries, such as ".cn" for China and ".jp" for Japan. ICANN earlier approved ".eu" for the European Union; registrations for that begin Wednesday.

But what's more interesting, ICANN discussed methods for allowing new Web addresses to be created in Chinese, Arabic, Cyrillic and other alphabets instead of the Latin script used in English. The technical tweaks required are complicated, but a test run is expected to begin shortly, ICANN spokesman Andrew Robertson said.

Source: Yahoo

Panasonic Starts Pilot Production 50GB Blu-Ray Discs

Panasonic has modified its existing pilot production line for single-layer Blu-ray Discs, called BD-ROM, so that it is able to replicate dual-layer BD-ROM discs with 50GB of storage capacity. The new pilot replication line is housed within the Panasonic Disc Manufacturing Corporation of America, which is located in Torrance, Calif. (Single-layer Blu-ray Discs have 25 GB of storage capacity).

The doubling of BD-ROM disc storage capacity is enabled by spin coating technologies developed by Panasonic that create two recorded layers on a single side of a Blu-ray Disc. In the process, readily available inexpensive UV curable resins are used in the creation of the space layer, cover layer and hard-coat, resulting in a reduction in disc replication costs. Video and other data is then embedded in the layers for playback later using a blue laser-equipped Blu-ray Disc player, recorder or BD-ROM drive-equipped PC.

The Torrance pilot production line is able to produce dual-layer BD-ROM discs with the attachment of a dual-layer replication line module to the existing single-layer line. Single-layer BD-ROM discs are currently being produced on the pilot line with more than 80% yield rates. Panasonic expects to provide sample dual-layer BD-ROM discs to the industry for testing by the end of this month.

Source: Panasonic

ATI Introduces Mobility Radeon X1600

ATI introduced Mobility Radeon X1600, company's first mobile discrete graphics processor featuring the Avivo technology.

The new 90nm GPU has 12 pixel and 5 vertex pipelines, supports Microsoft's Shader Model 3.0 and DirectX 9 and also features PowerPlay 6.0 with back bias technology to minimize power while in battery mode.

Mobility Radeon X1600 will be presented in notebooks from such OEM and ODM designers as Acer, Alienware, Arima, Asus, ECS, Evesham, FIC, Gericom, HP, LG, Medion, MiTAC, MSI, Packard Bell, Rockdirect, Samsung, Targa, and Uniwill.

Source: ATI

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