Hitachi Introduces 320 GB Mobile SATA HDDs

Hitachi has announced volume shipment of new 5,400 RPM notebook hard drives with a maximum available capacity of 320GB. These drives are designed to support the multi-tasking needs of consumers and commercial users balancing mobile computing and movies, music and other digital media.

The new drives feature optional Bulk Data Encryption (BDE) for users requiring increased data security. Apart from these drives’ Serial ATA (SATA) interface provides a fast 3 GB/s data transfer rate, allowing the drive to be used in a wide variety of applications including mainstream computing, portable external storage devices and other computing uses. Seeking to be power-efficient, the drives only consume 1.8W of power when reading and writing and their .55W low power idle means longer battery life for more "unplugged" notebook time and a longer drive life expectancy.

"The Travelstar 5K320 addresses a growing demand for high capacity hard drives, which are at the heart of today’s notebook PCs, external storage devices, gaming consoles and other mobile computing applications," said Larry Swezey, director, Consumer and Commercial HDD, Hitachi Global Storage Technologies. "And when coupled with our optional Bulk Data Encryption technology, the Travelstar 5K320 offers even greater value to notebook users by helping to guard against data theft."

The Travelstar 5K320 is now shipping worldwide. The enhanced-availability version of the drive is expected to ship in the second quarter of 2008. Pricing for these products is unknown as of now.

Hitachi Introduces 320 GB Mobile SATA HDDs

Hitachi has announced volume shipment of new 5,400 RPM notebook hard drives with a maximum available capacity of 320GB. These drives are designed to support the multi-tasking needs of consumers and commercial users balancing mobile computing and movies, music and other digital media.

The new drives feature optional Bulk Data Encryption (BDE) for users requiring increased data security. Apart from these drives’ Serial ATA (SATA) interface provides a fast 3 GB/s data transfer rate, allowing the drive to be used in a wide variety of applications including mainstream computing, portable external storage devices and other computing uses. Seeking to be power-efficient, the drives only consume 1.8W of power when reading and writing and their .55W low power idle means longer battery life for more "unplugged" notebook time and a longer drive life expectancy.

"The Travelstar 5K320 addresses a growing demand for high capacity hard drives, which are at the heart of today’s notebook PCs, external storage devices, gaming consoles and other mobile computing applications," said Larry Swezey, director, Consumer and Commercial HDD, Hitachi Global Storage Technologies. "And when coupled with our optional Bulk Data Encryption technology, the Travelstar 5K320 offers even greater value to notebook users by helping to guard against data theft."

The Travelstar 5K320 is now shipping worldwide. The enhanced-availability version of the drive is expected to ship in the second quarter of 2008. Pricing for these products is unknown as of now.

China likes its music on mobile handsets

Barcelona, February 11: More than a third of mobile phone owners in China, the world's largest mobile market, use their handsets to listen to music, more than in Britain or the United States, a study showed.

Some 34.8 per cent reported they listened to mobile music every month compared with 20 per cent in Spain, 18.9 per cent in Britain and 5.7 per cent in the United States, according to M:Metrics, a research firm that monitors mobile media usage.

M:Metrics, which was founded in 2004, collects data from France, Germany, Italy, Spain, the United Kingdom and the United States.

The December benchmark study on Chinese usage was the first of its kind, the company said.

It surveyed 5,163 Chinese mobile subscribers aged 13-54 via telephone in seven major cities: Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Shenyang, Chengdu, Wuhan and Xi'an.

Compared with users in the United States and Europe, Chinese consumers use their phones much less to check on their email or to send photos and videos.

Over 30 per cent in Italy, Spain and Britain use their phones to send or receive photos and videos, and only half as many do so in China.

Users in the United States lead the poll in email usage with 11.6 per cent compared with nine percent in Spain and Britain, but only 2.5 percent in China.

The firm also found that while some 30 percent of those polled owned Nokia handsets, giving the company a substantial lead in the Chinese market, owners of Sony Ericsson handsets were a driving force in using mobile media.

M:Metrics said global handset brands such as Motorola, Nokia and Samsung significantly surpassed native brands such as China Mobile in terms of being used to get mobile content.

"These companies are well positioned in a market where operators are seeking to grow mobile content in preparation for the rollout of 3G networks," the company said.

China is expected to issue 3G licences before the Olympics this year, but some predict licences will not be handed out until 2009, as kinks in its homegrown 3G standard, TD-SCDMA, are smoothed out.

Just like in the European and U.S. markets, 18-34 year-olds are the biggest consumers of mobile content in China, accounting for 64.6 per cent of those who accessed news and information via their mobile browser, M:Metrics said.

Now, charge your mobiles just by walking

Washington, February 8: University of Michigan scientists have found that a new energy-capturing knee brace has the potential to generate enough electricity from walking to operate a portable GPS locator or to charge a cell phone.

Arthur Kuo, an associate professor of mechanical engineering at the university, has revealed that the wearable mechanism works much like regenerative braking charges a battery in some hybrid vehicles.

While regenerative brakes collect the kinetic energy that would otherwise be dissipated as heat when a car slows down, the knee brace harvests the energy lost when a human brakes the knee after swinging the leg forward to take a step.

"There is power to be harvested from various places in the body, and you can use that to generate electricity. The knee is probably the best place. During walking, you dissipate energy in various places, when your foot hits the ground, for example. You have to make up for this by performing work with your muscles," said Kuo, who called the device "a cocktail-napkin idea".

"The body is clever. In a lot of places where it could be dissipating energy, it may actually be storing it and getting it back elastically. Your tendons act like springs. In many places, we're not sure whether the energy is really being dissipated or you're just storing it temporarily. We believe that when you're slowing down the knee at the end of swinging the leg, most of that energy normally is just wasted," Kuo added.

During a study, reported in the journal Science, the scientists tested the knee brace on six men walking leisurely on a treadmill at 2.2 miles per hour. They measured the subjects' respiration to determine how hard they were working.

A control group wore the brace with the generator disengaged to measure how the weight of the 3.5-pound brace affected the wearer.

The study report reveals that in the mode in which the brace is only activated while the knee is braking, the subjects required less than one watt of extra metabolic power for each watt of electricity they generated.

By contrast, says the report, a typical hand-crank generator takes an average of 6.4 watts of metabolic power to generate one watt of electricity because of inefficiencies of muscles and generators.

"We've demonstrated proof of concept. The prototype device is bulky and heavy, and it does affect the wearer just to carry. But the energy generation part itself has very little effect on the wearer, whether it is turned on or not. We hope to improve the device so that it is easier to carry, and to retain the energy-harvesting capabilities," Kuo said.

The authors believe that a lighter version of the knee brace would be helpful to hikers or soldiers who do not have easy access to electricity. They also envision its application in implantable devices such as pacemakers or neurotransmitters, which today require a battery and periodic surgery to replace that battery.

"A future energy harvester might be implanted along with such a device and generate its own power from walking," Kuo said.

China wants 'red' mobile messages, not blue jokes

Beijing, January 24: Communist Party officials in central China have urged mobile phone-wielding citizens to send rousing "red" text messages instead of blue jokes, but the response has been more derision than revolution.

Nanyang city, in rural Henan province, recently told residents to "mobilise to compose and send healthy, positive, uplifting red text messages," the China Youth Daily reported on Thursday.

"Red sentences occupy the text message culture front!," Party officials urged in a local newspaper, the Youth Daily said.

China's 500 million mobile phone users rank as the world's most avid text message senders and passing ribald jokes and satirical jibes about leaders is a national pastime frowned on by unamused Party officials.

"The broad masses of residents should mobilise ... and fight the vulgar with the healthy," said the announcement.

But many citizens have responded to the campaign with only more catcalls, the China Youth Daily reported.

"Too funny, this itself is a joke," said one message pasted on an Internet site. "You go your noble way and let us go our tasteless way," said another.

Other residents wondered whether officials should be doing more useful things.

"All of you wallow in wine and women and want us to be pure-minded and puritanical," one Nanyang resident told the paper. "It's going a bit far."

Now, mobile updates for fishermen at sea

December 26: Leading network infrastructure solutions provider ADC Krone will partner with telecom services provider Tata Indicom to enable fishermen receive updates on weather and information on catching fish in the sea on their mobile phones, the company said Wednesday.

Krone said the initiative has been taken up as a pilot project under the aegis of M.S. Swaminathan Research Foundation at Veerampattinam in Tamil Nadu and would be followed soon as a commercial service.

"Fishermen will hereafter spend far less time at sea, as they will know before sailing the weather conditions, wave height and wind velocity and direction," the company said in a statement.

Some 5,000 villages on the coast will be able to use the application. The mobile coverage will extend up to six km into the sea.

"The project is aimed at equipping the fishing community with weather knowledge, concentration of fish pools and safety messages. It will also minimise loss of life," Krone managing director Bala Chandran said.

The geographic base of Indian marine fisheries has 8,118-km coastline, 2.02 million sq km of exclusive economic zone, including 0.5 million sq km of continental shelf and 3,937 fishing villages.

There are 1,896 traditional fish landing centres, 33 minor and six major fishing harbours, serving as bases for about 2,08,000 traditional non-motorised craft, 55,000 small-scale beach-landing craft fitted with outboard motors, 51,250 mechanised craft and 180 deep-sea fishing vessels.

MIcrosoft Launches Ads On MSN Mobile

Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) on Monday began displaying mobile advertising to MSN Mobile customers for the first time, in hopes of generating additional revenue from the budding business.

Now when mobile users in the United States visit Microsoft's MSN Mobile Web page on their cell phone and smartphone browsers, they'll see banner and text ad placements from companies like Paramount Pictures and Jaguar Cars North America. Both have signed up as Microsoft's early partners.

When displaying the ads, Microsoft said it will conform to the U.S. mobile advertising guidelines supplied by the Mobile Marketing Association, a non-profit made up of agencies, advertisers, device manufacturers, carriers, retailers, software providers, and service providers that want to bring marketing to mobile devices.

The software giant claims that the introduction of mobile ads will enhance the experience for customers: "Microsoft is continuing to make significant investments in the MSN Mobile portal. By incorporating advertising on MSN Mobile, we are allowing advertisers to extend their existing campaigns from PCs to games and now to mobile phones, further delivering on our vision to extend advertising across multiple platforms and devices," said Joanne Bradford, MSN's corporate VP and chief media officer, in a statement.

The technology that Microsoft used to embed banner and text ads in its mobile portal was created by Microsoft's Advertiser and Publisher Solutions Group with expertise gained from its acquisition of ScreenTonic SA, which created a platform specifically designed for managing and providing ads on mobile phones.

Mobile advertising sales in the U.S. accounted for $421 million in 2006. That number is expected to reach nearly $5 billion by 2011 in the U.S. alone, according to market research firm eMarketer. Global mobile advertising sales will reach $11.3 billion by 2011.

Microsoft plans to capitalize on this opportunity through ad placements that provide advertisers with way to reach its MSN Mobile users. The company already launched similar efforts in Belgium, France, Japan, Spain, and the U.K.

Consumers, however, are not so eager to see advertising on their mobile phones. Many find mobile ads annoying, even when they come with promotions and special offerings. Microsoft is trying to present mobile ads as an "enhancement" to the content it already offers on MSN Mobile. But it might be a tough sell to mobile users who are already frustrated with their tiny phone screens without banner ads taking up the precious viewing space.