Fashion aficionados concerned that the hue of their laptop may clash awfully with their high fashion clobber will be delighted to learn that Sony is releasing their Sony F-type laptops in four stylish colours.
With Sony offering the laptops in white, pink, green and blue, fears of a haute couture faux-pas should be banished forever, although uptight Daddy-o’s can still purchase the laptop in sensible, corporate silver.
The slimline F series Vaios come in F20, F30, F50, and F70 flavours, with the top of the range F70 offering a 15.4inch widescreen with 1680×1050 pixels, fast Pentium M780 2.26Ghz processor, 1 gig of RAM, Geforce GO 6200 and 128MB of video RAM in a 2.8kg package.
Measuring 14.3-inches wide, 10.4-deep, and just 1 inch-thick, Sony’s engineers have managed to wedge in a 100GB drive, dual-layer DVD±R/RW/RAM and a Webcam for showing your friends your latest Pierre Cardin outfit.
Carbon Fibre Laptops
It seems that Sony can’t get enough of the funky finishes right now, with Sony Korea announcing two new carbon fibre laptops last week, the VGN-TX17LP/B and VGN-TX16LP/W 2.
Using space age technology usually being used for, err, planes and racing cars, Sony claims that these new VAIOs are twice as strong compared to existing T series notebooks, and weigh 30% less.
The display panel is a mere slip of a thing at 4.5mm thick with the designers waxing lyrical about the “sapphire black and platinum white” finish.
The Vaio TX series offer a handy AV mode button which makes the machine available for watching movies or listening to music in just 12 seconds with no need to boot up Windows.
The claimed battery life is impressive – up to 9 hours and 14-15 hours with an extended battery.
We’ve no idea of the price yet and – yes, you’ve guessed it – it’s only being released in Korea for the time being.
Japan’s largest annual IT show, Ceatec (Combined Exhibition of Advanced Technologies), opens today and will feature around 700 companies, according to the organisers. 
Toshiba has promised to display a super-slim 12.7 millimetre high drive designed for laptops which can read HD-DVD discs and read and write DVDs and CDs.
Blimey, Samsung have announced that they are planning to invest $33 Billion in memory chip production over the next 7 years, Reuters is reporting.
Earlier this month Samsung got a lot of attention when they 
Building on the success of their hugely popular JAM phone, i-mate have announced the new K-JAM smartphone/PDA.
The display comes in the form of a 2.8″ QVGA (240 x 320 pixels) 64k Transflective screen, and the device runs on the latest Windows Mobile 5.0 OS.
The phone offers support for a wide range of music formats, and claims 10 hours running time in PDA mode and 4-5 hours talk time.
Humax have dished out detailed information about their new dual-tuner, Freeview-enabled PVR, the PVR-9200T.
Receiving and recording of pay TV channels is possible through a special CA module.
There’s also a handy USB2.0 port provided for MPEG A/V file transfers between the Duovisio and a PC, letting users play back their digital photos or listen to MP3 files downloaded from a PC.
Dell has announced three updates to its popular Axim PDA series, headed up by the powerful, VGA-enabled X51v.
One big difference from previous models is the use of non-volatile memory, which means that the new Axim X51v uses RAM exclusively for running programs and stores all programs and data in flash. 
Connectivity is taken care of with integrated Bluetooth 1.2 and Wi-Fi 802.11b support, with WPA and LEAP security for the latter. 
Mention the name “Commodore” to old skool gamers of a certain age, and you might see a tear welling up in their eyes as they recall long, blissful hours playing Frontier Elite, Sensible Soccer and Lemmings on the legendary gaming platform.
Codenamed ‘The Navigator Combo’, the Windows CE-based handheld comes with a 30GB hard drive (preloaded with maps), a big 3.6in touch-screen display and an integrated GPS receiver, all packed into a refreshingly chunky case.
Videos can also be downloaded from the Internet or transferred from PCs via USB 2.0, or stored on SD memory cards.
The two companies presented a wide range of shiny new consumer electronic products for consumers and the retail market, including MP3/MP4-players, C64 gaming joysticks, multimedia download dispensers and home media centers. 
Building up to the required mutual backslap, he added, “Therefore the management of Yeahronimo and SupportPlus believe it is an obligation, when using the Commodore name, to continue offering the electronics consumer with products that have a high-quality and are attractive in price. SupportPlus already has showed they are an excellent partner in the historic re-launch of Commodore.”
GetMeThere.co.uk has launched what they are claiming is the first, free to install, Pay-as-you-go Mobile Satellite Navigation solution in the UK.
The system offers a comprehensive suite of features, including full turn by turn navigation, voice commands, traffic avoidance, auto-zooming maps as a junction approaches, hands free use, European road network coverage with full address, house number, street and postcode search.
Jon West, Director of GetMeThere.co.uk said “With over 4.5m navigationsystems expected to be sold this year across Europe, TARA Mobile SatNav has arrived just in time to provide a low cost, quality solution for the intelligent motorist. With GPS devices now available at around the £50 ($90, €74) mark, SatNav has become a must have for all motorists”.
Hard drives are soon to go the way of 8 track cartridges and steam powered radios according to Samsung’s semi-conductor CEO Dr. Chang Gyu Hwang. 
With a cackle in his voice and a size nine sending a RAID array skywards, Hwang reckons that we’ll soon be seeing laptop memory cards with 32GB of memory, based on multiple 16Gb flash chips. 
A big advantage of using flash memory in notebooks is that the technology is resistant to the sort of mechanical shocks that can often knacker a hard drive.
O2 has announced the launch of the o2 Xda Exec, the first PDA and mobile phone combo device to feature 3G.
Reflecting its business focus, the phone comes with Pocket Outlook, Word, Excel, Powerpoint and PDF viewers pre-installed and offers Bluetooth, Wireless LAN, 3G and tri-band GPRS connectivity.
Combined with our service bundle, we believe that the O2 Xda Exec will build on the success of the Xda range, extending our market share still further into 2006.”
Technical stuff: