HCL Laptop 39 Series

HCL announced Leaptops Series 39 Notebooks

 in the Indian market

HCL announced Leaptop 39 Series for the Indian market. In principle, it is Leaptop Series 39 was designed taking into account the weather condition in India. This series is designed to achieve a lower temperature difference of less than 6 degrees on the palm rest area. The HCL Leaptop Series 39 is available in both Windows and Linux versions and has a battery back-up of more than four hours. The leaptop series 39 come with a 14.1 inch wide screen and is powered by Intel’s Centrino and Centrino2 processor technology.
Starting price range for Leaptop 39 Series with the Centrino processor Rs. 39,900 and Rs. 42,990 for the Centrino2 processor technology

Sony to pull out of LCD JV with Samsung

TOKYO: Sony Corp ,struggling with a loss-making television business, is in negotiations to pull out of its LCD joint venture with South Korea's Samsung Electronics in a bid to cut costs.The Japanese electronics and entertainment giant is aiming to reach an agreement by the end of this year to sell its nearly 50 percent stake in liquid-crystal display joint venture S-LCD to Samsung.Sony intends to rely more on outsourcing to reduce procurement costs to cope with rapidly declining prices of LCD panels due to a global oversupply.

South Korean newspaper Chosun Ilbo had a similar report on the joint venture breakup in July, which Sony denied. A well-informed industry source told Reuters in Seoul that such reports seem to be "distorted" because Sony has been negotiating with Samsung over its return on investment in the joint venture, rather than shareholdings. "Under the contract on the LCD joint venture, the two parties are allowed to discuss such matters, which outsiders could misunderstand as a step for Sony to withdraw from the joint venture," said the source, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

In April, the two companies cut capital in the joint venture by $555 million as Sony sought to slash its TV losses and Samsung pushed ahead with next generation displays.
Sony is under pressure to show it can reduce its exposure to the loss-making TV unit and concentrate on developing its strategy for smartphones. Last week, it announced it will take control of its mobile phone joint venture with Ericsson as it seeks to exploit its music and video applications to help it catch smartphone leaders such as Apple Inc .Sony reports July-September results on Wednesday. Analysts are forecasting Sony will fall short of its operating profit outlook of 200 billion yen ($2.63 billion) for the year to March 2012, with consumer confidence wobbling in Europe and the United States and as the strong yen bites into profits.
The electronics giant, which competes with Samsung and LG Electronics in televisions, needs to slash costs as it heads for its eighth straight annual loss in its TV business. Sony has already sold off TV factories in Spain, Slovakia and Mexico in the past few years and outsources more than half of production to companies including Hon Hai Precision Industry. It retains four TV plants of its own in Japan, Brazil, China and Malaysia.

Samsung’s new phones will have flexible screens

Samsung‘s new mobile device lineup will feature flexible screens starting in 2012, the company announced today.

In its quarterly earnings call, Samsung’s vice president of investor relations, Robert Yi, told investors, analysts and press, “The flexible display we are looking to introduce sometime in 2012, hopefully the earlier part. The application probably will start from the handset side.”

After flexible-screen mobile phones roll out, the company plans to introduce the same technology for tablets and other devices.

In January 2011, Samsung purchased Liquivista, a strategic acquisition that will allow it to produce the kinds of displays that were announced today. Liquivista made electrowetting display technology, which is used to create mobile and other consumer electronic displays that are bright, low-power, flexible and transparent.

Flexible screen technology was also a focus of Samsung’s in March, when Yongsuk Choi, director of Samsung Mobile Display, gave an overview of the company’s future mobile device plans. At that time, Choi said most of the flexible-display technology Samsung was working on was still in very early stages.

Flexible displays have been on the fringes of up-and-coming mobile technologies for some time. For example, we saw a bendable e-reader from Plastic Logic back in 2008.

More recently, Sony, in particular, has shown some interesting work in the field, demonstrating its first flexible display at CES in early 2009 and showing off advanced, thinner, more flexible displays just last year.

Still, flexible screens aren’t something we’re seeing on the mass market yet; we wonder if consumers will warm to the idea when Samsung takes the wraps off these new devices.

Samsung recently surpassed Apple as the top smartphone manufacturer, shipping 27.8 million smartphones last quarter. Altogether, Samsung’s current share of the smartphone market is 23.8 percent.

Windows 8 smartphone

A Chinese company says it will bring the yet-to-be-released Windows 8 to the small screen.

In Technology Group has seemingly dedicated itself to merging the Windows PC experience with the smartphone--something the company has dubbed the "post-smartphone." They started with phones running Windows XP a few years ago, and by earlier this year, ITG's XPPhone was available with Windows 7. Now it says a far slimmer, lighter, and energy efficient XPPhone 2 that will run both Windows 7 and the PC version of Windows 8 (once it's released) is in the works.

Though it seems doubtful to me that many consumers will find a need for so much Windows in their pocket, ITG has made sure to pack the XPPhone 2 with the meaty hardware to pull it off. This beast will boast a 1.6GHz processor and 2GB of RAM. ITG's Web site also mentions the possibility of an insane 2GHz model. There's also plenty of storage space to house Microsoft's notoriously bulky OSes, with 112GB on board.

ITG is billing the XPPhone 2 not just as a phone but as the "smallest notebook PC in the world," measuring 140mm X 73mm X 17.5mm. The pitch is basically that the phone is easily dockable and can stand in for a laptop, desktop and in-car navigation system.

The success of this kind of a device will likely depend on it being at least more usable than the English translation of its press release, which requires several aspirin to navigate, with sentences like: "The Editor considers that, presently it forms three camps of smart phone in the way of tripartite confrontation--The Apple, Google & Moto, and Intel & Microsoft & xpPhone, of which stands for three complete different technical orientations."

Let's hope they took the money they saved on their translator and put it into engineering.Engadget reports that we could see an XPPhone 2 release as soon as January.