Filed under: Storage

Toshiba and SanDisk have been in a number of joint ventures for some time now, but it looks like the two companies are now starting what could be a more drawn out break-up process, with SanDisk announcing today that it’s selling 30% of its manufacturing capacity outright to Toshiba in a $1 billion deal. For the time being at least, the two will remain 50/50 partners in the remaining 70% of the companies’ joint factories, though Toshiba will apparently get 65% of the production capacity at those factories. As MarketWatch points out, this latest move comes just a month after SanDisk rejected a $6 billion buyout offer from Samsung, and some analysts are now speculating that Toshiba’s deal will only make the company a more attractive target for Samsung. Nothing is expected to get wrapped up before August of 2009, however, which is when Samsung’s current royalty arrangement with SanDisk is due to expire.

[Via The Inquirer]

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Filed under: Storage

Get your flash here, red hot flash memory. Toshiba is now sampling its new 256GB SSD with a 120MB max read and 70MBps write via 3.0Gbps SATA interface — not the fastest consumer SSD but not not bad. This 2.5-inch slab measures just 3.0-mm thick and targets laptops looking to shed the 9.5-mm constraint presented by standard hard disks. Like Samsung, Tosh also announced new 8GB, 16GB and 32GB SATA flash modules aimed directly at the booming netbook market with speeds topping-out at 80MBps for reads and 50MBps for writes. All the drives feature MLC-based NAND which accounts for the less-than blazing SSD speeds. On the other hand, that should help keep the costs low when these things ship in quantity later this year.

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Filed under: Digital Cameras, Peripherals, Wireless, Storage

Frustrated by somewhat sluggish transfers from your otherwise spectacular Eye-Fi card? Fret not, as the company has just announced a forthcoming update at Photokina that will reportedly enable new and existing Eye-Fi owners to make “the upload of digital photos from camera to computer twice as fast.” Also of note, as of October 5th, users can even add features that aren’t already included on their card and renew annual services by tapping into the updated Eye-Fi Manager Web application. In related news, the outfit will be pushing its wares to Japan and Canada by the year’s end, and in even more related news, Eye-Fi now supports direct photo uploads to Apple’s MobileMe and the AdoramaPix service.

Read - Eye-Fi getting 2x faster
Read - Eye-Fi going international

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Filed under: Storage

If you’re jonesing for the quickest, most nimble CF card this planet has to offer, you’ll be hard pressed to find one quicker and more nimble than this. Following up on Pretec’s launch, SanDisk has started shipping its 16GB 300x (45MB/sec) Extreme IV CompactFlash card, which marks a 12.5% increase in speed and 50% boost in capacity compared to its predecessor. Oh, but then there’s the $399.99 price tag. We know, right?

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Filed under: Cellphones, Home Entertainment, Portable Video

Movies on flash drives aren’t looking like the next big thing, but Gemalto reckons its approach to getting DVD content on smaller surfaces is different enough to get noticed. In an admittedly bizarre release, the digital security firm has announced a new Smart Video Card for Italian carrier WIND, which “embeds a DVD-compliant optical disc into the card body of a regular SIM card.” The card can store practically any digital content (including video, software or URLs) and can reportedly be played back on any DVD drive. So what, we buy a new SIM card each time we’re looking for a new batch of miniaturized content? Fabulous!

[Via FashionFunky, thanks Bob]

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Filed under: Storage

Hey Sony, since you’re so in love with tacking on random letters and such to your flash memory line, how’s about we toss three capital consonants in your direction capped off with a lovely question mark? In a move that is depressingly not at all surprising, Sony has introduced the Memory Stick PRO-HG Duo HX, that latest in a long, long line of proprietary Memory Stick products that it insists on producing. These are supposedly “ideal for high performance digital cameras and HD camcorders,” and they rely on an 8-bit parallel interface to achieve whatever level of performance they’re capable of. Weirdly, Sony only quotes transfer speeds (a maximum of 20MB/sec read and 15MB/sec write) when the card is used in conjunction with the bundled MSAC-UAH1 USB adapter, but anywho, they’ll be available in 4GB / 8GB flavors this October for those who care.

[Thanks, Rob]

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Filed under: Home Entertainment

PlayOn wants to make sure you can get your daily dose of Barackrolls and Airwolf episodes beyond the desktop, while Hulu might not have a slick streaming set-top box of its own, this media server software turns flash video RSS streams into easily browsed folders for your DLNA-compliant hardware. PlayStation 3, Xbox 360 and HP MediaSmart HDTVs being at the top of that list (with Nintendo Wii support planned by year-end) owners can grab the beta release of the software and stream low-res episodes of Psych, or any assortment of YouTube video they please. With Netflix support “just down the road” this could provide an end around for PS3 owners looking for streaming love, or Xbox 360 owners without Xbox Live Gold (we know you’re out there.) Bad news is the beta only lasts 60 days and there’s a $30 pricetag waiting at the end of the free lunch highway. Our experience was good, with no stutters in a Psych episode streamed via Wi-Fi to the PS3 (albeit with no choice of HD clips), but we’d wait for confirmation on the whole Netflix bit before dropping any dough.

[Via PS3 Fanboy]

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Filed under: Desktops, Peripherals, Storage

As your never-ending quest to find peripherals specifically made to match beautifully with your PowerMac G5 / Mac Pro continues, we’ve one that’ll surely shoot right to the top of your must-have list. Nervian’s CardReader Pro slips just under the front handle of your tower, providing (almost) integrated card reader functionality without putting a damper on your rig’s style. Better still, the USB 2.0 unit supports 52 different flavors of flash memory, ensuring that just about every card you toss in there will mount in short order. There’s no word on how costly this will be when it ships in October, but those definitely interested can nab 15% off by signing up for details at the outfit’s website.

[Thanks, choco]

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Filed under: Portable Audio, Portable Video

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Filed under: Storage

So LAPTOP magazine published a report confirming what most people already believe to be true about SSDs (that is, before last week when SSDs supposedly hit the fan): they use less power than traditional drives. Apparently they got an extra 20 minutes battery life when testing an SSD against a platter-based drive in an Eee PC and Gateway T-6828 (which jibes with our own experiences using SSDs in laptops), but if you ask us, the discussion is seems a little moot. SSDs perform way faster and are far better suited to portable computing where drives are moved, bumped, and jostled — the power savings is great, but the speed and reliability are still our top two reasons for going SSD.

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Filed under: Storage

We first heard about Toshiba’s plan to increase NAND flash capacities by building “3D” memory chips with “pillars” of stacked cells in January of 2007, but it looks like the effort is getting revived — Tosh and SanDisk have entered into an agreement to jointly develop and cross-license 3D memory tech. SanDisk was once rumored to be developing write-once 3D flash chips, so both companies have experience building the stuff, but it sounds like it’ll take another three or four years for the partnership to produce actual products, as high-yield production is still difficult.

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Filed under: Cellphones

After spying those “in the wild” shots of Nokia’s E71 and N66, we knew something had to be up — and that does appear to be the case. A forum member over at Mobile-Review has stumbled upon user demos for both of the forthcoming devices, featuring in-depth Flash walkthroughs on how to master all the basic features of either phone. It seems likely that an announcement is due any day now (though we’re thinking it won’t be coming on Monday) — but at least you can enjoy a bunch of new angles and animations while you wait.

[Via Cell Addict Blog]

Read - E71 Demo
Read - N66 Demo

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Filed under: Storage

Just a few months back, we all gave SanDisk a round of golf claps for moving towards 43-nanometer NAND production. Fast forward to today, and that “feat” doesn’t look so mighty anymore. Intel and Micron have just announced the industry’s first sub-40nm NAND flash memory device, the 34nm 32 gigabit multi-level cell chip. The process technology was collaboratively developed by the two firms’ joint venture, IM Flash Technologies (IMFT),” and there’s nary a hint of shame when they trumpet that this is the “smallest NAND process geometry on the market.” Sample shipments are expected to leave the dock in June, while mass production should get going sometime in the second half of this year. Somehow, we get the impression this won’t stay on top for long.

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Filed under: Storage

SuperTalent’s wide lineup of SSDs got a little bigger today, with the addition of some low(er)-cost MLC flash-based gear. Like the company’s earlier “world’s thinnest” 256GB drive, the three new models are external units, and you’re looking at capacities of 30GB, 60GB, and 120GB for $299, $449, and $699, respectively. That’s actually not all that bad, considering a bare 64GB SLC SSD can run an easy grand. Available now, it looks like.

[Via jkOnTheRun]

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A year ago today Toshiba was announcing ¥26.17 billion in profits for the quarter. Today, just ¥1.25 billion or about $12 million. In addition to the $580 million hit on account of its withdrawal from HD DVD, Toshiba also saw a swift decline in flash memory prices. While bad news for Toshiba on all accounts, we consumers are basking in a market dominated by a single high-def optical disc standard and cheap NAND and DRAM pricing. Sorry Tosh, but you won’t find any tears around here.

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Filed under: Digital Cameras, HDTV

Although Panasonic’s HDC-SD9 is mighty, mighty small, reviewers over at CNET felt that it fell short in a number of key areas. For starters, Panny included a few quirky design choices; for instance, removing the battery requires the LCD cover to be open, but doing so can also turn the camera on unless you place it in a different mode. Granted, the minuscule size didn’t leave the outfit too much to work with, but if you’re easily flustered by these kinds of niggles, you can run far, far away right now. As for image quality, critics noted that still shots were marginally better than awful, but capturing full motion HD clips was something it did manage to do relatively well. Overall, no one handling this critter was enthusiastically shouting for joy when all was said and done, so do yourself a favor and eye the review down there before clicking that order button.

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Filed under: Storage

The alphabet soup of different flash memory technologies is already a little bewildering, but it looks like the latest entrant could end up being the most promising of all, with single chip storage capacities of 1TB expected within ten years. Called array-based memory, the tech has been under development at a company called Nanochip, Inc. for nearly 12 years, and it looks like the first working samples will go out next year. Although those first prototypes will have storage roughly equivalent to NAND flash at tens of gigs per circuit, the plan is to rapidly scale up to 100s of gigs and finally to 1TB on a single chip. Because the chips can be manufactured using conventional fabs and aren’t subject to the same manufacturing constraints as traditional flash, they may also end up being far cheaper per gigabyte. The company is being funded by a number of prominent tech giants, including Intel, and says the tech can be used to improve everything from USB keys to SSDs to enterprise-grade servers — wait, bigger, cheaper, and potentially better? Yeah, sign us up.

[Via Slashdot]

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Filed under: Cellphones, Handhelds

It seems that Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen isn’t a developer for the firm — or at the very least, he doesn’t have a full appreciation for the height of the fence surrounding the iPhone SDK’s walled garden. The company and on-again, off-again Apple chum solidly backpedaled on the chief’s comments regarding Flash for the iPhone that were made just a day earlier, saying that “…to bring the full capabilities of Flash to the iPhone Web-browsing experience we do need to work with Apple beyond and above what is available through the SDK and the current license around it.” For what it’s worth, Adobe does say that it’s still very much interested in doing up a Flash client, it just needs a little extra help from Apple on the side to make it happen — so if we see this package pop up in the App Store later this year, we’ll know that at least one company’s been given a free pass to break the rules.

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Filed under: Cellphones

The word is out, kids. Adobe has apparently gone against old Jobsy’s wishes, and it’s planning a Flash player made all special for the iPhone (ala Windows Mobile) despite Apple’s concerns that the technology — in its current incarnation, anyway — isn’t cut out for mobile duty. During a conference call today, Chief Executive Shantanu Narayen said, “We believe Flash is synonymous with the Internet experience, and we are committed to bringing Flash to the iPhone,” adding, “We have evaluated (the software developer tools) and we think we can develop an iPhone Flash player ourselves.” We wouldn’t be surprised if Adobe were to be given a pass on all those pesky SDK rules that would likely prevent a proper browser-based Flash component to be coded for the device, though those Apple dudes can be real sticklers for rules.

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Filed under: Cellphones, Misc. Gadgets

It’s always interesting to hear execs chime in on the competition following big announcements. So it’s no surprise to hear that Steve Ballmer was peppered with questions about the iPhone during yesterday’s Mix ‘08 event with Guy Kawazaki. When asked about Silverlight — Microsoft’s attempt at usurping Adobe’s Flash — on the Flash-less iPhone, Ballmer said, “Silverlight for the iPhone is of course interesting,” adding, “I can’t say there’s been extensive discussion with Guy’s old boss.” He also wondered aloud about Apple possibly digging too deeply into developers pockets with its 30% share of application revenue. Ballmer said, “it’s a good business if you can make it.” A jab at Jobs’ claim that Apple doesn’t plan to make any money off the App Store. The highlight though came with Ballmer’s compliance to recreate his Monkey Boy Dance for Web Developers. Bill, we’re going to miss you.

[Thanks, Bryant]

Read — Q&A on iPhone
Read — Monkey Boy dance, take 2

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