Telecom companies, Samsung and Spice have come up with entry-level handsets for the Indian market.

Samsung's "Guru100" is a stylish bar-shaped handset equipped with features such as MP3 ring tones, mobile tracker, 9 hours talk time, and up to 500 phone-book entries.
The handset sports a 3.86cm LCD screen and a speaker phone for hands-free comfort. It also includes a Hinglish sms feature that recognizes both English and Hindi words.

Priced at Rs 1,949, "Guru100" weighs 78 grams and measures 104 x 44 x 16.3mm.

Meanwhile, Spice's new entry-level camera phone, "S-585" features FM Radio, VGA camera, and music player.

The one-touch FM Radio and MP3 player comes along with inbuilt speaker phones. Users can also watch videos on the 65K TFT color display. The memory slot is expandable up to 1 GB.

The S-585 comes with essential accessories, including a dual-corded headset and USB cable, and is priced at Rs 2,999.

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South Korean electronics giant Samsung has launched "Guru100", which is a bar shaped handset boasting of "young" features like MP3 ring tones, 500 phone book entries as well as mobile tracker. The Guru100 also has a Hinglish SMS feature that seems to be the current rage among Indian youth.

A 3.86 cm LCD screen and a speaker phone complete the impressive feature list of this phone, which is priced economically at 1,949.

Meanwhile mobile carrier Spice Telecom has introduced "S-585", an entry-level phone that again seems targeted at college-going youth. With FM Radio, VGA camera, and music player, the S-585 is sure to be lapped up rapidly.

The phone also has dual-corded headset, USB cable and an expandable memory slot of up to 1 GB. The S-585 is priced modestly at Rs 2,999.

Samsung is touting the reliability of solid-state drives, while citing an explosive market for the devices in server computers.
SSDs are based on flash memory chip technology and have no moving parts. Hard-disk drives (HDDs), in contrast, use read-write heads that hover over spinning platters to access and record data. With no moving parts, SSDs avoid both the risk of mechanical failure and the mechanical delays of HDDs. Therefore, SSDs are generally faster and more reliable. The catch is the cost: SSDs are currently much more expensive than HDDs.

There are also concerns about wear. That is, flash has the potential to wear out after tens (or hundreds) of thousands of write cycles.

This characterization, however, is too simplistic, according to Michael Yang, flash marketing manager at Samsung. A flash device that is rated at 100,000 write cycles, for example, can write 100,000 times "to every single (memory) cell within the device," Yang said. In other words, the device doesn't write to the same cell over and over again but spreads out the writes over many different cells. This is achieved through "wear leveling," which is carried out by the SSD's controller, he said.

This would make it virtually impossible to wear out a flash chip. Yang said a pattern could be perpetually repeated in which a 64GB SSD is completely filled with data, erased, filled again, then erased again every hour of every day for years, and the user still wouldn't reach the theoretical write limit. He added that if a failure ever does occur, it will not occur in the flash chip itself but in the controller.

On another topic, Yang cited explosive demand in the enterprise server market that caught his company by surprise. "At first it just sounded like an interesting idea," he said. But then demand took off. As Yang explained, companies like Citibank and American Express peg server performance on IOPS or input/output operations per second. "HDDs do 120 to 150 IOPS. SSDs 10,000 to 30,000 IOPS." Because of this overwhelming speed advantage many large corporate customers are opting for SSDs, despite the significant price premium SSDs command compared with HDDs.

Regarding cost, Yang expects to see a 35 percent to 45 percent year-to-year drop in SSD prices. This will be a welcome relief since 64GB SSDs currently can add as much as $900 to the price of a notebook PC.

In the third quarter, Samsung is slated to bring out a 128GB SSD based on MLC (multi-level cell) technology--which uses multiple levels per cell to allow more bits to be stored. But the company sees even larger-capacity SSDs, ranging all the way up to 250GB, possibly before the end of the year.

The company is also working with notebook PC makers to design ultrathin notebooks with SSDs that can fit into potentially even thinner designs than the 0.76-inch thick MacBook Air, which uses SSD.

source:blogs.cnet.com