Suvil is one of those firms that produces plenty of the little bits and pieces you never knew you wanted. One case in point is the Hong Kong company's ClipFree iAudio BT (top) Bluetooth add-on for pretty much any piece of kit with an audio output. We took a quick look at the gear this morning and were pleasantly suprised.
The ClipFree does the whole BT thing just the way it should — the package includes a dongle for a stereo, cellphone or whatever, a clip-on receiver, both in- and over-ear headphones and a couple of different audio jacks, so connectivity is simple.
Performance is fine over 5m or so, but you might not want to push it to the claimed 10m range, and audio is generally clear. The auto-switching ability — between an audio source and an incoming call, for example — is smartly done and battery life is reasonable at four hours of use or 120 on standby.
Suvil also has a range of Wi-Fi necessities, such as the Wi-Fi Hunter (below), a bare-bones key-chain 802.11 b/g detector. Currently, we only have pricing in Euros (€89 for the ClipFree and €15 for the key chain) but US and Japan readers can expect to see Suvil gear in the stores any day now.
0602411399March 27 is a significant day for Korea’s Samsung, as it holds its annual Mobile Solution Forum in Taipei today to announce the hottest imminent new products and technologies.
Foremost among those revealed this morning is a larger, faster solid state drive (SSD) that uses flash memory to replace the spinning platters in conventional hard disks.
The new 1.8in SSD is the largest yet from a major manufacturer, coming in at the 64GB mark, which brings the technology ever closer in size to typical HDD territory. The drive uses eight gigabit single-level-cell NAND flash memory chips, which allows it to operate considerably faster than Samsung’s previous-generation 32GB SSD.
Confirming that the 64GB SSD is faster than conventional hard drives, Samsung also noted that its read and write speeds are 20 and 60 per cent faster than the previous model.
After production begins in the second quarter of this year the most likely destination for the new drive is, of course, in high-end rugged laptop computers, which will come at a premium price, but there are other options.
Samsung says SSDs in the 8 to 16GB range will end up in car GPS systems and camcorders, while flash drives with hundreds of gigabytes of storage will eventually be used in servers.
If anyone is wondering why the sudden upsurge in interest in SSDs, Samsung’s footnote shines some light on the reason. The predicted value of the SSD market this year is an insignificant (to them) US$200 million, but that’s set to rise to $6.8 billion by 2010.
