Hasta La Gadget!

If day one of MWC was dominated by Windows Mobile, day two went to Android — although most of the announcements were vague and Toshiba’s Snapdragon-based TG01 did much to impress. Obviously the big announcement was the HTC Magic (née the G2), which’ll be coming to Vodafone UK in April, but several other manufacturers committed to building Googlephones as well. What else did we learn?

Continue reading MWC day two: a new hope

Filed under: Cellphones

MWC day two: a new hope originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 17 Feb 2009 20:20:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink | Email this | Comments

It’s not exactly a huge surprise at this point, but Fujitsu and Toshiba have announced today that they’ve signed a memorandum of understanding on the transfer of Fujitsu’s hard drive business to Toshiba, and that they plan to conclude a transfer contract “at an early date.” To make the transition as smooth as possible, Fujitsu says it’ll spinning off all its HDD-related business into a separate company in the interim, which Toshiba will buy an 80 percent stake in and make a Toshiba Group subsidiary. Then, once things are fully transitioned, Toshiba will buy up the remaining 20 percent and make the company a wholly owned subsidiary. Notably absent from today’s announcement, however, is any word of a dollar figure, though previous reports had pegged the deal at anywhere from $335 to $447 million. Toshiba also doesn’t seem like it’ll be resting on its laurels once the deal is complete, saying that it hopes to increase its overall HDD market share 20 percent by the year 2015.

Filed under: Storage

Fujitsu and Toshiba reach agreement on hard drive business deal originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 17 Feb 2009 14:54:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments

We’ve had our eyes peeled for ARM Cortex-based netbook news, and now among the action this week at MWC ’09 we’re getting our first look at Sparrow, a Cortex A9 processor aimed squarely at netbook manufacturers. This is a multi-core update to the Cortex A8 (processor of choice for the Palm Pre and Pandora), and it’s been speculated that this could be the processor for the next generation iPhone, with “at least triple the computing power of the ARM11 processors found in the [current] iPhone and T-Mobile G1.” Toshiba, Pegatron and Wistron are all said to be showing demos of their ARM-powered netbooks at the conference this year, with a company spokesman saying that Ubuntu for ARM will go public in April, with Sparrow phones coming to market sometime in 2010. Additionally, companies like Adobe, On2, and Symbian are said to be “tuning their apps to run on the latest cores from ARM” as we speak.

[Via Gadget Mix, Mac Rumors]

Filed under: Cellphones, Laptops

ARM debuts Sparrow multicore netbook processor originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 16 Feb 2009 15:03:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments

Volkswagen sure is talking tough about going green, but we’ve yet to actually see any of these long-teased concepts hit the show floor. In case a plug-in Twin Drive hybrid just wasn’t enough to look forward to, the suits in Wolfsburg have just inked a letter of intent with Toshiba in order to form a collaborative agreement that will see the two working together in the development of “electric drive units and the accompanying power electronics for Volkswagen’s planned New Small Family.” If rumors prove accurate, the NSF crew will mimic that Up! concept we’ve been drooling over for ages, and if you were wondering where the batteries would be coming from, this here arrangement suggests that it’ll be from within the partnership. Oh, and you want a launch date, don’t you? How about “forever from now,” or as VW’s Dr. Martin Winterkorn put it: “A considerable amount of research and development work still has to be carried out until we can produce the electric vehicle.”

Continue reading Volkswagen and Toshiba to link up on electric drive systems

Filed under: Transportation

Volkswagen and Toshiba to link up on electric drive systems originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 13 Feb 2009 10:04:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments

Because you can never have too many Tecra laptops in your life, Toshiba‘s announced that the A10-S3511 and M10-S3411 are currently making their way through retail channels. Both PCs sport a 2.4GHz Intel Core 2 Duo P8600 processors, 2GB DDR2 SDRAM, 160GB HDD, built-in webcam, WiFi, Bluetooth, Toshiba’s EasyGuard technology, a Li-on battery that’s expected to last just under 3 hours per charge, and Windows Vista Business with media to downgrade it to XP Professional. As for their differences, the A10’s has a 15.4-inch screen with WSXGA+ resolution, NVIDIA’s Quadro NVS, a 7200rpm disk speed, and a shiny new $1249 price tag,while the M10’s got a 14.1-inch TFT LCD with WXGA+ resolution, an Intel GM45 integrated graphics chip, a 5400rpm disk speed, and a $1100 asking price, which is a bit lower than what we heard back in July.

Read – M10 product page
Read – A10 product page

Filed under: Laptops

Toshiba Tecra A10, M10 laptops now available originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 10 Feb 2009 17:46:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink | Email this | Comments