Consumer electronics set to enjoy 11 per cent growth in 2005

Global shipments of consumer electronics products are expected to grow 11 per cent on-year in 2005 from about $113.5 billion recorded in 2004, thanks to brisk sales of digital TVs and portable MP3 players, said the Consumer Electronics Association (CEA), organizer of the recently concluded Consumer Electronics Show (CES), which was held in Las Vegas from January 6-9. In the US alone, shipments of MP3 players are likely to hit 10 million units, worth about $1. ...more

Nokia launches fleet of new phones

Nokia pronounces 'game on', with new multimedia handsets Yesterday Nokia launched new phones at the Nokia Mobile Internet Conference in Munich. Chief Executive Jorma Ollila said Nokia would ship between 50 and 100 million of the colour-display mobile phones in 2003, with 10 million offering organiser functionality and email services. The most notable is the Nokia N-Gage mobile game deck [pictured], the first of a new mobile game deck product category. ...more

Opera claims a record year for downloads

Opera is claiming to have hit new records for downloads of its standards-compliant browser. Ten million downloads have been made so far this year, and the Norwegian company claims many more will have been made via alternative sites. 'It is especially pleasing to see that so many American users are discovering that there are alternatives to Microsoft's old browser technology,' says Jon S. ...more

Creative gets aggressive on the MP3 player patent front

The chairman of Creative has vowed to aggressively pursue companies it believes are in breach of its patent on a navigation system for MP3 players. Sim used the launch of Creative's latest Zen player, the Vision: M, to announce that his company intends to grab itself a slice of the iPod pie. Creative was awarded the patent, which describes a hierarchical menu system, in August and argued that it had employed such a system for more than a year before the first iPod was unveiled. ...more

Sugar cube is memory of the future

Japanese researchers have managed to create a data storage device that can hold 1 Terabyte of information and is just 1 cubic centimetre in size, the same size as a cube of sugar. Two years ago the scientists at Kyoto University discovered that glass could be used to store information optically. By using a very short pulse of light produced by a femtosecond laser to strike a glass cube containing the element samarium, small luminous dots around 400 nanometers in diameter are produced. ...more