NEC, Samsung Plan for Smaller Digital Devices

[Jason Dunn]

<div class='os_post_top_link'><a href='http://www.pcworld.com/news/article/0,aid,109164,tk,dn020303X,00.asp' target='_blank'>http://www.pcworld.com/news/article...n020303X,00.asp</a><br /><br /></div>"Japan's NEC and South Korea's Samsung Electronics each announced Monday the development of new devices that should enable designers to make portable electronics devices even smaller. NEC said it has developed a new type of liquid crystal display panel that requires one fifth the number of connecting wires that a current display requires, while Samsung said it has succeeded in cramming a microprocessor and two types of memory into a single chip package. On its own, each development only means a slight reduction in space requirements, but taken together and combined with constant advances in other technologies they add up to smaller or more feature-rich products in the future."

[johnbrooks]

I wonder if NEC is going to offer the PDA "Pocket@i" concept with built-in wifi, CPU Intel PXA250(XScale) 400MHz, RAM/ROM 64MB in Europe and North America as well. They also seem to work on 802.11a!?

Samsung and CSR have teamed on Bluetooth so (Samsung) SEMCO will use the CSR Bluetooth chips in modules to provide Bluetooth capability to a wide range of end products, including Samsung laptops, PDAs and other consumer electronic devices.

Time will tell.

[Timothy Rapson]

Sharp also developed a lot of new technology to put into the new VGA C700 that Sharp will sell to anyone else. It makes the screen far more reliable that current tech. There is a lot of cool stuff like this that offers those little advances, that may one day give us PDAs 10 times as fast and battery stingy as current models in the size of a REX.

It all sounds so boring when you read little tidbits like these developments, but your point on the cumulative effect is so true.

[Kati Compton]

There's not really anything all that "new" about what these companies are doing. New to PDAs, I suppose. I'm actually a bit surprised that handhelds weren't using systems-on-a-chip already.