gHacks technology news » samsung

Samsung Diva Phones Turn Up The Bling Factor

Shailpik — Sat, 21 Nov 2009 19:21:01 +0000

Samsung put out on display two phones that have not been announced yet. And as one can expect, they got covered on the Internet. These phones flag off a whole new line of Samsung phones called the Diva. The first phone is a full touchscreen phone that has a 3” resistive touch display with a WQVGA resolution. It is running the TouchWiz UI, has a 5MP autofocus camera, a microSD expansion slot, Bluetooth and even FM radio. This is the S7070 and it is apparently coming out in the first quarter of 2010. The back of the phone is white with a diamond patterned texture.

Next we have a flip phone, the S5150 Olivia. Olivia has a slim body, smooth interiors and a stunning face. Yes, I am talking about the phone. It has the same diamond shaped texture on its front as the S7070 and there it has a camera and a secondary (looks like OLED) display. Just look at the live photos gathered by GSMArena. The main display on the inside is 2.2inch with a QVGA resolution. The camera is 3MP. It is likely to appear around the same time as the S7070.

As you can guess from a name like Diva, these are phones that are designed to attract the fairer sex. Yeah so you might think about gifting one of these to your lady love. Or if you are the lady, just talk a lot about how much you like the phones. If he still does not get it, hit him on the head with your netbook with this webpage open. Let him figure it out with an icepack over his head. You got time though, the release does not happen till early next year. No word on the pricing yet but I have a feeling that they would be priced similarly. [read]

Tags: diva, flip phone, s5150 olivia, s7070, samsung, touchscreen

Samsung A Day In The Life Viral Marketing

Martin — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 10:13:15 +0000

There are only a few companies that seem to make use of the Internet and its new possibilities in their marketing campaigns as Samsung. You might remember the viral marketing campaign for their new solid state drives where they gave 24 of their drives to some computer freaks to see what they could do with them. The video that was created during that campaign became highly popular especially among users who were interested in technology.

Samsung’s latest campaign was again uploaded to Youtube. The video which is called a day in the life was produced by Samsung France to promote the Samsung Galaxy smartphone.

The video is extremely well done. It shows a day in the life of the protagonist and his use of the Samsung Galaxy phone during the day.

The Samsung Galaxy i7500 is an Android based phone which many audio and video formats that most other cell phones do not support including divx, h.264 and iTunes plkus music files. Other specs include a 5 MP autofocus camera, GPS, 7.2 Mbps HSDPA, Wi-fi. stereo Bluetooth. Here is the video of the campaign:

Well done, don’t you think?

Tags: samsung, samsung campaign, samsung cell phone, samsung marketing, samsung smartphone

Europe To Get Standard Phone Chargers

Martin — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 19:00:36 +0000

Non-standard phone chargers are one of the most annoying things of cell phones. The lifecycle of a cell phone is usually two years. That’s when the contract ends and a new cell phone is offered as an incentive to stay with the cell phone provider for another two year period. Cell phone manufacturers use their own phone chargers which means that buying a new cell phone from a different company will usually mean that a different phone charger as well.

That’s bad for the environment either way as you end up with two different phone chargers or two similar ones as they are always sold with cell phones. It is also bad if you need to recharge the battery of your cell phone at a friends house only to find out that the phone charger is not compatible with your cell phone.

Cell phone suppliers like Nokia, Sony Ericsson, Samsung, Apple, Motorola and LG have agreed to produce cell phones that are compatible with standard charging devices in Europe. First cell phones are expected next year which is expected to reduce the waste that phone chargers produce each year. About 180 million cell phones are sold in Europe each year which also means the same amount of phone chargers.

According to the New York Times only data-enabled phones (which will account for about 50% of all cell phones sold in 2010) will be compatible with the new chargers which are in the beginning sold with the cell phones. Plans are to remove the cell phone chargers later on and sell them separately. It is likely that other countries will join the initiative.

Tags: apple, cell phones, europe, lg, motorola, Nokia, phone chargers, samsung, sony ericsson, standard phone chargers

Samsung LED 7000

Martin — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 07:21:23 +0000

I have to say that I’m very happy with my 42″ Samsung LCD TV although I’m not watching a lot of television. Samsung has shown off their new TV line LED TV Series back in January and some of the features look interesting. So interesting that I might consider ditching my old TV for a new one. The Samsung LED 7000 is one of the models of that series packed with features and technical innovations.

The television is sold in different sizes (as usual) including 46″ and 55″ with all models sharing the same feature set which includes energy efficient backlighting (lead and mercury free, energy star compliant), 1920×1200 Full HD support, 120 Hz Auto Motion Plus refresh rate and Internet connectivity.

The ultra slim design of the LED 7000 makes it an ideal candidate for a wall mount. Only one screw needed to mount the TV which makes the process easier and more efficient. A wireless or wired connection is available to connect the television to the network and the Internet. It can display widgets on screen that can display news or websites. Not sure if that is a killer feature but it might come in handy in certain situations.

What makes me consider buying the TV is the energy efficiency, the image quality and the wall mounting capability.

Which TV would you buy if you could select one?

Tags: Hardware, samsung, samsung led 7000, samsung tv, television, tv

Samsung 24 SSD Raid Viral Marketing

Martin — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 13:39:35 +0000

How do you buzz on the Internet? One of the most successful ways is a viral marketing campaign. Samsung thought of a great way of promoting their new 256GB MLC Solid State Drives. They decided to create an uber-geeky computer system powered by 24 of their SSDs in Raid mode and show of the video at Youtube.

24 drives equals a total storage of 6 Terabytes. The other system specs are as impressive. They added a combination of two Intel 3.2GHz QX9775 Quad-Core cpus, two ATI Radeon HD 4870 X2 cards, 4GB of 800MHz FB-DIMM DDR2 SDRAM, two Corsair HX1000W power supply units, an Adaptec 5 Series RAID card, an Areca 1680ix-24 RAID card and of course the 24 256GB MLC Solid State Drives.

How fast was the system after all? They managed to top 2 Gigabytes of sequential write and reading speed. They performed some tests like loading all Microsoft Office applications (in 0.5 seconds), all 53 apps of the Windows start menu (in 18.09 seconds), copying a 700 Megabyte DVD rip (0.8 seconds) or recycling 700 files with a total size of 5.6 Gigabytes (instantly).

The viral marketing campaign is highly successful with more than 250K views on Youtube already. Can you imaging running a system like this? What are your thoughts, let us know!

Tags: ati radeon, corsair psu, intel cpu, samsung, samsung ssd, solid state drive, ssd, viral marketing, youtube video

Microsoft Phone Data Manager

Martin — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 12:18:41 +0000

Microsoft published a beta of their newest product Microsoft Phone Data Manager which is tool to synchronize and backup data from a supported mobile phone. The contacts data can be synchronized with Windows Live Contacts while the media, the music, videos and pictures, can be saved in a local folder.

Microsoft Phone Data Manager is not a full blown backup solution like the software that comes from the mobile phone company directly which can backup data like sms, games or protocols. It is a beta product on the other hand that could see those features implemented in later versions.

The major advantage of using the Phone Data Manager is that it works with phones from different mobile phone manufacturers. That is handy for a family that possesses different phones but only one computer and basically everyone else who is using phones from different cell phone manufacturers.

The list of working mobiles include phones from Motorola, Nokia, Samsung and Sony Ericsson. About 30 mobiles in total are listed on that page that have been tested and are working with the Microsoft Phone Data Manager but there are also a few that are not working. Most cell phone owners will probably have to try and find it out for themselves if their mobile phone is not listed on that page.

Microsoft has posted a user guide on their website that walks the user through the process of installing and working with the Phone Data Manager.

It supports and can identify bluetooth and usb cable connections. While it lacks on features it could be a viable alternative for users with multiple phones from different manufacturers.

Tags: microsoft phone, microsoft software, mobile phone, Mobiles, motorola, Nokia, phone data manager, samsung, sony ericsson

Skype releases mobile client

Martin — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 20:52:49 +0000

Skype for your mobile [via Shodan] beta was released by Skype. This is basically Skype that can be installed on a mobile phone. The mobile phones that are currently supported are from Nokia, Samsung, Motorola and Sony Ericsson. Not all mobile phones from those manufacturers are supported though but the download page is providing images of the supported mobile phones so it’s pretty easy to find out if your phone is currently supported.

Two download options are available. You can either download the Skype for your mobile client directly by using your mobile phone or by downloading it to your computer first and transferring it afterwards to the phone. My Nokia N73 is not currently supported but shown as coming soon which means I cannot try the application yet.

You do get access to your Skype contacts which means you see when a contact is online. Chat is supported as well as calling contacts and other phone numbers. This is in the beta limited to the following countries: Brazil, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Poland, Sweden and UK. Anyone can receive calls however which makes this client useful even if you cannot use it to call others yet.

You pay the normal national or local rate if you want to call Skype contacts and an additional Skype-out fee to your destination. This does only make sense if you make international calls. If you receive calls on your mobile phone with Skype for your mobile installed you pay the Skype-out charge for a mobile call in your country.

Add to those the data rate charges of the phone operator. Skype is giving an example:

A person with 20 contacts, who’s online for 1 hour, IMs for 10 minutes and has a 20 minute call each day will use about 1MB of data per month. The more data you use, the higher your charges may be.

I first thought this was a bit low but then I realized that the phone calls do not seem to use any data.

Tags: mobile phone, mobile skype, motorala, Nokia, samsung, skype, sony ericsson

Samsung Syncmaster 2263DX

Martin — Tue, 05 Feb 2008 16:09:57 +0000

Most flat screen monitors these days come in sizes of 19”, 22” and 24” with a 16:9 ratio. The Samsung Syncmaster 2263DX LCD monitor is different. It does look like a normal 22″ flat screen monitor if it were not for the little 7-inch monitor that could be added on top or at a side of it. It’s a rather bold experiment in times where dual monitor setups become affordable to almost anyone.

The 7-inch monitor can be attached to the 22″ monitor by plug and play, just plug it in and you are ready to go. The main question however is who would shell out $500 for a 22″ monitor with the little satellite monitor if he could purchase two 22″ from Samsung (or any other monitor manufacturer) for just a $100 extra.

You can only display those applications on that monitor that do not require much space. Many would suggest Photoshop palettes or the like but I think it could be perfect for Instant Messaging, Email, Chats and even Stats of some sort. It maybe is an alternative for workplaces with not enough space for two monitors of the same size.

What do you think, could this be a new trend or is it just a geeky plaything that will not survive for long on the market ?

Tags: monitor, samsung, samsung monitor, syncmaster, syncmaster 2263dx

Hard Disk Low Level Format

Martin — Sun, 03 Feb 2008 10:24:03 +0000

There are two types of hard disk formatting possibilities, low and high level formating. High level formatting is the widely known formatting that erases data on the disks while low level formatting nowadays refers to the reinitialization to the factory settings. One of the major differences between both types is that data can successfully be restored after performing a high level formatting of a hard drive.

This is why experts suggest to either overwrite the hard drive with random data before formatting it or running tools like Eraser to erase all data on the hard drive.

The HDD Low Level Format Tool will low level format a hard drive erasing the whole disk surface in the process which has the result, that it is impossible to restore data afterwards. It supports SATA, IDE, SCSI, USB, FIREWIRE and Big drives (LBA-48) and the most popular manufacturers Maxtor, Hitachi, Seagate, Samsung, Toshiba, Fujitsu, IBM, Quantum and Western Digital.

I did not try that hard drive software yet because I do not have a spare hard drive lying around that I could use to test it with and I did not want to format one of my hard drives just for the sake of testing it. If any of you do test the software let me know about the results please. Running a recovery tool like Recuva after formatting the hard drive should show us if the data is really not recoverable.

Tags: hard disks, hdd, ibm, low level format, quantum, samsung, seagate, toshiba, western digital

Send Text Messages to the Future

Martin — Tue, 02 Oct 2007 13:15:19 +0000

Textmemos is a service that lets the user type in text messages that he wants to have delivered at a certain date and time. All that needs to be done is to enter the cell phone number, the cell phone provider, the date, time and of course the message. As of now 38 different cell phone providers are supported by Textmemos most operating in the United States and Canada with only a handful European ones.

The service itself is completely free and no advertisement will be send in any way to the cell phone number of the recipient. The system behind the service utilized the fact that many cell phone provider accept sms that are send by email which is exactly what Textmemos is doing.

New sms are processed every fifteen minutes and send out to the cell phone providers. All messages are send one hour in advance of the time detailed to avoid late delivery.

My cell phone provider is unfortunately not in the list but I have a friend who is using this service quite often. It works very well. This is nice if you forget birthdays often for instance or other important events.

Read More:

Textmemos
via MakeUseOf

Tags: cell-phone, mobile, Nokia, samsung, sms, sony, text memos

Reduce Hard Drive Noise

Martin — Wed, 14 Mar 2007 15:29:45 +0000

Many modern hard drives support a function called AAM – Automatic Acoustic Management. The feature is currently supported by most hard drives from Samsung, Maxtor and Hitachi. Most hard drives have the feature disabled by default which decreases access time but increases the noise level of the hard drive. If you prefer silence over performance you might want to enable AAM to decrease the noise level of your hard drive and slightly increase the access time.

Access time has nothing to do with data transfer rates which means it is probably a good idea to activate AAM if you think that your hard drive makes to much noises. All you need is the freeware Hitachi Feature Tool. This tool makes it possible to enable, disable or choose a custom value for the Automatic Accustic Management feature.

The noise reduction depends on the hard drive of course. The noise reduction for the Samsung SP2504C was 0.5 Sone from 1.9 to 1.4 Sone by using the custom value 170. A Raptor WD1500ADFD hard drive had a reduction of only 0.1 Sone from 4.1 to 4.0 Sone. The Hitachi Feature Tool will tell you if your hard drive supports Automatic Accustic Management prior to making any changes.

Tags: aam, acoustic management, hitachie feature tool, maxtor, samsung

gHacks technology news » samsung

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