10/27, 4:20pm
Hitachi, Toshiba join Sony in anti-trust query
Hitachi and Toshiba's optical drive divisions have also been implicated in a US Department of Justice investigation regarding possible antitrust abuse, according to another Monday WSJ report. As with Sony, not many other details were revealed, and executives at both Hitachi and Toshiba say they will fully cooperate with the investigations. Hitachi's optical drive business is a joint venture with LG, with Hitachi owning 51 percent of the operation, while Toshiba has the same split with Samsung.
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10/21, 12:20pm
AT&T sues AU Optronics, more
AT&T has filed a lawsuit in a federal court in San Francisco on Tuesday against Samsung, LG Display, AU Optronics and other LCD makers for allegedly colluding on fixing the price of display panels in the US. According to a Wednesday Bloomberg report, AT&T claimed Samsung and six others have formed an illegal international cartel meant to "restrict competition in the United States in the market for LCD panels." In its complaint, AT&T claims this conspiracy has included communications and meetings during which defendants agreed to eliminate competition and fix the prices of LCD panels that were coming to the US.
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10/13, 2:00pm
Hitachi 15,000RPM Ultrastar drives now shipping
Hitachi has released two new hard drives on Tuesday, both turning at the fastest-possible 15,000RPM design. Part of the Ultrastar series, this includes the company's first 2.5-inch drive with the extra speed, the C15K147, and the firm's fourth-generation 3.5-inch drive, the 600GB 15K600. Either has a 6Gbps SCSI (SAS) interface, though the latter can be had with a 4Gbps Fibre Channel Arbitrated Loop (FCAL) interface as well. The 15K600 also has one third more the capacity of its predecessor while claimed to be 23 percent faster.
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09/14, 10:10am
Casio Hitachi NEC joint cellular venture
Casio, Hitachi and NEC took defensive steps to protect their cellphones today and said they would merge their handset businesses into a single joint venture. The deal leaked earlier will see NEC join an existing Casio and Hitachi venture but largely take it over; NEC will have a 66 percent stake while Casio and Hitachi will have 17.3 percent and 16.7 percent respectively. All three will share their technology, production and other efforts as part of the deal.
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09/01, 3:00am
Hitachi 500GB notebook HDD
Hitachi has expanded its Travelstar line of 2.5-inch hard drives with the 7K500 series, available in capacities up to 500GB. The new drives represents the company's highest capacity notebook storage without sacrificing the 7200RPM speed and 16MB cache. Media transfer rates have been increased to 1245Mb/s, approximately 16 percent faster than the 7K320-series drives.
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08/28, 8:55am
Casio Hitachi NEC Rumor
Three of Japan's major cellphone makers are nearing a joint venture that would create one of the largest companies of its type, sources said on Friday. Contacts for the WSJ believe Casio, Hitachi and Sharp are in talks to create a phone-only firm that would launch by April 2010. The project would be an attempt to consolidate businesses after the combination of economic fallout and a largely saturated Japanese cellphone market, where such a high percentage of residents own cellphones that handset designers are often competing for upgrades rather than new users.
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08/27, 5:50pm
Hitachi HDTVs announced
Hitachi has announced several new plasma and LCD televisions to be released in the coming months, the P-XP035 Series and the L-XP035 Series. Both televisions feature a 500GB internal HDD, an iVDR slot and DLNA support, while an light sensor is used to automatically adjust the display brightness to suit the ambient lighting. The devices support 1080p video signals which can be recorded directly onto the internal hard drive.
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08/07, 10:40am
TDK 2 5TB Hard Drive Plans
Advances in TDK's hard drive technology could lead to another large boost in the capacity of hard drives within a few months, a roadmap presented this week shows. The storage firm is currently going through qualification tests of 640GB drive platters that would fit into a typical 3.5-inch drive and so would allow significantly more storage than existing 2TB drives from Hitachi, Seagate and Western Digital. A premium but commonplace four-platter drive could hold just over 2.5TB of data.
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08/06, 3:00am
Hitachi 2TB 7200RPM HDD
Hitachi GST is now shipping its first 2TB, 7,200 RPM desktop hard drive. The fourth-generation Deskstar 7K2000 uses the company's proprietary five-platter design with relaxed bit density and perpendicular magnetic recording technology. The company is also refreshing its K1000.C Deskstar line, with capacities ranging from 160GB to 1TB.
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08/03, 11:30am
Hitachi network projector
Hitachi has expanded its line of projectors with the CP-X3010N. The device offers the same basic features as the CO-X3010, but adds an Ethernet port and 802.11g/n connectivity. The device features integrated 16W speakers, 3,000 lumen brightness and a contrast ratio of up to 2,000:1.
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07/20, 2:35pm
Japan Looks to iPhone
The Japanese are turning to Apple's iPhone as a source of ideas for how to rescue their ailing cellphone business, the head of a local think tank said today. Professor Takeshi Natsuno of Keio University told the New York Times that companies like Hitachi, NEC and Sharp have generally been unable to sell phones outside of Japan due to difficult, often highly customized interfaces and that the iPhone is a key example of how to solve the problem. Its emphasis on ease of use over hardware is believed to have made it more palatable worldwide and encouraged third-party app development that isn't usually present in Japan.
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07/13, 3:10pm
LCD makers price fixing
The European Union's antitrust regulators have charged Philips Electronics, LG Display and a number of smaller, unnamed LCD makers with corroborating on fixing the price of LCD monitors, Philips announced on Monday. According to a Monday report, the EU antitrust regulators began their investigation in 2006, along with their US counterparts, and has now concluded that the involved firms knowingly kept pricing high. Philips said it would vigorously fight the accusation and claimed that it sold all of its shares in LG Display in March, eliminating possible incentives to illegally collaborate in the future.
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07/13, 8:40am
Hitachi: new portable HDDs
A few months after acquiring SimpleTech, Hitachi has begun two portable hard drive lines under its own banner. The rugged SimpleTOUGH and the home-oriented SimpleDrive Mini lines are bus-powered, 2.5-inch USB 2.0 drives available in 250GB, 320GB and 500GB capacities. The SimpleTOUGH line uses a Hitachi TravelStar drive in a shock and water resistant housing with built-in storage for a ruggedized USB cable. Although the company says the drives can withstand a 3 meter drop, Hitachi claims models it tested survived drops of up to 30 feet and were driven over by a one-ton truck without damage. The TravelStar drive is shock-rated at 400G while operating and 1000G when idle.
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07/13, 8:20am
Hitachi USB/NAS adapter
Hitachi has released a compact adapter under its SimpleTech label that allows any USB hard drive, memory stick or SD card to become a network attached storage device. The SimpleNET USB/NAS adapter includes two USB ports and a 100Mbps Ethernet jack to bring external disks online. The device is Linux-based and does not require reformatting of USB drives. Any USB-based storage device will work with the adapter, but printers are not supported. Hitachi says the adapter works with most networkable backup clients, including Apple's Time Machine.
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07/09, 4:40pm
Sanyo intros Repoch DVR
Japan's Sanyo recently announced it would bring a DVR device to market that relies on slot-in hard drives that comply with the iVR (Information Versatile Disk) standard shared with Hitachi. The Repoch will include an integrated tuner for receiving digital terrestrial TV broadcasts to enable viewing recordings on analog broadcast-compatible TVs. This will allow users to keep their outdated analog TVs even though these broadcasts have been discontinued.
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07/03, 9:20am
NB HD Shortage in Summer
Demand for notebook hard drives should lead to a shortage of disks throughout much of the summer, integrated circuit producers GMI Technology and Weikeng Industrial warned on Friday. As sales agents for hard drives from Hitachi, Toshiba and Western Digital, they tell DigiTimes that their clients hadn't anticipated demand and didn't adjust until it was too late. Hitachi and Western Digital were fiscally conservative due to the economy and didn't expand until early spring, while Toshiba is simply seeing very high demand for a single-platter 250GB drive.
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05/27, 10:45am
Hitachi UltraVision LCD TV
Hitachi on Wednesday leapt back into North American TVs with its LCD lineup for 2009. The UltraVision models headline the series and all have 1080p images with 120Hz panels. Certain models have as many as five HDMI inputs. Hitachi produces the higher-end sets in 42-inch (L42S503), 46-inch (L46S603) and 55-inch (L55S603) versions; the smallest set ships first, appearing in June for $999, while the 46-inch TV shows in August for $1,299 and the 55-inch in September for $1,799.
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05/25, 10:05am
Hitachi 720p Phone Debuts
KDDI unveiled its summer 2009 roster of phones and headlined it with one of the most advanced video-capable phones available. The Hitachi Hi-Vision Cam Wooo has a 5-megapixel camera capable of not only playing but shooting 720p video with true 3X optical zoom, autofocus and image stabilization. It records at a relatively high 9Mbps bitrate and can handle up to an hour of continuous shooting. An HDMI output similarly provides full-resolutino viewing, and a microSDHC slot provides the bulk of storage: an 8GB card can take 2 hours of video at maximum quality.
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05/22, 10:25am
Hitachi 720p Hi-Vision Cam
A leak today has revealed that Hitachi is planning the imminent launch of only the second phone to record HD video after Samsung's Omnia HD. Named in the brochure as the Hi-Vision Cam Wooo, the thin swivel phone found by Engadget would have a 5-megapixel camera capable of recording 720p video along with face detection. It would also get HDMI video output and a microSDHC slot that, with an 8GB card, could hold 2 hours of footage.
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04/27, 12:05pm
NEC and Renesas Merge
Semiconductor giants NEC and Renesas today said they would merge in a deal likely to change the electronics industry. The two plan to finish talks by July that would create a single company by next April. Such a deal would give them roughly $13 billion in combined yearly sales and would make it the single-largest Japanese company building processing technology.
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04/09, 11:55am
Hitachi ultra-thin HDTVs
Hitachi Japan recently announced the upcoming release of no less than 11 new HDTV models in two series, including four LCDs in the Wooo UT800 series as well as four plasmas and three LCDs in the Wooo 03 range. The ultra-thin UT800 LCDs are all about 1.4 inches thick and all sport 1080p resolutions. Their thin profile is achieved thanks to the use of Ultra Wideband wireless tuner boxes, called Wooo Stations, that sit away from the HDTVs. Apart from dual tuners, the Wooo Stations also house a 250GB hard disk drive, an iVDR-S slot for removable DVR recordings and an SDHC memory card slot. They are available in 32-, 37-, 42- and 47-inch sizes.
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03/27, 4:15pm
Hitachi CP-X2010 projector
Hitachi on Friday announced the upcoming release of a new 3LCD projector aimed at the educational market, the CP-X2010, which sports a 2,200-lumens brightness rating along with a 500:1 contrast ratio. Native resolution is set at 1024x768, with lamp life rated at 5,000 hours in Eco Mode or 3,000 hours in standard mode. CP-X2010's built-in speakers provide 16W of output, and for the hearing impaired or really loud environments, closed captioning functionality is integrated.
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03/24, 4:50pm
Hitachi outs Ultrastar HDD
Hitachi on Tuesday announced it will soon begin shipping a new internal hard drive, the Ultrastar C10K, which has an emphasis on low energy consumption as it consumes just 3.4W at idle and 6.1W while operational; the drive as a whole uses 65 percent less power overall. The fast drives, available in 147GB and 300GB capacities, sport a 6Gbps SAS interface, 64MB buffer memory and 10,000rpm disk speeds. Both versions are deemed suitable for home office use, as they emit just 29dB of noise.
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03/19, 11:00am
Sony Japan freezes wages
For the first time in company history, Sony will freeze the wages of its workers in Japan in an effort to cut operating losses and keep a lid on costs, according to a Financial Times report on Thursday. At the same time, the company will cut average bonuses, with factory workers getting a 53 percent smaller bonuses, down from the equivalent of about $23,400, that in itself is expected to save Sony about $105 million in 2009 compared to last year. The move would let Sony take active steps to keep costs in check without cutting more permanent jobs in its home country.
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03/16, 4:10pm
Hitachi replaces president
Hitachi turn around involves new president, company split
Hitachi on Monday announced it has named a new president to head up the company's turnaround plan to return to profitability. According to Monday WSJ report, Takashi Kawamura, a 47-year senior at the company who is 69, will replace Kazuo Furukawa in April. At the same time, the company will split up its automotive supply and consumer television operations. About two months ago, Hitachi announced the biggest loss ever among Japanese manufacturing companies and is expected to post a 700 billion yen ($7.1 billion) loss for the year at the end of March. The loss-making businesses will be made into wholly-owned subsidiaries but become independent in July.
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03/10, 2:55pm
Hitachi Guilty in LCD Fix
Hitachi this afternoon said it had pled guilty to rigging the prices of its LCD panels and agreed to pay a $31 million fine. The agreement with a US District Court in San Francisco finds that Hitachi held meetings with Dell that illegally set prices for computer LCD displays by agreeing to prices in advance and artificially adjusting the actual quoted prices to match the target. Hitachi's move effectively let the company set its own prices independently of the market between April 2001 and March 2004.
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02/26, 5:30pm
OWC hard drive dock
Other World Computing has released a number of new Voyager hard-drive docking bundles, with storage capacities up to 2.0TB and dual-interface or quad-interface options. The external Voyager S2 features USB 2.0 and eSATA connection options, with support for both Windows and Mac systems. Customers can choose between a 500GB or 1.0TB Hitachi Deskstar drive, 1.5TB Seagate Barracuda drive, or a 2.0TB Western Digital Caviar Green drive.
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02/26, 4:25pm
LG May Quit Plasma TVs
LG may be the next to discard plasma TVs, company vice president Lee Gyu-hong says. The executive has told Kyodo News that a sustained poor world economy would make it unprofitable to keep developing and selling the more expensive display technology. If no recovery seems likely, Lee estimates that plans to exit plasma would be made public before the end of the year.
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02/24, 7:00am
Hitachi acquires Fabrik
Hitachi GST today has announced it will be acquiring Fabrik, a privately-held supplier of personal and professional storage devices. As a result of the integration, Fabrik will remain intact and work as the core of Hitachi GST’s newly-formed external storage business. In addition, Hitachi will also be offering full support of Fabrik’s G-Technology and SimpleTech storage brands. According to President of Hitachi Steve Miligan, the combination of the two companies will expand their market reach and bolster their combined product range.
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02/05, 4:15pm
Hitachi intros DVR drives
Hitachi on Wednesday announced the upcoming release of the CinemaStar C5K500 2.5-inch hard drive available in capacities up to 500GB that sports a halogen-free design and low read/write power consumption which, at 1.4W, represents a 22 percent reduction than the older drives. The small form-factor drive is meant for use in DVRs, set-top boxes and video surveillance systems. The 160GB, 250GB, 320GB and 500GB drives feature 5,400RPM speeds.
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01/30, 8:00am
Hitachi Wooo H001
Hitachi is joining KDDI's spring phone launches with the Wooo H001. The swiveling clamshell has the same 854x480 resolution as most other phones in the lineup but adds a unique toggle that lets owners switch to a 3D parallax view. The effect not only pops in automatically for 1Seg digital TV and other video that includes 3D but can convert existing 2D images and photos to 3D, customize the perceived depth, and works either in portrait or the phone's notebook-like landscape mode.
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01/14, 3:25pm
Toshiba Fujitsu HDD Talks
Toshiba on Wednesday revealed (reg. required) that talks are currently underway to investigate buying Fujitsu's hard drive business in a deal estimated to be worth roughly $448.8 million. No details have been revealed, but Fujitsu itself has acknowledged the talks and says that Toshiba is one of "several" candidates for a possible deal, which in the past have also included Western Digital.
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01/09, 6:50pm
Hitachi gesture remote TV
Hitachi was drawing crowds at the CES show with its gesture-controlled HDTV that uses infrared technology (IR) to see user’s hand motions and respond accordingly. The display itself was Hitachi’s existing 42X902 UltraThin HDTV, while a specially-designed IR sensor and interface were developed to control the TV’s basic functions. Users were urged to wave to the TV to turn it on, while changing channels was performed by waving horizontally to bring up a channel menu, then moving an open or pointing hand in a clockwise circle to advance through the channels or counterclockwise to go down through them. Adjusting volume levels was done in similar fashion.
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12/26, 12:15pm
NVIDIA Urging New Material
NVIDIA is urging notebook manufacturers to buy into a new generation of graphics hardware to avoid a chronic failure problem with the earlier hardware's material, a memo obtained by VR-Zone reveals. The graphics company reportedly "strongly recommends" that partners making certain GeForce 8700M, 8800M and 9650M video chipsets switch to a revision with a Hitachi underfill, or contact bump material, as soon as possible. The new substance provides "improved thermal cycling," according to NVIDIA, and should improve reliability as well as prevent a glut of orders for replacement chips.
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12/16, 11:50am
V Low Cost Netbook HDDs
Hard drive manufacturers are in the midst of developing 2.5-inch hard drives inexpensive enough to easily be used with netbooks and other budget notebooks, say unnamed storagy industry contacts. Hitachi, Seagate and Western Digital at a minimum are all said to be developing drives that would cost between 40 and 50 percent less than many existing netbook drives, which cost up to $45 and take up a disproportionately large percentage of the final cost of systems that themselves often cost approximately $400.
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12/02, 1:20pm
Hitachi, Intel develop SSD
Intel and Hitachi Global Storage Technologies (Hitachi) on Tuesday announced they will join forces to develop and produce enterprise-class solid-state drives with Serial Attached SCSI and Fibre Channel interfaces. Meant for use in servers, workstations and storage systems, the SSDs should be both reliable and fast, the companies promise. The resulting SSDs will be branded, sold and supported by Hitachi GST. They will use Intel NAND flash memory and SSD tech, however, that the chipmaker already uses in its current enterprise SSDs.
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11/11, 9:20am
Fujitsu intros green HDDs
Fujitsu on Tuesday announced the upcoming release of its 2.5-inch MJA2 BH- and MJA2 CH-series hard disk drives, both 5400RPM, SATA units with 500GB of capacity. The MJA2 CH drives sport AES hardware-based full disk encryption (FDE) with a 256-bit key size. This hardware-based encryption offers greater security than software-based protection, as the user password is not obtainable when the drives are powered off.
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11/11, 7:15am
Hitachi Travelstar 5K500B
Hitachi is releasing a new family of Travelstar 2.5-inch drives with improved security features, and reduced power use for longer battery life. The Travelstar 5K500.B line will be available in several sizes ranging from 160 to 500GB operating at 5400RPM with an 8MB cache. Hitachi says it expects the 5K500.B will be the first hard drive line to comply with the new Storage Security specification being finalized by the Trusted Security Group. The optional Bulk Data Encryption feature encrypts data as it is written to the drive and reverses this as information is retrieved, preventing casual data theft online.
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10/17, 10:55am
OWC MacBook HD Upgrades
Other World Computing finished its week today by capitalizing on the launch of Apple's new MacBooks to ship its own set of MacBook drive upgrades. The kits take advantage of recent updates by hard drive makers and, as barebones kits, are normally less expensive than paying Apple's upgrade price. They also let owners keep the factory-stock drive, OWC is keen to add.
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09/25, 3:30pm
Hitachi upconverting tech
Hitachi is expected to demonstrate a new video up-converting technology at the CEATEC show in Japan due to start next week, according to a Thursday report. The company claims its super resolution technology will not only convert DVD and SDTV images into near 1080p HD resolution, but it also has the capability of improving the way HDTV broadcasts look. While no specific information on how the process works was revealed, a Hitachi researcher explained it analyzes the luminance signals of input images before processing multiple regions at a time.
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09/18, 4:40pm
Hitachi announces changes
Hitachi on Thursday announced significant changes in its operations for LCD and plasma HDTV production. The announcement comes after earlier promises of upcoming changes, spurred by $1,062 million in lost profits in fiscal year 2007. The majority of the loss stemmed from HDTV business. The electronics maker said it would focus on offering higher-value HDTVs in order to better compete with other HDTV makers, including integrating Internet access into future products. Video content on the web available thus far only via computers will be made accessible to Hitachi HDTV users via the company’s website.
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09/04, 1:20pm
Hitachi 1.5-inch plasma TV
Hitachi is unveiling a 1.5-inch thick 50-inch plasma display, which heads up the company's new UltraThin 1.5 family of products that also includes 1.5-inch thick LCD HDTVs, at the CEDIA Expo on Thursday. The display, which Hitachi is quick to point out is among the largest and thinnest of its kind, will headline Hitachi's release of plasma HDTVs in the A-, S-, V- and X-series, made up exclusively of 42- and 50-inch displays. While not quite 1.5 inches thick, the new plasma HDTVs will be available with manual swivel stands or remote-controlled powered swivel stands.
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08/11, 11:05am
Hitachi BD10 Cam in US
Hitachi today fulfilled expectations for an international release and updated its Blu-ray camcorders to include the BD10HA, the North American version of a new model already introduced in Japan. The new camera is about 20 percent smaller but includes a newer seven-megapixel sensor that improves light sensitivity, adds face detection, and captures 6.2-megapixel still photos in addition to 1920x1080 video.
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08/01, 3:40pm
Hitachi Si Alloy Batteries
Hitachi is developing a new generation of lithium-ion battery packs that should significantly extend the running time of portable devices without requiring a radical breakthrough in technology, the company said when discussing its financial results. The Japanese electronics maker plans to swap the graphite used in the electrodes of today's batteries with a silicon alloy material that would increase the effective capacity of a battery by 20 percent without making additional changes.
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07/30, 9:25am
Hitachi CinemaStar 1TB
Hitachi this morning launched a pair of CinemaStar drives for users of DVRs and any other computer or device that needs to run for long periods of time. The 1TB 7K1000.B relies on the same basic design as its normal DeskStar counterpart but is tuned to run all day and in harsher conditions. The new version is both more resilient against high temperatures as well as modified to run more quietly while it seeks data on the drive. The disk further borrows power optimization tricks from Hitachi's notebook drives to cut down on its energy draw.
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07/24, 7:35am
Hitachi Blu-ray Cam Update
Hitachi today launched a second update to its Blu-ray equipped camcorders to render it more portable as well as more flexible. The DZ-BD10H uses miniaturization of both the 30GB hard drive and the CMOS image sensor to shrink the camera by about 20 percent, fitting it more easily to hand. It also adds an SDHC card slot that adds about four hours and 45 minutes of full-quality 1920x1080 AVCHD video as well as a new way of offloading data beyond a direct USB connection or a miniature, one-hour Blu-ray disc.
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07/23, 4:20pm
E Ink displays in phones
E Ink Corporation announced on Wednesday that both Casio and Hitachi will use its E Ink Vixplex Imaging Film for the outside displays of their upcoming clamshell cellular phones. The company specializes in electronic paper display technologies, and promises its technology will decrease the energy used by the devices. While the Hitachi W61 was previewed back in January, the Casio Model G’zOne is all new.
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07/09, 12:00pm
Hitachi Deskstar 7K1000 B
Hitachi this morning touted its eco-friendliness and launched the Deskstar 7K1000.B. The disk holds the same 1TB as the earlier, original 7K1000 but demands 43 percent less power when idle, letting users upgrade without worrying that the drive will consume more energy just through its presence. The disk is also potentially more secure with the option of Bulk Data Encryption to lock data through hardware rather than depending on software.
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07/03, 9:40am
Hitachi at 5TB by 2010
Hitachi expects to offer a hard disk with five terabytes of storage by 2010, the company tells Japan's Nikkei BP (registration required). While some recent developments are nearing one terabit per inch, Hitachi says its CPP-GMR (Current Perpendicular to the Plane Giant Magnetoresistance) technology has improved to where the company will push past 1TB per inch in two years and allow a 5TB, 3.5-inch desktop hard drive in two years.
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07/02, 9:25am
iPhone Sought in Japan
Japanese cellphone users are most eager to have the iPhone 3G over any other smartphone in or coming to the market, according to a new study by iShare. The research group says that 57.9 percent of all those responding to a survey said they most wanted the Apple device, which placed well ahead of others despite the study method allowing multiple answers. Second place belonged to the Japan-made Willcom D4 UMPC and phone crossover at 35.8 percent, while the more conventional Willcom 03 was third at 33.1 percent.
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