Tiny Storage device

Seagate announced nine new products on the eve of its annual analyst meeting, scheduled to take place later this week.

Seagate's DAVE 3.5 x 4.7 x .47-inch form factor into which you can cram 20GB ~ 60GB and cost less than $200 (digital audio video experience) platform, for instance, is geared toward people who want to use their phone as an MP3 player, movie player or video recorder.

The unit, which contains a 60GB 1.8-inch drive, can connect to a phone via Wi-Fi, Bluetooth or a USB cable, and it can fit inside a coat pocket. Most phones come with a few gigabytes of capacity, at best, so a DAVE would significantly increase the amount of remote storage.

Some companies are also testing out the DAVE as a vehicle for renting movies. In this scenario, customers would walk up to a kiosk and select the movies they wanted. The kiosk would then beam them into the DAVE unit. The movies would contain copyright protection to prevent piracy, Watkins added.

In a twist, Seagate doesn't plan to market the DAVE as a product under its own name. Instead, it will make the DAVE for cellular companies and let them brand it.

At the other end of the Seagate spectrum is a drive optimized for security cameras. The drive, which offers up to 1 terabyte of storage, contains firmware that enables it to accept video streams from several sources.

The product launch also included a 1-terabyte desktop drive, a 250GB notebook drive, and backup drives from the Maxtor line. Seagate acquired Maxtor last year and continues to use the brand for its "value" (i.e. cheaper and less fancy) line of products.

The desktop Maxtor backup drives sport up to 750GB of storage space and cost about $270 each. In 2004, Sony showed off a 1-terabyte home server in Japan that cost about $5,000, so the price of storage continues to plummet.

Seagate also announced new drives for the first quarter of 2008, with enhanced error correction for digital-video recorders, including a 1TB model. In Japan, consumers are already asking for 2TB drives for their DVRs.

Seagate has also said it plans to move into the market for flash-based hard drives. The company now sells only hard drives that store data on magnetic platters.

Samsung Electronics and SanDisk have already released flash drives for notebooks and blade servers. By coming out with its own flash drives, Seagate can participate in what Watkins claims will be a corner of the storage market.

Flash memory is more reliable and consumes less energy, but it costs more, in terms of cents per gigabyte.
source: cnet

Bluetooth, Nokia unite for wireless watches

New technology may pave way for communication through small devices:

NEW YORK - The consortium behind the Bluetooth wireless standard announced that Nokia Corp., the world's largest maker of cell phones, is contributing a technology that promises to bring the wireless connections to devices that are too small for regular Bluetooth chips.



The technology, called Wibree, opens up the possibility of a host of small wearable gadgets, like watches, heart rate monitors, pedometers and pill boxes that communicate with Bluetooth-equipped cell phones or computers. A watch could display the user's incoming text messages, for instance, or an action figure toy could sense the presence of other toys.

Wibree has a lower data rate and much lower power consumption than Bluetooth, which is in widespread use as the interface between cell phones and wireless headsets. That means smaller batteries that don't have to be charged often, unlike Bluetooth headsets.

Nokia, which is based in Finland, started developing Wibree in 2001, and announced the technology in October last year. It formed a Wibree Forum with other companies to license and exploit the technology, an effort that will be subsumed by the Bluetooth Special Interest Group, which includes about 8,000 companies.

"Our members have been asking for an ultra low power Bluetooth solution. With Nokia's innovative development and contribution to the Bluetooth specification with Wibree, we will be able to deliver this in approximately a year," said Michael Foley, director of the Bluetooth SIG.

The decision by the Bluetooth SIG to embrace Wibree validates Nokia's technology, but it also means the Finnish company is giving away the results of a multiyear development effort as Wibree will now be licensed royalty-free. Such a move is not uncommon in the technology field _ Sweden's LM Ericsson developed and then gave away the original Bluetooth technology in the 1990s, calculating that widespread and fast adoption would allow the company to benefit more from its leadership than it would from a licensing scheme.

Nokia had been looking to turn Wibree over to an open standards group from the beginning, said Harri Tulimaa, Nokia's head of technology out-licensing. The move will help ensure Wibree will be deployed as widely as possible, he said Tuesday.

There is already a Bluetooth watch, sold under several brands, that vibrates in response to incoming calls on the user's Sony Ericsson phone and shows the number. However, because of the power-hungry Bluetooth chip and vibration function, the watch is large and heavy and requires charging every few weeks. Foley said Wibree should enable a wireless watch that's powered by a button cell that only needs replacing once per year.

Devices with Wibree chips will not be able to communicate with existing Bluetooth-equipped devices, according to Foley. However, future Bluetooth devices could relatively easily and cheaply be upgraded to include the ability to talk to Wibree devices, since the technologies use the same frequencies, and no new antenna or radio components would be needed.
By Peter Svensson, June 12, 2007