Martyn Williams

Samsung Electronics has begun shipping its first hybrid hard-disk drives that mix conventional magnetic storage with flash memory, it said Wednesday.

Shoppers at a Tokyo department store have a chance to get help with their make-up as part of a three week-long test of RFID technology that began on Friday. The Mitsukoshi store in Tokyo's Ginza district is host to the trial in which RFID tags have been attached to lipstick, eye shadow and blush.

Taiwan's government will allow its biggest tech companies to invest in mainland China, but only after they provide written guarantees that they will make equal or better investments at home, a government minister said Tuesday.

Terabyte drives, for long a goal of the storage industry, started to get within reach in the last year as drive makers began using a new technology called perpendicular recording

The number of fiber-optic broadband Internet subscriptions in Japan reached 7 million in the third quarter, according to data released Wednesday. The figures from Japan's Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications (MIC) also show that the fiber-optic service, which is low cost and offered throughout Japan by several competing carriers, continues to drive the expansion in the country's broadband Internet market.

An investigation into possible anticompetitive behaviour in the flat-panel display market widened Tuesday, with four more big vendors saying they had been contacted by investigators.

NTT DoCoMo Inc. and Mitsubishi Electric Corp. are planning to replace around 1.3 million batteries manufactured by Sanyo Electric Co. Ltd. because they may overheat and catch fire, the companies said

NEC launched its latest laptop PC on Tuesday with a splash. A bottle of water was poured over the computer while it was operating to demonstrate its toughness to harsh environmental conditions.