Martyn Williams

Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. is planning to launch at least one thin cell phone later this year to battle Motorola Inc.'s Razr handset in international markets, a company executive said Wednesday.

A Japanese researcher has developed a computer game in which the player becomes the game character, the game is played in real space and a pair of headphones substitute for a monitor.

Advanced Micro Devices Inc. launched its dual-core Athlon 64 processor at the Computex trade show in Taipei on Tuesday. Like one launched last week by Intel Corp., the chip contains two processors on a single piece of silicon and represents one of the biggest changes in PC processor architecture for several years. Dual-core chips offer users higher performance because tasks can be balanced between the two cores.

At least four things will be on the minds of many attendees at next week's Computex trade show in Taiwan: the dual cores of Intel Corp.'s Pentium D processor and the dual cores of Advanced Micro Devices Inc.'s Athlon 64 X2 processor.

Hitachi Global Storage Technologies Inc. (HGST) will next month begin shipping its first drive that supports the new 4G-bps (bits per second) Fiber Channel interface standard, it said Wednesday. The Ultrastar 15K147 drive, which HGST said is the industry's first to support the interface, will be available in sample quantities to system vendors for testing from June, said Sam Sawyer, a senior advisor at HGST's product planning and strategy department.

Microsoft Corp. has begun supplying a version of its Windows XP Embedded operating system tailored to the retail and hospitality industry, marking the first time that the company has customized an operating system for a particular market.

A worldwide day of action by IBM Corp. workers and unions in protest over the company's planned job cuts got off to a slow start with no reported action at company facilities in Asia-Pacific as of late morning.

Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. has developed what it says is the world's first organic light emitting diode (OLED) display that measures 40-inches across the diagonal. OLEDs have been viewed as a potential replacement for LCDs (liquid crystal displays) and PDPs (plasma display panels) in some applications for several years. They don't require a power-hungry backlight and so are viewed favorably for portable applications. Generally faster response rates of OLED screens means they are also being considered for use in televisions.