Martyn Williams

Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. has developed a cell phone that runs on Microsoft Corp.'s Windows Mobile operating system and includes a hard-disk drive. The new handset will be shown this week at the Cebit show in Hanover, Germany, the company said. The SGH-I300 offers 3G bytes of storage space, which is considerably more than that available in any cell phone currently on the market, and is Samsung's second phone to feature a hard-drive.

IBM Corp. reduced its full year revenue figure for its Global Services unit by US$260 million after discovering improper sales of third-party hardware at its Japan unit, the company said in a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) on Thursday.

Japanese software maker Justsystem Corp. has cleared the way for the launch of its Ichitaro word processing software this week by appealing a court ruling that had blocked the sale of its product on patent infringement grounds.

It is often said that the adult industry is at the forefront of new technologies. It was credited with driving initial consumer acceptance of VHS and DVD and was a pioneer in online video streaming. But in the battle over disc formats for high-definition video, its voice has yet to be heard.

Japan's largest Personal Handyphone System (PHS) operator plans to launch a new data service in February that will push the maximum throughput from the 128Kbps available now to around 1Mbps, it said Tuesday.

IBM Corp. and Silicon Graphics Inc. (SGI) have won contracts to supply Linux-based supercomputers to a Korean national university and a Japanese nuclear research institute, the two companies said Thursday.

Panasonic Mobile Communications Co. Ltd. unveiled in Beijing on Tuesday its first WCDMA (Wideband Code Division Multiple Access) cell phone for the international market, the company said in Tokyo.

Companies in South Korea and Japan say they are ready to launch a new satellite broadcasting service in the next two months that can send video and audio directly to devices such as mobile telephones, handheld terminals and in-car receivers.