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Set as: allows you to set the MP3 as an alarm tone. MP3 files with DRM (Digital Rights Management) can also be used as a ringtone and a caller ringtone, while files without DRM can only be used as an alarmtone.

though i just found this discussion on a workaround i shouldnt have to jump through hoops to use my device. in the past drm has been invisible. (being forced to watch previews on dvds sucks too btw. now i just pop in the disc and do something for 5 or 10 minutes.)

it is the engine design on a harley that is patented (i think) and makes the signature sound.

Even the system for doing this is not new. CDs and DVDs have different wavelengths and DVD players have been able to play both using a single lens for years. This just extends that technology - in otherwords a non-news item on the Slashdot frontpage.

I suspect the GP is misinterpreting "sides" of a disc for "layers".

http://downloadcenter.samsung.com/content/UM/20060 6/20060605081322171_P1000_XAA_BK_0602.pdf

Page 8 of the English manual, in the "Disc Type and Characteristics" section, you'll find a list of disc types the player supports.

In the first row, support for BD-ROM, BD-RE, and BD-R is listed for "AUDIO+VIDEO", with the disc shape listed as "Single sided".

In the DVD-VIDEO row, you'll see 4 entries:
* Single sided (5 inches)
* Double sided (5 inches)
* Single sided (3 1/2 inches)
* Double sided (3 1/2 inches)

Sure you can, but without any consumer-level display devices that will accept 1080p over component, how are you going to see them while you play?

Take a look at the specs for the Samsung HL-S5687W. It reads:

2-component video inputs
(480i/480p/720p/1080i/1080p)

Yes I admit somewhere just under $3k is somewhat expensive for a TV. But lots of people are buying HD sets that expensive nowadays. I'm also sure there are less expensive examples, that's just the first one I came up with in ten seconds of googling.

What you have forgotten is that if Sony had planned to have a base model that supported 1080p over component for some time, they might just have TV makers making displays that can accept 1080p over component inputs as well. It's called "strategic alliance". Furthermore these same TV makers, being no fools, could also independantly note that a console about to sell a few million units will offer 1080p over a component input and move to support that.

You know what would really kill the iPod? A better product! iPod has one heck of a marketing campaign, but let's face it that isn't the only reason for it's sucess. I'm a techie just like most of you, and I'm borderline anti-Apple. I been wanting an mp3 player for a while now. After about 18 months of researching it, I went with the iPod for numerous reasons.

1)It has by far the most accesories of any portable player.

2)It's by far the thinnest of any Mp3 player. The closest resemblace to the iPod is the Samsung Z5. The only problem is the 4Gb Z5 isn't much smaller than my 30Gb video iPod.

3)Quality. Before video was a factor, the only serious competitor to iPod was the Creative Zen Sleek. I'm glad I didn't get one. It started out nice, but let's just say it wasn't built for durability. Consumers were posting all over the net (it should still be on CNet and Amazon) about rattling noises. It seems that the earphones jack wasn't soildered properly, and thousands of people where having problems about it comming loose and falling inside the player. That's a great way to steer people away from Apple.

But it wasn't only hardware quality that was in question. The "Plays For Sure" nonsense was wreaking havok, and several people weren't able to install the software on Windows 2000. If that wasn't bad enough, the people that COULD install the player complained about being forced to keep the songs on their harddrive (no manual update like the one present in iTunes).

Now before I hear any of the usual iPod propaganda, let me dispell some of the most common rumors:

1)You do NOT have to purchase music from iTunes. It sounds obvious, but I actually heard a saleman in Radio Shack tell someone that the only way to get music in the iPod was to buy it. You would think he was just trying to sell more pre-paid cards for iTunes, but once I spoke with him, he actually didn't know. As a matter of fact, you don't even have to use iTunes at all.

(Disclaimer: I must warn you that I've heard stories of 3rd party software corrupting iTunes.db. It works fine with everything else, but once iTunes detects the .db file has been edited by a 3rd party, it might not recognize the file anymore.)

2) You do not have to buy QuickTime Pro to import movies. That was true once upon a time, that was changed in iTunes 6.02. However, iTunes is still slow, and neither iTunes or QuickTime can encode muxed videoes with audio, so you're better off using a free alternative.

3)There is an easy way to get your music back off of your iPod, but it isn't free.

Let's face it people : The iPod isn't perfect by anyone's standards, but it's the best player on the market by a landslide. If you want to bring Apple's domination of the mp3 market to a halt - give it some decent competition. Creative started now, so hopefully after a few years they'll have all the kinks ironed out. Until then, I can't recommend anything else.

I don't get it. Why does everyone go on about there not being a simple phone available?

The Nokia 1100

The Motorola C139

The Samsung
SGH-N625

Happy now?

I don't know about unicode tags but Samsung make a whole bunch of devices with OGG support.

A few months ago I was shopping for an all-in-one device. I settled on the Nokia 6230i.

It auto syncs my calendar via bluetooth when I walk in the front door of my apartment. It has an expandable memory card that I currently store 512 megs of mp3s on. Other standard features include java, camera, audio recorder, fm radio etc. On the other hand, battery life is pretty shit. I play 1-2 hours of music with it a day, and usually it needs to be recharged every 2nd or 3rd day. It does charge fast though.

I am pretty happy with it. Though if I were buying a mobile device today, I would seriously considering going with the Samsung D600.

Get a Samsung SyncMaster 930BF. I like it very much, and they also have a 2 ms variant that is a bit more expensive. Okay it doesn't look very dashing, but it performs :)

I don't believe that Samsung is a direct competitor to Apple in the DAP market, much the same way Dell isn't really a competitor to Apple in the desktop PC market. Apple goes after a pretty narrow market, and they're highly successful there. Samsung is more a more broad-ranging company sells tons of different things. It's a bit like comparing a small boutique carmaker to General Motors. Both make the same product, but are not really competing against each other.

Interesting that this announcement from Apple came the quarter after PortalPlayer announced a new technology (called Preface) that's designed to work with Windows Vista only.

So - were they dumped for practical reasons or for punitive reasons? What do people think?

Onto a different aspect of this story - the company being touted as the most likely supplier of replacement chips is Samsung (allready a supplier of a good deal of ipod flash memory). Is it really wise for Apple to trust a competitor with components crucial to Apple's core business? (ipods are Apple's core business now).

Well, I guess Apple are happy doing business like this

I don't think I've seen a single other company support the standard.

They do exist. Older Samsung camcorders such as this one take only Memory Sticks for flash memory.

According to the Samsung website, their newest camcorders take either SD/MMC or are like this one and take, niftily enough, SD/MMC, Memory Stick and Memory Stick Pro.

This may, admittedly, suggest that the Samsung camcorders are just Sonys in disguise.

Actually, boycotting Sony and BMG is hard, very hard.

With Sony - there are DVDs, and Music CDs, complete works of one artist or band, that must be boycotted.

But now when renting DVDs or buying CDs, or even downloading iTunes, I have to take that second look to make sure it isn't Sony or BMG. And yes, even if I wanted it, I'll put it back on the shelf. There are other suppliers of media that don't root kit infect your computer just to play some songs.

Boycotting the Electronics is easy, because lets face it, Samsung and Panasonic have taken the lead with TVs, Canon and Nikon have the lead in cameras, and if you like squandering your life, XBOX 360 will turn hours of productive time in to soul emptying wastefulness (as well as take away your extra spending cash.)

Skipping buying any VAIO computers is easy - HP Media Center PCs and Apple Macs are just fine for most tasks. Laptops, well pick your flavor - what ever you like.

MP3 Players - for the cheap ones, Creative is good, for all the extras, the iPod does a great job. And for the portable CD players - you can get good no-name players for like, $9 bucks on sale. If you drop it and break it, you wont be crying over the lost $70 for overly fancy CD-players.

Checking your components, Sony CD players, DVD players, and Sony media - as long as you double check before you buy, you should be able to live quite well, if not better, in a Sony / BMG free world. In fact, you might just save some money, since you're not paying for the 'Sony' name...

Last thing, about 1080p tv's not existing... while most tv's "support" and will display the 1080p content it's inputed with it's not showing the full resolution. I've yet to see any consumer tvs whether they are lcds, plasmas, or otherwise with greater then 1366x768 resolution which is a good deal less then 1920x1080.

Uh...well apparently you have not looked very hard.

Sony SXRD - 1920x1080 native in three different sizes. http://www.sonystyle.ca/commerce/servlet/ProductDe tailDisplay?storeId=10001&langId=-1&catalogId=1000 1&productId=1001969&navigationPath=n32050n100187

Samsung HL-R5678W - 1920x1080 (avaiable in 4 sizes). http://www.samsung.com/Products/TV/DLPTV/HLR5678WX XAA.asp

Mitsubishi WD-62927 - 1920x1080 again in 3 or more sizes. http://www.mitsubishi-tv.com/televisions/details.a sp?id=195.

>>The lower power consumption which improves battery life is persuasive for regular travelers, but for the average user there seems no need to make the change.

Better power consumption greatly benefits *everyone* who owns a laptop or any portable/embedded device. I'm not even a regular traveler, but I much prefer long battery life over short battery life even at the expense of speed. I've already decided that my next laptop must last at least 24 consecutive hours in the on state (With power management and all during idle time) without being plugged in. I simply don't want to carry a power brick or an extra battery with me.

This was the state of the cell phone industry back in the analog days. Even now, a popular modern phone such as the Samsung A650 only has about 1.5 hours of continuous analog talk time and 14 hours analog standby time versus 2.8 hours of continuous digital talk time and 7 days digital standby time. If the digital talk and standby times on that phone were as bad as the analog talk and standby times, Samsung would be out of the cell phone business. Even though cell phone chargers are small and lightweight, nobody wants to have to remember to carry one around. Why is this seen any differently for power bricks in laptops?

Samsung announced these drives last year and said that they should be available by 8-05. I have been looking regularly to see when they are going to hit the market for close to a year now. I wish they would go ahead and release them or plan announcements a little better.
If they could get the price down to near $10/GB I would buy one. I don't store mass amounts of audio or video on my laptop so a 16 or 32 GB would be fine for me. The decrease in power consumption and the increase in battery life could make the investment well worth the cost. I can currently get about 5.5 hours of battery life out of my laptop, if this could be increased to 7 or more from the reduced power consumption I would be all for it.

http://www.samsung.com/PressCenter/PressRelease/Pr essRelease.asp?seq=20050523_0000123980

Samsung came out with this May 23, 2005.

http://www.samsung.com/PressCenter/PressRelease/Pr essRelease.asp?seq=20050523_0000123980

http://www.samsung.com/Products/DigitalAudioPlayer /MP3Players/YP_Z5ABXAA.asp?page=size_contents

Almost 6lbs!

Careful ... the spec sheet says it only supports MTP under windowsXP with mediaplayer 10. So you may have a very exciting time getting it to hook up to your linux box. Then again, you may be one of the XP users out there who use ogg. Why do they do this? At least Apple had the sense to support their iPod stuff under non-apple OS's.

Samsung's OneNAND design uses some interesting implementation details to run faster than is normally expected with flash. Their specs at http://www.samsung.com/Products/Semiconductor/OneN AND/index.htm suggest writes at 9.3MB/s and reads at 108MB/s; plenty fast for many applications even without running multiples in parallel. It's certainly much slower than writing directly to the drive if the drive is active. However, if the drive isn't spun up at the moment and the amount of data to be written fits in the NAND flash cache, I could see this being a net performance boost over the spinup/seek time combination of the hard drive.

They also spec 100,000 erase cycles before it's worn out. As was noted by an underrated poster the last time this came up, intelligent flash controller designs like this can cope with bad bits and assuring level usage of the memory much better than what you normally see in random hunk of flash.
An analysis at http://www.sudhian.com/printdocs.cfm?aid=686 suggests 33 years of usage for a typical worker. When you run the numbers it doesn't sound that difficult to create a design that would likely outlast the mechanical parts of a standard hard drive.

Heh. Wow, you can view JPEGs on the 1.8" Color TFT-LCD. Judging by this picture it's 2-bit colour.

other nice features include accelerated fast-forward, time-out so you can listen as you go to sleep and not waste power, and auto-resume when you power off/on.

"Ok - that's going to inconvinience the Linux users for sure."

How so? The Samsung player also supports OGG Vorbis

But look, it actually has screws! Nice for maintenance (batteries?) or people that want to rebuild it into a mini-server or whatever a nerd can come up to!

Well..

2001: SAMSUNG Electronics develops and produces world's largest 40 inch TFT-LCD.
2001: SAMSUNG SDI develops world largest 15.1" full color Active Matrix Organic Electro Luminescece Display

There's two - and the list goes on.

Also they have won several design awards. It would be unfair to say that they are not innovative. Apple even invested $100 million (link above) in Samsung in 2000. Samsung is certainly not your ordinary low-cost copycat manufacturer - they spend huge amounts on R&D.

Here are direct links to the product on Samsung's website:

(4 GB) http://www.samsung.com/Products/DigitalAudioPlayer /MP3Players/YP_Z5ABXAA.asp

(2 GB) http://www.samsung.com/Products/DigitalAudioPlayer /MP3Players/YP_Z5QBXAA.asp

Here are direct links to the product on Samsung's website:

(4 GB) http://www.samsung.com/Products/DigitalAudioPlayer /MP3Players/YP_Z5ABXAA.asp

(2 GB) http://www.samsung.com/Products/DigitalAudioPlayer /MP3Players/YP_Z5QBXAA.asp

Actually, their player looks worse than the iPod. Look: here. While it's an obvious rip-off (the menu looks especially familiar, and, oh look, it's a click-square...), it just looks cluttered and cheap compared to the reference product from Cupertino.

-F

... no, seriously!

my new samsung a900 has a really functional speech-to-text function for dictating text messages right into the phone.

not useful for a location where you have to be quiet (the library, etc.), but much easier any other time.

http://www.samsung.com/Products/MobilePhones/Sprin t/SPH_A900ZKSXAR.asp

Wow, and your trends only have to hold true for another 11 years for the prediction to come true. I guess in an industry with as little innovation as computer technology, that just might happen!

In all seriousness, the nand people don't have a good plan reaching out that far. In particular, by that point to maintain 100% avg capacity improvement every 2 years, let's call that 64x capacity improvement (I know, that would actually reach into the 12th year, but the graphs you claim are using improvement rates even faster than that: 160% per 2 years). That's an 8x improvement in process, and this memory was built in their new 50 nm process:

http://www.samsung.com/us/Products/Semiconductor/U SNews/Flash/Flash_20050912_0000191464.asp

That puts this new hypothetical future memory on their 6.25 nm process (or with your less generous demands, a 2.7 nm process). That's getting into the range of significantly less than 1000 atoms per device (evidence for atoms / device claim: http://gtresearchnews.gatech.edu/newsrelease/SiNW. html). To think there won't be any significant changes or difficulties in reaching that goal is optimistic.

Meanwhile, all of this assumes that the hard disk people do nothing surprising in 11 years.

NOR flash is extremely slow for writes. This Samsung appnote
http://www.samsung.com/Products/Semiconductor/Memo ry/appnote/onenand_features_performance_051104.pdf
compares I/O performance of the various technologies (the chart is on page 28, so scroll down...)

For their test rig, NAND flash yields 8.8MB/sec writes vs NOR at 0.14MB/sec. That's why NOR flash is only used for BIOS memory and other things you don't have to rewrite very often. On the flip side, NAND flash gets reads at 16.5MB/sec vs NOR at 23.9MB/sec (or 108MB/sec, presumably in some kind of burst mode - that part isn't explained).

If their OneNAND performs as well as they claim, I could see using it for a boot drive; 68MB/sec read would be fine there, 9.3MB/sec write would be ok as long as you weren't paging to it or doing much of anything else. Linux would run pretty well with those parameters, its buffer cache is good at absorbing and deferring writes; Windows 2K/XP's memory manager/cache manager purges pages too aggressively though, which would make the write throughput a serious system bottleneck.

I don't know about China but it seemed that at least in my experiences, the big companies in Korea are cognizant about GPL licensing issues and are pretty good at complying with the license.

For example, when I was working there a year ago
(1) Korea-equivalent of BSA would conduct random audits of software licenses. Actually one consulting company that my company hired had to stop working for couple days because apparently they didn't have proper number of licenses for Visual Studio. The company I worked for also ran in-house audits from time to time to detect not only licensed software but unauthorized software like MSN, mp3, etc.

(2) The company actually had an entire group devote to GPL and there were several initiatives to educate engineers and product planners about various licenses including GPL (I attended several presentations on it) and I belive we also purchased (or acquired) several software that was supposed to detect presense of popular GPL software in our sources.

(3) Engineers and markets usually talked and argued about including GPL stuff in the product we developed. We would usualy opt for commercial libraries because we usually didn't want to go through the hassle (we were big enough not to care about costs most of the time - if we had to think about cost, it probably meant that marketing guys weren't doing a good job in product planning)

(4) Last group that I worked in actually forbade usage of linux because of GPL license and we spent couple mil buying commerical RTOS and was in the process of coverting linux to that OS.

So, while I don't think Korean companies are up to standards of U.S. companies, I think it is a mischaracterization that all Asian countries don't care shit about IP stuff. Maybe private citizens might not care (there weren't too many cases of Korean-equivilant of RIAA suing people but Korea is a much less-litigious society) but I think most companies by far are pretty good about complying with GPL.

For example: http://opensrc.sec.samsung.com/ has the sources for linux used in this product: http://linuxdevices.com/articles/AT7933085076.html (pretty decent product, although concept-wise, it is a knock off of japanese products)

The reason why Korean companies would care is that while chances are low they will be sued in Korea, they will be sued in U.S. and almost all companies need to sell their crap in U.S. to make money. So basically U.S. law becomes more-or-less de facto "international" law.

The latest generation Samsung DLPs are 1080p. (For example, see this page.)

Samsung is currently manufactering flash memory in at least limited quantities (don't know if it's in full production yet) on a 50nm process.
To the best of my knoweledge that is smallest process in production, Intel and IBM are certainly producig 65nm chips that will be on the market in the next few months.

I've been following the laptop hard disks for a little while looking for an upgrade.
For those interested another review is at Tom's hardware.

At any rate, as well as missing the Toshiba drives, I noticed they were using the Samsung Spinpoint M40 80GB for review. I'd discounted that previously because of it's lacklustre performance (also highlighted in the Tom's Hardware review).

But (you knew there would be one!) there's the newer M60 series that was released recently. The HM100JC looks interesting. Better transfer rate as well as lower power consumption, which is always handy for the laptop users.

Anyways, if anyone has one of these baby's pls post your impressions.

• USB Mass storage, USB host
• Ogg support
• Linux friendly
• Comes with Lame, Xvid and other cool GPL software on w32 CD

Samsung make a couple of decent, cheap 1Gb players that are USB2.0, flash, with FM tuners, with a good backlit screen e.g. this one and this one. They also support MP3 and WMA and a whole load of other codecs out of the box and have about 15 hours battery life on a single AAA.

Samsung make a couple of decent, cheap 1Gb players that are USB2.0, flash, with FM tuners, with a good backlit screen e.g. this one and this one. They also support MP3 and WMA and a whole load of other codecs out of the box and have about 15 hours battery life on a single AAA.

I've ripped all my CDs to ogg. Even though the adoption is slow, I do believe it is the format of the future. I've gotten myself a Samsung YP-MTZ 1 gigabyte. Plays 40 hours of ogg and mp3 on a single AA (R6) battery and it's got fantastic sound. It uses standard usb-storage driver so you can use it in Windows (2000 and above), Linux and Mac without special drivers.

Can Open Source Outdo the ipod?"

Can't someone make a decent camera-phone with mp3 functionality and 4GB of memory built in, and put it in a reasonable-sized package? Where's the culprit in preventing this? Bad engineering? Cell-phone carriers? Sony not wanting to damage their digital camera business?

I've been looking into the same area recently, and you haven't got long to wait (except if you're in North America);

Samsung SGH-I300 announced over 6 months ago, with a 3 GB hard drive.
Nokia N91 available very soon, with 4 GB storage.
SonyEricsson W900i with up to 2 GB, and designed to be a 'walkman'.
SonyEricsson P990i with a Memroy Stick Duo slot, again expandable to 2 GB. This is probably my next phone, it has the 3G video calling I want to play with, the full Symbian-based PDA functions, and enough storage to take a load a music. It also has wifi, VPN software and Blackberry functionality. This means it replaces my current phone, PDA, Blackberry, camera and MP3 player, in one unit. One charger to take way from home, one headset when I'm driving.... lovely.

But my last couple of phones have had a Memory Stick slot and an MMC slot, as well as having decent cameras. They've even been great as phones...

More monitor news:

As many people have commented above, LCD monitor response times are like printer page print times. Manufacturers lie, and lie, and lie. Since all online and print magazines (that I know about) are corrupted by taking money for sneaky ads that are presented as reviews, it is difficult to know the truth.

Samsung is shipping new monitors: SAMSUNG Provides Computer Users With Feature-Rich 21" And 24" Large-Screen LCD Monitors. Samsung claims "The SyncMaster 214T sports an eight-millisecond response time and the SyncMaster 244T offers a 10-milliseond response time."

Samsung's public relations agency has more info: Samsung Monitor Pressroom.

Samsung is reputed to be the manufacturer of the LCD panel used in making the Dell 2405FPW, which is now on sale at Dell with a coupon for $784, if I remember correctly. Supposedly, the 2405FPW is put together by BenQ in Hong Kong. I'm using a 2405FPW as I type this, and it is the best monitor I've seen.

Dell seems to be undergoing a social breakdown. I would think very carefully before I bought something from them that they had a hand in manufacturing. See this comment: Dell has tricky prices.

My understanding is that Samsung has built a new factory to manufacture new technology in LCD monitors. People often report that the 2405FPW has no dead pixels. I haven't seen any dead pixels on mine.

(I don't have any involvement with any companies mentioned above, other than as customer.)

read and write times for these devices are 3 orders of magnitude less than hard drives AND your search times go down to 0.


Why do people write things like this without quoting a reference for the figures?

NAND flash isn't that fast, especially for write.

E.g.

OneNand (the fastest sort)

http://www.samsung.com/Products/Semiconductor/Flas h/OneNAND_TM/

108MB/sec read
8.2MB/sec write

Normal NAND is much worse.

I got 60MB/sec write speeds on a SATA disk at the start. Probably the average is around
50MB/sec.

http://www.tomshardware.com/storage/20050927/hd_ro und_up-26.html#data_transfer_diagrams

So the Flash is 2x faster on a read, but 6x slower on a write.

Seek times BTW, are not zero on a flash disk. When you read the disk, there is a look up
table to convert logical sector numbers to physical addresses. Usually, this is like a
cache, so seeking to the end of the disk will cause the cache to miss and get refilled.
Cache refills require a lot of reads from the flash, so there is a penalty to seeking,
even though nothing moves physically.

2004 revenue was just under $122 BILLION, with net income of $11.8 BILLION.

So the fine is 2.5% of one year's net income, 0.25% of one year's revenue, and a mere 0.14% of their total assets.

This is incentive against cheating in future? How??

Seems like these fines are just the cost of doing business. I'm sure that $300M is a lot less than their manufacturing charges, or even their advertising expenses.


But it's still lost profits for their shareholders. According to their stock website, there are 148 million outstanding shares, and 22 million outstanding preferred shares, with an annual 2% dividend.

From their website, their profits last year were 10,000 million US dollars, so 300 million is a good 3 percent of that. Given that shareholders will probably own shares in their hundreds if not thousands, that's enough to be felt by each shareholder.

I went and tried out the Samsung Yepp YP-T7 largely for it's FM recording functions in a Flash-based player, and it's 65K color LCD ain't half bad either.

(I would really have liked to have retro-recording capability like my Archos Jukebox HDD based unit--it has a 30-sec recording memory so you can still get the beginning of the song if you're slow on the REC button-- but even Archos doesn't seem to be plugging that feature anymore).

It does OGG, as well as MP3, WAV, WMA, and audio ASF. Records FM (user-selectable bitrates), voice and line-in, displays text and JPEG images, functions as a mass-storage device, and recharges through it's USB connector.

I don't typically bother with playlists, so I can't comment on those. It'd be nice to be able to adjust listening volume while recording FM, but that's the only quibble I can think of.

---PCJ

http://product.samsung.com/cgi-bin/nabc/product/b2 c_product_detail.jsp?eUser=&prod_id=PO24FSSBS/

Then you sir, should try a samsung spinpoint.
http://www.samsung.com/Products/HardDiskDrive/

I'm pretty much sold on em. Very quiet drives that are plenty quick and they can be had at a good price.

I've had a wireless phone for years, never a single problem during a blackout, it works fine.

By wireless, do you mean cell phones or cordless phones?

Cordless phones definitely "die" during a blackout.