Willcom and Sharp Corporation managed to come up with one of the sleekest UMPCs created in the market. They just unveiled Willcom D4, also known as WSO16H.

Having physical stats of 470g and sizing up with 84x188x25.9mm, this little gadget pack quite a punch. Find out more on this baby in the full article.

It seems that LED back-lit laptops are the current trend in portable computer development.

Both Apple and Dell have jumped on the bandwagon and have tapped Kenmos Technology and Taiwan Nano Electro-Optical Technology (Nano-Op) to supply them with notebook-use LED backlight units. Want to know more? Check out the full article for more details.

Konica Minolta Japan will surely get cheers from people who are left groping in the dark when their cellphone backlights aren't bright enough to illuminate the LCDs in case of total blackout. The company has unveiled the world's brightest Organic EL backlight, which boasts a brightness level of 1,000 cd/m2. It'll be used in mobile phones and other portable devices to increase readability in both low light and bright light conditions. I'm thinking that with this technology, we can look forward to portable gaming devices that will be as bright (or even brighter) than the DS Lite.

No word yet from Konica as to when the technology will be commercialized.

With everything going mainstream, it's getting harder and harder fo have something you can truly call your "own". Since most products nowadays are being mass-produced, it's not out of ordinary to see other people having the exact same gadget, in this case, laptop as yours. We can't teach you how to build a laptop to make it truly original, but we can do the next best thing - show you how to personlize it by changing its backlight.

First Step

Unplug your laptop from the power source and for good measure take the battery out as well. Remove several screws under little stick on rubber pads to unattach the display from the laptop's main body. The LCD has a metal frame around it that has to be removed as well.

Second Step

Detach the housing from the main LCD frame to get more access to the metal housing that has the power leads coming out that held the bulb. Use a small screwdriver behind the rubber caps and slowly work out the bulb out of the housing.

The rest of the steps await after the jump!

It's back to nature for Qualcomm and other companies. They're promoting a radically new breed of screens for cellphones and other handheld devices. The new screen technology allows cellphones to stay on all day without draining battery life. With the new technology, the new screens don't need to be backlit. Instead, they'd rely on the sun's light or movement by liquids inside the screen for illumination.

Backlights are like vampires that suck 90% of the power supplied to the display, and the display itself eats up 30% or even more of the phone's overall energy. Liquavista came up with liquid-filled screens to address this issue. Here's how it works: Each pixel contains water and a droplet of dyed oil. When an electric charge is applied to the outside surface of the pixel, it becomes hydrophilic. The water is attracted to the surface, forcing the oil to the side and making the pixel take on the color of the lower surface of the pixel. When the charge is reversed and the surface becomes hydrophobic, the pixel takes on the color of the dyed oil.

Qualcomm, on the other hand is trying to market the iMod screen to cellphone manufacturers. With the iMod screen, the phone creates images that become visible when sunlight or ambient artificial lights hits the screen. In dimly-lit places, an integrated light does the work to brighten up the screen, but with less energy consumption.

The first batch of iMod screens show info in black, white and gray, but future iMods will have color displays capable of showing videos.

The technology is currently being tested on handheld devices, but is expected to be used in notebooks in the near future.