Asian consumer electronics giants Samsung and Toshiba are teaming up to give the NAND flash memory market more options. The two have agreed to license their proprietary NAND wares to each other so that the industry can rely on more than just a single producer.

The highest density embedded flash memory developed is now being sampled. Korean company Samsung is now sending samples of moviNANDTM - the 8 GB memory chip - to major mobile electronics manufacturers.

The memory chip consists of four 50-nanometer, 16Gigabit NAND flash memories, a high-speed MMC (multimedia card) controller and associated firmware. With the chip, the user could store as much as 2,000 songs, or even enough map data to implement global positioning system (GPS). Memory expansion is virtually limitless, because one can use removable media cards with the memory chip.

Mass production of this memory chip begins second quarter of this year. Since moviNANDTM allows NAND flash to be instantly accessed through a standardized MMC interface, manufacturers who use the memory solution can develop more phones quickly and at less cost than with raw MLC NAND components soldered into a handset.

Your next notebook might just have a bit more power to it. Wow. Big news. Progress is expected after all. So we guess when it comes to updates on upgrades, what matters are the details.

The details here is that the 1GB of integrated flash memory for mobile chipsets that Intel announced last spring is part of the Santa Rosa Centrino platform and it's expected to be available by the second quarter of 2007.

Soon after the launch, vendors will then get the option to include 512MB modules instead of 1GB modules, just in case the people in their area find the 1GB units a bit to pricey. Both 1GB and 512MB modules are integrated into the Crestline chipset that makes up the core of the Santa Rosa platform.

This is pertinent because Windows Vista relies heavily on the ability to use flash memory to cache files with Superfetch. Instead of reading data off the hard drive, Superfetch occasionally writes the files to an available NAND device. Vista will then pool the NAND device for the data instead of powering up the hard drive.

Because the flash memory is integrated right onto the motherboard this means that the system can read data considerable faster and save power.

Something for you upwardly mobile laptop lugging people to think about. Well, there's this, and then there's Fujitsu's flash-drive system. You're call really.

It would be really, really nice to own a Vertu Signature with the exclusivity it offers. However, to a not-so-rich individual like me, its price is enough for me to know that I'll never own such a sleek phone. This supposed to be CISC-made phone may as well be the closest I'll ever get to owning a Signature-looking phone.

On auction in eBay the past few days is a Mars Bar-sized phone that won't take too much stretching of the imagination to pass as a Vertu Signature. Although bearing different dimensions than Vertu's pricey product (122 x 42 x 15.5 mm), this 89 x 38 x 22 mm entry looks a lot like Signature from the front end.

The bidding for this product has already ended. Whoever won the auction will be owning a phone that has a 0.3 megapixel camera, 1.8 TFT display, 64MB SRAM, 128MB Nand Flash, T-Flash card slot, and USB connection. Although not as classy as its Vertu counterpart, the £139 (approx. $257) price tag may have enticed people from grabbing this little Vertu clone.

The Samsung Q1, an ultra-mobile computing device and the Q30, a 12.1-inch screen notebook PC, will be available in the Korean market from early June armed with a 32-Gigabyte (GB) NAND flash-based solid state disk (SSD), becoming the first PCs with such. This means that in the near future, hard disk drives could be obsolete because NAND flash-based memory disks are what we're going to use.

Compared to other mobile computers in its class, these two new PCs are built for optimal portability in mind. The SSD can withstand twice the impact that a regular hard disk drive couldn't, stored data can be more easily retrieved from flash memory than traditional hard drives. Professionals and executives can sleep soundly tonight without having I-lost-all-of-my-data nightmares.

Spell multitasking. The SSD reads 300 percent faster and writes 150 percent times quicker than normal hard drives, allowing multiple application programs to operate simultaneously and large volumes of data can be reproduced efficiently.

The only things "less" for these PCs are it's weight and operating noise. It is 20-30 grams lighter the typical hard disk drive and operates in complete silence compared to the 30dB operating noise of regular PCs. The coolest thing with these PCs is the "instant on" feature. It provides access to multimedia content such as digital multimedia broadcasting (DMB) TV at least 30% faster than with a portable multimedia player (PMP) without having to be booted up first.

"The new Q30-SSD and Q1-SSD models are only the beginning. Samsung will continue to lead the market, introducing new portable PC models that bring these benefits to both consumers and enterprise users.” said Kim Hounsoo, Executive Vice President of the Computing Division of Samsung Electronics.

It will retail for KRW2.3 million (US$2,430), while the Q30-SSD will sell for KRW3.5 million (US$3,700).