The unnamed Asian company which acquired ailing foldable e-paper startup Polymer Vision has been outed as Wistron. Polymer Vision declared bankruptcy back in July, and were acquired in early September; the deal is now known to have been worth €12m ($17.75m). Integration of the two companies actually began taking place last month, but right now it’s still unclear whether the Polymer Vision brand will be maintained.
HTC have confirmed to us that they’ll be offering an update to Android 2.0 for the HTC Hero. The update means that HTC will be skipping Android 1.6 – as on the HTC Tattoo, for instance – to concentrate on fettling HTC Sense to play nicely with the newest version of Android. However, the company have not given a definitive timescale for the release, asking only that owners “be patient”. Full statement after the cut.
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Intel have yanked their recent X25-M SSD firmware update, after users reported the new software killed Windows 7 installations. The update introduced TRIM support to the solid-state drives, together with boosting sequential write performance by up to 40-percent; however, some Intel support forum users have discovered that after rebooting their Windows 7 machine the new OS will no longer load.
Put nook and QUE together and you’ve got the ideal setup for a filthy pun, but you’ve also got Barnes and Noble’s upcoming ebook device lineup. Plastic Logic and the publisher have announced that the QUE will go on sale both in B&N retail stores and online, when it hits the market in 2010, right next to the Barnes and Noble nook announced earlier this month.
We were a little uncertain whether there was a market for HardKernel’s ODROID Android gaming device, but those doubts don’t appear to have been shared by the development community. We’ve heard that the entire first batch of ODROID developer edition units have sold-out, and will begin shipping in Korea on November 5th; meanwhile a second batch will go on sale there next week. The device sells for the equivalent of around $320.
Sprint and Palm have announced launch details for the second webOS smartphone, the Palm Pixi. The candybar handset – which we played with back in September – will arrive on the CDMA network in the US come November 15th, priced from $99.99 after $150-worth of instant and mail-in rebates, and presuming a new, two-year agreement.
Orange UK will begin selling the iPhone 3GS from November 10th, according to the Guardian, the day after rival carrier O2’s exclusivity agreement with Apple expires. The launch will see two UK networks offering the smartphone in the run up to the holiday period, and while you might be tempted to think that anybody who wants an iPhone probably already has one, Orange have apparently had 200,000 people register their interest in the handset already.
Kohjinsha’s PA-series MID may have satisfied us that the company is at least listening to critique about form-factor and usability – unlike other mini-notebooks, such as the UMID mbook m1 and Sharp’s NetWalker, it has a rotating touchscreen for use as a slate – but they still seem to have their fingers in their ears when it comes to pricing. According to WOW-POW, the PA MID will come in at 69,800 yen, which works out to a whopping $760.
Remember T-Mobile Project Dark and the leaked shots purporting to be new price plans for the US carrier? Well, now there’s official confirmation of the new contract and non-contract packages, hoping to lure those looking only for heavy upfront subsidies to a non-contract plan with equipment payments by installments. The new T-Mobile Even More and Even More Plus plans kick off at $59 and $49 respectively, the former offering the more traditional device subsidy along with a two-year agreement, while the latter does without both the subsidy and the contract.
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Samsung have invested "millions" of dollars into SSD storage firm Fusion-io, with the two companies looking to work more closely on solid-state memory applications in future. Fusion-io are responsible for a range of SSDs that slot into a desktop PCI slot rather than using a SATA channel. While not usually intended for use as a primary, e.g. boot drive, they make for incredibly fast serving of data: the ioDrive Duo, for instance, offers 1.28TB of storage and read rates of up to 1,500MB/sec.
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