Chuck out your handsets, here come the wristphones

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Phones

Samsung has said its GPRS wristphone will ship in Europe in time for Christmas. The device, announced earlier this year, is the world's smallest GPRS phone, claims Samsung.

The phone operates in the 900MHz and 1800MHz bands, and provides Bluetooth connections for headsets and PDAs. It has a built in speakerphone, and dialling is voice activated. The screen is a 256-colour 96x63 OLED panel. The phone measures 3.8 x 6.4 x 1.8cm and weighs less than 80g. Oh, and it offers 40 polyphonic ring tones.

The 400mAh Li-ion battery provides one-and-a-half hours' talk time and 80 hours stand-by time. Pricing has yet to be announced.

Not that Samsung wristphone will be first to market. Japan's DoCoMo will have that honour when it ships its Wristomo i-mode phone next week.

The ¥37,000 device operates on Japan's PHS system, enabling internet access as well as voice calls. It also ships with software allowing its internal phone book and diary to by synchronised with Microsoft Outlook via a separate data cable - alas there's no Bluetooth support here, unlike the Samsung.

However, the Wristomo does offer two hours' talk time.

PDA

Staying with NTT DoCoMo, the company has also launched a wireless sub-notebook, the Sigmarion III. Based on Windows CE.NET 4.1, the clamshell device offers built in wireless connectivity via Japan's 384Kbps FOMA network, the 64Kbps PHS system and slower GSM connections.

The device sports a 400MHz Intel XScale PXA255 processor 800x480 widescreen TFT display. It contains 64MB of SDRAM and 16MB of Flash storage. There's a Type II CompactFlash slot and an SD Card slot for expansion. It contains a 5in 800x480 TFT colour screen.

There's a USB port for PC synchronisation, plus the usual IrDA port, and 3.5mm headphone and microphone jacks.

The Sigmarion measures 18.9 x 11.7 x 2.1cm and weighs 455g, including the battery. The Li-ion power source provides four-and-a-half to eight hours usage, dropping to between three and five hours when the wireless connection is active.

Mobo

Tyan has unveiled its Thunder K8 S2880 mobo, designed for rack and tower servers based on AMD's Opteron chip.

The Thunder K8S S2880 supports both Serial ATA and SCSI storage options, and includes two Gigabit Ethernet ports. The board can take up to 12GB of memory. There's a PCI-X 133/100 riser card support, integrated VGA graphics with 8MB local memory and IPMI v1.5 remote management.

The Thunder K8S S2880 is sampling now, with volume production due later this month.

Gigabyte has announced its GA-K8DPXDW mobo for AMD Opteron-based servers and workstations. The board can take up to two Opterons, and provides both Gigabit Ethernet and Serial ATA support. What chipset the part is based on isn't known - Nvidia's nForce 3 Pro 250 or VIA's Apollo K8T400M seem the likeliest choices - and Gigabyte won't say when the product will become available. ®