Mobiles

Photo: Liquid Camera Lenses Coming for Cell Phones Photo 1

Seiko Instruments Inc. (SII) announced today plans to develop, manufacture and market Varioptic's Liquid Lens products, offering a cost advantage for auto-focus.

Varioptic's liquid lens feature many advantages over competing technologies in terms of cost, size, robustness, power consumption, silent operation and speed. These advantages position liquid lenses particularly well for the emerging camcorder phone market where continuous auto-focus for video is a "must-have" feature.

Commenting on this agreement, Christian Dupont, CEO of Varioptic said: "We are delighted to have signed this agreement with SII. SII's unique position as the number one Backup button battery and Capacitor supplier to the leaders in the cellular phone market meets perfectly Varioptic's objective to become the leading supplier of high quality image solutions for mobile devices. SII's proven expertise in the production of low cost miniature mechanical assemblies make them an ideal partner of Varioptic."

SII production capacity plan is expected to reach 0.5 million units per month by 3Q of 2008 and will expand mass production capacity according to market needs. This agreement builds on an existing production capacity for Arctic 314 and Arctic 416 liquid lenses designed for 5.0-megapixel, 1/3-inch and 1/4-inch format camera modules.

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Jabra's BT8040 is a typical looking Bluetooth headset that has an interesting feature hidden inside: A2DP music support. Sure, it only plays music in mono, but for casual listening while doing other things, it fits the bill. Ricky puts the BT8040 through its paces in this review.
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While we have been working the cell phone angle on MobileBurn.com for over 6 years, we have decided that it is time to open up another website, this one a true blog, that deals with gadgets and tech in general, not just phones.

We are looking for somebody to be our point person and lead blogger for this new startup site, and have posted some information on the job. Please take a look at it and apply if you think you might be a fit. If you aren't the right person for the job, then maybe you could forward the link to somebody you know that might be. I'd really appreciate it.

As for MobileBurn.com, we have a number of interesting reviews lined up. We've got Samsung's SGH-G800, a 5MP auto-focus cameraphone with a 3x optical zoom, Neonode's miniscule N2, Nokia's E90 Communicator, and even a solar powered Bluetooth headset. Great stuff.

Looking further ahead, CTIA is coming up in a couple of weeks, and we expect to see a decent number of new cell phone announcements there in Las Vegas. Stay tuned.

Kodak Active Matrix OLED (AMOLED) Technology to be Incorporated Into a Variety of Next-Generation Portable Media Devices
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