Toshiba brings 1GHz WinMo Smartphone

Toshiba T-01A smartphone runs Windows Mobile on 1GHz Snapdragon chipset.

Toshiba had showed Qualcomm's Snapdragon chipset pepped TG01 smartphone at the Windows Mobile 6.1 launch in London in February. Now, the same 9.9mm slim Toshiba TG01 smartphone has been launched as DoCoMo T-01A for the Japanese market. No word on its pricing is available as yet.

NTT DoCoMo's T-01A is the first commercially available product based on Qualcomm's Snapdragon System-on-Chip chipset. It's the same chipset that Qualcomm boasted of running at 1GHz at low power and offered instant switch-on. DoCoMo's T-01A is 9.9 mm slim and has 4.1-inch (800x480) resistive touchscreen display.
Toshiba's custom built graphical user interface will be masking Microsoft's Windows Mobile 6.1 Professional operating system. For network connectivity options, T-01A supports 3G HSPA 7.2Mbps along with support for Wi-Fi, GPS and Assisted-GPS.
This 1GHz CPU running smartphone will compete with Samsung's recently updated Omnia lineup and Apple's new baby - the iPhone 3G S.
This smartphone is slated to be available in Europe later this year. Let's hope that this slim 1GHz T-01A smartphone is available in India through "www.tatadocomo.com/" Tata DoCoMo tie-up.

Major CE Makers Pledge to Support Yahoo Widgets

Samsung, LG, Sony and Vizio have all pledged to support the Yahoo Widget Channel technology originally launched last September. But only Toshiba will be using Intel's media processor inside its TVs.

Las Vegas (Reuters) - Yahoo Inc unveiled on Wednesday a list of partners to aid its push to bring the Internet and television together, hoping their joint effort will finally connect with consumers.

At the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Yahoo said it has forged deals with companies including Samsung Electronics Co Ltd, LG Electronics Inc, Sony Corp and Vizio, which will make high-definition TVs that support Yahoo's online service.

Ever since the dawn of the Internet Age, tech companies have been promising to bring "convergence" of the online and TV universes, but those efforts have failed to take off with consumers who have found such products difficult to use.

The new TVs announced on Wednesday will be in the market as early as the spring and will support widgets—small Internet applications—that run alongside broadcast TV content, but not over it.

The applications can be used for a wide array of Web activities, like watching videos on Google Inc's YouTube.com, social networking on News Corp's MySpace.com, tracking stocks and sports teams, buying and selling on eBay, messaging friends using Twitter, or using Yahoo's own photo-sharing website Flickr.

The widgets will allow viewers more interaction with the programs they're watching, Yahoo said. There will also be applications based on Yahoo-branded services such as Yahoo Finance.

Yahoo, which has lagged behind larger rival Google in the Web search market, will use the technology as a new avenue to sell advertising.

In an interview ahead of CES, Patrick Barry, vice president of connected TV at Yahoo, said TV "is still top of mind for advertisers," the place where people spend the most time. (full Story)