by Sascha Segan

LAS VEGAS–Motorola on Tuesday announced three new phones, including the company's first phone made of recycled plastic, a ruggedized phone for AT&T, and a Web-optimized slab phone primarily for Asian markets.

Moto's most innovative new phone is the W233 Renew. Destined for T-Mobile, the Renew is a simple, bar-style voice phone with green accents. All the plastic used to make the Renew is recycled from the sort of large water bottles used in office water coolers, said Melissa Gardner, Motorola's vice president of global franchise marketing.

"We've had a lot of input from consumers who are interested in more eco-responsible mobile products," Gardner said.

The W233 ... Read more »

By Chad Berndtson


Portland's up to speed. About four months after Baltimore became the first U.S. city to receive a full-on WiMax rollout, Clearwire on Tuesday announced the debut of "Clear," its 4G WiMax wireless broadband service, to Portland, Ore. At its basic level, the open network provides average download speeds of 2Mbps to 4Mbps.

"Today is a historic day for the evolution of mobile computing and communications services in Portland and the U.S.," said Clearwire CEO Benjamin G. Wolff in a statement. ... Read more »

By Chris Preimesberger

Sun Microsystems may not be making a lot of money these days, but it is not afraid to keep investing in areas that it deems important. And the company considers cloud computing very important to its future.

The struggling IT giant, whose stock has been mired in single digits since August 2008, revealed Jan. 7 that it has acquired Q-layer, a small cloud computing software provider that automates the deployment and management of both public and private clouds. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Q-layer, based in Belgium, will become part of Sun's Cloud Computing business unit under Senior Vice President David Douglas. Q-layer develops and integr ... Read more »

By Tim Moynihan

Besides the new ultracompact camcorders and 70X optical-zoom standard-definition models that were also announced at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas today, Panasonic unveiled six new high-definition camcorders as part of its 2009 lineup--three high-end and three entry-level models.

On the high end, Panasonic announced two new hard-drive models, the HDC-HS300 (pictured above) and HDC-HS250 (pictured below).

Each have 120GB hard drives that hold up to 50 hours of footage at the lowest-quality setting. The HDC-HS300 ($1400, available in April) offers manual controls, an electronic viewfinder, and the ability to add an external microphone, while the HDC-HS250 ($1000, al ... Read more »

By Chloe Albanesius

LAS VEGAS—Toshiba on Wednesday unveiled several new portable DVD players, DVD recorders, Internet-enabled sets, and LCD TV combos, including a revamped line of Regza LCD TVs.

Toshiba will add three new Regza lines in April and May, dubbed the XV645, ZV650, and SV670 series. All new Regza sets will incorporate what Toshiba calls "Deep Lagoon" technology, which is intended to provide better picture quality.

"We're going to take a quantum leap with what Regza is" in 2009, Scott Ramirez, vice president for TV marketing at Toshiba, said at a press conference here at the Consumer Electronics Show. "For those who want the best, they will be looking at Regza."

The Regza XV series will debut in May 2009 an ... Read more »

By Tim Moynihan


During four digital camera announcements at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas today, Samsung introduced a wide-angle, 10X-optical-zoom camera that ranges from an extremely wide 24mm on the wide-angle end to 240mm on the telephoto end. In wide-angle capability, the Samsung HZ10W is the league leader at this year's CES among fixed-lens cameras.

The 10.2-megapixel HZ10W, which will be available in January for $300, also features a 720p high-definition shooting mode (30 frames per second with the H.264 codec) that saves video clips as one file, even after the shooter pauses the recording. Also in the mix are dual optical/digital image stabilization and today's usual host of face-detection, smile-trigger, and red-eye-correction modes.

In addition to the HZ10W, Samsung announced the ultracompact, 12.2-megapixel TL100, which is just 16.6 millimeters thick.

... Read more »