Well Philips also joins iPhone wannabe lineup with its upcoming Xenium X800 e2e handset. Actually it’s not Philips but a Chinese company that bought Philips cellphone subsidiary and still has rights to use Philips logo on the products (like Lenovo uses IBM logo). The e2e in the name stands for edge to edge for full-face touchscreen. The photos indicate that the phone will have WiFi and Bluetooth. No other information is available about the phone. If the images are real it will be interesting to see yet another iPhone follower in the market.

Hitachi today started shipping the fourth generation of 7,200 RPM mobile hard drive, the Travelstar 7K320. The new 2.5” hard drive will offer 60% more storage, 12% performance improvement and 22% less power consumption. The hard drive will come with Bulk Data Encryption for increased data security. Travelstar 7K320 will have 12ms average read time and 4.2ms average latency. The drive will use 0.8w power in idle state and 1.0w in active state. It uses SATA 3Gb/s interface to connect with the computer. The 320GB hard drive is available for $219.
[Via Business Wire]

Pioneer showcased their first generation of impressive KURO plasma TV at CES 2008. Well they have been hard at work and just after six months have announced the second generation of KURO display with black levels five times deeper than the previous generation. Like its Elite Series brother the KURO also gets Optimum Mode that allows the display to examine the sound, picture and room light conditions to automatically make appropriate adjustments to audio and video settings for optimal viewing. The 3.7” thick displays will come in two sizes, the 50” model for $4,000 and the 60” model for $5,500. Both the displays will support 1080p resolution and come with a new redesigned HD interface in June.

Pioneer announced two new Blu-ray players to accompany its TV and A/V receiver announcements. Both the players will have decoders for every next-gen multi-channel audio codec or will sent complete audio bitstream to the A/V receiver. According to Pioneer both the players will be fastest Blu-ray player in the industry with 15-second eject from off time and 22-second disc load time. The Blu-ray player BDP-51FD will be priced $599 and the higher end model Elite BDP-05FD will cost you $799. The Elite model will come with gold connectors, superior video decoder and a front faceplate with capacitance touch keys. Both the players will ship this summer.

Pioneer today announced four new high-end Elite A/V receivers – the Elite SC-07, SC-05, VSX-03TXH and VSX-01TXH. The receivers are designed to deliver the ultimate HD picture and sound performance for your home theater system. All the receivers will support DTS-HD Master Audio, DTS_HD High Resolution, Dolby TrueHD and Dolby Digital Plus. The receivers will have 12-bit color depth and a Faroudja video scaler. The SC-05 will be priced $1,800 and the top of the line SC-07 will be priced $2,200, both the receivers will be released in august. The VSX-01TXH and VSX-03TXH will be available next month for $750 and $1,000 respectively.

Pioneer has announced four new Elite KURO displays designed specifically for custom installation in high-end home theater systems. The displays employees an “Optimum mode” feature that allows the display to examine the sound, picture and room light conditions to automatically adjust audio and video setting, delivering a near flawless viewing experience. The 50” PRO-111FD ($5000) and the 60” PRO-151FD ($6500) Elite KURO HDTV models will be available in June. The Signature Series 50” PRO-101FD and 60” PRO-141FD monitors will be released in October and August respectively. All the models will have 1080p resolution and come with 2-year warranty.
[Via Business Wire]

Apple today updated the iPhone SDK for developers. The iPhone SDK beta 5 build 9M2173a contains bug fixes and the newest version of iPhone firmware 2.0 beta. It was expected that Apple would add GPS support and/or remote media streaming and control in this software update. But Apple has provided no such information in the release note. You can download the SDK from Apple’s website.

Samsung has also come to Windows Mobile 6.1 party and announced their new SGH-i200 handset. The 11.8mm thick handset comes with tri-band GSM, HSDPA, 2.3” QVGA display, 2-megapixel camera, VGA camera for video calls, Bluetooth and microSD card slot. The candybar handset has 4 hours talk time and 360 hours standby time. The media player on the phone supports WMA, MP3, AAC, AAC+, eAAC+, OGG and AMR formats. The phone measures 4.59” x 2” x 0.46” and weighs just 3.6 oz. The SGH-i200 will be released in Europe in June and rest of the world release will follow within a month.

According to an inside source at Palm, the company is working on two new handsets that will be launched in the third quarter of 2008. One of the two handsets codenamed Skywriter might be a Centro like Windows Mobile 6.1 based device and the other device codenamed Zeppelin might be a higher end device using Linux. Palm is also seeking developers for the platform, setting a deadline of May 30th for applications that will be launched with the new devices. Palm needs a very good new mobile device soon as the other smartphone makers like Apple and RIM are leaving the company well behind.
[Via Macnn]