Samsung’s HDD business is one of the partners of YouTube Symphony Orchestra and to celebrate its association, they have unveiled a special edition of S1 Mini HDD along with the YouTube logo. Apart from this, we have no info regarding its price or availability.

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Samsung S8300 that was unveiled at MWC in February has got its official call for India as just Ultra^TOUCH. It becomes the third 8 megapixel phone from Samsung for the Indian market after INNOV8 and Pixon.

The features include a nice 2.8-inch AMOLED touchscreen with 3D TouchWiz UI, GPS, 7.2Mbps HSDPA, Bluetooth, FM Radio, music player and a microSD card slot.

The Ultra^TOUCH phone will sell for Rs. 27,500 (US$543).

Samsung has unveiled Airness G600 slider phone in France. The phone is the same G600 stickered with the Airness brand. The specs include a 2.2-inch LCD, 5 megapixel camera, TV out, FM Radio and microSD card slot. The phone will retail for 199 Euros.

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Samsung Canada has teamed up with Ozzy Osbourne for a commercial to promote Gravity and Propel. I don’t if the phones will ‘make you heard’ but the ad is definitely funny.

Couple of days back, a new camcorder appeared on Samsung India’s webpage. The camcorder was not officially announced and a quick Google search shows that prior to this listing, only Chinese and Russian etailers seem to selling this.

Anyways, the VP-DX200I looks to be a very basic camcorder supporting DVD recording. 34X Schneider lens, 2.7-inch LCD, digital image stabilizer and ergonomic design is all that it has to charm the buyer. No word on the price.

Product Page

In a telephonic interview with CNET, Brian Beard, flash marketing manager for Samsung Semiconductor claimed that few years down the line, there will be a price parity between HDDs and SSDs. His reasoning behind this statement is that the flash memory prices have been coming down in the last five years and the trend indicates SSDs will someday meet the price point of a HDD.

“Flash on a dollar-per-gigabyte basis will reach price parity, at some point, with hard disk drives in the next few years.”

He also explains why the difference exists. “The difference in cost is fundamentally very different. A hard drive has a fixed cost of $40 or $50 for the spindle, the motors, the PCB (printed circuit board), the cables,” he said. “To make the hard drive spin faster (increase speed) or to add capacity doesn’t really add a lot of incremental cost to the drive.” (The price for most laptop-class hard-disk drives on the market is between $60 and $100 at retail, Beard said.)

“When you contrast this with SSDs, they also have a fixed cost for the PCB and the case and the controller, which is lower than the fixed cost of a hard drive,” according to Beard. “But as you scale the capacity of the SSD up, the cost scales linearly. For example, if the spot price of the flash chip itself is $2, a 64GB drive is going to cost $128 just for the flash and then you would add the fixed cost of the PCB and the case.”

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Samsung’s been mum on the development of its Android phone but it looks they decided to give a peek albeit blurry to the dealers in Amsterdam. As per the image, it will be a candybar phone with a large capacitive touchscreen display.

While most of the details are still held tightly by Samsung, the phone is expected to support Quad-band GSM networks with 7.2Mbps HSDPA, 3.2MP or 5MP camera, 528MHz processor or an undisclosed Samsung proc, microSD card slot, Bluetooth with A2DP and bunch of Google centric features found in Android.

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My skepticism about this ploy doesn’t matter because Samsung India thinks giving out a mid-range phone with every purchase of a laptop will help them spur the notebook sales. The phone that will be offered to the consumers is J700 slider phone valued at Rs. 6,089. I don’t know if we can say it as a flaw but all the buyers will get the same phone, right from the entry level R Series to the super expensive X Series.

A worthless comparison: The phone is just 5-6 percent of the purchase value of X360 notebook while it comes close to 20 percent when a buyer gets it with a R508 laptop.

Even though, the promotion page claims the end of the offer, Samsung will be running it throughout this month.

Promotion Page

Samsung’s couple of attempts partnered with the fashion brand didn’t turn out as expected. But now President of Samsung Electronics has confirmed to Taipei Times that they are gearing up to take another shot with Armani. There are not many details available except the phone will be a Windows Mobile based device presumably running Windows Mobile 6.5. Stay tuned, we’ll update as soon as something develops.

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Seeing a good prospect in the LED lighting business, Samsung Electronics and its affiliate Samsung Electro-Mechanics will also delve in the light-emitting diodes (LEDs) producing biz. Both the companies will invest 2900 million Won and is expected to start its operations in April under a tentative name of Samsung LED.

The reason for a new business are that the Korean government has announced to replace 30 percent of the street lights with LEDs by 2012 and also the global LED business is expected to rise up to $150 billion by 2018.

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