AR Rahman launches Nokia 5800 Xpress Music

Music maestro AR Rahman launched Nokia 5800 Xpress Music on Tuesday in India. The launch coincided with the 43rd birthday of the foremost composer of Bollywood.

Nokia 5800 Xpress Music is the latest cell phone offered by Nokia which is now available for online purchasing. Nokia 5800 Xpress Music is the first touch screen phone of Symbian S60 from Nokia. In 5800 Xpress Music Text entry can be done with a full-screen QWERTY keyboard. For music the Nokia 5800 looks capable and there is a 3.5mm headphone jack and 8GB of space built-in. a drop-down menu that provides direct access to the phone’s myriad music and entertainment features. There are strong music features to go with Comes with Music, a graphic equalizer and support for all the major digital formats. But there is only 8GB of memory in the form of a microSD card (enough for 5,000-6,000 tracks).

The new version of Y-Browser for the XpressMusic phone integrates a set of complete functions and features with a user friendly interface.

The Y-Browser allows you to access all the folders and drives. You can also copy, edit, move or delete the folder and can even create and unpack the folder. The Y-Browser also brings a change in presentation and improved settings menu. One important feature included is the file modified time that changes from UTC to local time. The new version has shortcut commands for menu items and has also added file association setting. The edit mark menu has two options, mark with wild card and inverse selection.



The new Nokia 5800 Xpress Music features a 3.2 mega pixel auto focus camera and with Carl Zeiss lens. Nokia 5800 Xpress Music features a 30 frames-per-second playback, with a single touch, images or videos can be shared by means of websites. Nokia 5800 Xpress Music provides high-quality video recording and playback. Nokia 5800 comes with 8 GB memory card, blue tooth, Built-in GPS receiver, A-GPS support, Nokia Maps 2.0 Touch and Wi-Fi.

Sansa slotRadio With Preloaded 1,000 Songs

Sandisk's newest Sansa makes acquiring music easier than ever, with 1,000 songs "handpicked from the Billboard charts" coming on a microSD card for use with the player. can also purchase genre-specific 1,000 song bundles for only $40. The Sansa slotRadio will be available very soon for $100 (1,000 song card included) at RadioShack.

iVoice Diamond-X Dual Mic Bluetooth Headset

iVoice introduced its Diamond-X Dual Mic Bluetooth Headset, described by the company as the world’s first Bluetooth headset to report the name of the caller from the user’s phonebook. In addition to the name reporting, it features automatic volume control depending on environmental conditions, up to 5.5 hours of talk time and 200 hours of standby time, dual microphones for noise cancellation, an in-ear design with three sizes of rubber ear gels, and an included mini-USB power adapter, car charger, and wall charger. It will be available later this month and is priced at $100.

IBM may cut 16,000 jobs

International Business Machines Corp, the biggest technology employer, may cut thousands of jobs this month amid the global economic s
lowdown, according to the employee group Alliance for IBM.

Employees have been hearing that layoffs will take place in late January, said Lee Conrad, national coordinator of the Alliance, an organization seeking union recognition at Armonk, New York-based IBM. The size of the reduction may be larger than those in the past few years, he said in an interview.

“Generally they go in batches of a couple hundred here and a couple hundred there,” Conrad said.

A post on the Alliance’s website said the company may cut 16,000 jobs, which would top the 15,600 eliminated by Chief Executive Officer Sam Palmisano in 2002. The worldwide slump has tightened companies’ technology budgets and IBM may report a 1.6 per cent drop in sales last quarter to $28.4 billion, based on the average analyst estimate.

“There’s likely to be production cutbacks at IBM,” said Timothy Ghriskey, chief investment officer at Solaris Asset Management LLC in Bedford Hills, New York. “There will be job cuts. For now, reducing the workforce to benefit the viability and competitiveness of the company makes sense.”

Solaris, which oversees $2 billion, held 29,000 shares of IBM as of Sept 30.

IBM rose $2.41, or 2.8 per cent, to $89.23 at 4 pm in New York Stock Exchange composite trading. The shares lost 22 per cent last year.

‘Rebalance our workforce’
IBM has frequently pruned its staff over the past few years. The company had two waves of job cuts in 2007, totaling more than 2,000 positions. IBM had $318 million in job-reduction costs that year, compared with $272 million in 2006.

“We constantly rebalance our workforce and continue to invest in growth areas,” said Ian Colley, a company spokesman. He declined to comment further when asked about the Alliance posting.

IBM had 386,558 employees at the end of 2007. Palo Alto, California-based Hewlett-Packard Co, the world’s largest personal-computer maker, had 321,000 as of Oct 31, and Panasonic Corp, based in Osaka, Japan, had 313,594 as of Sept 30.