Global dispatches: An international IT news digest

28.11.2005

Compiled by Mike Bucken.

Briefly Noted

-- Shenzhen Chuanghui Electronics Co. in Shenzhen, China, is openly selling relabeled Intel processors through at least two Chinese Web sites. Chuanghui describes the relabeled chips as Celeron processors that have been altered to pass as 3.6-GHz Pentium 4 chips. The company has set up virtual storefronts on an online marketplace operated by Ali-baba.com Corp. and on another site. An Intel Corp. spokeswoman in Hong Kong said Chuanghui's behavior "is not something that we tolerate or endorse."

-- StarHub Ltd. has launched an I-mode wireless Internet service in Singapore, according to I-mode creator NTT DoCoMo Inc. StarHub's service will be available across its GPRS and W-CDMA networks, according to Tokyo-based NTT DoCoMo. The two companies announced their plans to launch the I-mode service last January. NTT Communications Inc., a sister company of NTT DoCoMo, is a major shareholder in Singapore-based StarHub.

-- Toshiba Corp. last week said it plans to double the read/write speed of its NAND flash memory chips to 12MB/sec. within the next year. NAND flash memory is used as the basic storage in devices such as digital cameras, music players and memory cards.