Product News Roundup Tuesday, March 25

Rather than making you click through several news items, we decided to combine interesting product news into one news item with brief information about each item. Here is the overview of products that caught our eyes to day - Intel Diamondville surfaces, a new Toughbook and Xerox tells you if your office is as green as you believe it is.

Panasonic Toughbook 19 : A new rugged convertible Tablet PC expands Panasonics notebook family and joins the flagship (clamshell) Toughbook 30. The "19" weighs 5.1 pounds, comes with a Core 2 Duo U7500 (1.06 GHz) processor, an 80 GB hard drive, 1 GB memory (expandable to 4 GB), a choice of 10.4", 1024x768 pixel LCDs (touchscreen at 500 nits, regular display at 550 nits), Wi-Fi, WWAN, an optional GPS receiver, and optional 2 megapixel camera. The 19 will be available in May with prices starting at $3200. The integrated camera is offered as a $500 upgrade.

IDT PanelPort : IDT has a new DisplayPort receiver for flat panel displays for monitors, notebooks, and LCD TV displays. The device complies with the DisplayPort 1.1a standard and includes support security encryption through HDCP1.3. The four lane receiver device is capable of supporting up to WQXGA resolutions (2560x1600 / 60Hz) for monitor panels and two-lane resolution of up to 1920x1080 / 60Hz. The chip is sold for $5 in 10,000 unit quantities.

Xerox Sustainability Calculator : Xerox says it has created the "industry’s first Sustainability Calculator designed to help customers pinpoint opportunities to reduce their environmental impact while reducing costs." The application evaluates the current office environment of printers, copiers and multifunction devices and then measures environmental benefits that could be achieved in terms of energy and paper use, solid waste, water, air and greenhouse gas emissions, according to Xerox. In case you want to check if your office is green in Xerox terms, you can download a scaled down version of the tool from Xerox’ website.

Modu : Guinness has recognized the Modu phone as the world’s lightest mobile and has awarded a Guinness World Record. The phone actually weighs 1.41 oz and measures 2.8" x 1.4" x 0.3".

Gran Turismo 5 Prologue Soundtrack : We still call GT5 Prologue a demo version and find it brave to sell this game for $40, but we give Sony props for the way it preps the PS3 title for launch. Today we heard that the music included in the North American version will include exclusive music from Weezer ("Automatic"), Mars Volta ("Goliath"), DJ Shadow (Love Love), Justice ("Let there be light"), Kavinsky ("Testarossa Autodrive") , Thin Lizzy ("The Rocker") and SebastiAn ("Dolami"), among others. There are 18 additional non exclusive titles from artists such as Nittoku Inoue, Daiki Kasho and Goose.

Cyberlink MediaShow 4 : A new photo and video management, enhancement, authoring, burning and sharing application. According to the manufacturer, the software includes a 3D interface, 1-click tools for enhancing videos and photos and 3-click DVD authoring with instant preview and burning. Available in May for $50.

MSI GX600-Enhanced : So what can you expect from MSI’s gaming notebook, when it is called "enhanced" ? The manufacturer believes you will expect a new CPU, more memory and more hard drive capacity. Standard features now include a 2.4 GHz Core 2 Duo T8300 chip, 3 GB DDR2-667 memory, a 320 GB hard drive, Nvidia 8600M GT 512 MB graphics chip, as well as a 15.4" WXGA+ display. MSI did not provide information on pricing and availability.

ECS G10IL : We are somewhat surprised at the number of announcements including Intel’s Atom processor. Engadget had some info on this a few days ago, so, yes, call us late on this one. What is noteworthy is that this notebook will use the Diamondville CPU, Intel’s "other" Atom variant (next to the "Silverthorne" processor). It looks like it is about time that Intel announces its Atom CPU, since manufacturers out apparently can’t sit still anymore. The G10IL will go directly after the Asus EeePC, with an 8.2" and a 10.2" display, 2 GB of memory and Windows/Linux configurations. No word on pricing but can we guess about $400 for the entry-level model ?