Idea Cellular 1000Cr Tamil Nadu Investment

Idea has given contract for Network Rollout to Huawei.
Telecom major Idea Cellular will invest Rs.1,000 crore ($205 million) over the next three years in Tamil Nadu to expand its network, a top company official said Thursday.

"The company will invest Rs.1,000 crore to expand its cell sites to 2,400 by 2010 and presence to 1,200 towns in the state. By 2011 the number of cell sites will be 4,000 and the presence will be in 3,300 towns," Himanshu Kapania, director (operations) of Idea, told reporters while launching the company's services here Thursday.

Idea, which launched services in Tamil Nadu last month, now has has 1,700 cell sites in 600 towns in the state and has enrolled over 100,000 subscribers so far.

Citing Idea's successful penetration into the telecom market in the state, Kapania said: "It only shows that subscribers are not satisfied with the existing service providers. The call drop numbers are huge. We hope to garner subscribers with our service quality."

Idea will also set up a 2,086-km optical fibre network.

He added that 12 million of its total 43 million subscribers are in Karnataka, Kerala and Andhra Pradesh.

In Tamil Nadu the company will open 60 outlets to roll out its services.

Idea will will invest around Rs.7,500 crore this year to expand its services into new areas, Kapania added.

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Motorola New Slider Touch

It’s been quite a while since we heard anything from Motorola’s camp; in fact it’s been too long. However, here’s something for the Motorola fans out there, the company has just announced a new ROKR handset that’s being called the ZN50. From the images making the rounds I have to admit it’s quite a snazzy looking touchscreen slider.

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The ZN50 will feature Motorola’s new mobile interface called Panorama that like LG and Samsung also allows for up to three homescreens with widget capabilities. How imaginative... not! The handset will also feature -

• a 3.2-inch TFT touchscreen with a resolution of 240 x 427 pixels
• 3.5mm earphone socket with
• dedicated music keys for audio player that also features SRS WOW HD technology
• EDGE/GPRS
• GPS
• microSD card support
• 3 megapixel camera
• TV Tuner
• Bluetooth with A2DP and USB 2.0

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There’s no word on the handset coming our way so don’t get your hopes up. As of now it’s reported to be heading for Korea so we’ll just have to wait and see.

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Samsung Launches 250 GB HDD

Strengthening its line up of portable 1.8" hard drives for external storage markets, Samsung Electronics has announced its 250 Gigabyte 1.8 inch hard disk drive, the Spinpoint N3U which incorporates a native USB controller on its printed circuit board. This optimized design results in a smaller foot print, less power consumption and optimized performance, which is ideal for portable external storage devices.

The Spinpoint N3U stores up to 125 Gigabytes per platter for a total 250GB data storage capacity.

Samsung's N3U drive, however, uses a native USB interface and as such does not require this bridge board.

"The new high-capacity 1.8" 250GB drive enhances Samsung's product offerings and is ideal for consumers who require a small form factor, high capacity data storage," said Choel-Hee Lee, vice president of marketing Storage System Division, Samsung Electronics. "It is easy to carry around and it is designed to withstand a free fall drop of up to 50 centimeters and be resistant to a maximum shock incident of up to 1500G."

As a native USB interface device, the Spinpoint N3U eliminates possible points of failure due to loose cable connections and optimizes performance by eliminating the interrupt service time for the bridge board to convert PATA to USB signals. The N3U 1.8" drive also consumes about 40 percent less power than a 2.5" hard drive of an equivalent capacity.

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