Adlink announced a rugged, fanless computer that can operate at up to 167 deg. F and has room for two PC/104-Plus expansion cards. The RuffSystem 735 features four serial ports, four USB ports, two Ethernet ports, plus a CompactFlash slot and room for a SATA hard disk drive, the company says.

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A startup called TheCorpora is readying an open source Linux robot based on a Mini-ITX board with an Intel Atom and an Nvidia Ion GPU. The foot-and-a-half tall Qbo lacks arms or legs, but is mobile, can be controlled via WiFi, and offers stereoscopic face, object, and gesture recognition, plus speech synthesis and voice recognition.

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The French firm EviGroup says it is now shipping an Android-based tablet with a five-inch touchscreen. Running on a ARM11-based 667MHz Samsung S3C6410, the $250 “Evi Wallet” offers 256MB RAM, 1GB flash, a microSD slot, and 802.11n WiFi, says the company.

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[Updated, 11:00 a.m.] — As expected, Android 2.2 (“Froyo”) was announced at this morning's Google I/O conference in San Francisco. Touted as including the “world's fastest mobile browser,” the upgrade will include USB tethering with WiFi hotspot support, stream music from home PCs, and offer an improved online marketplace, the company says.

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Google announced an Android and Chrome browser-based IPTV platform today that will offer integrated search for content across TV, DVR, and the web. Initially optimized for the Dish Network, Google TV will arrive in set-tops and TVs later this year from Sony and Logitech, based on Intel's Atom-based CE4100 SoC, says Google.

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Avalue announced a Mini-ITX motherboard that uses AMD's RS780E chipset and supports low-power AM3 socket processors, including the Phenom II XLT Q54L and Athlon II XL CPUs. The EMX-780E is equipped with up to 4GB DDR2 memory, dual gigabit Ethernet ports, USB and serial I/O, and PCIe expansion, and consumes 7 to 15 Watts, claims the company.

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Advantech announced a 22-inch panel PC designed for medical applications. The POC-227 includes Intel Core 2 Duo or Celeron processors, an optical disk drive, four isolated serial ports and an IEEE 1394a port, plus a SAW (surface acoustic wave) touchscreen, the company says.

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Novell announced SUSE Linux Enterprise (SLE) 11 Service Pack 1 (SP1) in server and desktop versions. SLE 11 SP1 advances the server version's virtualization capabilities with full support for KVM, also boosting high availability clustering support, while the desktop version updates audio, Bluetooth, and multi-monitor support, Novell says.

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Android has overtaken Windows Mobile and Linux for fourth place in smartphone OS market share with 9.6 percent, says Gartner. The worldwide study of first quarter smartphone sales showed a 707 per cent year-on-year increase in Android sales in North America, while the total smartphone market saw its largest year-on-year increase since 2006, says the research firm.

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Mentor Graphics has agreed to develop Linux software for NetLogic Microsystems' MIPS-based processors, targeting next-generation Internet networks. Mentor Graphics' Embedded Software Division will provide Linux development software for NetLogic's XLP, XLR, and XLS multicore, multithreaded system-on-chips (SoCs), say the partners.

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The Linux Foundation (LF) announced that it has accepted the Open Source Automation Development Lab (OSADL) as a new Silver member of the non-profit organization. OSADL, which oversees the development of “Latest Stable” industrial real-time Linux kernel versions, among other projects, will collaborate with LF members on embedded and industrial Linux efforts.

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Amazon.com announced that a free e-reader app for its Kindle Store is coming to Android. The Kindle for Android app arrives amidst growing competition from low-cost e-readers such as the Kobe, Android models like the hot-selling Nook, and multi-function color tablets ranging from the iPad to a possible new Sony device.

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General Motors (GM) announced that version 2.0 of the Android version of its OnStar Mobile app for the Chevrolet Volt will feature Google Maps integration. The voice-enabled feature, which shows a Volt's location on Google Maps, may only be the first step in Android integration with OnStar, say reports.

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Imagination Technologies announced it has licensed its latest Powervr SGX Series5XT IP for GPUs (graphics processing units) to Texas Instruments (TI) for inclusion in forthcoming OMAP SOCs (system on chips). Following a similar agreement earlier this month with Renesas, the collaboration will “define a new zenith of graphics performance for mobile platforms,” the company claims.

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Synology America announced a two-bay, Linux-based networked-attached storage (NAS) device for the SMB market, integrating a 256-bit AES hardware encryption engine. The DiskStation DS210+ can hold up to 4TB of internal storage, consumes 30 Watts, and includes the new Synology DiskStation Manager 2.3 software, with improved RAID setup and security features.

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