SHOWCASE: HardwareZone.com managed to get some exclusive face-time with three of Sony Ericsson’s latest phones — the Satio, Aino and Yari — previously unveiled during the CommunicAsia 2009 period (for those of you who participated in our liveblog, you would probably have seen the commercials).

Anyway, the Singapore team wrote a summary of the features and produced a video highlighting the three different phones. We’ve reproduced the video here.

Popular Thai actress, Chompoo, has been selected as the product ambassador of Samsung's latest range of cameras, exclusively for the Thai market.

SHOWCASE: HardwareZone.com Singapore attended Samsung’s regional camera launch in Bangkok, Thailand recently. There, the company unveiled three new cameras, two of which are the Samsung ST550 and ST500 compact digital cameras.

Both feature an additional LCD screen on the front of the camera. This screen allows users to snap self portraits for social media posts or when travelling alone.

The secondary screen also doubles up as a numeric countdown for timer shots, with additional features like Samsung’s Smart Gesture User Interface and built-in Gravity Sensor.

This means photographers can tilt or hand gesture to quickly access the camera functions. The LCD touch screen uses Samsung’s haptic technology, providing slight vibration whenever an option is selected on-screen.

Both the ST550 and ST500 will be available by end-August. They’re identical except that the ST550 comes with a 1,152K pixel resolution 3.5″ touch-screen while the ST500 has a smaller 3.0″ 230K pixel resolution screen.

The third camera launched is the ST1000, which has a built-in GPS for you to geo-tag your photos. It also comes with Bluetooth 2.0, Wi-Fi and DLNA compatibility. The ST1000 features only a single 3.5″ wide 1,152K display.

Here are some photos taken from the launch event.

The Teardown Squad at Nikkei Electronics has dismantled the iPhone 2G and 3G models to compare component placements and reduction in costs.

SHOWCASE: The Nikkei Electronics Teardown Squad has put up a feature story showing the difference of the internal structure between the iPhone 2G and the iPhone 3G.

What the team had done is to disassemble the iPhone 3G and compare its components with those found in the the 2G model. While on the outside, both models look similar, engineers found that Apple had taken some measures to reduce the mounting area and parts costs with the 3G model.

What the engineers found is that the 2G model had its main parts mounted on both sides of a frame in the center of the chassis while the 3G model had parts placed on the back cover of the chassis. (more…)

Nikon's S1000pj has a projector.

SHOWCASE: Nikon has announced a series of new COOLPIX digital cameras with one — the S1000pj — equipped with a built-in projector. The projector, located in the front of the camera, is able to project images or movie clips on a flat surface up to 40 inches in size.

The camera has a 12.1 Megapixel image sensor resolution, 2.7″ LCD screen and 5 times optical zoom lens with 28mm wide-angle coverage. It is available in silver or black. (more…)

SHOWCASE: The team behind Singapore-based HWM and HardwareZone.com managed to get their hands on a Palm Pre from the US and produced a video showing its interface and features. Of course, if you’re not familiar with it, we’ve posted news about it here just to get you all warmed up.

Here’s the video:





For an extensive article on what the team thought about it, check it out here. If you’re asking whether it’s coming to Asia or when it would be available at all, we have no answer for you there. For now, the Palm Pre is on sale only in the US by telecom provider Sprint.