Paul Kallender

"I have a lot of trouble with your remote controls," Queen Elizabeth II said to Howard Stringer, Sony Corp.'s new CEO. "Too many arrows."

The market for MP3 players is set to double between 2005 and 2009 amid strong demand from consumers and hundreds of vendors striving to follow the success of Apple Computer Inc.'s iPod, a DisplaySearch Inc. analyst said in a conference in Tokyo.

Pantech Co. Ltd. of South Korea plans to change the shape of mobile phones in June. That

Japan will begin research in June to build a supercomputer capable of crunching numbers about 30 times faster than IBM Corp.'s Blue Gene/ L, the world's current fastest supercomputer, the Japanese government said Tuesday. Japan's Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology has established a program with NEC Corp., Hitachi Ltd., and several Japanese universities to develop a supercomputer by as early as 2011.

Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. has started producing its first NAND flash memory chips on an advanced process, a move that will help lower the cost of memory cards for consumers in time for the year-end shopping season, according to an analyst.

Intel Corp.'s forthcoming Pentium D, the company's first dual-core processor for desktop PCs, was already on display in a small electronics shop in Tokyo on Tuesday.

Following a rise in fraud and public pressure, many of Japan

Matrix Semiconductor Inc. has used its write-once 3-D technology to make what it says is the world's smallest memory chip. The move could lead to cheaper one-use memory cards, the company said. Matrix increases the density of memory cells on a chip by stacking them in layers, reducing the surface area occupied by the memory chip. This allows more chips to be made on a single wafer and cuts manufacturing costs.