Chi Mei Optoelectronics (CMO) and Chunghwa Picture Tubes (CPT) have expressed they have no intentions of completely suspending production during year-end 2008 or the Lunar New Year in late January, despite facing falling utilization rates for the first quarter of 2009.

According to AUO, the panel supplier is looking to utilize less manpower, and hence lower productivity, to compliment its poor outlook for the first quarter of next year. The company will start its annual maintenance at the end of this month, but said it has no plans to cease production completely.

CMO said that the company is aware capacity will be underutilized and has scheduled routine maintenance and R&D efforts for the duration. Despite its falling utilization, none of CMO’s plants have stopped production or operations entirely, according to the company. Meanwhile, CMO is encouraging its employees to take unpaid holidays amid the economic slowdown, said the company.

CPT also said that it is encouraging more unpaid leave and is also running a new working schedule at its production sites. The company has no plans to implement layoffs or production halts, and annual maintenance is scheduled to take place over the Lunar New year holiday, the company said.

Market watchers have estimated that LCD panel makers will experience a sequential utilization rate drop of 10-20% for the first quarter of 2009.

Most speakers we know come with stands, but Jamo takes the gravity-challenged route by offering its A 804 wall-mounted speaker.

This speaker was specially designed to be used at any corner of a surround sound setup, where two of these can function as a front stereo pair, a rear pair or even flipped to double up as a center channel speaker. You will find that each A 804 comes with a bassreflex ported cabinet that measures a mere 3.9″ deep. On the outside, you will find leather and high-gloss black aluminum, steel and high density polymer as the materials of choice while inside resides a 0.75″ silk-dome tweeter with Jamo’s proprietary WaveGuide technology, a 4.5″ midrange and two 4.5″ woofers. Expect to pick this up from next month onwards at $449 a pop.

Firebox has launched a portable digital TV with a 4.3-inch WQVGA LCD screen that has a built-in DVB-T receiver for Freeview channel pick-up.

As well as offering TV-tuning abilities, the device is an MP4 video player, audio player and picture viewer and has built-in FM radio too.

File support covers MP3, WMA, OGG, WAV Audio, AVI, WMV9 Video and JPG, BMP, PNG image support.

Measuring 12.7 x 7.8 x 1.2cm, the player has touch sensitive buttons and the rechargeable battery provides 3.5 hours viewing time in TV mode, 7.5 hours in video mode with 42.5 hours promised for MP3 playback.

On the downside, the audio output is only through the headphone socket, so it’s a going solo option only, there’s only 1GB of internal memory (content can be transferred via SD cards up to 2GB only or USB) and it’s Windows-only if you want to connect it to your PC.

Complete with leads, earphones and a carry case, the portable digital TV is available now from Firebox for 210 USD.