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Microsoft Corp. has won federal approval for a wireless adapter for its Xbox video game console that allows players to connect to the Internet without cabling, according to a posting on a regulatory Web site.

The site for the Office of Engineering and Technology of the U.S. Federal Communications Commission shows that approval for the unit was granted late on Thursday. A Microsoft spokeswoman said the FCC posted the information about the device in error, but she confirmed the adapter had been approved. She said the government office had agreed to a request to keep product details confidential ahead of a planned product launch.

Microsoft declined to say when the launch would be.

The approval on the federal office's site includes a number of exhibits, among them internal and external photographs of the device, as well as the user's manual that would presumably ship with the product. However, the spokeswoman said the photos on the FCC Web site are not pictures of the final product.

The unit that is shown is black, with an antenna on the right side and the green "XBOX" logo stamped on its top. It also has a stamp that says "54 Mbps," a common reference to the wireless standard for speeds of 54 megabits per second. The application for the device's authorization, also posted on the FCC site, listed Advance Data Technology Corp. of Taiwan as the technical contact.

The documents did not list any pricing details, and the Microsoft spokeswoman did not disclose them.

A number of other companies, including the Linksys unit of Cisco Systems Inc., make and market wireless adapters to connect online-enabled game consoles to the Internet. Those adapters generally sell for around $100.

News source: Reuters - Microsoft Wins OK for Xbox Wireless Adapter

The converter kit, including an external SATA cable, a USB power cable, and a power adapter, is priced at $55. The company also sells a CardBus SATA adapter for mobile PCs for $59, and a CardBus SATA controller for desktop PCs for $37.

Officials of Certance said that Costa Mesa, Calif.-based company is incorporating SmartShield and TapeShield technology in its complete line of DAT 72 tape drives and automation products.

SmartShield was designed to improve the reliability of DAT 72 solutions by allowing tapes that were written "out of spec" to be read by another DAT 72 drive. This improves a drives ability to recover difficult-to-read data during a system restore via a multiple-pass, cumulative read of fragmented data, the officials said.

The company also unveiled TapeShield, which improves reliability by cutting the amount of dust and debris that collects inside a tape drive, the officials said. This is done by sealing the chamber for the head-to-tape interface, the addition of a continuous-contact capstan cleaner, and a sapphire-based media-cleaning blade.

On the NAS side, Irvine, Calif.-based Procom Technology just introduced the NetForce 1800, a midrange NAS appliance aimed at small and midsize businesses.

The NetForce 1800 can be configured for up to a full terabyte of storage in a 2U-high rack-mount footprint, and multiple units can be connected to give a maximum capacity of 6 Tbytes, company officials said.

The unit can be purchased with Procom's optional ProMirror disaster recovery software, which allows clients to keep a near-real-time copy of mission-critical data at a geographically remote site.

The NetForce 1800 is expected to begin shipping in September with a price starting at $16,995.

San Diego-based Iomega introduced three new NAS backup bundles for small and midsize businesses that include products to backup to disk and archive to tape, company officials said.

The bundles, which are offered as pre-tested and certified solutions, include a Windows Powered Iomega NAS server with up to 1.3 TBytes of capacity, an Iomega Tape autoloader with up to 6.4 TBytes of compressed capacity, and backup and data protection software.

The software can be selected from Computer Associates' BrightStor ARCserve 9.0 and eTrust AntiVirus 7.0 or from Yosemite Technologies TapeWare 7.0.

There are four new bundles. One includes a 320-Gbyte NAS appliance with a Quantum 640VS tape-based tape autoloader and Yosemite TapeWare 7.0 for $6,999. The second bundles a 640-Gbyte NAS appliance with an LTO tape autoloader and CA software for $12,999, and the third bundles a 960-Gbyte appliance with the LTO autoloader and CA software for $23,999.

However, through Sept. 29, the company will increase the storage capacity of the first bundle to 480 Gbytes and that of the second bundle to 720 Gbytes.