LaCie is a big name when it comes to external storage devices. The products that the company offers tend to put as much emphasis on how the drives look as how well they perform. There is nothing wrong with that, it's great to have a drive that looks good and performs good too. LaCie has unveiled a pair of new and good looking USB 3.0 drives today.
The new drives are the Minimus and the Rikki. Both of the drives connect to USB 3.0 ports and offer data transfer speeds up to 5Gb/s. Both of the drives are also enclosed in an attractive brushed aluminum chassis. That chassis not only looks good but helps the drives dissipate heat and is recyclable.
Author: Shane McGlaun Posted: 2 hours, 26 mins Ago
Today's smartphones are great for keeping entertained when you are commuting or have nothing else today away from the home or office. You can stream all sorts of TV, sports, and movie content from various online sources. The catch is that if you are in a data roaming area or have a pay as you go data plan, streaming video content can get expensive very fast.
Nokia has announced a new solution that will allow users of Nokia smartphones that run Symbian^3 to watch TV programming on the go with no need for a data connection or WiFi network. That means that users can watch all the programming they want for free. The solution is called the Nokia Mobile TV Headset, DVB-H. As the name suggests the headset has an integrated DVB-H mobile TV tuner.
Author: Shane McGlaun Posted: 4 hours, 24 mins Ago
The smartphone world is running on single core processors for now, but soon there will be new devices hitting the market that will use dual-core processors inside. Some of the first will be LG smartphones with Tegra 2 processors inside. Other companies are also bringing dual-core processors to market that will be placed inside smartphones and all manner of other devices.
The latest new processor to be unveiled is the ARM Cortex-A15 processor. ARM claims that the aggregate performance of the little A15 is over five times that of what is offered inside today's high-end smartphones and over ten times the performance of ARM based infrastructure platforms. In smartphones and mobile computing devices, the A15 will run at 1GHz to 1.5GHz and have as many as two cores.
Author: Shane McGlaun Posted: 5 hours, 26 mins Ago
We can all agree that the internet is fantastic and opens up an entire world of information and other fun stuff for us to consume. We can also agree that the internet can be a massive pile of crap that we have to deal with thanks to spam, viruses, and botnets. Microsoft is fighting botnets and has won a major legal battle against one of the big botnets this week.
A US District Court judge for the Eastern Virginia district has granted Microsoft ownership of 276 domains that were once part of the massive Waledac cybergang botnet. The botnet was hit with the first major blow early this year when the same judge granted a temporary restraining order that took the 276 domains offline.
Author: Steve Dougherty Posted: 12 hours, 48 mins Ago
Our Download of the Day today is 7-Zip 9.16 Beta.
7-Zip is a file archiver with a high compression ratio.
The main features of 7-Zip are:
• High compression ratio in new 7z format with LZMA compression • Supported packing / unpacking formats: 7z, ZIP, GZIP, BZIP2 and TAR • Supported formats for unpacking only: ARJ, CAB, CHM, CPIO, DEB, DMG, HFS, ISO, LZH, LZMA, MSI, NSIS, RAR, RPM, UDF, WIM, XAR and Z. • Compression ratio for ZIP and GZIP formats: 2-10 % better than the ratio provided by PKZip and WinZip • Strong AES-256 encryption in 7z and ZIP formats • Self-extracting capability for 7z format • Integration with Windows Shell • Powerful File Manager • Powerful command line version • Plugin for FAR Manager • Localizations for 74 languages
Author: Steve Dougherty Posted: 13 hours, 5 mins Ago
Our Deal of the Day today is the Dell Small Business - Dell Vostro 230 Mini Tower Desktop with Intel Core 2 Duo, 2GB Memory, 160GB HD, DVD, and 20” LCD Monitor for $419 plus Shipping!.
Offer: $419 (plus just $8 shipping) after $256 instant savings gets you this Dell Vostro 230 mini tower desktop with 2.93Ghz Intel Core 2 Duo E7500 w/VT, 2GB DDR3 SDRAM, 160GB hard drive, 16x DVD-ROM, Windows 7 Home Premium 32-bit, 15-month antivirus, and 1 year warranty, plus a Dell E2011H LCD monitor. Expires 9/8/10.
If you’re one of the many who have been frustrated by the shortages of stock when it comes to the latest and greatest smartphones, you may know that the culprit has been that fancy AMOLED that they come equipped with and that Samsung can’t keep up with demand. Samsung has taken a major step forward in ramping up the supplies with their new facility opens in July; ramping production up from 3 million units per month to 30 million.
Many phones, like the EVO 4G and the Droid Incredible, have faced repeated pushbacks in delivery dates due to the shortage of these screens. With some devices turning to alternatives like Sony’s Super LCD screens, Samsung had to make it a priority to start meeting the huge demand for their AMOLED screens. "We've put in a great deal of effort to move up mass production," Lee Woo-Jong, vice president of marketing for the display business, said in an e-mail to the Dow Jones Newswire.
Samsung seems to have a goal of putting a Galaxy S phone in nearly every corner of the world. Samsung announced today that three different versions of their popular handset are set to invade China; a market with over a billion wireless customers.
The three versions being released are HSPA, EV-DO, and TD-SCDMA versions of its high-end Android phone for China Unicom, China Telecom, and juggernaut China Mobile, respectively. All three versions will use the same 4-inch Super AMOLED display that is seen on their phones worldwide. The EV-DO from China Telecom is expected to be the first version to hit stores, which is planned for later this month.
Android’s yummy food related naming system for their mobile OS platforms is so popular that even spinoffs are using the idea. Kai-Fu Lee, the former president of Google China, announced today that he is launching a new mobile operating system codenamed “Tapas” that is based on the Android platform.
Tapas will be specifically geared towards the Chinese market, incorporating features like software that detects what city incoming calls are coming from, contacts that sync with Chinese social networks, and a music player that downloads and displays song lyrics. Mobile karaoke? Count me in! Sharp, Haier, and Tianyu have already signed on as hardware partners in this interesting project, with certainly more to come if the project is successful.
Computer enthusiasts are into all sorts of things when it comes to their computer systems. Some like gaming, some like crunching numbers, and some like to see how far they can push their hardware when overclocking. The most hard-core overclockers get away from liquid and air cooling and go for more exotic methods like liquid nitrogen to keep components cool.
Corsair announced today that its Dominator GT GTX6 RAM modules have been use to break memory speed worked records for DDR3. Overclocker Matthias Zronek used the Corsair RAM to break frequency records with CPU-Z validated speeds of 3078.2MHz at CL8-11-8-31 and 3059.4 MHz at CL7-11-8-31.
I have always been surprised with all the notebooks that I review that most of them have giant power adapters. The adapters for some of the smallest machines are much bigger than they really need to be. A fat power adapter adds bulk and weight to the gear you have to carry around with you on the road. Cooler Master has unveiled a new power adapter that is claimed to be the world's smallest 95W adapter.
In addition, to providing 95W of power for notebooks or netbook computers, the adapter also has a USB port built-in for charging your USB devices like phones and cameras. Cooler Master ships the charger with nine different tips that allow it to work with most of the notebooks on the market today from major manufacturers.
I just got done updating my iPhone 4 to iOS 4.1 and as we mentioned in the previous post, among other things, it brings support for HDR photos.
Basically HDR-enabled photos are brighter and more vibrant because they mix three separate images into one. I can tell you that it now takes longer to save a snapped photo on the iPhone 4 due to the extra images that need to be processed, probably indeed three times longer, which makes sense. You can however turn off HDR if you don't want to use it. The standard non-HDR image and HDR image are both saved in the photos directory.
Above is one sample I quickly snapped around the office. Sorry for not venturing outside, but it's night time here anyway. As you can see, the images are indeed brighter. It almost looks like I quickly went into a photo editor and increased the brightness, but I can tell you I did not. This will be very handy for people in non-perfect lighting conditions who enjoy uploading photos directly from their phone while on the go to places such as Facebook.
Along with the announcements of the new mobile processors coming, Qualcomm CEO Paul Jacobs also gave a demo of a sweet new technology that they are working on that combine augmented reality and peer to peer sharing. The demo showed moving photos from a phone to wireless photo frames over WiFi to change to images shown on the fly.
Sharing photos is made as easy as choosing the photo, pointing the phone at the frame you want to transfer to, and clicking a button. While some things like multiple frames showing the same image are bound to confuse the app, it's a neat step in effortless sharing of photos and files that could be extended to other user's phones. This also takes the pain out of changing photos in those wireless photo frames, which has always been a major downer for me.
Folks, Google just got done releasing Instant to the world, now Apple has turned around for its time in the spotlight with the launch of iOS 4.1.
If you remember from last week, this is the update that brings some cool updates to Apple mobile devices such as Game Center, HDR images, uploading of HD videos to YouTube and so on.
It is ready for download right now. Fire up your iTunes and have fun. I'll snap some HDR photos as quickly as I can and follow-up with another post shortly!
Google just got done officially announcing Google Instant at it's press event.
What is Instant? It's something pretty darn impressive, I reckon. It's about speeding up the time it takes to find something on Google. They even reckon that it can save you between 2 - 5 seconds per search and considering the amount of search the average user does every day, that probably would add up to a considerable amount of time.
Basically you've got use to suggestions as you type, but Instant speeds things up another level by dynamically narrowing down results as you type in the actual results area. It's wicked. As of now I have access to Instant in Taiwan using Chrome, but at the time of writing it wasn't active in IE and Firefox.
Zotac has offered its line of mini-PCs called the ZBox before. These little machines look more like DVD players than a computer with tiny dimensions. The company has announced a new version of the ZBox today that is the first mini-computer in the world to ship with a Blu-ray player inside the tiny machine. The integrated Blu-ray drive is a slot-loading unit.
The new machine is the ZBox Blu-ray HD-ID33 and it has slots for up to 2GB of RAM and supports a single SATA 3GB/s HDD or SSD. Another version of the machine is offered called the HD-ID34 that has 2GB of DDR2 RAM and a 250GB HDD pre-installed inside the tiny computer. Both machines use an Atom D525 CPU running at 1.8GHz.
The thing that most of us were really looking forward to when we first heard of USB 3.0 was faster data storage for external hard drives. Waiting for slow USB 2.0 drives to back up lots of data is no fun. One of the first companies to offer USB 3.0 flash drives was Super Talent and the company has announced coupe new and speedy additions to its lineup today.
The flash drives that Super Talent is offering are the new USB 3.0 Express Ram Cache drives that will come in 32GB and 64GB. Super Talent claims that the drives can boost small block random performance by up to 300% compared to drives that don’t use the DRAM caching system.
Paul Jacobs, the CEO of Qualcomm, spoke at the IQ 2010 event in London, England today and cleared up a few rumors. He stated that the 1.5 Ghz Snapdragon processors will be are available and we should be seeing them in device early next year. There was even a demo of a game called ilomilo running on a device boasting the new Snapdragon processor.
When asked about the dual-core chips, Jacobs replied that they would be ready sometime in the first half of 2011. These processors will be going head to head with devices sporting the Tegra 2 platform from NVIDIA and Intel’s Moorestown. Tablets and smartphones should definitely be seeing a huge boost in power from these new platforms, and with them planning to be released so close together, hopefully that means we will see competitive prices as the companies battle for our hard earned dollars.
The gaming computer market is crowded with offerings that run from entry-level machines that many can afford up to high-end rigs that have massive price tags that only the geeky gamers with lots of money to burn can afford. Origin has unveiled a new gaming PC called The Big O that will undoubtedly give you a nerdgasm when you hear the specs of the beast.
The brains of the operation are a pair of Intel Xeon X5680 CPUs that are each overclocked to 4.3GHz. Each of those CPUs has 6-cores and support ECC memory. Origin will cram up to 24GB of ECC Corsair RAM into the rig for you. Those CPUs are liquid cooled to keep things running cool and quiet. The machine can also be fitted with up to four EVGA GTX 480 FTW video cards.
