Another portable/tablet device (re: iPad 2, Xoom, 3DS, Galaxy Tablet, Playbook) announces Augmented Reality capabilities.

Yay.

The Sony NGP unveiled some AR demos at the GDC 2011 in San Francisco yesterday. This bit of exciting news also got lost in the iPad 2 Internet Frenzy Of 2011.

Do you have buckets of free time and love antiquated Microsoft operating systems? You might want to give this guy a call.

Youtube user TheRasteri (Andrew Tait) posted a 10 minute video of his Windows OS experiment. Using VMWare, this video tracks the installation of DOS 5.0 to Windows 1.0, and then every additional upgrade. Tait's intent was to determine how compatible with each other the various versions of Windows were, and tested this using color settings and programs installed in DOS at the beginning of the video. Based on the download times of each of often mammoth-sized updates, this experiment looks to have taken Tait at least a day to complete.

Turns out that in some instances Windows offers over 20 years of compatibility. Sadly, the fast-food restaurant color scheme that Tait chose and Doom II only lasted until Windows 2000. Strangely enough, Doom II came back in XP, but the color settings were still gone (even when Tait reset them in Windows 2000).

Amidst the craziness that was the iPad 2 announcement yesterday, Nintendo's exciting news about their own portable device may have been obscured.

President of Nintendo Saturo Iwata took the stage at the San Francisco 25th annual Game Developers Conference yesteday to deliver a keynote in which he spoke about the history of Nintendo and his own career. He also fondly recalled the origin of one of Nintendo's favorite characters, Tinkle Popo:

Wait what? Tinkle Popo?

Earlier on today I stopped by the BitFenix headquarters here in Taipei and spoke with product manager David about the Taiwanese company's new range of mid-range computer cases that are due to go on sale midway through April in the United States and Europe.

Shinobi is the name and there are two versions: the standard Shinobi coming in at $59 USD and the Shinobi Window coming in at $69 USD. You would be mistaken in thinking that the only difference between the two is that one has a side window and the other one doesn't. While that is partly true, the window version is actually more expensive since it also includes a well designed tool-free design for the hard drives and optical drives.

These cases are made of a nice soft rubbery material that is easy on the eye and feels great. The design is simple with no fancy lights or anything like that, but still manages to maintain a good level of style. Internally most of the important chassis design points can be ticked off with good color coding, impressive cable management, a CPU cut out for easily changing coolers without the need of having to remove the motherboard and more.

Even though there's no USB Port, iPad 2 still got some pretty cool accessories today at the unveiling.

Smart Cover

As you can see from the video, this cover is all magnets and intelligence. The cover, made of microfiber, attaches magnetically to the side of the iPad. It's unique design allows the user to fold it into two different stand positions, and it's quite lightweight as well. Not only does using the cover clean your iPad screen, it automatically puts the device to sleep, too- which will of course reawaken when you fold back the cover. Pretty darn nifty- and it's available in polyurethane (bright colors) or leather (earthtones), albeit at a moderate price tag of $39 and $69, respectively.

According to the twitter-stream-throttling hashtag #ipad2, everyone in the world is talking about Apple's newest post-PC product release, announced today at the Yerba Buena Center in San Francisco. Despite rumors of his failing health, a very chipper-looking Steve Jobs showed up to deliver the keynote presentation, which in true Apple style rolled out all of the next-gen iPad's newest features, many of which confirmed previous rumors and speculations about the device.

The iPad 2 is slated to ship March 11th in the United States, and will bring with it (among mass hysteria and frustrated Apple Store customers) a host of "long"-awaited specs:

-A5 Dual Core Processors

For those of you old enough to remember Flashback, this news might come as a surprise to you. France-based VectorCell is the work of Paul Cuisset of "Moto Racer" and "Flashback" fame. They have a new title in the works dubbed, Amy.

The world of "Amy" takes place in December 2034, when global warming has taken its toll on human life with the spread of disease and the occurrence of natural disasters. The game is set in the small Midwestern town of Silver City where players take on the role of Lana, who wakes up in the aftermath of a meteor strike.

Amongst the warzone she wakes up in, she discovers that everyone around her is inflicted with a virus of some sort that makes them violent. Lana must find a way out of the chaos before she too loses her sanity. During her escape Lana encounters a strange little girl who she rescues and must make choices that will ultimately affect both of their lives.

WOW. That's all you'll say when you see the video below. This is where the teaser footage came from, but it full gameplay footage. The one thing in this video that brings a tear to my eye? A guy gets shot and from the your point of view, you walk up and pick up him to drag him to safety... this is where a WASD graphic comes up, telling you to press "S" (which is obviously, reverse/backwards).

Compared to the disappointing Crysis 2 PC demo, this looks absolutely, hands-down, new-pair-of-jocks worthy of your money. The video shows off the insane character models and movement animation, environmental and lighting detail (smoke and debris fly when bullets hit walls). I've been really pushing Battlefield 3 to crazy levels of anticipation, but believe me, I'll be taking the day off work when this puppy comes out.

Did I say one day? I meant a week.

Crytek and EA launched the Crysis 2 multiplayer demo yesterday and after playing it, I found myself quite under-enthused. It was okay graphically, but there are only a few drop down menus for graphics, no way near the customizability of the first. There's barely any destruction (which was a big feature of the first game) and no sound through my USB-powered Logitech G35's.

Motion blur is too annoying in the sequel, and it is only DirectX 9. News is leaking that the full game will ship with DirectX 9 only and DirectX 11 support will be added later through a patch. This is a very big blow as CEO Cevat Yerli has put his name on the line saying this will still be a huge hit on the PC and they have spent considerable time on PC making sure PC fans are not disappointed.

If this news is true, yet again, PC gamers are kicked in the balls. DirectX 9 on one of the biggest titles of the year, in 2011? It's not 2007 anymore, Crytek.

The company behind the Killer line of gaming network gear has introduced their new Killer Wireless-N laptop network adapter. Bigfoot are making claims that the Wireless-N adapter offers transfer speeds of up to five times faster than competing WiFi adapters.

Bigfoot says this will give laptop gamers an advantage over opponents who don't have a comparable networking kit as it cuts down on latency and lag. Bigfoot Networks' CEO Michael Howse also said that other wireless connections that are usually unsuitable for other online activities that are sensitive to wireless packet loss such as VoiP and HD video streaming would benefit from these new Bigfoot products.

He went on to say "with our innovative networking technology and advanced 802.11n hardware, Killer Wireless-N adapters not only accelerate performance for online games, they also reduce stuttering, excessive buffering and other annoyances in video chat and on-demand entertainment services."

Valve are not a company afraid of change, they've dominated digital distribution in the past near-decade or so and now are expanding out into the lounge rooms of gamers worldwide. The announcement is not detail heavy, but it does give a few facts.

"Big picture" mode will provide "controller support and navigation designed for television interaction", it will also allow players to "enjoy Steam and their library of Steam games on more screens throughout the house." This probably means they've re-jigged the Steam interface to fit a large TV or projector setup and have it accessible via controller.

This could be a major win for Valve, it might stop the couch-gamer from going to console if they can hook up a single HDMI cable to their TV and use wireless controllers to boot.

Google is currently investigating a problem with the e-mail portion of its company following complaints from some of their Gmail users saying that all of their messages, attachments and Google Chat logs have vanished.

Google issued a warning via it's App Status Dashboard saying they had been hard at work attempting to recover the lost data. "Google Mail service has already been restored for some users, and we expect a resolution for all users in the near future," the website reads. "Please note this time frame is an estimate and may change. This issue affects less than 0.08% of the Google Mail userbase. Google engineers are working to restore full access. Affected users may be temporarily unable to sign in while we repair their accounts."

Supposedly there is a bug which is completely resetting accounts, some users have said that when they logged in they would receive a welcome message as if they had just opened up their account. Considering Gmail has over 170 million users, a 100, 000 section of people is only 0.08-percent of their total user base.

iFixit are at it again, this time ripping apart the 2011 edition of Apple's MacBook Pro. Some facts about the dissection of it show that the RAM and HDD are still user-replaceable parts, which is a good thing. The battery inside is a 77.5 watt-hour battery with Apple's claims of 7 hours of use.

They did find a tonne of thermal paste on the CPU and GPU and noted that this may cause overheating issues in the future, so to anyone who purchases one of these new MBP's, this is something of an important note. Another surprising thing they found was one of the screws near the subwoofer enclosure had been stripped and there was also an unlocked ZIF socket for the IR sensor, tsk, tsk.

Other than that, it looks like another great thing of beauty. The guts of the MacBook Pro are glorious. If only I had the money to do this myself!

Rumor has it that NVIDIA will be the first one out of the gate with a dual-GPU for 2011. Sources close to Taiwan-based Digitimes are saying that both AMD and NVIDIA are noticing a drop in demand for low-end discrete GPUs as IGPs and especially APUs are absorbing this segment.

The results of this? NVIDIA and AMD are looking to pump up hardware for the performance market given the shift in demand. Word is that NVIDIA is set to unveil the dual-GPU based Fermi card by the end of next month in the form of the GeForce GTX590. The GTX590 is looking to sport two GF110 cores with a total of 1024 CUDA cores, 3027MB of GDDR5 memory, dual 384-bit memory buses, 128 texture units and 96 ROPs - effectively, double the GTX580 specs.

While over in the red camp, AMD are patiently waiting and are rumored to have their Radeon HD6990 dual-GPU card ready to go and are going to let NVIDIA release first so that they don't have the time for last minute adjustments to tweak the GTX590's performance. This could mean that AMD might have the upper-hand once the dual-GPU battle begins.

Earlier on today we visited the GIGABYTE headquarters in Taipei and had a good old fashioned full look at its newest motherboard that will be officially launched next week at CeBIT in Germany. We are talking about the X58A-OC aka Hi Cookie's baby.

GIGABYTE has long wanted to produce a motherboard dedicated strictly to overclockers - that wait is now over. We are talking about a board that doesn't just overclock well, but one that cuts out the crap and nonsense and just gets down to the business of high-end overclocking.

The Taiwanese company has long been involved with overclockers and overclocking events around the world where it has managed to create a sizable market for itself. It has learnt much from the investment put into these events over time and even managed to pick up a famous Taiwanese extreme overclocker named "Hi Cookie". This guy is the brains behind the X58A-OC, an overclocking motherboard designed by a real overclocker. Logically it makes perfect sense, but how does it actually work out? From what we saw today, pretty well.

HP now have a notebook that is capable of watching the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy on a single charge. Color me impressed HP. The new notebooks feature new processors and a sturdier, more power efficient design. HP's latest offerings go by the names of EliteBook and ProBook and are constructed with HP's "Forge" framework that includes aluminum-allow hinges, titanium-allow display latches, a magnesium-reinforced ABS chassis, a bottom-case drain in case of spills and a HP "DisplaySafe" frame.

The EliteBook 8460p (14-inch) and 8560p (15.6-inch) seem to be the premium outings which feature the HP DuraCase that meets the MIL-STD 810G military standards and boast up to 32 hours of runtime with an HP BB09 Ultra Extended Life battery. The ProBook line features the same attributes while offering more options in configurations ranging from ultra-light to desktop replacement.

EliteBooks pricing start at $999 and can be built with Intel's Sandy Bridge i5/i7-based processors, a 1GB AMD Radeon HD 6470M discrete graphics chip, up to 16GB of RAM, mechanical or solid-state storage, as well as a choice between Windows 7, SUSE Linux Enterprise 11 or FreeDOS. The ProBooks on the other hand start from $579 and feature cheaper options like Intel's Core i3 or Celeron CPU's and Windows Vista.

Apple has let the Lion out of its den and out to developers around the world. Apple's OS X 10.7 "Lion" is Apple's next-gen personal computer operating system and a preview build has been released to developers, it is much different to the current Snow Leopard in that it merges bits of iOS into the new operating system.

Apple states this in their press release as "some of the best ideas from iPad and brings them back to the Mac." The results? 10.7 is built around the Mac OS X app store and multi-touch, a new Launchpad offers the ability for users to arrange and run apps similar to how they would on an iOS-based device. There's also a new feature called "Mission Control" which allows users to use the multi-touch input to preview and switch between apps that are currently running.

This is described by Apple as: "Mission Control is a powerful, entirely new feature that unifies Expose®, Dashboard, Spaces, and full screen apps to give you a bird's eye view of every app and window running on your Mac. With a simple swipe, your desktop zooms out to display your open windows grouped by app, thumbnails of your full screen apps as well as your Dashboard, and allows you to instantly navigate anywhere with a click."

Apple has unleashed their 2011 edition MacBook Pro's and they're a beautiful sight. They sport Intel's new Sandy Bridge processors, AMD 6000 series mobile GPU's and they also include the first introduction of Intel's LightPeak tech, now called Thunderbolt.

The new MacBook Pro range comes in 3 different sizes, 13-inch, 15-inch and 17-inch. The 13-inch MBP features a dual-core i5 or i7 chip while the 15 and 17-inch models feature quad-core Sandy Bridge goodness. All models include Intel's integrated HD3000 graphics while the 15 and 17-inch feature switchable dedicated graphics in the form of AMD Radeon GPU's.

All models feature the new Thunderbolt technology which is capable of 10Gbps. Thunderbolt will be a winning feature in Apple's new lineup, but will require quick action from companies to release products that an make use of the insane new speeds Thunderbolt provide. Another new feature is FaceTime HD which can be used to make full-screen HD video calls from the MacBook Pro.

We are now 29 days into the TweakTown Aussie Flood Appeal and it is time for another update on the donations we have received so far.

At this very moment, the donations total $5,989.75 AUD - yes, some of you donated odd amounts like $11 and $16, but thanks all the same for the extra. It all counts! We have converted to Australian Dollars since that is what will be given.

Happily we are now well above our $5,000 USD minimum, but still a ways short of our target of $10,000 USD. The first end date for the appeal is Feb 26, 2011, but as mentioned in the original news post, we may extend up to March 31st in one week intervals if required.

Intel's revised Sandy Bridge-based motherboards are looking to arrive in the first week of March, everyone is calling them B3. While CeBIT is cranking along in the first week of March, press and customer samples of B3 revision boards will be making their way around the world.

It's also possible that there might be B3 revision boards at CeBIT, but that is something that will have to wait until the event itself to see if it's true. If it is, stock on retailer shelves shouldn't be too far behind and because the issue only effects SATA II ports, most customers seem to be ok with it. How do we prove this? Intel still has huge demand for Sandy Bridge even with the fault, it's an unstoppable Denzel Washington-type train.