Asus has more products on the market today that you can shake a stick at. The company got its start long ago but for most of us here in the US the Asus brand only became familiar when the netbook craze took off. Asus is always adding new gear to its line of offerings and has a new Eee Note EA-800 device that will land in Taiwan this week. The device is designed to let users take notes using a tablet style device.

The tablet has a price that works out to $230. It has some very nice features as well with an integrated camera and mic that will let you record notes and take pics. It has a 3.5mm headphone jack so you can listen privately to things you record or music. The screen of the tablet is 8-inches, it has a resolution of 1024 x 768, and the battery promises 13.5 hours of continuous use.

The only downside to the device for folks looking for a cheap tablet alternative is that its screen is monochrome. The operating system for the device is Linux. The same Eee Note tablet will hit other countries ultimately winding up in the US in Q1 2011. I'm not sure about this deice, it's not far off in price from other tablets on the market right now with more capability.

Ever felt like the need for a dual-screen laptop? Well, Engadget have had a sneak peak at some new Acer hardware - as they announced a range of new devices at a New York press conference last week, the message they were putting across? Keyboards are out, Kenny Powers is in (and by Kenny Powers, I mean touchscreen keyboards instead of the physical keys).

Acer announced a range of tablets, with most of them Android-powered. Sizes of the tablets ranged from five to ten-inches each. Acer's Iconia laptop is the gem here - ditching the usual keyboard on a laptop for a 14-inch touchscreen which matches the main display. This is not something Acer are releasing and forgetting about, Acer has hinted this might be a change for them and it will be a first in a series of products that will unravel over the next few years.

Obviously this has been tried before but with the iPad and various other tablets and smartphones upgrading over themselves every few months, it's only a sign of things to come. A full touchscreen keyboard sounds weird, but people who had used it said that after a few minutes of changing the orientation of where their fingers pressed on the touchscreen, that it started to feel normal.

Itching for a new laptop? Well, Apple are looking to refresh the MacBook Pro line early next year and instead of a simple upgrade in specs we could see a complete redesign like the latest MacBook Air received.

The new MacBook Pro is poised to move into SSD territory by offering up to 512GB of Solid State storage, the removal of the optical drive and it might include Light-Peak which will make it a first-ever debut into the market giving Apple the exclusive.

The last few upgrades of the MacBook Pro line have just been slight tweaks - nothing the really push the line to the top of the market. But these changes could see a very big change in the way the MBP is perceived. The removal of the optical drive is a bold move, but with the age of Network Attached Storage and large HDD's or external storage - there's not much to worry about, if you still use an optical drive, I'm sure an external device will be optional.

PCI-Express 2.0 has been here for us for what seems like an eternity in the tech world - so much moving past us in terms of cores on a CPU, the amount of system ram and at the moment the apocolyptic GPU wars between the great AMD and NVIDIA.

PCI-Express 3.0 is the next gen champion to be on your motherboard. It is rumored to be clashing it's hammer with the Sandy Bridge E 'Patsburg' on LGA2011 which is slated for 2011. Depending on whether the LGA2011 becomes the consumer-targetted replacement. The closest definite for PCI-Express 3.0 is for early 2012 when Ivy Bridge hits.

What will it bring us you say? We see a doubling in speed from PCI-Express 2.0's bandwidth of 4Gbps to a next-gen of 8Gbps, a 100% increase - also remember that is per lane in each direction which means the total bandwidth going to the next gen is going to be 32Gbps. This gives it a huge upgrade to allow GPU's to start running laps around their current high end VGA cards.

Well - just as I was losing faith in the high end PC phenomenon, my socks have just been blown off and my hair looks like I've just stuck a fork in an electricity socket. Crytek have announced "Warface" - it will use Crytek's proprietry graphics engine, CryEngine 3 and will be a PC exclusive multiplayer shooter.

Coop missions will be a key-feature, right now there's no mention of a single player campaign. More interesting though - is that they plan to release Warface as a free-to-play shooter and is looking to target the Korean and Asian markets specifically.

'Our passion is to always deliver the best gaming experience possible,' said Crytek CEO, Cevat Yerli. 'That's why we opened our Crytek Korea office in 2008, which today enables us to offer a game that is tailored to suit its market. We're excited to debut with Warface in South Korea and to deliver a compelling and truly unique experience soon.'

Home theater fans that have multiple 3D sources like cable boxes, Blu-ray players and game consoles might have the need for a converter box that can handle those multiple inputs and shoot them out to a projector. If you are one of these folks a new offering from Optoma called the 3D-XL will ship in December.

The product is called the 3D-XL and the thing is compatible with HDMI 1.4a inputs and supports multiple 3D devices. It can switch between 2D and 3D inputs and only works with DLP projectors. Those projectors don't have to be the Optoma brand, any DLP projector will work.

The 3D-XL supports 1080p 3D content and uses passive 3D glasses. It ships with one pair of 3D glasses and additional pairs of glasses are about $90. I wondering the glasses that we typically recycle after seeing a 3D flick in the theater will work for the device. The 3D-XL Converter box will sell for $499 at Amazon.

I have never felt the need to have the artificial sound of crickets, waves, or anything else to fall asleep or stay asleep. I really don't need any colored lights to sooth me into dream land either. I guess some folks need that sort of stuff though and if you are one of the Pure has a new audio device for you called the Twilight. The thing might actually be a pretty cool radio for a kids room.

The white dome on top of the radio hides a light that changes between several colors. The light can be white, blue, green, purple, red, or orange. It also has built-in lullabies for kids including 'twinkle, twinkle, little star' and 'rock-a-bye baby'. It also has a built-in FM receiver that will let you listen to your local stations and you can plug in an iPod or MP3 player via the aux input.

The Twilight also has a headphone port for private listening and it has a sleep timer that will turn off the music and the lights when you want I to. The snooze function is activated by touching the white dome and the alarm can wake you up with light as well with a dawn simulation. The Pure Twilight has an accessory for docking your iPhone or iPod and the price for the device is unknown.

Hitachi along with Japan's New Energy and Industrial Technology Development Organization (NEDO) - a public-sector body that promotes research of energy efficient technology, National University Corporation Tokyo Institute of Technology as well as Kyoto University have together developed a new hard drive data recording technology that has promised to increase data density 8-fold.

Together they have developed a new patterning tech for the magnetized bits that are laid on the platters - which are only 10nm in size. This new technology is made possible by using new materials, and also the use of a self-arranged phenomenon of polymer materials.

It's practical applications increases areal-density of disk platters to 3.9 Terabits per square inch (!!!) which is an 8 fold increase compared to the current 500 Gigabit standard. This will let loose 24TB HDD's in the near future.

Yesterday we visited the ASRock headquarters here in Taipei and Chris Lee, Marketing Manager, was on hand to give us a full hands-on video look at their upcoming P67 Transformer motherboard.

The Transformer is an upcoming motherboard based on the Intel Sandy Bridge P67 Express chipset and should go on sale in early December. But what is so special about this motherboard and what gives it the right to attain the "Transformer" moniker?

You would expect a P67 motherboard to come with support for an upcoming Socket LGA-1155 processor from Intel, but in typical ASRock style, their on the toes engineers have come up with yet another unique idea. Most users with a current generation LGA-1156 Lynnfield processor now would probably be on a P55 based motherboard. ASRock came up with the idea of allowing users to experience all the new performance benefits of the P67 chipset while using their existing processor.

The newest movie streaming startup Zediva has an interesting way of circumventing licensing requirements and other issues that Netflix, Hulu, and other well known streaming services have to deal with. Their process? Offering rental of a DVD player and DVD for a fixed amount of time and then streaming the media to you.

According to Zediva founder Venky Srinivasan, "Our users rent a physical DVD, along with a DVD player from us for a fixed amount of time. They then control that DVD player remotely over the internet - and stream the movie privately to themselves. Think of it as a really long cable and a really long remote control." This workaround allows Zediva to charge lower prices than the competition: $1.99 per movie and ten movies for $10. Movies can also be re-rented for free for up to 14 days. Movies can be rented out just like in any Brick and mortar store.

Zediva only currently has around 40 movies in stock at the moment, but is starting small and working on offering "the top two or three movies of the week." We'll see what the copyright law experts have to say about the methods to this madness, but you have to admit it's creative.

No, not Opera, the web browser - Oprah as in one of the most powerful women in the world, Oprah. Telstra today announced it has secured a deal with The Oprah Winfrey Show to supply network support for the live shows as well as ensuring network coverage for the show's 300 guests next month.

Back in September, The Oprah Winfrey Show announced that it would fly 300 audience members out to Australia to film two live shows at the Sydney Opera House on 14th of December - the trip is partly paid for by a $3 million fund from the Australian Government.

The audience members will be connected through Telstra's Next G network using the "summer-proof" Motorola Defy smartphone - while the show's producers will be given Telstra's Ultimate broadband USB modems. Telstra's chief marketing officer, Kate McKenzie announced the deal this morning.

Ah Angry Birds. It now has it's own day. Some sources of TechCrunch have been flung into their offices and said that there's going to be something big happening, specifically in London's Trafalgar Square. Which has supposedly become a big venue to launch big games - especially console games.

There's speculation Angry Birds will get a Windows Phone 7 announcement on the day, there's also speculation that Rovio Mobile will launch a console version or that it will spin out into a movie.

But, there's something else boiling about this... Rovio Mobile has just bought on Peter Vesterbacka as head of business development for North Americ

Memory is already at insanely low prices, but lower prices is not a bad thing, right?

The price of DRAM is set to continue falling throughout the first half of 2011 - the wholesale price of a 2GB DDR3 module has dropped 46 percent since the start of 2010, from around $46.50 to $25 - it could also drop to as low as $20 before the end of the year.

This fall in pricing will continue due to a manufacturers being able to increase output thanks to the use of immersion scanner technology that improves yields in their fabrication plants and the unusually (that's weird) low demand for memory.

I am really looking forward to WiFi Direct being integrated into all sorts of products. WiFi Direct is a new spec that was officially launched not too long ago. It allows devices to directly connect to each other using WiFi giving lots of bandwidth and circumventing the need for a router and other tech usually needed for setting up a wireless network.

The specification opens up some really cool possibilities. Things like connecting directly from your iPhone to an Android device to transfer a file or video. Streaming a video from your iPhone directly to a TV in the living room and sharing of web connections. It appears that the first product to use WiFi direct is the LG BD690 Blu-ray player.

The device has WiFi Direct Certification and which only one device needs to be WiFi Direct certified you would be able to connect any WiFi packing device directly to the Blu-ray player. You will be able to sit across the room, stream that video you made on your smartphone to the player and see the video on TC. Other than the WiFi direct support, specs for this machine are scant. This thing is very interesting.

NVIDIA has been pushing its 3D Vision stereoscopic support for what feels like a long while now and AMD got in on the game via its HD3D Technology open eco-system with the launch of its Radeon Catalyst 10.3 driver back in March. Who are we missing, though? Oh, Intel!

During our visit to the ASRock headquarters today, we got an early look at one of their Intel H67 Express based motherboards and noticed something interesting on the packaging. Something along the lines of "Intel" and "3D" in the same line got our attention pretty quickly.

It turns out that as long a H67 motherboard comes with a HDMI 1.4a connector, Intel will be able to provide 3D support to desktop systems early in 2011 when the Sandy Bridge platform officially goes on sale around CES time.

Earlier on today we visited the ASRock headquarters here in Taipei and Chris Lee, Marketing Manager, was on hand to give us a full hands-on video look at their upcoming P67 Socket LGA-1155 Sandy Bridge Extreme6 motherboard.

Due to NDA restrictions, we are kind of limited by exactly what we can say and show, but in the video above, you still get a good look at what is on offer. One of the tricks that ASRock has up their sleeves is to do with USB performance. Using the included ASRock XFast USB technology, they claim performance improvements of up to 100% when "turbo mode" is enabled in the small application which pops up whenever a USB device is attached to the motherboard.

All upcoming ASRock P67 motherboard also support UEFI which is a next-generation BIOS that provides a full graphical interface, support for using a mouse as well as support for OS booting 3TB and larger hard drives. Also on the software side, with the P67 series, ASRock is also introducing AXTU which is an all-in-one revised tuning program which holds all of ASRock's software tools in one handy location.

Rumors are beginning to surface again of Activision implementing a subscription based model for their kinda popular Call of Duty. Supposedly Activision is waiting until the backlash will have less of an effect from the current sales of Black Ops.

There are claims that the subscription will begin with cheap membership that provides virtual goods such as special weapons and armor. This would of course increase to more expensive subscriptions that would give access to map packs which would then lead to eventually offering (when the time is right) they will then offer an "all access pass" to play games like COD, World of Warcraft and Starcraft 2.

"The trick is managing this without destroying sales of the game. They will tread very carefully, and will make sure that they let consumers know that they are NOT taking anything away, but are merely offering a LOT MORE VALUE for a little bit of money," Pachter said. Activision quickly chimed in on the matter and partially refuted the claims.

I bet when you read that title you thought it was going to Microsoft's Xbox 360 console - didn't you? HA! Well, Polyphony Digital head Kazunori Yamauchi told Eurogamer that he "doesn't know" if the next-gen Gran Turismo title will be on the PlayStation 3 of the next-gen of console hardware.

He went on to say "10 years ago it was easier to predict what would happen three years in the future," he said in an exclusive interview at the official GT5 launch event in Madrid. "Nowadays no-one knows what happens in the future. In three years, we don't know what will happen."

With the release of the game happening in the last 24 hours - Yamauchi also responded to the criticism of GT5's online feature set - saying "Online updates are planned of course for leaderboards and matchmaking - [they're] all planned in the process of evolution."

Gone are the days of Billy boy saying 640k will be enough, most systems I sell go with 4GB of memory, some with 8. Triple channel kits come in 6, 12 and 24GB so memory is going up and up and up. Sandy Bridge and Bulldozer plan to combat this with LR-DIMM's.

LR-DIMM's are a JEDEC version of the late MetaRAM tech - which basically faked a DRAM chip with a heap of small ones. LR stands for Load Reduced, and that's exactly what the buffer on the DIMM does.

The effect of this? You can make a 4G DIMM from 32 x 1Gb chips and the system only sees 8 x 4Gb chips. It makes the life of the memory controller much easier (less Facebook emo updates) and effectively quadruples DIMM capacities.

LG today announced the launch of a 23-inch 240Hz LCD for monitors that refreshes at an insane 240 frames per second. Being a fan of 120Hz gaming myself, I find this highly interesting - wouldn't mind testing one out myself! (wink TT gods, wink).

The full HD 23-inch 240Hz panel was developed by combing 120Hz tech with scanning backlight tech which enables a backlight to repeatedly turned on and off. The standard refresh rate of most LCD monitors is 60Hz, with 120Hz entering the market in the last 18 months (being pushed for NVIDIA 3D Vision mostly) a 240Hz refresh would significantly refuse motion blur - gamers alike, crying with joy.

LG Display's copper bus line technology was used for fast processing of large amounts of image data - the results of this has a motion picture response of 8ms, which is pretty equal to large premium TV's. The 240Hz LCD features an IPS (In-Plane Switching) technology for no distortion in color or images from any viewing angle.