We really like our teardowns around here. If you take your shiny new gadgets and rip them apart so we can see if the are as pretty inside as you we will watch. We may make fun of you behind your back for killing a perfectly good gadget, but we will watch. Generally, a tear down involves a geek and your average set of tools. TechOn has torn down one of Sony's Google TV sets and had to get help from some engineers to do it.

After laying the Sony NSX-24GT1 on its screen, the tear down started with the simple removal of a few screws to open the case up. Things quickly became much more complicated as the engineers helping with the tar down got into the boards the set uses. There are gobs of cables inside there with three circuit boards with one being the TV board and one an Android board and the other a power supply.

The heat sinks were soldered to the boards over the SoCs they keep cool. The team removed those heat sinks, but they had to use a soldering iron to remove them. After getting that heat sink off you can see, the chips underneath that are the brains of the connected TV. It appears from the tear down that Sony uses a single chip for its sets sold globally. The TV isn't as interesting on the inside as the Microsoft Kinect that was torn down not too long ago.

I would be willing to be that a DVR or two is not enough for many of you. My kids use the upstairs DVR to record all sorts of cartoons and the wife and I record all sorts of other shows on the DVR in the living room. Several nights each week we miss shows we really want to watch in favor of shows that we like a little better. The good news is that Hulu lets us catch up on some of those shows, but the offerings could be better. Hulu Plus promised to make that line up better and at higher resolution.

The catch was that when Hulu Plus was first announced at $9.99 monthly, many people thought that was just too much to pay for the service. While the service has been in beta that $9.99 price has been reconsidered by Hulu for the official launch. With Hulu Plus now all official for anyone who wants to join the new price is a bit more palatable than the original with a $2 discount making the new price $7.99.

There were lots of rumors swirling a few months back that the Hulu Plus service would come in at $4.99 monthly so the real price is more than many were hoping for. I'm not sure a $2 monthly discount is enough to woo those on the fence to subscribe. The service is available on a wide range of connected TVs and Blu-ray players with more coming. You can also view the shows on the iPhone, iPad, and PS3. Xbox 360 support is coming as well. HD content will be offered in 720p resolution. Early adopters at $9.99 per month will see a refund on their next bill.

USB-IF announces second certified USB3.0 host controller - these are the sweet, sweet words that might help USB3.0 have more market penetration.

Most motherboards have at least 2 USB3.0 ports these days - but with this news, it is only a step in the right direction.

Today, the USB Implementers Forum (USB-IF) announced the certification of USB 3.0 host controller FL1000 from Fresco Logic, a fabless semiconductor company that designs, develops and markets SuperSpeed USB connectivity solutions. The certification of Fresco Logic's host controller is an important step in the industry adoption of SuperSpeed USB solutions, providing manufacturers and developers with a second certified solution.

The Nintendo Wii is known for its innovative control system with motion that has been imitated in various ways around the gaming industry now. THQ has offered up a new and cool controller for various games and uses called the uDraw Game Tablet. The tablet is an accessory for the Wii that will land in time for Christmas in the US.

The uDraw will sell for $69.99 and comes bundled with a drawing, coloring art-based game called uDraw Studio. THQ also has two other video games that support the uDraw tablet. Those games include Dood's Big Adventure and Pictionary. Each of the games is available for $29.99 per title. The tablet will land in other countries next year. THQ will also offer more games that support the device in coming months as well.

"The uDraw GameTablet is an amazing addition to the Wii and opens up its creative possibilities," said Reggie Fils-Aime, President and Chief Operating Officer of Nintendo of America. "THQ has shown enormous innovation with uDraw, which is not only a perfect holiday gift, but we think will become a 'must-have' for Wii owners for a very long time."

One thing you can count on when taking pictures of a baby is that the flash is probably going to scare the little guy. That means you have about one or two shots to get the image you want before the kid is screaming. The same goes for pets, they don't like the bright light either. The other thing about the built-in flash on most DSLRs is that it's just not that great for taking images.

A cool product called the Lightscoop is available for just about every DSLR camera on the market. The thing hooks to the pop-up flash on a DSLR camera and has a mirror that shoots the light up to the ceiling and makes it more diffuse. The result is that the bright flash isn't right in the subject's eyes. The flash bounding off the ceiling also lights the subject more evenly.

The Lightscoop works with DSLRs from Canon, Fuji, Nikon, Olympus, and Sony. It can be had in standard or warming versions for $29.95. It comes in a version for Sony cameras only and a universal version that works with other cameras. You can also buy both the standard and the warming version together for $49.95.

The geeks over at AnandTech have laid hands on the new OCZ Vertex Plus SSD and are offering up a preview of the storage device and its new Indilinx Martini controller. The new controller came after the next-gen 6Gbps Jet Stream controller from the firm was delayed until next year. The controller used in the OCZ SSD is called Barefoot and is a new hardware revision and Martini is the new firmware for this new hardware only.

The new controller sets aside more spare area for its garbage collection and bad block allocation than the older controllers. The older Barefoot controller would leave an SSD with 128GiB of NAND with 119.2GiB or storage and the new one leaves 115.2GiB. The target pricing for the SSD using the new controller will be $74.99 for 32GB, $114.99 for 64GB, and $194.99 for 128GB. That pricing is actually pretty good.

In testing the Vertex Plus SSD scored 220.6MB/s on sequential read and 204.7MB/s on sequential write. AnandTech says that new SSD controller loses in longevity to other more modern controllers, but helps make up for that in price. The SSD would be a decent option for a budget performance system wanting to use an SSD.

When it comes to the mobile industry the major players like AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon are at each other's throats in a fight for subscribers and dominance in the market. The three have managed to find common ground in the potential to make huge sums of money by revamping the way consumers pay for goods and services at the register. The joint venture is called Isis.

The goal of Isis will be to work with the Discover Financial Services payment network to allow consumers to pay for products using their mobile devices and NFC tech inside the handsets. The user would present the mobile device at checkout rather than cash or credit card to pay. Isis plans to roll its tech out to select markets in the next 18 months. The tech uses "strong" encryption and privacy protection according to Isis.

The first card issuer to use the Isis system will be Barclaycard US. The CEO of Isis is Michael Abbott who was with GE Capital before, said, "Our mobile commerce network, through relationships with merchants, will provide an enhanced, more convenient, more personalized shopping experience for consumers," said Michael Abbott, Chief Executive Officer of Isis. "While mobile payments will be at the core of our offering, it is only the start. We plan to create a mobile wallet that ultimately eliminates the need for consumers to carry cash, credit and debit cards, reward cards, coupons, tickets and transit passes."

Google TV is cool and when it was first announced I was really looking forward to getting it on my set with the Logitech Revue box so I could watching Hulu and online shows from networks. After the device launched, all of the major networks and Hulu blocked users of Google TV from being able to access any of their online content making the Google TV service much less appealing. At launch, the only TVs to support Google TV were from Sony.

Sometime next year that will change. Samsung will be making an announcement in January that it will support Google TV. The specifics of their plans are unknown, but with January being CES time, we will most likely hear then what will happen with Samsung and Google TV. I would be surprised if there aren't some Samsung TVs supporting the service on hand at CES.

Samsung says that it is open to using Intel chips inside the sets. I am sure Intel will land the deal. Google TV and online access on TVs is the way many TV makers are combating falling prices in the market and trying to woo users to their sets. Price competition in the market is very competitive with many consumers viewing TVs as a commodity and buying on price more than brand. If Google TV is blocked by more major services, it will be useless to many.

The holiday season is upon us for sure and shopping for gifts is at the top of to-do lists for tons of people all around the world. Odds are you have a gadget hound on your list that would love a new eReader like the Nook color. Barnes & Noble has announced that it is now starting to ship the Nook color eReader, which is the latest in the Nook line up. If you have already pre-ordered the device, and put in your order early, you may be one of the select groups that get the new reader first.

Barnes & Noble states that the Nook color will start arriving at the door of those that pre-ordered today and will continue to ship throughout the week to pre-order customers. The pre-orders are being filled for those that ordered online and those that ordered in stores as well. B&N says that a "very limited" number of the Nook color devices will land in Barnes & Noble stores, Walmart, and Books-A-Million stores this week as well.

If you didn't pre-order and really want one of these things, you had better start looking at these stores daily. I suspect this will be one of the more popular eReaders this Christmas. The Nook color has a 7-inch VividView color touchscreen and delivers books, magazines and more content to readers. If you order the reader online today, you can expect to receiver your device around November 26. However, B&N says it will "adjust" that date as needed due to demand. That means there is no way of knowing exactly when the device will turn up for buyers. The Nook color sells for $249.

This is the working of Intel's "tick, tock" method - the Sandy Bridge being the "tock" and bringing a 32nm fabrication process. Arriving on the same train will be the 6-series core-logic chipsets. These new chipsets will be on a slew of updated LGA1155 socket motherboards.

Sandy Bridge's arrival is quite close - so motherboard makers are tent-poling to show their line ups. Today, we have the Asus 6-series motherboards to have a quick look through. As with other quite long articles, I'll post a quick speel and the pictures for you to tent-pole over yourself, there's a few surprises throughout!

First up, I will note Asus are readying 17... yes, seventeen! different 6-series motherboards for Sandy Bridge. But, even that number is lower than Intel's last CPU platform launch. 10 will be based on P67 - which won't use Sandy Bridges integrated graphics, 6 boards will use the graphics ready H67 chipset while the final board is looking to incorporate the business-focused twin Q67 chipset.

And with this news all graphics card partners and companies have entered in two key strokes on their keyboards, colon and capital O.

Futuremark® announced today that 3DMark® 11, the upcoming DirectX 11 benchmark, will be bundled with MSI's line of GTX 580 series NVIDIA graphics cards at launch and upcoming enthusiast level graphics cards for select, model, stock and country. The bundle will be available while stocks last in specially-designed collector's edition packaging inspired by the Deep Sea scene in 3DMark 11. MSI is the official launch and bundle partner for 3DMark 11. https://www.3dmark.com

"We are proud to partner with MSI on this unique promotion," said Oliver Baltuch, President of Futuremark Inc. "Together MSI's high performance graphics cards and 3DMark 11, the industry standard for DirectX 11 performance measurement, make a great package for discerning PC users."

When it comes to gaming mice gamers tend to fall into two general categories. You have your low sensitivity gamers who like to be able to make big hand movements when they are controlling their character. You also have high-sensitivity gamers that like mice that move a long way on screen with tiny hand movements. What mouse you choose will depend on what type of gamer you are. If you are the low-sensitivity type of gamer, Tt eSports has a new optical mouse for you.

The mouse is called the Azurues and has some interesting features built-in. It has adjustable sensitivity with a switch from 400 dpi to 1600 dpi. Considering that the high-end laser gaming mice have sensitivity upwards of 5000dpi, this mouse is certainly for the low sensitivity gamers out there. Tt eSports is aiming this mouse at FPS gamers, but it will work for any type of game.

You don't get tons of buttons with this mouse, it only has three. It has a lighting system that makes the mouse scroll wheel and logo glow. The cable is braided for durability and the mouse feet are made from a low friction material. The entire mouse has a rubberized coating that offers good grip. You can also adjust the weight of the mouse, which is a common feature on many gaming mice today. Pricing and availability are unannounced at this time.

Gamers tend to drive many trends in the consumer electronics world. For years, the only way you got anything 3D in the home was if you had a PC and were playing with a stereoscopic 3D driver. Some of the 3D games that NVIDIA had optimized drivers for looked good. Gamers will pay the money it costs for 3D gear in the home before your average TV watcher will and the gamer will wear the glasses that 3D requires while many people are holding at for 3D TVs that need no glasses.

If you are a gamer looking to step up to NVIDIA 3D vision gaming a new LCD is now available for you to pick up. Other than a compatible NVIDIA video card, all you need for 3D gaming action is a LCD with 120Hz refresh rate and the NVIDIA 3D Vision glasses. The Planar SA2311W LCD is a 23-inch wide 1920 x 1080 resolution LCD that has a 2ms refresh rate. That should give the screen plenty of speed to support gaming and fast action without any video issues.

The monitor will sell for $449 and it is set to ship in December. It doesn't include the 3D vision glasses, but you can bundle the 3D Vision gear with the screen for $640. The screen has 2.1 megapixels and can show 16 million colors. The panel has a refresh rate of 55hz to 120Hz and works for both 3D and 2D content. Connectivity includes VGA, DVI-D, and HDMI.

I have said it before, when it comes to FPS games the only way to roll in my opinion is with a mouse and keyboard. I can't play with a gamepad in my hands from an Xbox 360 without flailing about on screen like a noob. I know there are some people out there that are hard-core Xbox 360 gamers and can play with the gamepad with some leet skillz, but I am not one of them. If you are an Xbox 360 gamer that likes FPS and other games where you need to be able to hit many buttons at once, the Avenger might be interesting to you.

The Avenger is a sleeve that grips your own Xbox 360 controllers and puts all sorts of weird levers and stuff on the controller. It looks like the Borg assimilated the thing. According to the company that makes the thing it is designed to increase the manual dexterity and accuracy of the gamer when plying games like Call of Duty and others. The Avenger also claims to improve response time.

Users can activate up to nine buttons at once with the Avenger installed and the thing ships with a stabilizer tripod, tension straps hair triggers, and sensitivity adjusters. It looks really weird and I think it will have a steep learning curve. Considering that it's only a sleeve for your controllers, it is also expensive at about $60. You could buy a new gamepad for that much.

I'm not one to get an input device just because it's cool or popular. I like cool and popular gear, but more importantly, the stuff has to work and have a purpose. I think that the Microsoft Kinect motion controller for the Xbox 360 has a good use on the console, but on a computer, I am not convinced that there is any reason for it to be there. A geek has now hacked the Kinect controller to work with Mac OS X.

The controller apparently works with the OS, but it is unable to actually control anything. The potential to control something is there, but I just don't get the need for this at all. I can agree that its cool to get it to work on the Mac, but the reality is outside of modding fans having Kinect work on anything other than the Xbox is of dubious value. If you are one of these modding fans that wants to hack into the device the guy who made the Mac mod used an open source tool called libfreenect to do the deed.

The guy crafted a Mac port for the software and offers it on his own site for you to download. I can only assume that the point of Kinect is for game control like on the Xbox, I'll stick with the mouse and keyboard that have served me well for years and year's thank you.

The only thing that Apple fans lust for nearly as much as new hardware from Cupertino is a new update for their beloved Apple OS'. We knew that iOS 4.2 is set to hit after a beta for the OS surfaced for devs a while back. The OS was expected to hit iTunes today and geeks the world over have probably been spamming the software all day looking for the update.

We have some bad news; apparently, the OS update is delayed. The reason for the delay is that there was some sort of issue with WiFi with the iPad stemming from the update. It's much better to have irate users that couldn't get the update, than irate users with iPads that can't get online after updating so Apple made the right call here.

According to some sources, the iPads could connect to a wireless network but were unable to do anything online. That's sort of like having the world's hottest chick ready to go and running out of Viagra. We have no idea how long the update will be delayed, but some are saying it could be a few weeks. With no official word from Apple on the time frame, it could just as easily be this afternoon too.

Today we visited the Antec offices here in Taipei, Taiwan and were introduced to their range of new "High Current" power supplies which were only just announced a couple of days ago.

Christoph Katzer, Antec's Power Supply Marketing Manager, was on hand to give us a solid run-down of the new High Current Pro and High Current Gamer power supplies that started shipping this week.

The High Current Pro is at the top-end of Antec's range and comes with 80 Plus Gold certification and in a range of sizes from 1200-watts down. We also got a look and unboxing of the High Current Gamer PSU series which is more affordable. They come in five different wattages all the way up to 900-watts and lack cable management on the rear of the PSU which helps cut costs down. Chris commented that roughly half of Antec's PSU business is units without cable management.

There are 110 million Android users and counting - AVG is looking to jump on the anti-virus market by purchasing Android platform security company, DroidSecurity.

For years, people said devices like phones (and Apple products) would not be harmed by viruses - but just like anything that gets popular, there will always be ways to break through that nasty "NO" word and create a new market by unleashing viruses onto these types of products.

AVG has seen this market emerging and is getting in quick by acquiring DroidSecurity.

Qantas has unveiled their next-gen check-in service which involves micro chipped smartcards replacing boarding passes and RFID to track your bags.

The first airports to take advantage of this will be Sydney and Perth - with the latter having live trials since July. Melbourne, Adelaide and Canberra will be enabled throughout the first half of 2012.

Next-Gen Checkin uses a smartchip embedded into the new Qantas Frequent Flyer cards - which are being rebranded as "Q Cards" and are being sent to the airline's most frequent fliers. The chip will identify each passenger and their bookings - which in turn makes the Q Card double as an electronic boarding pass.

It has been a while since a hacking project has gotten people excited - with more and more companies clamping down on their hardware, the hacking "scene" has not been twiddling their thumbs.

Enter, hacked Microsoft Kinect.

Someone has taken the open source driver and plugged the Kinect into his own multitouch UI "TISCH" software library (which already supports the Wiimote as an input). The result of this is an Microsoft Surface-esque multitouch interface which has picture shuffling and zooming - but this amps it up a bit by using the full body tracking instead of the touchscreen input.