Last week the folks at the Microsoft Innovation Centre got their hands on a prototype of LG's latest and great smartphone codenamed Panther.

This Windows 7 based smartphone has been rumored to be around for a bit now and the MIC guys were allowed to test it to test Windows 7 applications in Singapore on an actual device as opposed to an emulator.

The SSD world is more competitive than ever, especially since SandForce readied up their SF-1200 mainstream controllers for manufacturers which kept pricing down whilst pushing performance to new heights; a combination that has everyone jumping on the bandwagon.

However, big gun mechanical storage maker Seagate is focusing on bringing something much different to stand out from the crowd and has been developing some SSD-threatening 'hybrid' drives for mass market.

Seagate calls it the Momentus XT which marries a traditional mechanical 2.5-inch, 7200rpm, 250, 320 or 500GB (750GB rumoured to be in the works, too) 3Gbps SATA HDD with a 4GB solid state drive (likely from Seagate's Pulsar series).

With ATI's mighty HD 5970 still standing up proudly on the graphics card performance podium after more than six months, it's been a long time coming for NVIDIA to answer and while many were hoping the top dog single GPU GTX 480 would bring the goods, it falls short in many cases which isn't surprising given it's only a single GPU card.

Up until just very recently there wasn't even any real indication of NVIDIA working on a dual-GPU based GTX 400 series card, but this is obviously the most logical path to go down for NVIDIA to attempt a firm hold of the crown once again.

With Computex just around the corner, Lifting up a rock in Taiwan has shed a dim light on such a card being in the works; the GTX 490.

The folks over at bit-tech have been digging hard to find out what sort of things we can expect to see at this year's Computex from the big names in the biz and has got hold of some exclusive details and pics on what MSI has planned for the event.

Most interestingly, they spotted a mysterious black plastic box with silver mesh that is clearly designed aesthetically to attract ethusiasts/gamers. From the above picture alone you might have struggling to work out what exactly this is.

This should give you a pretty good idea :-

Indeed, this is MSI's first real stab at providing more powerful external graphics to boost gaming performance in laptops.

Turn by turn navigation is going to get a lot more fun If Mobilizy has its way. The brains behind the Wikitude augmented reality apps for Android, Nokia, and iPhone have announced Wikitude Drive for Android phones with Android 1.6 or later installed. This is the first augmented reality turn by turn navigation app that uses the phone's GPS and camera together to layer the selected route over a live view of what is in front of the car.

2,000 lucky beta testers were allowed to begin test driving (sic) the app on Thursday after downloading the app from the Android Market. After download number 2,000 the app will disappear from Android Market until either the beta expands or is ended.

While many may believe that multifunction devices like the iPad will spell doom for the dedicated e-reader market, LG Display has a different outlook on things. The South Korean company, which is the second largest producer of electronic paper behind Taiwan's Prime View International, is forecasting 76-78% growth by the end of the year.

Shipments of electronic paper displays jumped to 5 million units because of the strong growth of e-readers like Amazon's Kindle, but the emergence of tablets like the iPad with their color displays, multifunctional abilities and touch functions have led many to believe the e-reader will be short lived and pushed to the side.

Prolimatech has proven itself to be capable of designing top performing CPU coolers in the past that get recognized with ease amongst all the top-end performers on the market.

The company has just unveiled a new model which is designed with space constraints in mind (ie. in mATX and mITX systems). It's a down draft style cooler which despite being quite compact in size (just 45mm tall and 92mm wide), can still have a 120mm fan mounted to it which will further assist in cooling components surrounding the CPU socket area.

The cooler also sports six nickel plated copper heat-pipes to better assist in heat transfer. All current as well as some older AMD and Intel sockets are supported.

When it hits shelves as of sometime next month it'll cost around $40 U.S.

The courts have spoken and the people have shed a tear. Newzbin has just taken its place next to many other user friendly "content" websites and P2P software companies. Any announcement on the Newzbin website states:

Newzbin Closed

Regrettably the Newzbin website has to close as a result of the legal action against us. More details here: https://deepsharer.wordpress.com/2010/05/18/newzbin-gossip/

But the post Newzbin Story is just beginning.

There are very few times in life where getting something that's supposedly worse that what you ordered is a good thing. Receiving a video card that has not even been released yet could be one of those times. Imagine the surprise of the guy who was possibly shipped a Galaxy GTX 465, which is not slated for release until June 1st, instead of the GTX 470 he ordered.

He apparently became suspicious when he installed the card and the NVIDIA drivers would not take and he had to change the device id to get it to install. The card identifies with the reported GTX 465's lowered clocks and 1024mb of RAM.

Apple's iPad is popular. While this is not exactly news, the data shown that Apple's iPad is selling 200,000 units a week while Macs are only pacing 110,000 a week is. The new tablet is outselling the rest of the Mac lineup combined and nipping at the heels of the 245,000 units per week the iPhone are garnering according to a report by RBC Capital Markets analyst Mike Abramsky.