Does anyone actually remember breaking out one of those huge foldout maps to figure out which road or highway you needed to take to get where you are going? Global Positioning System (GPS) technology has flooded the market, from standalone GPS devices like TomToms to in-dash navigation in your vehicle to using your phone to figure out where you are and where you are going.

Now it is reported that the U.S. government is pumping 8 billion dollars into GPS system enhancements that will expand the range, improve the accuracy, and improve the reliability of GPS technology. This is no small feat: 24 new satellites are planned to replace the current satellites that make up the current system one at a time. The first satellite in the new system has just been launched this past weekend with the complete upgrade not scheduled to be done until 2021.

"This new system has the potential to deliver capabilities we haven't seen yet," said Marco Caceres, senior space analyst for aerospace research firm Teal Group. "Because GPS touches so many industries, it's hard to imagine what industry wouldn't be affected."

Retrevo, a consumer electronics site, recently surveyed 1,000 U.S. consumers and found that the iPad's popularity is taking a toll on netbook sales. When interested parties were asked whether they were planning on buying an iPad or a netbook 78 percent, or a little more than 3 out of 4, said they would choose the iPad while 22 percent favored a netbook.

Laptops are still staying popular with buyers as well, with 65 precent of people surveyed who were planning to make a mobile PC purchase this year said they would favor a regular laptop over a netbook. Those who did prefer the netbook over the iPad said that size was the biggest concern, with 55 precent preferring the smaller footprint. 20 percent of those said price was the major concern, and 19 percent showed battery life as the deciding factor.

While these numbers show a big preference to the iPad over netbooks, analysts are saying that the $200 or more price difference between the iPad and netbooks should not cripple the sale of netbooks this year. Jeff Orr, an analyst with ABI Research, reportedly said earlier this month that just one percent of potential netbook buyers would be impacted by tablets, like the iPad.

Nokia and Yahoo have announced that they will be striking a partnership to create cross platform opportunities for both companies. Yahoo is expected to become the global provider of Nokia's Ovi e-mail and messaging services, while Nokia will power Yahoo's map service online and on all of their mobile devices.

With this deal Nokia, who has already partnered with Microsoft to offer Office products like Word and Excel on certain models of mobile devices, is continuing to target users who need enterprise features. Yahoo is looking to bolster their map and navigation features, and this partnership makes sense as Yahoo currently uses maps from Navteq who is owned by Nokia. Yahoo Maps is looking to rebound since Google and MapQuest have overtaken a large section of the map platform market.

Nokia, who is the world's largest phone maker, is also looking to become more of a major player in the smartphone market in the U.S. where RIM, Apple, and Android are currently dominating and looks to use Yahoo's brand recognition to change this. Nokia CEO Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo said, "Location, maps and navigation will get more mind-share, will get more attention in the U.S. and many more users in the North American market."

The rumor mill is always speculating on what products are coming to market along with products that will be killed off. The rumor mill of late has been speculating that NVIDIA might be ready to end the GTX 470's run despite it being new.

The Tech Report reports that NVIDIA has stated it has no plans to kill off the GTX 470. NVIDIA mentioned the good, better, best arrangement for the Fermi line making the GTX 470 the better offering in the mix.

NVIDIA told The Tech Report, "The GTX 470 is really important for us from a product perspective. It's basically our best price-performance product in the enthusiast line, so we have absolutely no plans of discontinuing that. Actually we are enhancing that part of the product line over the next month or so."

Yesterday we stopped by the ASRock headquarters in Taipei to check out a couple of their new goodies ahead of Computex next week and today we dropped into ECS who showed us a couple new motherboards that they will be showcasing at the big show next week.

In our second video from the visit we got an exclusive look at the ECS A890GXM-A(U) V2.0 Black Series motherboard that supports 140 watt AMD Socket AM3 processor by way of the AMD 890GX chipset. This is a similar product to the original A890GXM except it sees some changes with the most notable being the ability to unlock cores hidden in AMD Phenom II and Sempron 140 processors. Additionally this is done without the need of adding in additional chips like its competitors, and it is done without advanced clock calibration (or ACC).

This mobo also ushers in a new ECS feature and that is called 15u Gold Contact technology. Basically extra bits of gold are added to the pins on the CPU, memory and PCI Express x16 slots and sockets to increase reliability and performance through improved conductivity. In theory this sounds great, but in practice we are not sure about its full effectiveness. We will have to get one in for a full review.

Yesterday we stopped by the ASRock headquarters in Taipei to check out a couple of their new goodies ahead of Computex next week and today we dropped into ECS who showed us a couple new motherboards that they will be showcasing at the big show next week.

First up we got a look at the ECS P55H-AK Black Series motherboard. It is a brand new board part of its P55 family that supports Intel Socket LGA-1156 processors with thanks to the Intel P55 Express chipset. The P55H-AK will be ECS' top gaming board with lots of bells and whistles to boost performance. It supports full speed SLI and Crossfire by way of the included NVIDIA NF200 chipset that provides additional PCI Express lanes. Adding to the gaming side, ECS also uses the Realtek ALC899 chip for what they call excellent audio and they have also worked with Creative to add in Sound Blaster X-Fi MB2 support.

Topping things off, ECS added not only one, but two NEC USB 3.0 controller providing four USB 3.0 ports - two on the back I/O panel and included is a cable that allows two USB 3.0 ports to be added to the front of your case or at the back of the case, depending on your preference. There is also not only one, but two SATA 6G controllers providing two onboard SATA 6G ports and two eSATA capable SATA 6G ports on the back I/O panel. Some of the other features and specs are listed in the image below.

The technology field is highly competitive not only in the products launched but in employees. Competitors are always after key workers at places like Apple, Intel, NVIDIA, and AMD. Workers routinely move from one company to the other as they are lured away to the competition.

NVIDIA has reportedly lost its VP of CUDA and PhysX Manju Hegde to AMD. Hedge was key in helping NVIDI Again support for PhysX and CUDA early in the life of both offerings. Both are doing well today.

The loss of Hegde certainly won't spell doom for NVIDIA, but AMD should reap some benefits. AMD has been unsuccessful for the most part in getting the developer community to adopt its platforms like HDR with AA. Hedge should be able to help AMD a lot there.

In warm-up phase for Computex MSI gave folks in Holland a bit of a tease on what they plan to hit the VGA market with when NVIDIA breaks the chains on its GTX 465 at the beginning of next month.

MSI's well regarded Twin Frozr II cooler will be implemented in a non-reference version of this card, and they have plans to include it on GTX 470 and 480 cards as well.

There were no actual pictures of the cards shown with the coolers attached; we only know from the press event slide that the cards will be called N480 / N470 / N465 TwinFrozr II, using a large heatsink with chunky full copper base. No doubt we'll catch them in full whilst doing our rounds at Computex.

In our first batch of pre-Computex Taipei 2010 coverage this week, we visited ASRock who had some pretty cool new stuff on display that it will show at the big Asian IT show next week. The second thing we were shown was ASRock AIWI.

AIWI is an Apple app for devices with a motion sensor such as the iPhone that gives your ASRock powered system the ability to play games through your iPhone or iPod touch over wireless or Bluetooth. After you've installed the app on your phone and the ASRock software on your system (and it has detected which games you have that are supported - not all games are supported but there is a pretty good list so far), you simply connect your phone to your PC and then you are in business.

Not only can you play games using your phone as the controller with motion control like a Nintendo Wii controller, but you can also use it to control your system as it has mouse and keyboard functions too. Check out the video above as we went hands-on trying it out with Virtua Tennis 2009.

As many of you know, Seagate launched their first hybrid HDD/SSD-type storage solution for consumers yesterday under its Momentus XT series. These new drives are based on traditional high-performance (7200rpm) 2.5-inch mechanical hard drives, but include a technology Seagate calls Adaptive memory which will move the most accessed files into a much faster solid state flash area for optimal performance that improves over time. The end result is significantly improved performance + large drive capacities, whereas a 256GB+ SSD will still cost a small fortune and is out of reach for most consumers budgets.

ASUS loves the Momentus XT enough to partner up with Seagate and include Momentus XT series drives in their Republic of Gamers G73Jh-A3 notebooks. This means much better storage sub-system performance without increasing the cost of their laptops a great deal.

ASUS says that when testing the G73Jh-A3 with a Momentus XT drive it noted a 29% performance improvement in the PCMark Vantage HDD gaming test suite and 33% in the productivity test suite when compared to a traditional 7200rpm mechanical drive. When running Microsoft's Velocity benchmark ASUS also saw a 44% decrease in system boot to desktop time and Call of Duty: Modern Warefare 2 loaded 43% quicker.