CES 2012 - With the CES attendees safe at home we can now tell you the full story behind the ioSafe Check Yo Self Before You Wreck Yo Self Event. By now you've certainly seen the 8 foot tall tesla coil that put on an amazing display. The tesla testing was actually part of an interactive magic show. The ioSafe Rugged Portable Thunderbolt drive did take several direct hits from the simulated lightening but the results were as expected, the drive survived and held the data we put on.

The drive was filled with several documents and other files, one you can see here. The drive was then blasted, we were there and smelled the ions in the air. The data survived.

What you haven't heard yet is what happened next. To protect all of our electronics equipment from the charged air our backpacks and cell phones were placed in a protective cage that was grounded. Being ioSafe, the company who delivered the first waterproof data backup system none of us thought anything about the giant tub of water sitting close by. Dunking drives in water is actually on the tame side with ioSafe.

CES 2012 - RunCore made the trip to CES this year and brought with them a glimpse of next generation SSD technology.

With Samsung and Apple soaking up supply of Samsung 20nm NAND flash, Toshiba 24nm in limited supply and SandForce staying quiet for the first half of the year, companies are turning to Marvell to bring something fresh to the SSD market. RunCore is no exception and they will have a new Marvell high performance SSD on the market soon. With speed of around 550MB/s read and 450MB/s write we are starting to get excited to see more of these drives.

RunCore is in several different markets and over the coming years the company will grow by a large margin. Here we see two new SSD-on-chip designs where the controller and the flash is built into the same package that reduces power and heat. These products will be built into military systems that need high speed in places where space is limited.

CES 2012 - Cameron is still in Vegas for a couple of more days but I darted back home to coach youth basketball. After spending the last two days of CES in a steak coma I'm ready to get back to work and finish up the CES coverage. The show was really good this year with more than 152,000 visitors and more than 20,000 products launched.

OWC (macsales.com) was exhibiting on the show floor with a booth that was absolutely jam packed with enthusiasts. Industry insider Andy Marken from Marken Communications personally gave us the tour. The first stop of the day tipped up a little PCIe action. Here we see a new OWC PCIe SSD that uses a Marvell RAID controller and four custom SandForce SF-2281 controlled SSDs. Each SSD uses Toshiba NAND flash and different capacity sizes should be available. The capacity will ramp up quickly with four slots. The Marvell controller supports several different levels of RAID including 0,1,5 and 10. Performance will only be limited by the PCIe 2.0 4 lane link so we are expecting some amazing performance out of this product.

OWC is also venturing into the miniSAS market with new external drive systems from the Jupiter product family.

CES 2012 - Here we are looking at the near $2800 Razer Blade, is the fastest PC I have ever seen boot with my own eyes first off. Beside the raw speed of this unit, there have been a few really innovative additions included. The mouse pad has been moved to the right and has LED lit function buttons that will change the operation of this multi-touch LCD mouse pad. This will allow for real time stats to be displayed, even the option to get on the net and watch game play video as the game is still on the main screen. I know that is a lot of money to pay for a mobile gaming system, but this is the coolest laptop/notebook that I have ever had the pleasure of using.

They also made something that was awarded for CES 2012, Project Fiona! This is essentially a tablet with a thick aluminum frame added to support the handles of the game pad controllers that are derived from the Hydra Nunchucks. This is still in development, and there are beta testers with new requests, and Razer is working out all of the final details still. I for one like the idea, and hopefully Fiona makes her way to store shelves, as I think there is a ton of potential here!

For those Star Wars freaks out there Razer is delivering a newly painted and backlit kit of this keyboard featuring the mouse pad of the Blade along with a Naga mouse. Another cool feature of mouse and keyboard combo is that it doesn't matter which side of the force you are on, the keyboard and LCD mouse pad will illuminate and sport either icon and its coloration. The mouse pad under the Naga mouse is also part of the combo, and will reverse teams with a flip of the inner white section of the pad.

CES 2012 - During my meeting with Tony at SilverStone I saw a few cases around the room that looked very familiar, yet not exactly what we have seen to date. For instance we have the chassis seen here. At first glance you are thinking this is the FT-03, and it is, but in m-ITX form factor this time! Various changes were made to the cooling system shrinking in fan diameter, as well as the entire chassis getting much smaller, offering this new solution, the FT-03 Mini.

With three of the four side panels removed you can get a look at the interior design of the FT-03 Mini, and can also now see that this chassis will use a SFX power supply to aide in keeping the overall size of this chassis to bare minimum. I was told these should be arriving sometime in March, but pricing was not discussed at this time.

I also took a look at the GD06 and reviewed it not too long ago, but I guess there were some requests that came from users in what might improve the user's experience. For instance the GD07 pictured here, near the power button is a power LED that now has a dimmer switch on it, and also has a power button lock out mechanism to disable any accidental power downs from curious children's fingers. There are also some interior changes that have been made, and I was told to expect mine soon, so that I can show you in more detail what is new there.

CES 2012 - I found ARCTIC on the floor at CES and found a few coolers on display. Here we have the i30 in this image. There is an a30 model for AMD mounting which is exactly the same as this i30 model sans the mounting hardware, of course that has to be different. This four pipe cooler was in full operational speed, and both were dead silent. I just spoke with Daniel while I was in Las Vegas, and was told this cooler is in transit right now, so expect this review very soon!

On the wall behind the CPU cooler display were the new series of GPU coolers. This is a redesign of the original Twin Turbo Cooler. The Twin Turbo II has a changed heat pipe arrangement under it, but since they were mounted to the display I couldn't get a great image of it. You can tell from the top that the fan spacing has been changed, the black shroud has been increased in size, and this cooler still connects to most of the older cards, as well as a few that the original did not.

Next to the Twin Turbo II was mounted next to this new design as well. Here we have the Accelero Xtreme which is just like the one I reviewed previously, but this time is specifically designed to work with the AMD HD 7970. The main change to the cooler for this card is the addition of a few millimeters of extra copper to the base of the cooler to allow contact with the die height of these new cards.

CES 2012: I'm trying not to get excited for Windows 8-based notebooks, or ultrabooks, until something comes out that makes me sit back and think "Wow". Well, I think I'm getting to that point with Lenovo's ultrabook, IdeaPad Yoga 13.

Intel requires that all 13.3-inch (or smaller) ultrabooks to be, at most, 18mm thick. However, there is a provision that if the ultrabook has a touchscreen, it can be up to 20mm thick. Lenovo's IdeaPad Yoga 13 sports a touchscreen, yet measures up at just 17mm thick. Yoga 13 does all of this without losing battery life, as Lenovo rates the Yoga good for over eight hours of use.

It doesn't just sport a touchscreen, it's an IPS panel to boot. The panel features very wide viewing angles that are perfect, as the Yoga's hinge allows the display to swing open 360-degrees and can convert itself into a tablet. Once the display spins beyond 180-degrees, the keyboard turns off and you can hold the unit and interact with it just like a tablet. Yoga 13 includes a soft-touch coating on the palm rest that ensures the system is easy to hold and won't slip or scratch if you place it on something in tablet mode.

CES 2012: AMD, you funny. Thunderbolt has been here for nearly twelve months now, and at CES, AMD unveiled a concept they call Lightning Bolt. For one, I love how they've kept the name virtually identical to Thunderbolt, and secondly, how long until Intel or Apple release something called Spaedon or Maedon or something to that affect, you know what I mean.

What is AMD's Lightning Bolt capable of? It can deliver USB 3.0, DisplayPort and Power over a single cable with miniDisplayPort connectors. It's designed to be simple, and affordable. For notebooks, there is a mux, which can combine power, DisplayPort and USB 3.0 into a single DisplayPort-like cable. The other end of the cable would connect to a Lightning Bolt breakout box that would provide the three connectors: USB 3.0, DisplayPort and Power ports.

The cable is a standard mini-DP cable, with changes to two of the pins. AMD's goal is to aim for affordable, single-cable docking stations for notebooks. AMD says that the cost of the mux and associated components on the notebook side would be just, one dollar. Eventually, the mux will be built into the notebook, and you'd just see a mini-DP interface with a little symbol that would indicate Lightning Bolt.

Microsoft has shown its strength just now, with the Xbox taking in nearly half of all consumer spending from physical sales in 2011. Roughly $6.7 billion, or 40-percent of consumer retail spending, was spent on the Xbox, breaking into two separate categories. $2.1 billion on consoles, and $4.6 billion on games, according to NPD data released today.

These figures take into account U.S. retail sales of new physical videogame content, inclusive of portable and console hardware, games and accessories. In the collective sectors, they generated revenues of $17.02 billion last year, an 8-percent decline from 2010's $18.6 billion in generated revenues. Out of that $17.02 billion, Microsoft took a very respectable 40-percent of those sales.

The report doesn't include sales from digital formats, with things like downloadable content, social and mobile games, used and rental sales. Those so-called "newer" categories generated $7.24 billion in revenues last year, an increase of 7-percent over 2010. Whilst the increase in spending on alternative formats was there, it wasn't enough to offset the declines in physical retail. Consumer spending across both categories was between $16.3 and $16.6 billion, falling 2-percent from last year.

Facebook has previously held presidential debates, Twitter has had live concerts, but now theater has taken the social networking stage. Berlin's Maxim Gorki Theater used Facebook to host a live theater experience on Monday, which is what they have called, Facebook's first performance.

Maxim Gorki Theater used Theodor Fontane's Effi Briest, and performance a special adaption for the "online Facebook stage", reported Reuters. A spokesperson for the theater told Reuters: