Connectivity & Cloud - Page 21

IOGEAR is known for producing a range of weird yet wonderful and useful tech products and this one is no exception.

The USB Net ShareStation is a small and simple yet elegant and highly useful device that allows you to easily add USB to your network. Its relevance is a little questionable as you could of course just plug a USB device into a computer connected to your network but that of course means that computer needs to be switched on which could waste power.

Usually only reserved for the Japanese made by companies we've never heard of before, USB graphics adapters provide an alternative to adding another graphics card to your system, to add more graphics outputs from your system.

So, are you running out of USB 2.0 ports on your motherboard? Apacer has come up with an interesting and well designed product called PH151. The engineers didn't a fantastic job on the design but the marketing department could have come up with a more exciting name!

PH151 is a 4-port Hi-Speed USB hub supporting transfer rates up to 480Mbps but before you begin to yawn, it is rather interesting. Instead of being a regular flat shaped hub design, it is designed using a Y shape, which means there will be no more port blocking by attached pen drives.

There are two ports on the top and two on the front - I like the top ports as it will allow pen drives to stand vertically which would make for a nice change. Best of all, it will only cost you $20 AUD down under and weighs just 41 grams.

Super Talent has just announced its newest range of ultra tiny USB pen drives which happen to also offer the smallest design coming in sizes ranging from 1GB to 8GB.

The Pico Series of pen drives are incredibly small and feature up to 30 MB/s (200X) transfer speeds and measures just 1.50"x0.50" and weigh next-door to nothing at 4 - 6 grams.

There are three drives in the Pico Series including PICO-A, PICO-B and PICO-C. Each look fairly familiar however each vary in size slightly one swivels and is water proof, one is rugged and water proof and one is simply retractable.

ASRock hit the news headlines around the world today with the announcement of its latest AMD 780G based motherboard that claims to be the first out with a DisplayPort connector.

I would normally try to avoid making a fuss over yet another USB flash drive to hit the market, but this one being an extremely well thought out concept design definitely deserves a special mention.

Transcend sends word of their brand new Curvy Pure-White USB pen drive - yet another USB flash product from the Taiwanese company who seems to produce a new model each week.

The V33 is pure white which may make a good addition to your girl's Christmas stocking. Among the top features are its ultra-compact body measuring in at 60mm x 16.5mm x 8.1mm and it is a lightweight coming in at a mere 7 grams.

Galaxy recently informed us about the release of their brand new 8800GT graphics card with native HDMI port for HD output up to 1080p resolutions.

Asus has quietly launched two motherboards based on Intel's G35 chipset which relies on Intel's integrated graphics, but this time the graphics engine is somewhat different, as the G35 chipset relies on the GMA X3500. Intel claims that the new graphics engine supports DirectX 10 as well as Shader Model 4.0 and OpenGL 2.0. The G35 chipset is long overdue, but it looks like Intel has finally managed to ship it out to its partners, as the Asus boards have just gone on sale in Japan.

The two models are the P5E-V HDMI and the P5E-VM HDMI, with the main difference between the two being that the first one is ATX while the second one is mATX. Interestingly enough, Asus claims CrossFire support for the full size P5E-V HDMI board and it looks like the design is similar to a P35 board in terms of CrossFire support. Both boards feature an HDMI connector as well as a D-sub for the onboard graphics and an HDMI to DVI converter comes in the box.

We happened upon a few pictures of a somewhat different Radeon HD 3850 card from a Chinese manufacturer that we're not familiar with and we can't really make out the name, as it's only in Chinese, although the card also says Zero on it, but if this is the brand, then we're still not familiar with the company behind this card.

What makes this card so different is the fact that an onboard HDMI connector, rather than relying on a DVI to HDMI converter commonly used on ATI cards. This could be an advantage in tight spaces, as you don't need to make room for those extra couple of centimetres that the dongle takes up.

E-Ten has announced that it's finally shipping the Glofiish X800 and the company also released its X600 at the same time. The X800 was shown back at Computex earlier this year, but it has taken this long for it to become available. It features a 500MHz Samsung SC3 2442 processor and it has 256MB of flash memory and 64MB of RAM. The screen measures 2.8-inches and has a 640x480 resolution.

It's a 3G handset which HSDPA support and it works on 2100, 1900 and 850MHz for 3G and it also works on all four GSM bands and as a backup to 3G it does GPRS class 10. Of course it also has 802.11b/g Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 2.0 with EDR.

Leadtek has announced a new dinky graphics card for those that need something affordable with HDMI output. The good news is that the PX8500 GT TDH HDMI as Leadtek calls it, still has a DVI connector. As the model name suggests this card is based on the GeForce 8500 GT GPU and it's paired with 256MB of 128-bit DDR2 memory

The Core is clocked at 450MHz and has 16 stream engines while the memory is clocked at 800MHz. The GPU is cooled by a heatpipe and a passive heatsink which should keep the card nice and cool. It's a low profile card and this should make it a great option for home theatre PC machines.

Belkin has launched what it simply calls a Network USB Hub which allows you to share and access printers and USB storage devices over your wireless network. Rather ingenious, although being able to share printers on a network is hardly something new and there are already routers that can share USB storage devices. The trick here is that Network USB Hub can connect to any and all routers or even a switch or a hub.

The neat thing here is that the Network USB Hub can share some devices that traditional print servers or network sharing routers weren't too fond of, such as multifunction printers, digital cameras and scanners. It can also be used for backing up data from a USB storage device or even a digital camera to a NAS.

Intel, HP, Microsoft, Nec, NXP Semiconductors and Texas Instruments have announced that they're developing a new USB standard simply called USB 3.0. The new standard is claimed to be ten times faster than USB 2.0 and it will target fast sync-and-go applications on PC's, mobile devices and consumer electronics.

USB 3.0 will remain backwards compatible with current USB standards, but it will be more power efficient and better optimized for low power drain. An optical version is also meant to be developed, but how this is meant to interface with various devices wasn't made clear.

The first draft specifications should be ready in the first half of next year and the first implementations we'll see will be in the form of discrete chipsets. Apparently over 6.2 billion USB devices have been shipped since 2001 and 2.1 billion of those last year alone. Goes to show how many of the peripherals we use are connected via USB.

Remember XCM and that Xbox 360 HDMI cable for none HDMI equipped Xbox 360's? Well, they've updated the information on their website and have added some better pictures of the mysterious cable. Now it appears to have an Xbox 360 AV connector in one end and an HDMI connector in the other.

According to XCM it will also be able to output 1080i, as the cable converts the analog signal to a digital signal, which is why it can't do 1080p. It's also got a pair of RCA stereo audio outputs and an HDMI to DVI adapter.

Corsair have introduced some new "Flash Padlock" secure USB 2.0 drives today which have a hardware-authentication lock feature. If you want to keep your data secure whilst on the go, one of these would be a perfect partner.

The drive will "auto-lock" everytime you remove it from a computer, requiring you to key in your PIN number on the simple touch-pad interface.

The Flash Padlock comes in two capacities, 1 and 2GB with pricing of $29.99 and $39.99 USD respectively.

For full details you can read up on Corsair's official announcement here, or head straight to the product page folks.

Buffalo has released four external USB SSD drives with capacities of 8, 16, 24 and 56GB. The 56GB version would set you back US$750, with the 24GB version coming it at $336, the 16GB model at $234 and finally the 8GB one at $142. Although we dig SSD drives, this seems like a strange way of making the most out of them.

Buffalo has designed a fairly attractive drive enclosure for the SSD drives that measures 89 x 57 x 14 mm (H x W x D) and weighs in at just under 61g for the 56GB model. The drives are meant to be shock proof up to a drop of 2.5m, so dropping one of these off your desk shouldn't do any kind of damage to them.

Normally we wouldn't cover something as basic as a voice recorder, especially as it comes built into many MP3 players these days, but Olympus has launched four new models that features a built in USB port. Again, this might not seem like a big deal, but it's taken until now for a voice recorder company to release such a product.

The first two models, the WS-110 and WS-210S features 256 or 512MB of built in memory and measures 94.7 x 38 x 10mm (H x W x D) and features a built in LCD screen. They're powered by a single AAA battery and Olympus claims it has enough juice for up to 21h of recording.

Samsung is apparently working on a new handset with integrated GPS as part of its new line up of handsets that are expected to arrive late this year or early next year. The unofficial model name is i550 and it will also be using the Symbian S60 operating system. This is not the first time Samsung has developed a phone with Symbian as its OS, although it's not Samsungs main choice of OS for its handsets, unlike Nokia that almost exclusively uses Symbian.

The i550 is also meant to be a 3.5G handset with HSDPA, although it only supports speeds of up to 3.6Mbit. It's meant to have a 2.6-inch display which will hopefully have better than 240x320 resolution, 128MB of RAM and 150MB of ROM. The built in memory can be expanded via a microSD card slot and the phone features a mini USB connector.

Samsung Electronics has revealed the first display to feature the new DisplayPort interface that it has developed together with Intel, AMD, Nvidia, HP, Dell, Lenovo, Philips and others. DisplayPort is also sanctioned by VESA and it's the next generation display interface on computers, set to replace DVI, LVDS and D-sub.

However, there's a little while before you can go out and buy one of these, as they won't be available until Q2 2008. The demo display measures 30-inches and it has WQXGA (don't you just love acronyms?) resolution, which to most of us means 2,560x1,600 pixels.