News Archive for 09/06/09
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PCMCIA has introduced the next-generation ExpressCard technology, Standard 2.0, which is claimed to support transfer rates ten times faster than the current Standard 1.2 protocol utilized in a wide range of notebooks. Devices that could potentially benefit from the increased speed include eSATA adapters for external hard drives, streaming media and video adapters, or high-performance storage modules such as SSDs.
Confirming earlier reports, EVGA on Tuesday launched the GeForce GTX 285 Mac Edition graphics card which offers similar features to the Windows variant. The accessory supports single or dual displays with resolutions up to 2560x1600, while providing 1GB of DDR3 memory and 240 processing cores. EVGA has designed the component for improved graphics-intensive operations such as gaming, motion graphics, 3D modeling, rendering and animation. Users can connect the displays to two dual-link DVI-I ports.
An angry Comcast Internet subscriber has written a complaint (caution: may not be safe for work) that alleges the provider is intercepting his DNS requests to other, non-Comcast DNS servers and redirecting them to its own. The author says Comcast takes UDP traffic bound for port 53 on any server and redirects it to their own, making it nearly impossible for users to use different DNS servers, including their own.
Online electronics retailer Dynamism is now letting shoppers pre-order the Viliv X70 Ultra Mobile PC (UMPC), and its base price is revealed by the online product page. The device has a 7-inch, 1024x600 touchscreen display, and packs a 16GB or 32GB solid state drive, which is partly responsible for the quick, five-second boot-up time of the pre-loaded Windows XP operating system. The base configuration makes do with a 1.2GHz Intel Atom CPU, while a 1.3GHz Atom is optional. All versions get 1GB of DDR2 RAM.
A new firmware update was recently approved by Verizon Wireless for the carrier's HTC Touch Pro handset. Firmware version 1.08 has three major improvements, including adding Verizon's Visual Voice Mail functionality. It also allows users to access the GPS sensor via Google Maps and Windows Live Search for Mobile, effectively unlocking it.
Korea's iRiver has recently announced the upcoming release of its NV Classic portable media player, which has a built-in DMB digital TV tuner and doubles as a GPS navigation device. A 7-inch, 800x480 resolution touchscreen and a custom Magazine interface serve as its near-exclusive controls. There is no internal memory, as iRiver instead ships the NV Classic with two SDHC memory cards. A blank 4GB card will hold multimedia files, with the device supporting MP3, WAV, OGG and WMA audio files, MPEG1-4, WMV9 and XviD videos and JPEG and BMP images. A second SDHC card contains mapping information for the navigation functionality.
Newton this afternoon rolled out its first peripheral made just for iPhone users. The MoGo Talk case protects the back of an iPhone 3G or 3G S but has a shallow slot to fit a bundled MoGo headset. The in-ear Bluetooth earpiece not only stows away but also charges through the slot to let owners charge both the iPhone and the headset with a single cable. Despite the thin size, it has a talk time of about four hours.
At the SID Display Week show in Korea, Samsung's LCD unit is showing off a 10.2-inch prototype display that combines LCD video display and e-paper technologies and allows users to switch between the modes. The active matrix panel uses a cholestoric liquid crystal arrangement, which means they are arranged in a series of layers that are slightly rotated. This design is what enables the display mode to operate in memory mode like conventional e-paper displays or else switch to a dynamic mode to display video.
ASUS vice chairman Jonathan Tsang today said in an interview that his company intends to beat Apple in design in the US. Even though the Eee PC line has been successful in the country, Tsang tells the New York Times that ASUS has little recognition in the US and that it plans to rely on engineering to boost its name, with Apple's MacBooks as the conspicuous target. The company's focus on product design reportedly leaves little room for a marketing budget and thus gives it little room to depend on advertising.
T-Mobile today acknowledged that a recent hacking attempt had obtained information from its servers but downplayed the risk from the event. While the cellular carrier confirmed that data posted by the infiltrators on security message board Full Disclosure was real, a company representative has claimed to Electronista that none of the information would have compromised either T-Mobile itself or any of its subscribers. The provider nonetheless said it would watch for further attempts and has already taken "additional measures" to guard its network.
Just over a month after it was announced for the European market under a slightly different name, Harman Kardon's first Blu-ray disc player, the BDP-1, got an officially confirmation of its arrival in North America on Tuesday. The HD disc player will feature BD-Live compatibility via an Ethernet jack to access extra movie content and other features online. It supports a film-speed 24FPS without pulldown and upscales DVDs to 1080p.
Ugobe, the company that owned the intellectual property rights for the Pleo robot dinosaur but recently went into Chapter 7 bankruptcy has been purchased by the manufacturing partner of Pleo, Jetta Company Limited. According to a RobotsRule report, the United States liaison for Jetta, Steve Ohler, says the company will re-release and improve Pleo and build accessories such as batteries and chargers. The bankruptcy sale took place on May 21st and there are no other details forthcoming from Jetta about when the Pleo will again be available on the market.
Comcast today expanded its DOCSIS 3.0-based cable modem service to Washington, D.C. with a price cut to match. The US capital has the same 50Mbps peak downloads and 10Mbps peak uploads as other areas but has had the price of the service drop substantially, down $40 to $100 per month. It's not specified whether the cut applies just to the Washington area or if other regions also receive the price cut today, though a leak regarding the cut said it would apply broadly on June 20th.
The weekend launch of the Palm Pre had produced a "record Sprint sales debut," the carrier claims. First-day and first-weekend records are said to have been surpassed by late Sunday, although Sprint has refused to disclose the exact number of Pres sold. The lack of data may be attributable to the short timeframe, although the company may also be worried about comparisons with AT&T and the Apple iPhone.
Acer could be introducing a smaller Timeline that may ultimately kill the high end of its netbooks, a rumor from Taiwan's PC industry indicates. An 11.6-inch version of the Timeline is purportedly tapped for July and, DigiTimes says, will create pressure in the category. To avoid a conflict with the same-size Aspire One 751h netbook, Acer is believed to be either cutting the price of the 751h or else phasing it out entirely.
Verizon's edition of the Palm Pre is slated to launch almost immediately after Sprint's exclusivity period ends, a leak would suggest. In referring to a person "familiar with the situation," the Wall Street Journal understands that the Pre will ship through Verizon in January. Sprint has maintained that its exclusive is longer than six months but, if true, would only have the Pre to itself for one month more before allowing other US carriers to sell it.
Magellan today produced a quick but important hardware revision for its RoadMate line. The 1475T improves on the earlier 1470 with free traffic updates that help re-route drivers around congestion. Magellan's approach is ad-supported rather than subsidized and helps keep the GPS device's price down.
Sony is rumored to be getting ready to drop the price of its PlayStation 3 gaming console to coincide with the next release of EA Sports' Madden this fall, according to a Monday IndustryGamers report. Sterne Agee analyst Arvind Bhatia notes that Madden is due for an August 18th release and claims that "industry sources" know the console should lower in price in time for the game's appearance, which could potentially boost sales.
Nokia today started carrying the N97 in its Chicago and New York City flagship stores. The smartphone comes to the US both with native 3G using AT&T's HSPA network but also preloaded with Qik's self-titled video streaming app. Using it provides both offline recording for later use as well as Qik's signature ability to stream video live to the web, either for a set group of friends or as a public broadcast. The N97 in particular supports up to a 16:9-ratio, 642x358 feed.
NAVIGON today signaled its intent to compete against TomTom's iPhone app with software of its own. A version of MobileNavigator will use iPhone OS 3.0's support of turn-by-turn GPS to provide the same driving directions as many of its dedicated GPS units, including its Reality View, lane and speed assists, and its notification of road signs. Owners can play music from their device's existing library, plot routes based on contacts' addresses and auto-resume navigation after taking a call.
German automaker VW and Autonet Mobile on Tuesday announced they will collaborate to bring the uconnect web in-car Internet service to VW's Routan minivan. Later in June, all Volkswagen dealerships across the United States will be able to outfit new Routan minivans with the option. While specifics of how the system operates haven't been announced, similar systems from Autonet are available in Chrysler vehicles and Cadillac. The 3G mobile data modem runs on EVDO and gives users downloads between 400Kbps to 800Kbps and uploads at roughly 400Kbps. This allows for live audio and video streaming as well as online gaming, Autonet claims.
Western Digital on Tuesday launched one of its largest home drives with an upgrade to the My Book Studio Edition II: the new model pairs two 2TB drives together in a RAID 0 stripe for a total of 4TB of space, affording it enough room for very large backups or other media. As before, it comes pre-formatted in HFS+ for Macs and is seen as particularly useful for large Time Machine backups.
Napster is likely to be hiring for possible iPhone and Mac OS X apps based on a job listing at Craigslist. The Los Angeles software engineer position would require both experience with OS X iPhone elements, such as Cocoa Touch, as well as Mac OS X-specific features. What projects the recruit would work on are unclear, but Napster says part of its goal would be to have its products "work more effectively and natively" in Mac OS X.
Logitech this morning upgraded its V220 wireless mouse with its first color and pattern options. Normally only coming in dark gray, the three-button notebook mouse now has blue, pink, purple and red solid colors as well as three patterned versions that draw on those same colors. It shares its RF-based nano USB receiver with higher-end mice like the VX Nano and can leave the connector plugged into a notebook even when it's in a bag.
HP this morning rolled out a trio of notebook refreshes it's gearing towards students, particularly in price but also in design. The Pavilion dv6 is being given a headlining dv6z Artist Edition 2; the 16-inch notebook has special lid artwork that won a recent MTV design contest and also comes with relatively high specifications for an AMD-based system, including a 2.3GHz Turion X2 Ultra, 4GB of RAM, a 500GB hard drive and a Mobility Radeon HD 4650 for its video. It also gets a bundle of three Corel audiovisual editing apps and will launch on June 10th for $950.
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