News Archive

Attention all Verizon Droid owners: The long-awaited Android 2.1 update is finally coming your way. An internal company email obtained by Engadget shows that the Android 2.1 operating system update will begin a slow rollout process starting today. According to the note, 1,000 users should have received the update by noon today. Another 9,000...

Free iPhone apps are a plenty, but some are definitely better than others. Falling into the "better" category is the new MapQuest 4 Mobile iPhone app. Not only will this app turn your iPhone into a personal navigation device, but the latest version will also give you basic spoken instructions that tell you where to turn. Another cool feature...

If you were hoping to get a brand new iPad shipped directly to your house by the store launch date of April 3 and haven't already placed a preorder, you're too late. Recently, Apple announced that customers who placed preorders after March 27 will have to wait until April 12 for their iPad to ship. Apple began taking preorders for the iPad...

Intel launched its much-anticipated Nehalem-EX processor today; the new chip could redefine performance at 4P and above. Nehalem-EX, aka Beckton, aka Xeon 6500/7500 is Nehalem at full throttle; Beckton is an eight-core/16-thread processor with up to 24MB of L3 cache or ~3MB per core compared to Nehalem's 2MB/core design. It supports up to...

One of the biggest pains to buying a GPS system is the knowledge that your maps will be outdated within 12 months, if not sooner. TomTom knows it, and they're doing something about it. Announced this week, the company is selling select navigation models that come with Lifetime Map and Traffic Updates. For free!It's a move that was probably...

Desktop replacement notebooks aren't as popular as they once were, but the big boys still have a place in the laptop world. A really, really big place. iBUYPOWER has just revealed what might be the most noticeable notebook of the year so far, not only because of the great specifications list, but the sheer size of this unit.The Battalion Touch...

Google Earth has been a huge addition to the navigation and technological world, but we haven't really seen it used for anything other than TED demonstrations and at-home tinkering. But now, the cops are onto the software, and they're using it to track down the bad boys we hear about so often.According to a new report from Florida, the virtual...

Tech savvy students living in the UK have an opportunity to pull in a pretty respectable part-time income and move up from dining on Ramen Noodles to fast food joints. All they have to do is snitch on their fellow classmates as part of Warner Bros.'s anti-piracy efforts.It's actually a little more involved in that and the qualifying candidate...

Out of the 365 days that make up our calendar year, Sony has chosen to release its next system software update for the PlayStation platform on April 1, otherwise known as April Fool's Day. Install it, however, and the joke's on you, at least if you're planning to roll with an alternate OS. That's because the optional update will disable the...

Dell's Precision line has always been associated with professionals; they don't exactly cater to gamers and bargain hunters, but they've always been well equipped for CAD users and other hard-working pros. The Precision M4500 is the company's newest mobile workstation, following up on the Precision M6500 that was launched late last year.It's...

1TB drives have already hit the 2.5" HDD market, but Western Digital realizes that not everyone needs or wants all that space. In order to serve that other demand, the company has introduced a slightly smaller drive, the 750GB Scorpio Blue. Still a sizable piece to say the least, and this drive boasts a 375 GB-per-platter areal density and...

If there's one thing everyone needs on a flight, it's in-flight Wi-Fi. That's something we can all agree on, right? While the business and casual travelers debate, Aircell is announcing yet another partner in their efforts to blanket the sky with Internet: US Airways. The company has managed to land deals with nearly every major (and minor)...

Timing has a way of spicing things up, and this is definitely one of those cases. During the same week that Verizon announced that they would be cutting back on future FiOS roll outs, AT&T has announced something in the opposite vein. As of this week, AT&T is giving its U-verse users an even faster broadband choice, with U-verse High...

AMD launched its new Maranello server platform and accompanying 8-12 core Magny-Cours processors today. The new products are two prongs of a three-pronged offensive AMD has launched at its rival. Both Magny-Cours and Maranello are evolutionary products—we'll have to wait for Bulldozer to really shake things up—but the CPU manufacturer has...

How do you improve what's already the fastest GPU on the planet? By slapping the "world's best waterblock" on it and tossing the whole thing into your water cooling loop, of course! That's exactly what EVGA has done with their GTX 480 & 470 Hydro Copper FTW videocards.Swiftech gets an assist for designing the waterblock, which sports a...

Our insiders may have been a few months off, but it looks like things are still going to happen. You know that Verizon Wireless iPhone you've been waiting forever for? The Wall Street Journal is reporting that a CDMA iPhone will go into production this September, paving the way for a model to be compatible with both Verizon and Sprint in the...

1TB may not quite be the new black, but it's getting close. And that's just the way we like it. As capacities increase across the board, more and more external HDD makers are looking to get the biggest drive(s) possible into their products. Toshiba isn't as popular as Western Digital or LaCie in the external hard drive market, but a 1TB drive...

Just before the weekend, Sanyo held a lunchtime press conference in Japan to show off its latest line of Gorilla series personal navigation devices (PNDs), including the NV-SD740DT, NV-SB570DT, and NV-SB550DT.According to Sanyo, all three models significantly shorten the time it takes to detect your current location. By analyzing signals for...

Perhaps by now you've heard that Nvidia has officially launched a little thing it likes to call Fermi  which is only the company's next-gen graphics architecture and currently the fastest single-GPU 3D accelerator on the planet. Fermi parts won't actually ship until early April, but already we're seeing a deluge of product announcements,...

Samsung has not traditionally played a huge role in the evolution of notebooks. Companies such as Dell, Lenovo, HP, Acer and Asus have all done noteworthy things to push the envelope, with the Adamo XPS, ThinkPad, IdeaPad and Eee PC all coming from this group. Even those who don't follow technology on a daily basis would probably associate...

Microvision has earned their fame from producing the first PicoP-based microprojector, the SHOW WX. That handheld projector just recently started shipping in America, but the company isn't done just yet. Today, they have announced the completion of the design of a new ultra-miniature PicoP laser projection display engine, which is even smaller...

This is it. It's really happening. 3D is taking over our lives, and there's nothing we can do about it. But is it really such a bag thing? There's no question that consumers have yet to truly speak on their acceptance or rejection of 3D in the home, but if there's any programming that could really spearhead things, it's sports. Sports is arguably...

Intel rocked the processor world a few weeks ago with the introduction of the six-core Core i7-980X Extreme Edition, but now we're beginning to wonder if there's any stop to this "core" madness. AMD has just shook things up even further with the new Opteron 6000 series platform, boasting Direct Connect Architecture 2.0 and plenty of power...

Victorinox is a brand you may have heard your dad or grandfather speak of, and if you're someone who associates closely with the outdoors, you may actually own one of their products. If we said "Swiss Army knife," you'd know immediately what we were talking about, and sure enough Victorinox is the parent company that makes those knives.In...

Fully a third of the top dogs on Barron's 30 Most Respected CEOs list released in this week's print edition hail from the tech world.Given how virtually all anyone talks about these days (other than healthcare, but don't expect a discussion of that here) is social media, gadgets and the interwebz, it should be no shock. Nonetheless, a few...

iPhone users now have another GPS option for their phones. Magellan GPS recently announced the Magellan RoadMate App for iPhone for the United States and Puerto Rico. The app uses the same interface as the company's dedicated personal navigation devices. Feature highlights include:Spoken street name guidanceHighway lane assistIn-app music...

Tablet PCs may be all the rage right now, but there's still the question of how many people actually want to use a keyboard-less slate. We're guessing that the novelty may wear off, and that most folks will end up yearning for an actual keyboard to bang on. For that reason, we think there is a lot of attractiveness in something like the 10.1"...

The recession has a lot of negative effects, but largely, the technology industry has continued to flourish. Unfortunately, one of the greatest competitors in the Internet industry seems to be scaling back their efforts, and the tough economic conditions are primarily to blame. Verizon made the news in a big way a few years ago, promising...

Asus has already announced their version of NVIDIA's new Fermi-based GPUs, and now Zotac is stepping in with new versions of the GeForce GTX 470 and GTX 480 as well. The specs here are all what you would expect; the 480 has a 700MHz Engine Clock speed, 480 unified shaders, 1401MHz shader clock, 1.5GB of GDDR5 RAM, a 384-bit memory interface...

Digital Storm is following the crowd, but how could you blame them? With NVIDIA turning the graphics market upside-down by introducing the Fermi-based graphics card lineup (GeForce GTX 470 and GTX 480), the company is revealing a new version of the Black|OPS gaming PC with NVIDIA's latest in the rig. The Black|OPS has always been a fantastic...

We're sensing a trend here, and Maingear is helping to substantiate our assumptions. Right after NVIDIA announced their new GeForce GTX 470 and 480 GPUs, Maingear has arrived with new high performance gaming PCs that have none other than NVIDIA's Fermi graphics cards in them. Of course, the SHIFT "personal supercomputer" is the first to arrive...

Considering 91% of Americans carry a cell phone, there are not a lot of new customers for wireless carriers to target. That is, unless you start considering non-human customers. That's just what AT&T has in mind with a new dog collar that can connect to the Internet. After talking about wireless dog collars for more than a year, AT&T...

Time Warner Cable's New York City customers just got a nice bonus in the form of free Wi-Fi. The free Wi-Fi is available to 1 million of the company's New York City customers in places like public parks and commuter train stations. “Road Runner customers can experience a fast, simple and easy connection from their laptops or portable Wi-Fi-enabled...

We hope you're ready for the onslaught of new Fermi-based GPUs, because they're coming--ready or not. One of the first companies out of the gate to support NVIDIA's latest gaming efforts is Asus, which has just launched the ENGTX400 Series of graphics cards that are based around the GTX 470 and GTX 480. You already know how this baby will...

Wii owners who are Netflix subscribers should begin finding a little extra something in their mailbox soon.The mail-order and online movie rental service is sending discs out to its subscribers who own the Nintendo game systems that will allow them to access any movies or TV shows that Netflix streams online. The videos will be accessible...

For better or worse, the launch of NVIDIA's next-generation GPU architecture codenamed Fermi, a.k.a. GF100, is one of the most highly anticipated in our industry, ever. Information about the GPU has been tricking out for many months now, some of it good and some bad. Regardless of what you have chosen to believe or ignore up to this point,...

Fermi! It's here! After hearing about NVIDIA's next huge play in the GPU world for months on end, the card that is destined to overtake the best Radeon out there has arrived. In a CyberPower machine, so far. We anticipate NVIDIA to unveil the next-gen GPU at any moment from the PAX trade show floor, but CyberPower is giving us a heads-up that...

If we were to ask you what percentage of Americans do you think own a cell phone, what would you say? 35 percent? 50 percent? 75 percent!? If you said 75 percent, pat yourself on the back for picking the most obvious answer, but you're still wrong. The answer is D, 91 percent of Americans carry a cell phone.That's according to the CTIA, which...

As 2010 rolls on, it might be easier to take inventory of which companies aren't planning on entering the ebook reader market rather than which ones are. Count Kobo among the latter, who this week announced a $149 e-reader during the CTIA show.The price sounds about right, but does Kobo have a real shot at competing in what's fast becoming...

When you think of Apple's iPad, you probably think of a large iPod touch, or maybe a portable e-mail machine for your couch. Or maybe you think of something that you'd love to have if it only supported Flash and Hulu. Or maybe you think it'd be a great replacement for a netbook. But would you consider it seriously for work? That's the question...

Hypersonic PC used to be regarded as one of the most well-respected PC builders in the world, up there with the likes on Alienware, Falcon Northwest and Voodoo. Now, they're just a distant memory. OCZ Technology, the parent company of Hypersonic, has recently made the tough decision to shut down the operation, leaving hardcore PC gamers one...

Secondary displays aren't a new sector; for just over a year now, select companies have been offering smaller, USB-connected displays that help give desktop and notebook owners a little bit of extra screen space, and given that these are mobile, you can tote them easily and use them on multiple computers. MEDL Technology is really amping things...

Asus has been a huge fan of USB 3.0, and they have definitely supported the protocol on a few Eee PC machines and motherboards early on. We personally think everyone should be shifting to USB 3.0 as soon as possible, and it's tough to swallow any new PCs with "just" USB 2.0. Now, Asus is making a challenge to every other company out there:...

Fusion Garage hasn't had the easiest time getting their JooJoo tablet out of the door, but no one ever said it was easy being a startup. The company whose tablet used to be known as the CrunchPad is finally shipping out, but only to customers who pre-ordered one from the beginning. We heard that units would begin shipping last month, but that...

AT&T is launching a new music experience for users of the LG Xenon, Samsung Solstice and Samsung Impression phones. With AT&T Music, users will be able to download songs and albums, stream radio, and create customized radio stations. The service also has a song match feature that will identify a tune and the ability to search for lyrics...

When it comes to hard drives, only a few things really matter. Size, durability, and size. Did we mention size? Toshiba understands the demands of the storage world, and the company has really stepped things up lately by pushing the areal density boundaries in order to deliver two of the highest-capacity 2.5" HDDs in existence today. Two new...

Announced last month at Mobile World Congress, the Jabra CLIPPER caught some people's attention with its built-in 3.5mm headphone jack that essentially brings the power of Bluetooth to any pair of 3.5mm headphones. That's right—with this device, you can listen to your music through your favorite set of headphones while still having the functions...

OpenPeak's OpenTablet make a debut last month, but it was quickly forgotten in the wake of Apple's iPad launching and a number of other major competitors hitting the scene as well. There's no reminder like a reminder that involves one of the major for U.S. cell operators, though, and that's exactly what's being announced this week. AT&T...

Google rolled out a new security feature for Gmail that can alert you when it thinks someone else may be using your account. By using the IP tracking feature that Google launched in July 2008, the new security feature will display a warning if it detects that your account has been accessed from two different geographic regions within a short...

Shame on you, Sony. Why? Well, the company's PlayStation Portable turned 5 years old this week, and did so with little fanfare, or even a few balloons. That's okay, PSP, because HotHardware has your back, though we're not going to sing the birthday jingle. Aw, what the heck.Happy birthday to you, Happy birthday to you,Happy birthday dear PlayStation...

Jon Peddie Research has released a report pegging the total value of the PC gaming hardware market at some $27 billion in 2010, up from $20 billion in 2008. Currently, 'enthusiast' class hardware accounts for ~46 percent of that amount. JPR predicts that this will fall to 35 percent in 2013, but because that shift will occur in a growing industry,...

We'd like to begin our coverage of the latest DRM idiocy in gaming by apologizing to Ubisoft. After reading about some of EA's recent bright ideas and the constant connection EA's Command and Conquer: Tiberian Twilight requires in order to play the single-player game, we realized we'd unfairly painted Ubisoft as being uniquely stupid, out-of-touch,...

Computer cases tend to reveal certain things about their owners. With one glance, your friends can estimate just how serious (or casual) your computer hardware addiction may be. Whether the chassis is a generic, cream-colored throwback from the 90's, a standard mid-tower with a couple of LED fans, or an extravagant full-tower gaming behemoth...

Apps, apps, apps. They're everywhere, and where they aren't, they will soon be. App stores have taken over the world, and they're now leaving the smartphone realm and bleeding over to printers, netbooks and even wireless routers. Belkin is a huge networking player, and the company has been making routers, switches, hubs and all sorts of other...

AT&T's 3G MicroCell was a huge hit when it was announced last year, but the major problem was that it was only available in select areas. If you aren't sure what this device is or why you should care, it's basically a tiny cell site for your house. If you get horrible service while at home, this basically puts the nearest cell tower right...

Samsung Mobile has really taken advantage of their floor time at the CTIA wireless show in Las Vegas. Following the release of the Wave S8500 and the Galaxy S, the company introduced the second 4G phone to debut at the show. The SCH-r900 won't run on the WiMAX network that Sprint and Clearwire use; instead, it will run on the LTE network that...

NVIDIA's Fermi has been revealed, but having a new platform revealed and having a new platform available for purchase are two very, very different things. The graphics world has been waiting on pins and needles for NVIDIA to make good on their promises from September, and while we can't be absolutely certain that new Fermi-based GeForce cards...

Is there anything better than bringing home a new ThinkPad? Is there anything better than mobile broadband? We guess the answer is yes in both circumstances, as now you can get a Lenovo ThinkPad with both 3G and 4G support. Announced this week during America's largest wireless trade show, the ThinkPad is gaining 3G and 4G support courtesy...

In a one-on-one meeting with Engadget, Verizon Wireless' Senior VP and CTO Tony Melone revealed some interesting details about the wireless carrier's plans for LTE and LTE-related devices. More specifically, Melone confirmed that ALL of its data-only LTE WWAN devices (such as aircards, MiFi-type products, and USB data sticks) will also support...

While most wireless carriers are touting their 4G plans at the CTIA trade show, T-Mobile is focusing on its 3G network. The company unveiled plans to upgrade its 3G service to High Speed Packet Access Plus (HSPA+) technology. HSPA+ will give customers faster data speeds than today's 3G network. By the end of this year, T-Mobile plans to have...

As promised, the HTC HD2 from T-Mobile is officially here. To help welcome this new smartphone to the market, Gogo Inflight Internet is offering free service for up to six months to owners of this new phone. Gogo Inflight Internet lets you check email, surf the Web, and connect with friends while traveling on an airplane. As you'll recall,...

Move over dedicated media players. Samsung today announced that its upcoming Bada-powered Wave will be the world's first mobile phone to be DivX Certified for HD video playback at 720p resolution. In addition, Samsung said it is working with DivX on HD Certification for its upcoming Android-powered Galaxy S smartphone."We were very excited...

Corsair says that "big things do come in small packages," and while we know nothing about undersized packages, we can see why Corsair is prone to brag. After all, they've just crammed 32GB of capacity into a flash drive hardly bigger than a quarter.The 32GB Flash Voyager Mini USB flash drive is Corsair's largest capacity yet in that particularly...

Eye-Fi took a simple concept and made it a reality, simultaneously solving an issue that many folks had: how do I upload images straight to the Web without needing to upload pics first to a PC? The company has stood alone in the industry over the past couple of years, and this week at CTIA they're announcing their newest card to send images...

A sweeping change is hitting the mobile industry, and we're not just talking about 4G. It's VoIP, and it has been around for years in the PC world, but is just now gaining ground in the mobile world due to carrier's being reluctant to support it. Operators have long feared that enabling the use of Skype or any other VoIP calling software would...

This year's CTIA show in Las Vegas is all about what's next: 4G. What's interesting is that most carriers don't even have 3G figured out; AT&T's 3G network still isn't robust enough to handle bursts of traffic in major cities, and yet the mobile world seems set on moving on to WiMAX, LTE, neither, or both. Clearwire is the major provider...

Origin PC made quite the entrance when they entered the gaming PC scene a few months ago, but it takes more than just two machines to really get any major chunk of market share. In order to suit even more needs, the company has just introduced the EON15, a 15" gaming notebook that packs plenty of power. Described as a machine that "doesn't...

Today is the day for Android-related news. We've already heard announcements from Samsung and Sprint/HTC. In an attempt to return to the smartphone space, Kyocera revealed its own Android-powered smartphone today. The new Kyocera Zio M6000 will launch in the second quarter and feature a 3.5-inch WVGA motion enhanced touchscreen display as...

Samsung is hoping to make your life "more convenient, more exciting, and more integrated," with its new Galaxy S smartphone. This smartphone runs on the latest version of Android, offers a 4-inch Super AMOLED screen, and has a 1GHz processor. The Galaxy S will be coming to Europe, North America, Latin America, Australia, and Asia soon. Although...

This summer, Sprint customers will be able to get their hands on the world's first 3G/4G Android-powered smartphone. Otherwise known as the HTC EVO, this smartphone features a 4.3-inch touchscreen, 8 megapixel camera, HD video capture capabilities, HDMI output, and the HTC Sense user interface. Behind the scenes, the EVO is powered by a 1GHz...

VIA Technologies is talking up its VX900 chipset, and promising that its new "media system processor" (MSP) will offer silky-smooth 1080P playback when paired with a VIA Nano 3000. "VIA's trail-blazing VX900 will bring welcome relief to those pining for the best view of HD video online," said Richard Brown, Vice President of Marketing, VIA...

If you own an iPhone or pay the slightest bit of attention to Apple, you know there's an app for that. There's an app for this. There's an app for pretty much anything you could ever want to do, unless you're browsing the web. If you're doing that on a non-jailbroken phone, you're doing it on Mobile Safari, Apple's official (and only)...

A report from videogame industry analyst Michael Pachter indicates that EA is investigating new revenue streams, particularly digital revenues that might entice players to buy into an extended game demo and follow up with a full game purchase once the title was available. That's the noninflammatory version of this story's lede; the inflammatory...

As promised, Google stopped filtering Chinese search results on Monday; users attempting to visit Google.cn are now redirected to Google.hk. That's the company's Hong Kong domain, which is not censored to comply with China's demands. The next move in the ongoing saga is China's; Google's decision to redirect mainland Chinese users to a different...

During the Consumer Electronics Show which took place in early January of this year, we showcased a myriad of upcoming products in our coverage of the event. Of the literally thousands of things we saw at CES, however, we'd consider only a handful of them to be truly stand-out products. One of those geek-lust worthy products, at least in our...

Couch potatoes who suffer from Internet addiction may want to steer clear of this one, lest they overdose with awesomeness. We're talking about Toshiba's new UX600 series LED TVs, which the company says combines high picture quality with Internet capability.LED is the latest buzz in TV tech and helps these new sets deliver a 3,000,000:1 contrast...

MSI today announced the launch of its R5870 and R5850 videocards in Twin Frozr II trim. What does that mean? Superior cooling performance, according to MSI, who claims that its specially cooled cards run up to 12C lower than ATI's reference cooling assembly.In order to lower temps by double digits, the Twin Frozr II cooler comes constructed...

When you think about the market for a pre-built, proverbial "Killer Gaming Rig," you have to consider the class of consumer that would have interest in this type of system. For the most part, the average do-it-yourselfer isn't going to take much interest here, save for perhaps the appreciation of all the bleeding-edge technology and design...

Why the sudden surge in Bluetooth headsets? Probably because America's largest cellphone trade show is going on in Las Vegas. CTIA has already delivered a snazzy new piece from BlueAnt, and Samsung Mobile is following that up with the introduction of the Modus. Also known as the HM3500, this "convertible-style" headset boasts dual microphone...

If there's one nation out there who really, really cares about the digital well-being of their citizens, it's Germany. Just a couple of months after the country warned the general public to avoid Internet Explorer due to a raft of security concerns, the government has now done likewise to an unexpected rival: Firefox. Once known as the runaway...

Oh, boy. 3D really might be taking over the world. In all honesty, we won't believe that until Google announces a 3D version of their search engine, but believe us, it's probably already in the works. Just when you thought there couldn't possibly be another 3D announcement on the horizon, Nintendo (of all companies!) comes out and hits the...

As a great song says, don't call it a comeback, they've been here for years. Motorola has become a fixture in the mobile phone industry, with the RAZR turning the industry into one that made the cellphone not just a tool, but a must-have accessory. The company slipped a bit over the past few years, but since the launch of the CLIQ, DROID and...

MicroSDHC. It's a card within the popular Secure Digital family, but it's one you don't hear about very often. It's extremely small, smaller than a thumbnail, and they're generally quite expensive and only useful for cellphone owners. You see, most MicroSDHC card slots are found on mobile phones, where a small card is needed to boost storage...

This spring, Verizon Wireless customers will get the ability to pay for online content and digital goods through their mobile phone accounts. To facilitate this capability, Verizon Wireless plans to roll out Danal’s BilltoMobile payment service. The BilltoMobile feature can be used when buying an item from Danal’s participating network of...

Asus has another addition for its Rampage line of high-end motherboards. This time around it's the Rampage III Extreme, otherwise known as the Rampage III "All That + Back Of Chips." It's not as if the company's Rampage II Extreme was exactly lacking in features, but here we have the Rampage III with a few goodies the Rampage II didn't carry....

Imation has become the first company to break the 1TB barrier in magnetic tape storage with a new LTO Ultrium Generation 5 tape cartridge capable of storing 1.5TB of uncompressed data or up to 3TB if compressed. Imation has been at the forefront of tape storage research for about a decade; the US National Institute of Standards and Technology...

We've all heard about the dangers of texting while driving. Study after study has shown the dangers and many organizations and states have responded with attempts to ban drivers from using their phones to send messages while behind the wheel. At the CTIA Wireless 2010 show, Safe Driving Systems plans to show off a new way to prevent texting...

One of the tools Microsoft developed to aid companies in transitioning from Windows XP to Windows 7 was a free virtualized copy of Windows XP. Once downloaded and installed, users with XP-specific applications could run them seamlessly alongside Windows 7. Inventing such a practical, useful tool apparently frightened someone at Microsoft and...

We're just around two weeks out from seeing a deluge of iPad news (given that it ships on April 3rd), and already companies are racing one another to get iPad-specific apps out on the App Store. A New York Ties report on the sprint has a few notable entries, and if companies really do put in the time and effort needed to create iPad apps that...

It's a USB flash drive, or is it? Active Media Products, which is a mainstay in the flash memory and storage industries, has just released a unique new take on the typical flash drive, and rather than usign the new USB 3.0 standard, they're choosing to use something else entirely: eSATA.eSATA is an underutilized port that transfers data far...

A key Microsoft kernel architect, David Probert, has come out with a surprising statement regarding Windows' ability to harness multiple cores. While Windows has taken advantage of multicore technology for over a decade, Probert notes that users rarely see the performance that they should. "Why should you ever, with all this parallel hardware,...

According to the latest stats from web tracking firm Statcounter, Internet Explorer has been losing ground in Europe, including big markets like France, Britain, and Italy. Hardly surprising given the sanctions imposed on Redmond by the European Union to include a so-called browser ballot with Windows.So far in March, IE's web surfing share...

Bluetooth headset usage has been declining for some time now, and for good reason. They often don't work well, and they always make the user look goofy. But a few companies have managed to stay afloat as the others have died off, with Jabra and BlueAnt being at the top of the heap.The latter company has just introduced a new Bluetooth headset...

If the latest reports turn out to be true, then Hewlett Packard might be doing a huge favor for Apple. According to Spanish paper Clipset, worst case scenario is that HP won't be shipping its Slate tablet until September, by which time Apple's iPad would have about a 5 month head start.We probably won't have to wait quite that long, but whether...

It's been just over a year since AMD completed its spinoff of GlobalFoundries in an attempt to radically change its own financial trajectory. The gamble appears to have paid off for both companies; we recently sat down with GlobalFoundries executives to talk about the company's first year and plans for the future. GlobalFoundries current...

In case you've been living under a rock, the "green" movement is out in full force. Companies have falling over themselves in order to push out "eco-friendly" products, and while some of this stuff is just marketing fluff, Sprint has made a solid effort to actually offer phones that are somewhat less damaging to our Earth. Just a few months...

Dell, in the smartphone world? Believe it or not, it's true! Dell got out of the handheld game when they killed the Axim PDA line a few years back, but with smartphones becoming more and more popular (not to mention profitable), Dell found it hard to resist. After well over a year of rumors of a "Mini 3," the Dell Aero has just surfaced on...

Wow. There had been rumors that webOS would be coming to AT&T, but just a few weeks after the carrier grabbed their first Android phone (Motorola's Backflip), Palm has announced that the Pre Plus and Pixi Plus will soon be on sale at AT&T. That leaves just T-Mobile USA out in America when looking at operators with webOS, but since...

Microsoft has confirmed that there's a service pack in the works for both Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 but the company isn't saying when it plans to release the updates—at least not yet. The fact that Windows 7 and Server 2008 R2 are built on the same code base should simplify SP1's development. Thus far, Server 2008 R2 seems to be...

It's a tablet-eat-tablet world out there, and with Apple's iPad starting a trend that isn't likely to die throughout 2010, you can imagine that all sorts of lesser-known contenders will be popping up with tablets and slates of their own in order to strike while the iron is hot. Today, Neofonie is introducing the WePad, a German-made unit that...

Earlier in the year, we had the opportunity to review Lenovo's ThinkPad Edge 13, a 13" ultraportable that was an affordable version of the classic ThinkPad that has been around for so many years in the business world. We didn't find that machine perfect for everyone, but there's a good chance that the 14" and 15" versions of the same rig might...

Customers of the antivirus/antimalware company BitDefender ran headfirst into a major problem over the weekend, courtesy of a (very) faulty virus definition update for systems using 64-bit flavors of Windows. After installation, users flooded the company's forums complaining that BD was now identifying every executable on the system as being...

For a while now, Microsoft has been attempting to attract users with its Bing search engine and gain a larger portion of the market share. A new statistic from Nielsen seems to show that Microsoft may be headed in the right direction. According to Nielsen, Bing's market share reached an all-time high in February with 12.5% of the market. What's...

Is the battery revolution upon us? Based on all the broken promises we've seen of revolutionary advancements over the past decade, we're guessing not, but we're certainly hopeful that EcoloCap Solutions is onto something. We've said for years now that battery life needs to improve in a big way on notebooks, and PC makers just need to be more...

We've heard "there's an app for that" countless times now, but is there an accessory for that? If "that" is talking about a MIDI interface, well, there is now. Line6--which is well known throughout the guitar and music industry as a high-quality company that products guitars, amps, effects and accessories--has just introduced the MIDI Mobilizer,...

If you haven't updated the driver for your laptop's touchpad lately, you may want to think about doing so, particularly if your laptop has a Synaptics touchpad. As a user on Hardware Zone forums discovered, there's a new driver from Synaptics that enables multitouch gestures as well as two-finger scrolling and three-finger click. What's really...

Uniforms, tighter schedules, banning of cellphones; could school possibly get any less organized? We're sure it could, but the higher-ups at Nintendo want to affect schools in a positive way by introducing their products into them, of course.  We have previously heard of Dance Dance Revolution being used in select Physical Education programs...

The Internet can be a pretty scary place, and apparently it can be pretty addicting too. Not that we're too worried about you checking back here for the 40th time today, but if you've found yourself having a tough time disconnecting in London, there might be some help just around the block. If you're willing to shuttle over and accept it....

When Palm demo'd the Pre a year ago in January, the phone was seen as the company's last chance to reverse its fortunes. Despite positive reviews and praise for the company's WebOS and Palm Pixi, the once-dominant cell phone and PDA manufacturer has continued to lose ground (and money). For Q3 2010 Palm reported a loss of $18.5 million. That's...

When we previewed Internet Explorer's new rendering engine this week we noted that the same features that made IE9's hardware-acceleration possible probably aren't compatible with Windows XP. Microsoft initially dodged giving a straight answer to the question of XP support but has since admitted that the new browser won't be XP-compatible...

The NPD Group released a statement today that points toward surprising growth in desktop sales this past February. Historically, desktop sales have trended steadily downwards for the past ten years; notebook shipments first surpassed desktop shipments in 2008. New data suggests the pendulum has oddly swung the other way—desktop unit sales...

The camcorder sector has largely grown without too much attention over the past few years. It just hasn't emerged as one of those "must-have" mainstream technologies, whereas netbooks, smartphones and tablet PCs are just about everywhere. A lot of innovation is still going on with camcorders though, and while many of them are somewhat boring,...

Microsoft's Xbox 360 Arcade console is about to get a lot more interesting, and a lot more viable. For most, the idea of buying the cheap(er) console and then buying an expensive Xbox 360 hard drive or 512MB Memory Unit was something that just added up to "too much." But in order to continually battle Sony and Nintendo, they are reportedly...

At its Mix10 conference this week, Microsoft revealed that its upcoming Windows Phone 7 OS will not offer copy / paste functionality. Instead, Microsoft hopes to predict when you would use such functionality and offer a single-tap alternative action. "Windows Phone 7 Series will not initially offer copy-and-paste; instead, we try to solve...

Another week, another new MSI notebook! The company just keeps on churning them out from every possible type of user, and the P600 has one particular group in mind: business users. the 15.6" P600 is the outfit's latest machine, but rather than being designed for hardcore gaming, it's designed to just get through the work day. It's loaded with...

The OLPC XO computer set out to change the way laptops were viewed and used in schools everywhere. It ended up costing a bit more to manufacture than originally planned, so it didn't make the vast impact than was intended. It still made a small impact, though, and now loads of poorer schools worldwide have computers that they otherwise wouldn't....

AT&T, as you may well know, is a U.S. cellphone operator. They provide cell service to millions of people, and they are the exclusive U.S. home of the iPhone. What AT&T is not, however, is a hardware company. Or maybe they are, judging by their most recent announcement. The company that sells wireless service to iPhone users across...

As it turns out, Google apparently wasn't bluffing when the company claimed it would close shop in China following complaints of censorship and a string of cyber-attacks. According to a report in a Beijing-based newspaper, the search giant will do exactly that."I have received information saying that Google will leave China on April 10, but...

Sprint is expected to unveil a WiMAX phone from HTC at the CTIA trade show next week. According to analysts, Sprint will show off the first WiMAX phone for its network on March 23 at the annual CTIA show. Previously, Sprint promised a WiMAX phone for sometime this year, but the carrier has not announced a launch date. The rumored phone would...

Car manufacturers often tout the peace of mind that comes from GPS devices that can help you recover a stolen car, unlock your car doors, etc. When used in the wrong hands, however, these devices can wreak havoc. After a man who was fired from a Texas auto dealership used an Internet service to remotely disable ignitions and set off car horns...

When Intel announced its plans to develop a discrete graphics card capable of scaling from the consumer market to high-end GPGPU calculations,  it was met with a mixture of scorn, disbelief, interest, and curiosity. Unlike the GPUs at SIGGRAPH in 2008 (or any of the current ones, for that matter), Larrabee was a series of in-order x86...

We've been having a bit of fun ourselves with a fancy 6-screen ATI Eyefinity setup in the HH labs, but someone obviously things that an even half-dozen may be "overkill" for some. So obviously, 5 is perfectly acceptable. Powercolor, which knows a thing or two about graphics cards, has just introduced their HD5770 Eyefinity 5, which features...

iBUYPOWER has never been one to get lapped by the other hardcore gaming PC makers, and following up on Core i7-980X related announcements from all of those other guys, this company has stepped it up by introducing not one, but four new overclock-ready Paladin systems. Better still, all four feature new Intel six-core processors, and all four...

Last week we reported that Dell's Adamo XPS was apparently dead after it vanished from the company's website, online store, and was listed as out-of-stock everywhere but a handful of Best Buys. It didn't make sense for Dell to have canceled the product just three months after shipping, but customer service reps at both Dell and BB were reporting...

Although Solid State Drives are all the rage lately, they comprise only a fraction of the overall desktop PC storage market. While SSDs are undeniably fast and enhance the overall user experience, they are also prohibitively expensive for many users and offer relatively low capacities. As such, traditional, spinning hard drives, with their...

In the early days of personal navigation devices, it wasn't unheard of for a PND to have preloaded maps of a single region rather than the entire U.S. Today, most PNDs come preloaded with a full map of the U.S.; many offer maps of Canada, Europe, and/or Mexico as well. Although having access to these maps can be useful, it can also be costly....

How often do you feel compelled to log into Facebook or Twitter and see what your friends are up to? An even bigger question is, would you ever shove your partner away during an intimate moment to see what's happening in your online world? If so, you're not only addicted to social networking, your priorities are also way out of whack.According...

We've been joking for years now that Google is taking over the world. Slowly but surely, our laugh is growing dim, because it actually does actually look like Google is doing their best to achieve global domination. First it was search domination, then it was e-mail domination, then it was breaking into the clean energy market, then announcing...

It has finally happened. Amazon has caved to the vocal minority, and Kindle for Mac has finally launched. It's funny timing, really, given just how close the world is to receiving the iPad and the iBookstore, but Amazon knows that it better get in on the Mac market while it can, and before Apple grabs hold like it has done with the music market/iTunes....

Gateway may not be the giant that Dell is anymore, but they're still hanging around and producing quality machines for a smaller crowd. The company has just announced an expansion for their EC Series, with the new EC14D boasting something that most 11.6" machines don't: an optical drive. The new EC14D01h (full model number) has an 11.6" widescreen...

iLuv has managed to hold their own in the volatile iPod accessory market, and now they're one of the biggest names in the iPod clock market. Amazingly enough, it seems that not everyone has one of these yet, because iLuv just keeps cranking them out. The newest one is a bit different than the others, though, with the iMM190 App Station coming...

Oh brother. We get the feeling that a monster has been created. In just over a year's time, 3D has managed to take over nearly every part of the entertainment world. 3D is now in cinemas, homes, video games, Blu-ray movies, and even on TV commercials. It's the new "big thing." And we all know what happens each time a new "big thing" comes...

Acer plans to add the Aspire TimelineX 1830T to its lineup. This laptop measures less than an inch thick and weighs 3 pounds. It has an 11.6-inch screen with a resolution of 1366 x 768 pixels and integrated graphics. Reports have it that this notebook will offer a Core i5 520UM processor with a base clock speed of 1.06GHz. Using Intel's Turbo...

Would you look at that? Soon after we learned of an AT&T-friendly version of the Google Nexus One smartphone, Sprint is coming out with an announcement of its own to let us know that it too will carry the Nexus One. So why would you choose one variant of this phone over the other? Sprint hopes its coverage will help: The wireless carrier...

The hardware specifications for the components in the XBox 360 or Playstation 3 may not have changed since launch day, but semiconductor manufacturing has advanced significantly. Supposedly leaked photos of a new XBox 360 motherboard indicate that Microsoft could be poised to take advantage of that fact. If the image is real (and it might...

T-Mobile has officially announced the release details for the upcoming HTC HD2 smartphone. You can expect the HD2 to be available Wednesday, March 24 for $199.99 with a two-year contract. It will also be available without the two-year contract on an Even More Plus service plan for $449.99. The HD2 boasts of a 4.3-inch capacitive, high-resolution...

PayPal revealed a new Send Money application for the iPhone and iPod touch. With version 2.0, you'll get secure mobile access to your PayPal account as well as Bump money transfers, Split Check, and Collect Money features. With Bump, you simply put two iPhones together to transfer money from one owner's account to the other's. The Split Check...

Digital Storm is completely and fully on the Core i7 bandwagon. Just a day after the custom PC builder announced that Intel's benchmark warrior (that would be the Core i7-980X Extreme Edition) would be present in their consumer desktops, now the company is bringing the same chip to their most powerful workstation.Engineered to suit the needs...

Some blunders are entirely understandable, like forgetting to put your pants on before walking out in public (we've all been there, right? Right?). Others have you scratching your head wondering 'what the frack were they thinking?' Google's latest move falls into the latter category, but we're getting ahead of ourselves. In a blog post this...

Motorola was all but dead in the cellphone world just 2 years ago. A DROID, CLIQ and DEVOUR later, and it's hard to believe these guys ever went anywhere. Motorola is firmly back on track in the smartphone arena, and the CLIQ XT is yet another fantastic addition to their portfolio. Launched today solely on T-Mobile USA, this Androd-based phone...

iTunes has the music market locked down in some ways, but there are still subscription-based services out there gaining traction simply because it's a market that Apple has shunned. There's no way to pay iTunes a monthly premium in order to stream as much music as you'd like, but that functionality will soon be coming to the iPhone anyway.MOG...

Spring Design voiced their intentions to jump into the ebook market late last year, and even at CES we were led to believe that the Alex e-reader would ship by February. It's obviously March, and the Alex is still not in the hands of consumers. But that's the bad news; the good news is that one of the world's first dual-screen e-readers is...

Intel's new Core i7-980X Extreme Edition processor rocked our benchmarking lab, and now it's ready to rock your own computer den. The chip has already landed on a bunch of new machines (or old machines with refreshed specifications) Velocity Micro wants to make sure that they are also an option when it comes time to select a new 980X-based...

See that headline? If you'd asked us last week if we'd ever use the word "sexy" to describe a browser—particularly a Microsoft browser—we'd have beaten you with a stack of TPS reports. This week, well, it's a different story. The actual IE9 browser isn't available for download yet, but Microsoft has made what it calls the Internet Explorer...

MAINGEAR is expanding its lineup to offer the new Intel Core i7 980X 6-core processor. The MAINGEAR SHIFT is part of the company's high performance consumer desktop lineup. In addition to the new Intel processor, the SHIFT now boasts of SATA 6G which enables Crucial’s new RealSSD C300 to reach speeds of 335 MB/s on sustained reads. MAINGEAR...

Western Digital introduced new 1TG and 750GB My Passport SE for Mac portable USB drives. The new drives are currently available at WD's online store and are formatted for Mac and compatible with Apple Time Machine software. The drives are USB powered and feature 256-bit hardware encryption with password protection. WD Introduces New One Terabyte...

EUROCOM has been known to go overboard when it comes to notebooks, though some may say they're just going beyond the call of duty in order to offer up cutting-edge products to their customers. Intel's new Core i7-980X "Gulftown" has been quite the hit in the desktop world, but given the massive heat output, it has yet to find its way into...

When it comes to hardware-accelerated PhysX and the future of GPGPU computing AMD and NVIDIA are the modern-day descendents of the Hatfields and McCoys. Both companies attended GDC last week, where a completely predictable war broke out over PhysX, physics, developer payoffs, and gamer interest in PhysX (or the lack thereof). The brouhaha...

CyberPower is rolling out a new series of high-end gaming rigs based on Intel's Gulftown processor. CyberPower's top of the line Black Pearl, Gamer Xtreme 3D, and Fang Series Black Mamba gaming systems will offer the Intel Core i7-980X Extreme Edition Processor. In addition, the entire line of X58 systems will offer the Core i7-980X option....

Many people forget that Microsoft is a hardware company as well as a software company. There's no question that Windows, Windows Mobile and now Windows Phone 7 Series gets the majority of the attention, but the Zune HD, their line of mice and keyboards, and even their webcams are certainly deserving of a look. Today, the Redmond-based giant...

ZOTAC is best known for a couple of things: intense graphics card, and powerful small form factor PCs. Today, the company is touching on both of its core values with the introduction of the world's first ION Upgrade Kits. This is a huge boon for anyone looking to get a little more horsepower behind their existing shell.The ION Upgrade Kit...

Gamers come in all shapes and sizes, and believe it or not, not all of them prefer to game with the same hand. There's no doubt that right-handed gamers are catered to more often than not, while left-handed gamers are usually left to fend for themselves. Today, Razer is making life a lot easier for left-handed in-game snipers, with the first...

Digital Storm has been fighting tooth and nail to make a name for themselves in the gaming desktop area, and there's hardly a better way to do that than by putting the world's fastest CPU into one of their desktops. And then overclocking it. The company's massive Black|OPS desktop is now available to order with Intel's Core i7 980X Extreme...

Building a Home Theater PC is often times a much better option for enabling your entertainment center for various forms of digital media playback capability.  Rather than stepping up to additional discrete components, like a stand-alone Blu-ray, DVD or CD player, why not really infuse your living room entertainment center with real intelligence...

Gaming headsets are becoming more and more popular with online gaming becoming a more well-integrated aspect of gaming in general, and Astro Gaming has been at the forefront of the revolution. The new Astro A30 Cross-Gaming Headset uses the same audio and voice communication DNA in the A40, but it utilizes a lightweight, street-styled design...

Show of hands - who out there is drinking the Apple flavored Kool-Aid? If everyone's being honest, then look around and you'll likely see a lot of limbs flailing about, and certainly a good number more than if we would have asked this question one year ago. Why is that? According to market research firm NPD, retail sales of Mac computers in...

It's half awesome, half scary. There's a line where helpful because downright invasive, and Google seems to always be creeping up on it. First came Buzz, a new social network that many found too invasive due to the auto-add feature and the extremely small "disable" button at the bottom of Gmail. Now, mobile Google searches for products can...

It wasn't so long ago that Apple's CEO Steve Jobs was introducing the original iPhone to the world, and on hand to help him do it was none other than Eric E. Schmidt, the chief executive of Google. Google played a huge role in the software side of the iPhone, as both the Google App, integrated Google search within Mobile Safari and Google...

Intel announced its new Xeon 5600 series today in a move the company claims is great for server admins, businesses concerned about security, world peace, and puppies. (We made those last two up). The new chips (codenamed Gulftown) are basically identical to the ultra-high-end Core i7-980X that Intel launched recently, with the exception...

To commemorate the Valentine's Day holiday, we announced an exciting sweepstakes, along with our friends at Cyberpower PC, in which we planned to give away a custom, fully loaded Intel Core i7-powered system, complete with 4GB of RAM, an ATI Radeon HD 5870 graphics card, and a Kingston SSD--among numerous other goodies. The response we received...

Fans of the reimagined Battlestar: Galactica TV series and its spinoff Caprica have another title to look forward to in a few months. At GDC last week, German game-developer Bigpoint announced it's developing a BSG-themed MMO designed for browser-based play across a wide variety of devices. The developer wants the game to scale well enough...

3D TV may be the wave of the future, but the technology definitely has some hurdles to overcome first. For one, the cost of the 3D glasses that are typically sold separately from the television add a chunk of change to the overall price of 3D entertainment. To make matters worse, most of the glasses available today are only compatible with...

Kingston Technology Creates World’s Fastest Memory — Intel Certifies HyperX Clocked at 2400MHz Fountain Valley, CA -- March 15, 2010 -- Kingston Technology Company, Inc., the independent world leader in memory products, today announced it has developed the fastest Intel-certified memory in the world. Running at 2400MHz, Kingston’s HyperX®...

It's been a few months since we've talked much about the FTC's investigation of Intel's alleged abusive, monopolistic behavior but the case isn't sitting still. NVIDIA is a major party of the inquiry and the GPU manufacturer has just launched a new area within its own site dubbed "The Case For Innovation" detailing the findings and documents...

TomTom has a lot of weight on their shoulders. They're consistently looked at as one of the top dogs in navigation, and thus expectations are extremely high. That's particularly true on the iPhone and iPod touch, where TomTom's app was the first major one into the App Store and the only one that Apple actually spoke of by name during a keynote....

The Game Developers Conference just wrapped up in California, but one lingering piece of news that didn't quite make the cut for the show has emerged today. NVIDIA has just announced that their 3DTV Play is making its debut, enabling consumers to connect their GeForce GPU-powered computer to newer 3D HDTVs that are equipped with HDMI 1.4....

Last week, OCZ hit below the $100 belt with a new affordable solid state drive for the performance-minded market, and now Intel is doing something similar. In a race to the bottom (dollar wise) that has been evading us for far too long, it looks as if SSDs may finally be on their way to consumer-levels in terms of pricing. Even as SSD prices...

We imagine the suits over at the FCC must be big fans of the movie Top Gun, because a major new Internet policy that's about to be unveiled proves someone in Washington feels the need for speed. We're talking about a policy that would task ISPs with putting 100Mbps speeds in place at 100 million American homes within the next decade.That's...

Just this past week, the Game Developers Conference was held in downtown San Francisco, CA. If you're unfamiliar with GDC, it is the "world's largest professionals-only game industry event." In other words, everyday gaming enthusiast can't just walk in off the street to take a look around. GDC is held every spring and is basically a forum...

Messaging and mobile data could not possibly be hotter right now, and AT&T knows it. The company has just debuted four new messaging phones for their Spring lineup, perfect for those who just came back from Spring Break with a "lost, stolen, missing or otherwise broken" cellphone. We know there are quite a few of you in that camp too,...

3D just might be taking over the world, but that's perfectly okay in NVIDIA's eyes. The company has been on the forefront of 3D technology within gaming ever since their 3D Vision kit hit the market, and it's widely viewed as the best 3D solution out there for gamers looking for additional depth in their gameplay.At the GDC Expo in California,...

With March Madness kicking off in a matter of days, there's really no better time for this announcement to come. ESPN has managed to get themselves onto a variety of platforms: radio, television, Internet, mobile, etc. One thing that Sprint has going for them that all of the other U.S. carriers don't is a little deal with the nation's biggest...

This weekend the weather has been acting up here in the Northeast.  We've had some torrential rains causing localized flooding and the wind has been fierce, giving us the feeling that Mother Earth has decided to kick up her wrath a bit, forcing us all to seek shelter indoors.  Or, perhaps, the change in atmosphere has nothing to...

In the spirit of Valentine's Day, we thought it would be fun to give away yet another awesome gaming system! In conjunction with our good friends at CyberPower PC, with support from Thermaltake, Gigabyte, Kingston, XtremeGear, and Sapphire, we’ve put together a killer rig to give away to celebrate Valentine's Day! This time around, you...

Barnes & Noble plans to offer a version of its eReader software designed for the iPad. The eReader will enable users to access more than one million eBooks, magazines, and newspapers in the Barnes & Noble eBookstore as well as content in a user's own Barnes & Noble digital library. Even though the iPad will compete against Barnes...

Approximately 3-6 months after it rolls out its faster 4G network based on the LTE standard, Verizon Wireless is expected to begin offering a phone that will take advantage of LTE's faster speeds. According to Anthony Melone, chief technology officer at Verizon, the first LTE phones will have two radio chip sets. This will enable them to work...

Okoro Media Systems has been making HTPCs (and little else) for years on end, and they're quietly becoming a force in the media center PC market. They specialize in making computers that work well in a living room setting, and their newest generation of HTPCs is proof of why they're staying at the top: offering cutting edge components.With...

Packard Bell. That's a name that takes you back in time, huh? Believe it or not, Packard Bell hasn't gone anywhere in the U.K., and they're actually a fairly popular brand across the Atlantic. It's actually kind of a shame that the company isn't doing much else in America any more, as this is one of the most useful products we've seen in the...

Dell has been quite busy beefing up their notebook line, but one area that has seen little to no attention over the past few months is the LCD. Dell is a huge seller of LCD monitors, but because they aren't as flashy as new notebooks, new tablet PCs or new desktops, we suppose that they haven't been marketing the new releases as hard.That...

Opera Software released an Android version of its popular Opera Mini 5 beta web browser. According to Opera, the mobile browser compresses data by up to 90%, making pages load more quickly. In order to achieve this boost in speed, the browser is actually a proxy-based browser that connects to Opera's servers. These servers compress the data...

The Khronos Group that maintains the OpenGL API launched two new flavors of the specification at the Games Developer Conference (GDC) this week. OpenGL 4.0 is designed to update the API to DirectX 11-level functionality, while the 3.3 release is meant to allow previous generations of OGL hardware (presumably 3.x-compliant cards) to take advantage...

Broadband speed tests are nothing new, but the FCC is offering Internet users a chance to weigh in on just how fast connections are across the country. Unlike regular speed tests, the FCC's program records the street address from which the program is run (no other personal information is requested). I'd really prefer a plan that didn't make...

If we told you that the trend in technology was towards the mobile side, you probably wouldn't be surprised. Think about how much mobile news you've seen over the past few years, and try to think if you had ever seen or heard that much mobile news in the 10 years prior. The smartphone has emerged as a must-have tool in society, whereas it...

Experience TwonkyMedia Server on Thecus NAS 3/11/2010 - In today’s digitized world, NAS devices have become a part of our everyday life as more and more people are integrating NAS into their home networks to stream, share and store digital contents. With the aim to enhance the user’s home digital entertainment experience, Thecus Technology,...

At first, we suspected this was all a joke. And in the end, it may wind up being exactly that. But right now, there's a real possibility that the Internet could be nominated to wind the next Nobel Peace Prize. You may be chuckling right now, but don't be surprised if this idea doesn't gain a huge amount of traction. There's seems to be quite...

Hot the heels of Intel's announcement of its shiny, new flagship Core i7-980X Extreme Edition 6-Core processor, custom builder Origin PC has added the 980X to its on-line system configurator. Perhaps more interesting than the almost immediate integration of the Core i7-980X Extreme, despite Intel's claim that the CPU wouldn't be...

After a month-long online campaign to promote its launch, Pentax is finally unveiling the 645D medium format digital camera. This is the first digital version of the company's 645 medium format camera system. It features a 40 megapixel, 44 x 33 CCD sensor as well as a 921k dot 3.0-inch LCD. The camera is compatible with the existing 645 system...

It wasn't supposed to happen this way. Back when all three consoles were just spec sheets and demo units it was Microsoft vs. Sony and Blu-ray vs. HD DVD. Even the pundits who thought the Wii's motion control interface could win it market share weren't predicting that the modest device would prove as popular as the XBox and PS3 combined. Both...

One of the biggest complaints surrounding Apple's iPhone OS is the lack of multitasking support, and it's a valid one. But if the latest rumor proves to be true, critics will soon be silenced, or at least redirect their disgust squarely on the lack of Flash integration.Citing "people with a proven track record in predicting Apple's technological...

We're not usually ones to call a company "on fire," but MSI is definitely just that. Notebook after notebook has been announced from the company over the past week or two, and instead of taking Friday off, these guys and girls have popped out a real stunner. The GE700 is the company's latest big boy, a 17" gaming and entertainment machine...

We are back again this week to talk about some more happenings in the HotHardware world with our friends at TechVi. Topics include Intel's new Core i7-980X Extreme 6-Core processor, a couple of home theater friendly machines from Toshiba and Dell, fake Core i7-920 processors from NewEgg, and Android's rapid growth in adoption rate in the mobile...

Battery research is one of those things that continues to frustrate us. How long have we been dealing with AA batteries that die out way too quickly? How long have standard sized notebooks been stuck with batteries that can't last over 3 to 4 hours in heavy use scenarios? Far too long in our estimation, and we're eager for a change. Of course,...

Sony's PS3 is getting an upgrade in the form of HD movie content from all six of the major movie studios. Walt Disney Pictures, 20th Century Fox, Paramount Pictures, Sony Pictures Entertainment, Universal Pictures, and Warner Bros. will offer HD movies for purchase and rental on the PlayStation Network video delivery service in the United...

It's no secret that American broadband isn't as robust from a national perspective as it could be, particularly when compared to other nations. Virgin Media a major broadband player in the United Kingdom, and they have pushed for faster speeds in the home for years now. They were responsible for rolling out one of the first commercial 100Mbps...

Today's the day. And yes, by that we mean it's Friday. But also, Apple has a tempting offer for those wanting to jump on the (second) tablet PC bandwagon, as the iPad has just gone up for pre-order. Apple will arguably be first to market with one of these next-generation tablet PCs, and while we are not yet told whether a Tegra (or Tegra 2)...

3D is the tech story of the year in 2010, with tablet PCs following closely behind. 3D is now everywhere: in cinemas, in HDTVs, and soon, in video games. Sony already admitted that 3D games would eventually be released for the PlayStation 3, and now Darkworks is making 3D possible for everyone else. At GDC in California this week, the company...

OnLive just announced that their remote gaming service would finally launch on June 17, 2010, and already a major competitor has stepped up to create a bit of competition. InstantAction is a company that's offering a new way to game, and as with most everything else these days, it's highly connected to the cloud and highly different from the...

The specs and capabilities of modern smartphones/handheld devices have been increasing rapidly for several years and according to the GPU developers of Imagination Technologies, the sky's the limit. The company owns and develops the PowerVR 3D architecture that dominates the mobile 3D segment; company reps at GDC this week have told journalists...

Not every high-end, haute couture product turns out to be a bestseller—even Steve Jobs had the Cube—but it's rather odd for a manufacturer to design, advertise, tease, and launch a product only to pull it off the market barely four months later. Nevertheless, that's the news from Dell on the Adamo XPS. The Adamo product line will continue...

Zotac announced its upcoming next-generation-based Ion system at the beginning of March and has firmed up its launch plans and final system price. The ZBox (model number HD-ID11) is going to be a bit more expensive than what we were initially quoted; instead of $209.99, the ZBox will sell for $239.99. That's still significantly lower than...

Active Media Products has a thing for tossing out new storage solutions when you least expect thing, and today they're doing just that with an all new SSD in a form factor that doesn't get nearly enough attention. The 2.5" drive, which fits nicely inside of notebooks, gets the most SSD action, while desktops and portable media players get...

The latest quarterly smartphone results are in from market research firm comScore, and surprise-surprise, Google's Android platform continues to rock the marketplace while everyone else looks on.According to comScore, smartphone usage is up 18 percent in the latest quarter, sitting just shy of 43 million users. And while Google's Android OS...

Samsung announced two new portable media players that promise high quality movie and video capabilities as well as a superior audio experience in a compact design. The new R1 has a 2.4-inch TFT LCD touch screen and supports up to 50 hours of audio and four hours of video playback. The R0 has a 2.6-inch LCD and tactile keys for easy navigation....

Palm used the Game Developers Conference to announce a public beta version of its webOS Plug-in Development Kit (PDK). The company is also showing off new games from early PDK developers at the conference. Palm tells us more about the PDK: The PDK complements the Palm webOS Software Development Kit (SDK), letting developers use C and C++ alongside...

Samsung's new eReader will soon be available in the U.S. The Samsung eReader was initially previewed at CES in January. From the eReader, users can access content, write notes directly on the page, highlight content, and share notes with friends. The Samsung eReader offers Wi-Fi connectivity, advanced handwriting capabilities, and access to...

Nintendo has their Wii remote, Microsoft will soon have their Project Natal, and now, Sony has their PlayStation Move. At the GDC '10 conference in San Francisco, the maker of the PS3 decided to cut loose and unveil the "next generation" in console control, though it's really just a sophisticated improvement upon the PlayStation Eye that has...

Although they are not due to hit store shelves for a few more weeks, Intel is using the always exciting Game Developers Conference currently being held in San Francisco to officially unveil the new Core i7-980X Extreme processor. Intel's Extreme Edition processors have always been targeted at ultra enthusiasts and hardcore-gamers, so what...

Earlier this week we covered the news that nearly 80 percent of all Internet users worldwide feel that Internet access is a right. In a week, the FCC will present its specific plan for bringing broadband Internet to the estimated 35 percent of Americans who currently either don't have or can't get such service. A new brief discussing the organizations...

Western Digital has found a pretty safe spot when it comes to external storage, and anyone who has followed the industry for any amount of time will notice that the My Book and My Passport lines haven't changed much over the years. Today, WD is adding a slight twist to the existing My Passport line by introducing the My Passport AV Portable...

Just when you were beginning to think "vaporware," OnLive has delivered in the clutch. Nearly a year after being introduced to the world as the future of remote gaming, this service has finally left the "informational" stage at the GDC Expo in California. For those who missed out on last year's news, OnLive is basically an online streaming...

Mmm, don't you love the sweet scent of corporate upgrade season? It's the most wonderful time of the year! For those offices that can't justify the bulk purchase of Dell's Precision M4500, there's the new Vostro 3000. This machine slides into Dell's "affordable" business lineup, one that has become progressively more attractive over the years...

Never has the phrase "you have to pay to play" been more applicable than it is to the SSD market. Solid state drives trump their mechanical brethren in just about every way, including speed, power consumption, and durability, but one area where HDDs still hold an advantage is in price.It should come as great news, then, that OCZ has broken...

There is just never a break any more, is there? You know we're talking about a break in the flow of notebooks; if it's not HP or Lenovo or MSI, it's Dell or Asus or Acer. Almost every single day a new laptop is emerging, and today Dell is taking it to the business world with the introduction of the "world's most powerful 15.6" mobile workstation."...

Here's something we have always despised: tangled cords. Here's something we have always loved: flat HDMI cables. Now, headphone maker JAYS is making what amounts to our perfect product: earbuds with tangle-free, flat cabling. We can't believe it has taken this long for someone to do it (on lower-end models), but we're thrilled that this little...

Intel, at a gaming conference? Yes, it's true, and there is big news coming from the company today at GDC '10. While developers and software engineers gather in San Francisco to discuss the future of gaming, Intel is making a few announcements that they hope will shape the future of PC gaming. With Steam rolling out to (Intel-based) Macs this...

Lenovo proved at the Consumer Electronics Show in January that it wasn't messing around when it comes to latest generation of notebook technologies. The company has a vast array of options, from tiny to huge, and they span the gamut from casual road warriors to hardcore business users. There's also a machine or two in there for the gaming...

Including room and board, it now costs over $50,000 per year to attend Stanford University. That's a lot of cash to cough up to send your son or daughter to the second ranked university in the world (according to the Academic Ranking of World Universities), but money well spent when you consider your offspring will be tackling the tough issues,...

Bicyclists will now be able to figure out the best route to take to work or on recreational rides using Google Maps in the United States. Google announced the addition of biking directions to the maps this morning, unveiling it at the National Bike Summit in Washington, D.C. Bicyclists will be able to get step-by-stepbike-specific route suggestions,...

MSI has an itch, and obviously the only solution is to just ship more machines. After announcing the availability of the X-Slim X360 and the Wind U160 earlier in the week, the company has now said that two versions of the Wind12 U230 are also making their way out to consumers. This machine takes the place of the popular Wind12 U210, with the...

As smartphone use has increased, we've seen more and more instances where wireless networks get jammed as data-hungry users attempt to surf the Web and perform other tasks from their handhelds. These wireless carriers could soon get relief from a somewhat unexpected source—cable companies. Time Warner Cable is trying to sell wireless carriers...

Since August 2009, Verizon Wireless has been testing its upcoming 4G LTE network in Boston and Seattle. Now, the wireless carrier wants to boast about the test results. The trials have shown the network is capable of peak download speeds of 40 to 50Mbps and peak upload speeds of 20 to 25Mbps. In addition, the tests have shown average LTE data...

Check monthly console sales from the XBox's launch in 2005 to the present day, and Sony's PS3 lags both the XBox 360 and the Wii. According to the most recent data available, Sony has sold 33.5 million PS3's, Microsoft is at 39 million XBox 360s, and Nintendo has moved 67.45 million Wiis. It comes as something of a surprise, then, to hear...

Back in the early 1960s, Bell Aerosystems developed and demonstrated the Bell Rocket Belt. It was the first successful jetpack, capable of reaching speeds of up to 30 mph, could travel up to 30 feet vertically, and had a maximum range of ~400 feet. It weighed 120 lbs loaded and flew for a whopping 21s on a single tank of fuel. Unsurprisingly,...

A few weeks ago we covered a controversial case that erupted in Pennsylvania's Lower Merion School district. A student at the district, Blake Robbins, was disciplined for activities that allegedly occurred in the privacy of his own home. The district's evidence for said activities was a photo taken by Robbin's school-issued notebook without...

Docking stations are great; they allow notebooks to become entirely more functional at one's main work desk, and they allow them to become connected with an array of already-place peripherals (printers, mice, monitors, etc.) The only problem that is few notebooks are designed with docking stations that match perfectly, and those that are are...

It's hard to believe that just over a year ago, we began to hear rumors that 3D films would be coming to the cinema. Now, every Dreamworks Animation picture ever will be made for 3D, and almost every major blockbuster (Avatar, Alice in Wonderland, etc.) that hits the silver screen has a 3D couterpart for those who want additional depth (and...

Promising to change the Internet as we know it? Far too many companies say this without any real meaning behind it, but Cisco might actually have something that could truly revolutionize the way we enjoy the world wide web. But as with most things that have a Cisco label, it will basically all be done behind the scenes. The CRS-3 Carrier Routing...

In just a few weeks, Apple will finally release its much hyped iPad to the public, and if Apple has its way, the iPad will do for the tablet space what the iPod did for media player market and iPhone did for the smartphone sector. In other words, it will set the bar by which all competitor products are measured, no matter how loud the anti-Apple...

Just when you think you've got your head around Asus' Eee PC netbook family, another one is born. As the siblings continue to increase in number, it's getting harder and harder to keep track of which machine is which, but one thing is for sure: this new one is one of the most promising Eee PCs yet. The Eee PC 1005PR ships with Windows 7 Starter,...

Wireless charging, believe it or not, isn't really new any more. It has been around in one form or another for years now, and Palm's Touchstone brought the technology firmly into the smartphone field. Powermat also has adapters that enable pretty much any smartphone to benefit from contact charging, but Case-Mate is hoping to step things up...

Just because Microvision's SHOW WX laser pico projector shipped somewhere in the world, it doesn't mean that U.S. consumers have been able to easily find one. Today, the company announced that their flagship product is now available and on sale in America, with a special limited edition bundle heading things up. Starting now, the Standard...

MSI has been steamrolling lately, with a whole bunch of new notebooks hitting the market recently to suit those looking for netbooks, business machines and multimedia power houses. The latest machine to prop up MSI's lineup is the X-Slim X360, which comes equipped with a Core i5 CPU, Intel's Turbo Boost/Hyper-Threading technology, 9 hours...

MSI's new Wind U160 netbook is now available for purchase. This is the second netbook in MSI's lineup to feature the Pine Trail platform. The U160 is powered by an Intel Atom N450 processor and comes with 1GB of DDR2 memory, a 160GB hard drive, and a 6-cell battery that MSI claims can last for up to 15 hours in ECO mode. The U160 is MSI's...

Yesterday, we brought you news that a batch of Core i7 processors that shipped out of NewEgg had been complete fakes. The boxes in question looked real enough from the outside, but opening the cardboard revealed "fans" that were actually stickers and processors made of aluminum. and a bit of paint. At the time we identified D&H Distributing...

Energizer has discontinued the sale of its Duo Charger/USB Charger due to a vulnerability in the Windows-based software that was supposed to be downloaded to support it.The devices allowed users to charge nickel metal hydride batteries from either a wall socket or a USB connection. The documentation with the charger suggested users download...

There's been a fair amount of chatter surrounding Microsoft's upcoming Windows Phone 7, but thus far the software developer has been reluctant to reveal much in the way of details. On Friday, Microsoft's partner group manager for Windows Mobile, Charlie Kindel, announced via blog entry that developers of current or hypothetical future Windows...

VALVE TO DELIVER STEAM & SOURCE ON MACLeading Gaming Service Expands to Mac Platform March 8, 2010 - Valve announced today it will bring Steam, Valve's gaming service, and Source, Valve's gaming engine, to the Mac.Steam and Valve's library of games including Left 4 Dead 2, Team Fortress 2, Counter-Strike, Portal, and the Half-Life series...

ASUS Leads Again with Exclusive CPU Core Unlocking TechnologyASUS M4A89GTD PRO Series Motherboards transform various AMD dual and tri-core processors into performance shredding Quad Cores! Fremont, California -- ASUS continues its innovation leadership with the first AMD 890GX based motherboards featuring SATA 6Gb/s, USB 3.0, and exclusive...

We've already covered AMD's upcoming Magny-Cours processor and associated Maranello server platform in some detail, but AMD is apparently wanting to build some buzz around its new hardware. Over at his AMD blog, AMD's director of product marketing John Fruehe recently spilled the beans on a 48-core contest. The AMD Server team is kicking...

If you could design your own laptop in an effort to have the perfect balance of performance, price, size, weight, and features, what would you include and what could you live without? As part of its Blue Label program, Best Buy asked that question of its customers--accepting as much feedback as its customers could give and then channeling...

What could you do with 8 physical cores of CPU processing power? Probably not a whole lot on the desktop front (save for you Folding@Home fanatics), but in the server sector, Intel's upcoming 8-core Nehalem-EX chip is pretty big news, and it's launching later this month, according to Intel Xeon Platform Director, Shannon Poulin.The announcement...

Last month, Google shook up the ISP landscape in a big way, and all with the stroke of the (digital) pen. The company announced that they would soon begin testing a 1Gbps home fiber network, which could provide home Internet speeds that could only be realized in one's imagination before. Needless to say, Americans began to get hopeful, and...

Right now, smartphones are all the rage. Every new phone that comes out seems like a smartphone, and if it's not, it gets overlooked and brushed aside within hours of being announced. Put simply, if a phone can't check your e-mail or update your Twitter status, it really has no place in American society right now. It's an interesting situation,...

Broadband Internet. It's a luxury that many of us take for granted, and if it goes out even for a few minutes, we get up in arms about the outage. We expect it to always be there, and we expect it to always work perfectly. Frankly, we don't give a single thought as to how life was pre-broadband. In fact, we probably complain more often than...

We aren't sure what took so long, but we're very glad that the wait is over. Google's Android operating system has made an indelible mark on the smartphone market segment, and it's the first major OS to rival the iPhone in a serious way. Palm's webOS was certainly revolutionary, but not enough mainstream consumers have bought in for Apple...

For the longest time, there were two main choices when it came to selecting a digital camera. You either purchased a DSLR, or you purchased a point and shoot. Needless to say, both of these options provided drastically different results, and there has been little in the middle to satisfy those who didn't want to jump into one camp or the other....

Apple decided it would take Oscar night as its opportunity to unveil its first official iPad commercial for the world, for their sake, to hopefully covet.  There is little question Apple certainly knows how to dress up a product sexy but with the harsh criticism the iPad has gotten in the press during this pre-launch time window, it's...

It's not often that we hear credible reports that a driver may have caused actual, physical harm to a video card, but that's precisely what an unhappy group of users has done. According to reports, the latest series of Forceware (196.75) caused certain cards to overheat or fail altogether due to a fan control problem. NVIDIA has pulled the...

Ubisoft's eagerly awaited Silent Hunter 5 was released last week as the first title carrying the company's new DRM system. That system, as we've previously discussed, requires that gamers maintain a constant Internet connection or be kicked from the game. One of the major flaws in that system was the fact that the game wasn't saved before...

You know what's even better than weird news? Weird news well-flavored with legal stupididy, that's what. Our saga today starts with a shipping oddity; specifically the fact that Overclockers.com forum member Dreadrok ordered a Core i7 920 from Newegg and received a completely fake processor. It's a good fake, too—if it weren't for a few misspellings...

We've been good friends with the folks at Ars Technica for many years now.  Not only does their fearless leader Ken Fisher, hail originally from the Boston area (which of course makes us a bit partial), where HotHardware also had its start, but there is little arguing that the Ars team punches out high quality, informative and engaging...

Here's a name you haven't heard in awhile: Sceptre. The company has been making LCDs, TVs and other monitors for years now, but it has definitely been awhile since it was able to product something to take on the offerings out now from Dell, Samsung, Sharp and the rest of the gang. Making a play for business in the "my current LCD is too tiny"...

While speaking at the Morgan Stanley Technology, Media, and Telecom Conference, Peter Klein, Microsoft's chief financial officer, revealed some interesting numbers about Windows 7, Xbox LIVE, and a few other Microsoft products. More specifically, Microsoft has sold 90 million copies of Windows 7 to date, making it the fastest-selling operating...

There's no doubt that tablet PCs are all the rage in 2010, but that big-screen bandwagon seems to be bleeding over into various other realms of consumer electronics. Take Mio, for example. The relatively unknown navigation company has made big waves this past week at CeBIT thanks to the unveiling of their Moov V780. What makes this unit stand...

People don't pay much mind to the fact that Walmart, Sears and loads of other retailers shy away from selling wildly explicit material, but when it comes Apple, it seems that everyone is keeping a close eye on what they do. Just a few months after the company announced that it would be yanking some sexually-related apps from the App Store...

Do you know who is currently the world's most "admired" company? According to recent reports, that would be Apple. Even though the company has less than 10% of the global PC operating system market share, Steve Jobs has managed to create a force that has permeated throughout the consumer electronics realm, and the mindshare battle is clearly...

Verizon Wireless is planning to introduce two new phones from Microsoft in May or June according to sources familiar with the matter. The new phones will target teenagers and will offer easy access to social networking sites and keyboards for text messaging. Reports claim the phones will be made by Sharp and will have the Microsoft and Verizon...

When a game developer releases a demo, it's typically intended to entice players into first trying and then purchasing the full version. In keeping with that goal, demo versions of a game are (usually) designed to be fun. This is the stuff of Game Design 101 for most of us, but a crack team of cutting-edge gaming researchers at Sony have applied...

Tom Peterson over at NVIDIA gets all the chicks.  I mean with his technical know-how, witty banter and boyish good looks, it's easy to see why.  Okay, maybe that's not why.  Maybe it's because he gets daily hands-on time with the soon to be released but not yet, NVIDIA GeForce GTX 480, otherwise known as GF100.  Not only...

AT&T has expanded the "compatibility matrix" for its myWireless Mobile (free) application to include BlackBerry devices.  The app allows AT&T subscribers to manage their accounts, including viewing usage statistics, adding or removing features, and making payments. The myWireless Mobile app has been available for quite some time...

We are back again this week to talk about some more HotHardware with our friends at TechVi. Topics include the new 890GX chipset from AMD, Western Digital's SiliconEdge Blue SSD, some fun with ATI's Radeon HD 5870 Eyefinity 6 Edition and 6-screens, and porting Quake II and Quake III to the Motorola Droid...  Show Notes:0:25 - AMD 890GX...

We don't enjoy saying that the first ball has dropped here, but it sure seems that way. Hulu, which was called by NBC an "evil plan to destroy the world," might just be destroying NBC's hope of raking in any serious profits. The site delivers all sorts of television programs to online viewers at no cost, only requiring them to watch ads along...

PCs continue to get more powerful, and mobile smartphones continue to gain functionality that could have never been imagined just a few years ago. But little attention in the mainstream is paid to how we control all the gizmos that we encounter in our lives. The mouse and keyboard combo has been the go-to tandem for years now, and the touchpad...

For the last couple of years, Dell's foray into the small-form-factor desktop market was its successful mini-tower (with the emphasis on "mini") Studio Hybrid. But with Dell's latest small-form-factor entry, the Inspiron Zino HD, out goes the vertical mini-tower and in comes the horizontal square--7.8-inches wide by 7.8-inches deep to be exact,...

If it looks like Windows and acts like Windows, then it must be...Linux! Or at least that's the case with the North Korean government's "Red Star" operating system, as Russian college student and LiveJournal blogger "ashen_rus" (real name Mikhail) tells it.Mikhail posted a review of the Red Star OS on his blog, and while none of us here speak...

We never thought we'd say it, but notebooks are the new black. Notebook after notebook has launched since CES (we've lost count, to be honest), yet only a handful of new desktops have done likewise. We know the desktop still has a life to live with hardcore gamers demanding performance that only a desktop GPU and CPU can provide, but it's...

Apple helped us all get over everything we had just seen at CES by introducing an all new product in their notoriously tight product line, but few details were available at the event for consumers who were ready to buy now. We broke down the pros and cons of the iPad, which is the first major tablet PC to garner mainstream attention in the...

Considering Microsoft and Google are competitors in the mobile phone space, it may seem a bit surprising that Microsoft is writing applications for the Google Android platform. In reality, though, Microsoft has previously released a couple of applications for competing platforms. In December 2008, Microsoft produced its first iPhone app called...

Corsair expanded its lineup by adding the Force Series of SSDs. These new drives use SSD Processor technology from SandForce in combination with MLC flash memory to deliver up to 280MB/sec read and 260MB/sec write speeds. The drives also feature class-leading random read/write performance. The Force Series of SSDs are available in capacities...

TRENDnet's been a trusted player in the wireless space for awhile now, and while they don't have the clout that D-Link and Linksys do, the TEW-691GR is still a unit worth looking at if you're hoping to bring a new router into your life. This new one is a 450Mbps Wireless N Gigabit router, and it's designed with gamers and transfer junkies...

Bluetooth has become the de facto standard in the short-range communications field. It's hard to find a new PC these days without Bluetooth support, with even many netbooks offering Bluetooth 2.0 or 2.1 onboard. Bluetooth 3.0 became official last year, though it's still a feature that's rarely found. But what if we told you that Bluetooth...

There's two bits of Ubisoft news today, one of which we're still investigating. First up, the company apparently payed attention to the outrage of gamers who discovered the DRM in the PC version of Assassin's Creed II would throw them out of game without saving if they lost an Internet connection in a single-player game. AC2 won't be released...

Forget about unlocking achievements and collecting in-game items, you can score some serious real-world cash just for playing Major League Baseball 2K10. And not just a little bit of loot, but $1 million! That's the largest ever for this kind of contest.So what's the catch? Just be the first to pitch a perfect game (no hits, no walks, and...

Speaking at the Digital Landscapes Conference this week, Google vice president of Global Ad Operations, John Herlihy, made a rather surprising prediction regarding the future of desktops and laptops. These two types of devices (including netbooks) may be the Internet access points of choice for an overwhelming majority of people worldwide,...

Here it is folks, the first ever third-party application for Google Buzz, now available through the iTunes App Store. It's called Buzzie, and for the next few days, you can snag it for 33 percent off as part of a special introductory price.If you're a fan of Google's newest social networking tool and can't imagine owning a smartphone other...

Alpine Electronics and Nokia are working together to bring a new technology called Terminal Mode to car infotainment systems. By integrating a smartphone with in-car electronics, the companies will bring services such as navigation, music, weather reports, and application stores to the car. When appropriate safety measures are in place and...

Claiming to be the thinnest, lightest 10.1-inch netbook on the market today, the new Averatec N1200 weighs 2.2 pounds and measures less than an inch thick. In order to make this design possible, the N1200 incorporates a slim LED LCD as well as a 7mm hard drive and a magnesium-alloy casing. The N1200 features a 1.66GHz Intel Atom N450 processor,...

Dell introduced two new computing options designed to give companies increased IT performance with reduced energy and operational costs. Dell describes the new Dell OptiPlex 980 Desktop as the "most powerful and the most energy efficient" commercial desktop the company has ever offered. The second new option is the Dell FX100 zero client solution,...

Every so often, an idea comes along that really strikes us as amazing. This is definitely one of those. IBM has a team of scientists with IQs that we can't even fathom, and those very people have created an ultra-fast device that can use light for communication between chips. The goal here? It's to find a way to replace electrical signals...

A couple of important things matter a whole lot when it comes to making a buying decision on a notebook: price, power and fashion sense. Yeah, fashion sense. While plain ole notebooks may have sold like hotcakes years ago, people demand style now, and that's exactly what HP is intended to give you with the new HP Mini 210 Vivienne Tam Edition.This...

We're just doing a bit of testing here in the lab today, and wanted give you all a glimpse of what was on the test bench. We have already given you glimpses of AMD's ATI Eyefinity technology running on more than three screens on a few occasions in the past, but we haven't had the ability to do any hands-on with the technology up to this point...

A collective shudder likely went up the spines of Netflix and Gamefly customers around the nation when they heard the U.S. Postal Service is looking to eliminate Saturday delivery.Both services — Netflix for DVDs of movies and television shows, Gamefly for video games — rely on snail mail to get their goods into customers' hands. Other mail...

When we first caught wind of this story, we thought maybe there was some kind of bizarre oral fixation that prompted a New York resident to toss a perfectly good USB thumb drive into his mouth and swallow it like a Tylenol. As it turns out, Florin Necula was simply trying to destroy evidence seized during a federal raid.We've seen this tactic...

Competition in the video card market can be pretty cutthroat, particularly when it comes to predicting the whims of the enthusiast market. Companies regularly vie for the title of Largest Pe... Fastest Video Card Available and they're willing to pull out all the stops to take home the crown. Case in point: Sapphire. The manufacturer's latest...

Panasonic is facing down a class-action lawsuit alleging that the company's G10 line of plasma televisions is defective. The 'alleged', in this case, is a bit of a misnomer, as the issue has been independently confirmed and admitted by the company itself. The question at hand is whether or not the change is picture quality constitutes a breach...

Scientists have theorized that there might be frozen water on the moon for decades—while water vapor quickly boils away on the moon's surface, frozen water was predicted to exist inside permanently shadowed polar craters as far back as the 1960s. Evidence has mounted for the existence of water in the last 10 years, but new findings from NASA...

It may seem an odd way to write news about a product, but before we talk about the Sony Dash, we're going to talk about the Chumby. A Chumby is a bit of consumer electronics designed to run a variety of widgets that can do...well...just about anything. The entire project has been open-source from the beginning, and the touchscreen device is...

Sony Ericsson has been forced to take a long, hard look at their smartphone lineup with competition hitting from every angle, but it wasn't that long ago when the company's standard phones were their proverbial cup of tea. SE's sliders were amongst the nicest in the industry, and it's good to see the company still has what it takes in that...

Maingear has been keeping its game up in the gaming laptop arena, and there's no clearer evidence of that than this machine. The mX-L 15 multimedia notebook is one of the sexier machines we've seen to emerge in quite awhile, and continued unveilings like this could really put the company on a different playing field. It lacks the marketing...

Super Talent introduced a new USB 3.0 SuperCrypt drive that offers AES hardware encryption and high performance. The new drive is available in capacities of 16GB, 32GB, 64GB, 128GB and 256GB and supports USB 3.0 speeds of up to 240MB/s. For encryption, Super Talent offers two options, both of which include the STT encryption utility for password...

Finding rugged cameras isn't all that hard, and honestly, finding any sort of rugged "accessory" doesn't take too much effort. When it comes to notebooks, however, your options are limited. For better or worse, Panasonic has had the rugged laptop market on lock-down the past few years, as their Toughbook lineup is generally seen as the go-to...

Talk about an obscene amount of power. AVADirect has begun selling what it claims is the world's most powerful i7 SLI gaming notebook  -- the Clevo X8100 -- and after taking a peek at the spec sheet, we won't argue. Every bit the desktop replacement, only the chassis qualifies this one as a notebook, even if the hardware under the hood...

Nokia unveiled a new line of smartphones on Tuesday. The new Cseries line focuses on social networking and sharing. As the first smartphone in the Cseries lineup, the C5 comes with an affordable price tag of 135 Euros ($183) before taxes and subsidies. The C5 provides direct access to favorite contacts directly from the handset's home screen....

These "world's fastest" claims seem to be flying in at a record pace these days, but even though companies are holding their crowns for shorter periods of time, that's not stopping Kingston from bragging while they can. Today, the company is introducing the world's first, fastest low-voltage and ultra low-voltage memory for performance machines.The...

The TiVo. Everyone knows the name, and everyone knows the purpose, but for whatever reason, the name that's associated with "DVR" isn't in too many homes. Many consumers simply opt to grab the DVR that is offered to them by their cable or satellite provider, mostly because it's cheaper on a month-to-month basis, and it's also a lot easier...

Solid State Storage products are obviously setting the computing market on fire as of late.  There is little question that the writing is on the wall.  Like the vacuum tube transistors of yesterday, spinning hard drives are bound to go the way of the Dodo bird.  It's only a matter of time; not if, but when.  However, the...

If you're still running Windows 7 Release Candidate, you've likely begun to experience bi-hourly shutdowns. Microsoft released the RC in May as a final public test before the RTM build in July. While the RC version has been free to use without restrictions since its release, Microsoft has made it clear that it planned to discontinue the free...

2010 has not been kind to Microsoft's security team. In under a month's time, we've seen Microsoft address a bug that was supposed to fix an ancient exploit but instead caused more headaches, all while having to encourage consumers not to be duped by a fake security site parading around as something useful. As if those software savvy folks...

We've already covered the launch of NVIDIA's power-saving Optimus technology and associated Next-Generation Ion platforms for Atom today (including the ZBox from Zotac), but there's a nifty video over at nTersect (NVIDIA's company blog) that's worth a watch if you want to see just how "Off" your video card is when a system uses Optimus technology....

Video: AMD's Radeon HD 5830 graphics card @ The TechReportMotherboards and Chipsets: Jetway NC94-510-LF Mini-ITX Atom Motherboard @ TechwareLabs Second Generation NVIDIA ION Announced @ Legit Reviews A Look at NVIDIA’s Next Generation ION @ Hardware Canucks The Next-Generation NVIDIA ION Tech Report @ TechARP NVIDIA Next-Generation ION 2 Preview...

If you follow us around here, you'll know that we love mechanical key switch keyboards. These kinds of keyboards are extremely rare compared to the more conventional boards, and they're generally better built and able to withstand more key presses of the life of the device. Most people don't type enough or care enough about their typing experience...

Intel announced its AppUp application store at Mobile World Conference last month and the company is pushing out an incentive package aimed at luring developers into netbook-centric programming. The new program—the Million Dollar Development Fund—is currently made up of three separate elements: Fast Track 2010, Dollars for Downloads 2010,...

Zotac gave details on the next system in its line of mini-PCs today, the HD-ID11. Externally, the HD-ID11 is nearly identical to the HD-ND01 we reviewed last year, but the manufacturer has made a number of small upgrades to add a few of the features we had on our wishlist for the original MAG. There have also been a few subtractions; we'll...

This story is just now breaking, with developments still filtering in. Rather than introducing new MacBook Pro refreshes or doing something else that Apple typically does on Tuesday mornings, the Cupertino-based company unleashed a bombshell on HTC and the entire smartphone sector just hours ago. Apple just filed a lawsuit against HTC, which...

A new analysis of 130 total studies covering more than 130,000 gamers from elementary school age to college age conducted in the U.S.A., Europe and Japan reasserts the influence of violent video games on aggression in children. Dr. Craig Anderson's conclusions appeared in Psychological Bulletin, a journal of the American Psychological Association...

CeBIT is just starting to heat up in Germany, but Corsair has a mind to keep things on ice. Aside from launching a new USB 2.0 thumb drive, the accessory maker has also introduced the Corsair Cooling Air Series A70 and A50 CPU coolers, with the former designed for those "looking to squeeze every last megahertz of performance out of their high-end...

In the United States, discussions of copyright protection and infringement inevitably revolve around the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, or DMCA. Since it passed twelve years ago, the DMCA has become the weapon of choice for US companies seeking to fairly protect their property as well as institutions attempting to unfairly silence criticism...

If you've been shopping for a home theater remote, there's a good chance Logitech's Harmony line made it on your list of candidates, right up until you took a peek at the price tag. At its most expensive, Logitech's flagship model runs a hair under $400, putting it out of reach of Joe Six-Pack.Good news, cheapskates. Logitech today announced...

It's not too often these days that a product hits the market and really catches everyone off guard (in a good way, at least), but it looks like a small start-up named Infinitec has done just that. It has launched a new product with a huge tagline: the Infinite USB Memory Device. "Infinite" sounds pretty crazy to us, but the IUM is actually...

The CeBIT trade show has opened its doors to the world today, and a handful of companies are already out making announcements. Corsair is getting things started right with a new line of ultra-high speed, high capacity USB flash drives. By and large, the flash drive market has grown somewhat stale. There's just not a lot of innovation left...

If the cost of the iPhone and its corresponding service plan has deterred you from purchasing Apple's popular phone, you'll like this. Katy Huberty, a prominent analyst with Morgan Stanley, expects Apple to introduce a new iPhone in June that will be more economically friendly to its customers. Huberty claims the cost of the iPhone hardware...

USB 3.0 is continuing to flourish in a big way, and while it's not unexpected to see the big names (Seagate, Western Digital, etc.) pick up the protocol, you know things are really starting to heat up when the smaller ones do as well. Walton Chaintech has just introduced what they call the "smallest USB 3.0 device in the world," with that...

Microsoft is tightening its control over upcoming Windows Phone 7 devices. As a result, Windows Mobile 6.x devices won't be upgradable to the newer OS. Even devices such as the recently announced HTC HD2 won't qualify for an upgrade. At first glance, the HD2 meets Microsoft's criteria for a Windows Phone 7 device. It has a 1GHz Qualcomm processor,...

Ever since NVIDIA's original ION chipset proved it was possible to pair Intel's low-power Atom processor to a relatively powerful graphics core and attain acceptable multimedia performance, the market has been curious as to what NVIDIA's Ion 2 Next-Generation Ion product might offer. This has also been a topic of some discussion between Intel,...

It has been quite a while since AMD launched a new high-end desktop chipset. The 790FX has been riding high at the top of AMD's line-up for over two years now. It has been paired to newer Southbridge chips and AMD did follow up with the 790GX about a year and half ago, but for all intents and purposes AMD's flagship desktop chipset has remained...

By now you've certainly heard of Microsoft Security Essentials (MSE), the free antivirus program hailing from Redmond and intended to replace Windows Live OneCare. Looking to capitalize on MSE's brand recognition, there's a rogue program making the rounds called "Security Essentials 2010." If the screenshot above looks at all familiar to you,...

When we first took a look at OCZ's Vertex 2 Pro series SSD back in February, we noted that our evaluation was a product "preview" due to the fact that the product was still being finalized in many ways and wasn't yet available on the open market.  Little did we know that exact product would never see the light of day in retail. ...

Much of the e-reader chatter of late has focused around the Kindle and how it will compare to the iPad, but there'll soon be another hat in the ring. Last October we discussed the Entourage Edge and its nifty dual-screen design; we now know that the tablet-sized e-reader/netbook (Entourage is calling it a Dualbook) will retail for $490. That's...

Just a few years ago, tech-related trade shows meant hard drive after hard drive announcement. Today, it's SSD after SSD announcement. OCZ Technology, a mainstay in the flash storage industry, has chosen Germany's CeBIT trade show to reveal their first USB 3.0 portable SSD. The Enyo USB 3.0 is an external drive that houses an SSD and connects...

It's beginning to feel like a new solid state drive is being introduced each week now, and recently, every day. Plextor is best known for their optical storage products, primarily optical drives and optical media. But with the SSD market exploding, the company has decided to shuffle their priorities somewhat and join the fun. Plextor's very...

The Internet is abuzz this morning over Apple's "2010 Supplier Responsibility Progress Report." In it are some 24 pages detailing the results of Apple's self-imposed audit of all of its suppliers to ensure that each one meets the company's "Supplier Code of Conduct." What has the Internet swarming with activity is this little tidbit:"Apple...

Western Digital has a good thing going with their "My [insert name here]" line of external storage solutions, and that train keeps rolling today with an all-new My Passport Studio drive. Design wise, it doesn't look all that different than prior versions at first glance, but there's one particular change across that front that could very well...

Today sure feels like launch day, as quite a few big-name companies have decided to kick March off with a bang this morning. Of course, CeBIT is getting underway in Germany, so no one should really be surprised. One of those companies is Netgear, who has decided to introduce a couple of new devices that provide a wide variety of functionality....

If current rumors are to be believed, AMD's hexa-core Thuban processors are headed for desktops in the near future. First we'll see the new 890GX chipsets launching in March, with three Thuban models following on April 26. The new desktop processors will reportedly come in three flavors: Phenom II X6 1035T, 1055T, and the 1075T. We've got...

If there were ever an underserved market in the PC industry, it's the HTPC niche. We understand that this market is exceptionally tiny when compared to the desktop or notebook landscape, but it's still one that is becoming all the more important with the shift in content distribution from conventional Pay-TV providers to Internet delivery...

We're now in the second full month after CES, which means that PC companies are finally free to start really introducing bang-up products once again. As the Spring swings in and consumer dollars begin to flow, Hewlett-Packard is hoping to take advantage of the yearning for a new notebook. We assume as much, otherwise we have not a clue why...