Shawn Oliver
Opinions and content posted by HotHardware contributors are their own.
Recent posts
You know what the world needs? Another Mini-ITX mainboard. And you know what the world is getting courtesy of EVOC? Another Mini-ITX mainboard. With the eco-friendly crowd growing larger and more vocal by the day, it makes sense for EVOC to cater to that audience with a new mainboard designed...
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There's little doubt that media buying is changing. iTunes is selling more and more singles while physical disc sales dwindle. GameStop is hiring executives to manage digital aspects of business. And Redbox is dabbling in video games after years of sticking to DVDs and Blu-ray Discs alone.You...
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Oh, Facebook. You bring us so much joy, and you help us to waste so much valuable time. But you're useful in so many ways, and you keep us connected (at arm's reach, anyway) with a vast array of high school sweethearts that we'd otherwise never even bother to look for. But can you be more than that?It's obvious that its creators think so,...
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Although Palm's Touchstone, a contact-based charger for the Palm Pre, brought the idea of wireless charging into the mainstream, WildCharge has been doing this same type of deal for years now. In an effort to provide a wireless charging...
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For frequent fliers at select airports, paperless boarding is no big deal. In fact, it's a way of life they adopted well over a year ago. But for many, they still have to search tirelessly to find which pocket they crammed their boarding pass into before stripping down and cruising through...
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Traditionally speaking, Sony has never been a company to follow publicly accepted norms. From Mini-Disc to ATRAC Memory Stick Pro to those UMD movies that nobody wanted for their PSP, the outfit has a long, storied history of forcing its own proprietary formats onto consumers. Of course, that...
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If you're anything like us, you spend a great deal of time looking at an LCD monitor. Every so often you'll get up the nerve to go look at an HDTV or a movie screen, but by and large your eyes stay planted on whatever monitor is connected...
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BlizzCon may be stealing the limelight in terms of gamer-centric expos right now, but for those in the know, QuakeCon is still a sight to behold. The 2009 edition kicked off today in Grapevine, Texas, with a truckload of interviews and...
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HTC's Touch Pro2 is being widely hailed as the very best Windows Mobile-based smartphone ever. Which makes sense considering that HTC's legendary hardware is behind the magic, not to mention the fact that the WinMo operating system has...
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While most of the world anxiously awaits Sony Ericsson's big move into the wide world of Android, the company's latest two show that it still has a wild side. Designed specifically for those who value fashion (and who can find these phone attractive), the new Jalou flip-phone is marketed more...
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While netbooks are certainly garnering the majority of the notebook spotlight these days, thin-and-light machines such as Acer's Timeline series and MSI's X-Slim family are making a move for the forefront. Just this week, Lenovo also introduced its first significant foray into the segment, and...
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You know, Dell's Vostro lineup is really turning into one to watch. While it's admittedly aimed at the business users in the crowd, a lot of the systems are perfectly suitable for everyday consumers. Take the company's newest offerings...
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You know, we'd really hate to be in charge of the "innovation department" that's responsible for making keyboards better. Like, how do you make a keyboard significantly better than the last one without creating a new way for humans to type? It's like telling someone to make Pepsi better--just...
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Around here, there seems to be a never-ending debate surrounding batteries. You can't live with 'em, and you certainly can't live without 'em. Whether we're discussing just how disingenuous most battery life figures seem on modern day...
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Well, well--turns out those pricing leaks from Amazon the other day were legitimate, and now Microsoft has stepped in to confirm what most of the tech-savvy world already knew. The company's next-generation Zune, and arguably the iPod's...
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Need some new networked storage? How about lots of networked storage? If you answered both of those with "yes," QNAP has you covered. The storage solution provider has today expanded its their Turbo NAS lineup with a pair of new ultra-high...
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You know what we haven't heard much about lately? Piracy. It used to be all the rage, but after iTunes (and pretty much every other online music store) went DRM-free, it seems those stormy waters have calmed. Or, on second thought, maybe no one was talking about it. New research from the...
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For many, it's not difficult to remember back when USB flash drives topped out at around 8GB and demanded a near fortune. Today, these minuscule drives are near ubiquitous, and with flash prices in free fall, a rather sizable one (capacity...
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If you're looking to score a rugged notebook, there's hardly a better place to look than in Panasonic's Toughbook line. For years now, the iconic series has led the way in durable computing, with its briefcase-styled rigs able to withstand an intense amount of abuse in the field, on the road...
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Anyone paying even the slightest attention to the evolution of Dell designs would know that the company has come a long way since the beige box days in the late 90s, but even for the newer, fresher, hipper Dell, this one's pretty radical. Just as the company decided to dump its Inspiron Mini...
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OCZ Technology is at it again, this time pushing out a new range of solid state drives for the laypeople in the crowd. The Indilinx-based devices, which proudly boast a Solid 2 Series label, are designed to slot neatly into notebooks that can hold 2.5" form factor drives. The MLC based...
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7E+09. At a glance, that figure probably doesn't mean much to you, but believe it or not, that's the current population of this place we call Earth. As has been made abundantly clear through the most recent worldwide recession, we're...
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