Shawn Oliver
Opinions and content posted by HotHardware contributors are their own.
Recent posts
Apple never has been a company to cater to the lower-end. For whatever reason, it just never has had to compete on price alone. For decades, the company has made clear that the price premium associated with its products was due to the unique design and ingenuity. That said, there's hardly ever been a better time for Apple to consider dipping...
Read more...
Hey, kids -- how would you feel about taking your next round of end-of-quarter exams without even having to pick up a pencil? No, we're not talking about telepathy (though, we kind of like the idea!), we're talking about laptop testing. In a move that we can only hope spreads encouragement to classrooms around the world, about 6,000 students...
Read more...
It's official: the world is getting another Kindle. Whether or not it needs another Kindle remains to be seen, but you can bet the print media publications are all in agreement that we do. Not quite a month after we began to hear rumors that a larger screen Kindle was in the works, Amazon has officially scheduled a press conference for this...
Read more...
There's no denying that the 3D arena is just blowing up these days, and Vuzix is definitely making a name for itself. The company famous for producing those wacky eye goggles has just announced that it has expanded its 3D support to include field sequential, side by side and 3 formats of anaglyph on its AV Video Eyewear products.There's also...
Read more...
It has been quite some time since we've heard of any new wares coming from Patriot Memory, but today the outfit is joining the quickly growing solid state drive market with a trio of devices. The company is debuting its Fusion SSD Series, a name that likely rings a bell for those familiar with the NAND Flash industry."By the addition of the...
Read more...
It's a little funny, really. Just two weeks ago, we saw a report from ABI Research asserting that netbooks were getting along just fine in the recession, and already another research firm is out to burst that bubble. Essentially, iSuppli is anticipating that netbook sales will begin to cool once our economy is completely back on track, noting...
Read more...
Generally speaking, we look to companies such as LaCie when scouting a fashion-friendly external hard drive. Evidently Samsung's tired of being left out of the mix, as it has today introduced a 1.5TB solution that has quite a bit of style. The STORY Station is a desktop storage solution "designed to meet the explosive demand for external,...
Read more...
Wow, Acer's been busy of late. The Aspire Revo, a few new Aspire notebooks and two new all-in-one desktops -- all in April. Not to be sold short in any way, shape or fashion, the company is also hard are work on at least one Android device, and it definitely has an Android-based netbook in the rear of its mind.Acer president and CEO Gianfranco...
Read more...
Hulu has suffered its fair share of criticism from dissing Boxee, but now that things seem to be ironed out between the two, we're thrilled to hear that more content is coming to the online video portal. Hulu and The Walt Disney Company today announced that Disney, through a subsidiary of ABC Enterprises Inc., has agreed to join NBC Universal,...
Read more...
Well, what have we here? No, really -- what in the world is this? Japanese site Akihabara News.com has images of a completely intriguing new netbook accessory, a little something called the -- wait for it -- Netbook Stand. Designed by Century, this all-in-one device appears to be a netbook stand, cooling station and expansion dock, all in...
Read more...
OWC, or Other World Computing, is notorious for pumping out upgrades when companies refuse to do so themselves -- particularly Apple. Thus, it's no shock to see it offer up faster internal SuperDrives (DVD burners) for Apple's 13" MacBook and 15" MacBook Pro.The new OWC Mercury SuperDrives offer faster burn speeds than factory – up to 8X DVD,...
Read more...
These days, most every hard drive, SSD and flash drive functions just fine on Macs, PCs and Linux machines. For whatever reason, Kingston Technology's DataTraveler Vault Privacy Edition lacked that OS X friendliness -- until now, that is. At long last, the company has made this highly secretive drive compatible with Macs boasting OS X 10.4x...
Read more...
Got big weekend plans? Oh, yeah? Cancel them. Starting on Friday (that's tomorrow, folks) at 12:01AM GMT -- which actually ends up being 8:00PM EDT this evening -- the PC version of the heralded Left 4 Dead will be available for a free 24-hour trial via Steam. That free trial will include access to the recently released Survival Pack DLC,...
Read more...
Not sure if you've noticed, but VIA is definitely getting deep into the media server game. Shortly after launching its NSD7200 2-bay Windows Home Server device, the company has today introduced a new motherboard aimed specifically at these very servers. The VB8002 Mini-ITX board brings the performance efficiency of the VIA Nano processor to...
Read more...
Word on the street is that AMD launched its super-cheap ($69 MSRP) Athlon X2 7850 Black Edition this week to celebrate 40 years in the industry, and while the last decade in particular hasn't been too kind to the company, it's still hanging tough and struggling to compete with Intel, NVIDIA and the rest of the big boys.Today, the Sunnyvale-based...
Read more...
We took a look at AMDs ATI Radeon HD 4770 GPU earlier this week, and MSI isn't missing a beat by announcing its first card based on the new chip. The simply titled R4770 is the company's latest graphics card to be based on a 40nm chip, and with comes GDDR5 high-speed memory -- something that was previously reserved for the R4870 and R4890...
Read more...
There's WiMAX, and then there's Wi-Fi. And now, there's a chip that understands both wireless languages. As you well know, the former is a burgeoning next generation wireless data technology that operators such as Sprint have begun to roll out, and while LTE is largely believed to the true next gen data protocol for cell phones, it's hard...
Read more...
And here you were thinking that NVIDIA was stretching its bounds by dabbling in the CPU and nettop arenas. Today -- out of nowhere, really -- NVIDIA has jointly announced with GeoStar that its hardware and software solution will "transform seismic computation for oil and gas companies in China." Bold words, huh?As the story goes, GeoStar is...
Read more...
Another week, another news clipping involving SSD shipments. As the demand for solid state drives creeps up, more and more companies are joining in to snag a piece of the increasingly lucrative pie. This go around, we're seeing Imation -- you know, that company that makes all those CD-Rs you never got around to using -- ship its M-Class and...
Read more...
ZigBee may still be foreign to many consumers, but it's a growing wireless transmission technology that has especially taken hold in the home automation realm. To that end, ARM has decided to hitch its wagon to one Ember in order to delve gently into what could be a promising partnership.Announced today, Ember will rely on ARM's own Cortex...
Read more...
You know, now that we really sit back and think about it, USB flash drives have been around for ages. Somehow, these minuscule storage devices have survived (and even thrived) for years while chip technologies have arrived and vanished, optical media formats have been born and buried and DRAM prices have precipitously fallen. Now, rather than...
Read more...
For those familiar with consumer electronics at all, we're certain that NEC isn't a name lost on you. Renesas Technology, however, is likely to be entirely less familiar. Nevertheless, it's about to get a lot closer to being a household name -- even if it's name isn't the one being used. What gives, you ask? NEC and Renesas have just announced...
Read more...
