Movies, Music, Video Games, Social Networks and Lifestyle News And Reviews
Product reviews and news of digital entertainment products and services in movies, music, video games, game streaming, social networks and lifestyle products.
I love technology. I know that's probably pretty obvious to anyone who comes to a site named "HotHardware", but I just had to say it. So, what has inspired me to state the obvious in this blog post? The Olympics. As my partners in crime here on the site can attest, I'm not much of a sports guy. Save...
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Unlike the enthusiast system manufacturers, Alienware and VoodooPC, Richmond, Virginia-based Velocity Micro is still an independent, privately held company. In fact, Velocity Micro is doing well enough on its own to have even purchased the enthusiast, boutique system maker, Overdrive PC last year. On top of that, Velocity Micro is one of the...
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Social music networks are like college. You all meet up there for a while, make friends, maybe a few enemies, share all sorts of things, and then scatter to other places and make new friends. The overriding constant is that nobody has any money in either place. Social.FM, which until recently was known as Mercora, was launched in 2005, and...
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Triple word score! Hasbro can now stop worry about a server overload on its Facebook Scrabble application: only two days after disappearing from Facebook, Scrabulous is back, but with a new name (Wordscraper), and minor tweaks to hopefully eliminate any copyright issues. Obviously the name is a good start in terms of deflecting lawsuits. Besides...
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Synopsis: Dell's XPS M1730 is a powerful Desktop Replacement notebook designed with the performance enthusiast in mind. Sleek styling and custom lighting adorn this beastly, semi-portable machine that weighs in at well over 10lbs. Gaming and multimedia performance with the M1730 is top notch, with frame rates across its beautiful...
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Early last year, Antec launched their gaming line of cases with the Antec Nine Hundred - instantly garnering praise throughout the PC enthusiast crowd. Its main claim to fame was the complete openess of the front bezel, using perforated bays and 120mm fans to keep airflow rushing inside. Also notable was the expansive interior,...
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As I'm sure you're all well aware, Hollywood has a long history of producing sub-par (way sub-par) movies based on popular video game franchises. With a few rare exceptions, just about every movie based on a video game, from Super Mario Brothers to Doom, has stunk on multiple different levels. We'll give Mortal Kombat...
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In the last six months we've seen a wide variety of cost effective, yet powerful, video cards hit the market. First came NVIDIA's superb GeForce 8800 GT last October which, despite being introduced at an upper mid-range price point, provided top-notch performance not far off from the best cards of the day at nearly 1/3...
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Facebook and MySpace perform important functions for their users. But when you get right down to it, they exist and are popular because they are amusements. Serious business is not discussed on a page with glitter fonts and Linkin Park music videos that auto-play. There is a social site that's all business --LinkedIn-- and it's received an...
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Don't worry, Rupert (Murdoch); MySpace still outdraws Facebook in terms of unique U.S. visitors. But in terms of worldwide visitors: second place.comScore statistics indicate that Facebook drew even with MySpace in April. At that point, the networks interested about 115 million users each. If we're allowed mentally to extend the...
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Dell's XPS branded products have come a long way since they first appeared in 1993. Starting life as a performance trim for the Dimension product line, Dell has nurtured XPS into a well-known and respected premium performance brand. While not all XPS branded products are specifically targeted at gamers, gaming has always been at the core...
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Facebook has 70 million members, so if the owners change something about it the users don't like, the angry virtual mob that appears outside the window with digital pitchforks and torches is something to behold. Facebook's attempt to share information about user's purchases through a utility they called Beacon didn't go down too well, ...
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Enthusiasts are familiar with the Smooth Creations team as the artists behind the airbrushed gaming rigs from the likes of Falcon Northwest, Alienware, and Maingear. Not as many may be aware, however, that Smooth Creations has recently expanded from the realm of painting cases to that of building and selling painted, customizable systems and...
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YouTube may rule supreme in the melded world of online video and social networking, but Microsoft has a new trick up its sleeve that it hopes might steal some eyeballs away from the competition. Launching today in 20 countries and 12 languages is Microsoft's Messenger TV service, integrating online video directly into Microsoft's Live Messenger...
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A tweet deal for Twitter? Well why not, as they've managed to snag another round of financing.A source familiar with the negotiations tells me that Twitter signed a term sheet for "either $15 million or $20 million" last week. We're still trying to find out who is in, but the word is that it's largely an inside round of funding with one outsider...
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Why give them the opportunity to get used to an ad-free experience? Twitter Japan is launching, but unlike the U.S.-based version, with ads from Day One.In a conversation Tuesday evening, Joi Ito of Digital Garage, the Japanese company Twitter tasked with some of the Japanese localization, told me that Twitter decided to launch in Japan...
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Anyone ever watch the movie The Cheyenne Social Club? Well, this ain't that kind of social club. Thursday Rockstar Games announced the Rockstar Social Club, scheduled to launch (drum roll) on the same day as Grand Theft Auto IV, April 29th (go figure).Today Rockstar announced a new website called the Rockstar Social Club. Essentially a high...
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Facebook has been garnering all sorts of bad press lately about the iffy security and privacy of their users' information. Today's version of Whoops! for Facebook is a security lapse that allowed unauthorized strangers to see personal photographs posted in areas on Facebook that were supposed to be private. And I wasn't just making a cheap...
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You may recall that Chris Avenir, a first-year chemical engineering student at Ryerson University in Toronto, Canada, faced expulsion after it came to light that he had created a Facebook-based chemistry study group. The horror, the horror!Chris Avenir's apparent exhortation to fellow Ryerson University engineering students to "input...
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In a somewhat surprising move, AOL has shelled out $850 million dollars to acquire social networking site Bebo. If you add Bebo's 40 million users worldwide to AOL's customer base for AIM and ICQ, AOL can now boast 80 million unique users. And AOL can show those 80 million users advertising while they're on their service. I imagine it's a...
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Mobile computing has come a long way in the last few years. Notebook manufacturers have been squeezing more power and features into ever more portable packages. As technologies have continued to be refined, shrinking in size and power requirements, manufacturers have been able to expand their creative ideas, bring ever more...
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If you've followed the tech sector for any appreciable amount of time, you've no doubt heard the tale of Dell Inc. - one of those stories where a guy with a dream founded a company and eventually built it into a corporate giant. Right from the beginning, Michael Dell believed that the future of PC sales...
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