GOOGLE ISN’T A company that’s afraid to take on the competition with its many web based services and its latest addition allows you to make voice calls for free from within Gmail. Ok, so it’s a limited time offer until the end of the year and it only applies to calls initiated from within the US to phone numbers in the US or Canada.
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DESPITE ALL THE criticism Apple gets, the company has done one thing well, in fact so well that its computers are playing an entirely different game than the humble beige box we all know as the PC. When Apple moved to x86 it dropped hardware legacy support and started with a clean slate and we’re now at a stage where the PC is desperately in need for the same treatment. You may ask why, well read on and I’ll try to explain.
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WESTERN DIGITAL HAS been trying to branch out into new product areas beyond its storage solutions and have so far managed to do quite well with its media players. Today the company announced yet a new addition to its product line-up, the Livewire Powerline AV network kit.
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INTEL AND NOKIA’S joint product development has now spun off a join laboratory that will be researching the world of “3-D” [sic] for mobile devices. The research will take place at Oulun yliopisto or University of Oulu, if you prefer, and it’s meant to lead to “new user interfaces and experiences”. We can’t guarantee the virtual sauna, but considering the Finnish people’s obsession with saunas, well, who knows what will transpire…
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INTEL HAS FINALLY unveiled its dual core mobile Atom N550 processor and the netbook manufacturers are jumping at the chance of getting something new into the market. However, don’t expect to see a raft of new designs, as instead it’ll be pretty much the same old chassis with slightly different bits inside.
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OCZ’S REVODRIVE PCI Express based SSD was something of a surprise when it was announced and it’s a fairly unique product in the market considering its competitive retail price compared to a standard SSD. However, it’s now looking like OCZ is readying a new model called the RevoDrive-B which is yet another PCI Express based SSD, but with an extra trick up its sleeve, it’s got a pair of SATA ports for drive caching.
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AMD’S 3DNOW! INSTRUCTION set was never as big of a hit as Intel’s MMX or SSE and it now seems like AMD is getting ready to drop support, sorry, that’s deprecate support for 3DNow! This means that most new AMD processors will no longer have support for 3DNow! but judging by AMD’s blog post on the subject, it’s hardly going to have any effect on the performance of its future processors.
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INTEL’S NEXT GENERATION of consumer desktop chipsets will lack native support for the good old PCI bus which dates back to 1993. However, most of the motherboards, if not all, that we saw at Computex back in June still featured PCI slots and it only just dawned how this can be. It turns out that the bridge chip makers are going to be making some bucks here by selling PCI Express to PCI bridge chips.
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SONY’S PS3 WAS long deemed unhackable, at least until today when videos appeared on YouTube of a solution that allows you to back up the Blu-ray media that the PS3 games come on, onto either the internal hard drive of the PS3 or an external USB hard drive while remaining playable. The solution is called PS JailBreak and unlike previous solutions for older consoles, it doesn’t require the console to be opened, nor does any soldering have to be performed.
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COMPANIES TEND HOLD all sorts of events and competitions to draw attention to either its products or events. MSI has just kicked off what it calls the Princess Leia cosplay contest on Facebook which gives you the chance to vote for one of five Taiwanese girls that will run around MSI’s Master Overclocking Arena finals dressed up as Princess Leia.
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MANY WERE DISAPPOINTED with MSI’s 870A Fuzion board, as it wasn’t the Hydra board many had expected from MSI. However, it appears that MSI is about to make amends as it’s getting ready to unleash the 870A Fuzion Power Edition. This is the board everyone expected MSI to release and it looks much closer to the early board pictures that appeared on the net.
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MEASURING A MERE 16x20x1.85mm SanDisk’s new iSSD or integrated SSD as it’s also known as, is very possibly the world’s smallest SSD. It’s intended to be embedded in devices that support the standard SATA interface, such as tablets, smartphones and other portable computing devices.
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MICRON AND INTEL has announced that they’re the first to sample 25nm three bits per cell NAND Flash memory today, also known as TLC NAND Flash. The companies are getting ready to enter mass production later this year, for what the two are claiming is the industries smallest and highest capacity NAND Flash memory.
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YESTERDAY AMD QUIETLY dropped the prices for many of its Phenom II and Athlon II processors, although the biggest price drop is a mere 18.9 percent. Some models had their price dropped by as little as 99 cents and one model even went up in price by $4. We’ve compiled the numbers to make life easier for you to see the price changes, although there really isn’t much to get excited about.
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LAST FRIDAY, ASUS held an investors conference at its headquarters in Taipei, Taiwan and the CEO Jerry Shen shared some details of what Asus is working on. It’s clear that Asus considers Apple to be one of its major competitors, especially with regards to the iPad, a device that has caused no end of headaches for Asus, especially as it’s stealing netbook sales from Asus.
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