EARLIER TODAY WE attended a Toshiba event where the company was showing off its new Portégé R700 13.3-inch notebook. We wrote about it before, but as the RX3W which it is known as in the Japanese market. Their Portégé range of notebooks has always been one of Toshiba’s flagship models which have made a good compromise between portability and performance.
Read more ▶
CORSAIR HAS ANNOUNCED a couple of additions to its Force series of solid state drives which, at least in terms of capacity, are competing directly with Intel’s offerings. The new drives are the F40, F80 and F160, all of which offer impressive performance figures, although the pricing is quite competitive considering all things.
Read more ▶
DDR3 IS SLOWLY but surely starting to take over from DDR2 as the mainstream memory type and this means that the memory manufacturers are shifting more and more of their production to DDR3. Samsung has announced that it has begun mass production of its new 32nm DDR3 memory in capacities of up to 2Gbit, or 256MB per chip.
Read more ▶
LOW-PROFILE GRAPHICS CARDS are usually based on entry level GPU’s, but there are exceptions from this rule of course. MSI has launched its latest low-profile card today and it is a peculiar beast that doesn’t seem to fit in. The idea of a low-profile card is usually that they take up less space, but this card appears to take up more space.
Read more ▶
THE MUCH ANTICIPIATED pricing for Microsoft’s “casual gamer” accessory – Kinect – for the Xbox 360 has been announced today and, as predicted, the motion controller will retail for $149.99 on its own. However, that’s only half of today’s news as Microsoft also announced the new slim Xbox 360 Arcade which was leaked by Amazon.de a few days ago.
Read more ▶
IF YOU’VE BEEN waiting for a more powerful replacement of Intel’s CULV platform, then you’ll be glad to know that its partners have started to launch Core i UM based notebooks en masse. This is a couple of months later than expected and we wrote a little piece about this before Computex. Various markets seem to be getting models from different manufacturers at the moment, although this is most likely a business strategy more than a supply issue.
Read more ▶
ALTHOUGH IT’S ABOUT a month since we reported Intel’s price drop and new processor launch, it has finally happened. We’ve got a few new processors in the market and Intel has dropped the price on some of its models by as much as 47.6 percent. So if you’re looking for a bargain deal on a new CPU, then there might be something that’ll fit your needs.
Read more ▶
THIS IS ONE of those things that you almost have to be a local to grasp, but Taiwan is about to be hit by an equivalent to the so called millennium bug, but in the case of Taiwan, it’s a centenary bug. What many people don’t know is that Taiwan has its own calendar and this year it’s the year 99 in Taiwan and next year it’s 100 years since the Republic of China (ROC) was formed.
Read more ▶
THERE HAVE BEEN some concerns over TSMC’s manufacturing capacity of 12-inch 40nm wafers and it seems like the company is set on solving this problem, although it won’t happen overnight. TSMC broke ground for its new Fab 15 earlier today in Taichung, Taiwan and the new fabrication plant is set to be ready to start mass production in the first quarter of 2012.
Read more ▶
APPLE MIGHT NOT be having the best of times at the moment thanks to the iPhone 4 antenna issues, but it seems like that isn’t stopping the company from working on new products. The latest rumour is of an 11.6-inch MacBook Air and the much rumoured next gen iPod Touch. The new rumours are courtesy of Digitimes and although the Taiwanese outfit has been correct before, we’ll take the MacBook Air rumour with a pinch or two of salt for now.
Read more ▶
THERE’S NO DOUBT that Google’s Android smartphone operating system has become a huge hit and we’re seeing more and more devices with that OS. Details of what is potentially HTC’s next high-end Android handset has turned up on a UK website and it looks like HTC is getting ready to take up the fight with the latest models from its competitors.
Read more ▶
SONY IMPRESSED WITH its first two NEX mirrorless DSLR cameras (for a lack of a better term), but its third camera in the NEX series is something entirely different, namely a camcorder with interchangeable lenses. It shoots 1080p video, of course, but in addition to this, it also shoots 14Megapixel still pictures thanks to its Exmor APS HD CMOS sensor.
Read more ▶
WE BROKE THE news about Renesas new USB 3.0 host controller back in April. Back then we reported that the new controller was going to have a reduced power consumption, but at the time we didn’t know by how much. Renesas has finally unveiled the new host controller and has managed to reduce the power consumption by 85 percent when no peripherals are attached to the controller’s ports.
Read more ▶
JUNIPER SYSTEMS HAS announced its new Mesa Rugged Notepad and if you’re the kind of person that likes to take your “pad” with you wherever you go, no matter the conditions, then this is the product you’ve been waiting for. Juniper Systems claims that it’s the world’s first rugged notepad, although we’re not entirely sure that this statement is correct, although as they’re not calling it a tablet but rather a notepad, they might just be right.
Read more ▶
AS OF YESTERDAY, the Open Handset Alliance gained a new member in MediaTek, a company mostly known for its optical drive controllers and various solutions for DVD players. However, the company has more recently become a serious player in the cellular phone market, especially in China, so its move to join the OHA makes a lot of sense.
Read more ▶
