Hardware

December '08 was the month when VHS tapes have officially gone for ever from Wal-Mart shelves, but luckily, now we have even more toys to play with instead of old-fashioned VHS players. It is now all about Blu-Ray image and sound quality. The latest news show that end users have got a handle on buying Blu-Ray disks because December '08 sales of those are 400 percents (1.5 million pieces) higher than a year ago. So, what do we have here is a new gadget that will help us enjoy every last bit of Blu-Ray quality sound on our PCs. It is a new sound card from ASUS called Xonar HDAV1.3 Series that is one of the first sound cards that bring ultimate sound performance to PCs. Well actually we know of course that the first one was Xonar HDAV1.3 and Xonar HDAV1.3 Series is an enhanced version.

The Internet is a great medium to dive in for any information one might ever need. Until so, many entrepreneurs will present their Internet gadgets to offer end users new possibilities in using Internet resources. LaCie have came up with a new idea how increase the amount of information that flows in and out our PCs. Not a novelty actually, but a very useful gadget anyway, especially for those, who face a strong need to make their personal data accessible any time and anywhere. How did they in LaCie manage? – Easy. The device is simple external hard disk, but with some new features.

This week should be considered a milestone in world SSD hard drive production if guys from Super Talent are honest about what they have prepared for the early January '09. They say they will hit the market with world's fastest SSD. They are called UltraDrive LE SSDs which are aimed for enterprise servers and data centers, and UltraDrive ME SSDs for notebooks. OK, let Super Talent be the fastest in this field for instance, but what then to say about SanDisk? Mind you that this November '08 they have unveiled their ExtremeFFS (Extreme Flash File System). What they have said about it was that ExtremeFFS increases random read and write speeds up to 100 faster than the existing once. Such kind of result is achieved by splitting physical and logical location of data on the disk. However Super Talent is not likely to say how they achieve their speeds and just present us the figures.

Designers tried many times to invent some innovative and interesting ways to control our computers. While mouse and keyboard can do this job very well, people demand something new, something interesting that modern technology can offer. We saw many interesting experiments - from eye-controlled mouse pointer to amazing machine that can be controlled with thoughts. However, they all suffer from the same flaws - expensive hardware and limited capabilities. Wii showed that innovative way of controlling your console can be fun and entertaining, so this time PC users can obtain something similar, only without any Wiimote at all. This new method of working with computer is fully based on image recognition and gesture control.

Since there is an unseen demand on notebooks and netbooks nowadays, there are appearing more and more technological novelties designed especially for them. Many of those gadgets though can totally be used in PC also, but anyway they are primarily aimed to save space inside of laptops or to providing better performance on the same space. New HyperX DDR3 from Kingston also appeared as a gadget for well-equipped notebooks and would be quite good for PCs I guess. As long as external graphic cards and hard drives and overcloking will take place for gaming devices, Kingston are looking forward to be successful with HyperX DDR.

G-Tech G- RAID2 Hard drive array external builds on the original G-RAID design by incorporating the latest and greatest disk storage technology currently available. The use of the latest generation components enables G-RAID2.

Super Talent company does not want to make its fans to wait too long for new models to appear. After those 5 models from MasterDrive DX series, two new models from MasterDrive LX series of 2,5 inches where launched with the capacity of 64 GB and respectively 128 GB and a SATA-2 interface of 3 GB. It is well-known the fact that hard-disks are more preferred than SSD yet because of the report between the price and the storage capacity that is favorable for the first ones. New MasterDrive LX could be the beginning of the change in this dispute.

Toshiba has been working on Serial ATA and Parallel ATA technology for a considerable time now, and this week Toshiba has presented some new devices in this domain. New gadgets are three hard disk drivers of the MKxx29GSG series and have SATA interface. They just only differ by their capacity: 120 GB, 160 GB and 250GB. HDDs are of 1.8 inch form factor which is not primarily used for PCs, but for smaller gadgets like portable mini PCs, portable media players, notebooks and mini notebooks or "netbooks" (notebooks that come with price limited by half a thousand dollars average scope and smaller dimensions). So we have a quarter of a terabyte – one of the largest capacities on a 1.8 inch hard drive of them all.

Harmonix is dedicated to creating 100% customer satisfaction and to those of you who've encountered any hardware issues, we are sorry for the hassle.That would seem to confirm the "two models" theory of guitars; unfortunately they did not confirm that there are two separate models of drum kits.

Jun 7th 2007 6:46PM by Richard LawlerFiled under: HDTV, Laptops, Media PCsIntel's Santa Rosa mobile platform will get a high definition upgrade in the second half of this year when it integrates dedicated hardware decoding from Broadcom to support HD DVD and Blu-ray playback. The extra processing power will let notebooks keep running their Windows Vista Aero experience -- which currently takes a major hit -- while playing high-def discs without relying on more expensive GPUs from NVIDIA or ATI.

eadyDrive - Perhaps the most interesting and promising of Vista's hardware-based performance initiatives, ReadyDrive uses hybrid hard drives. HHDs slap together a bit of Flash memory -- kind of like the thumb drive you've got in your pocket right now -- and mix it up with a traditional hard disk drive.

Feb 28th 2007 8:10PM by Evan BlassFiled under: GamingBad news for those European fans who've still been anticipating the PS3 despite delays, higher costs, limited selection, and weak launch stock: the rumors were true this time around, and your 'newly designed' console will be shipping sans PS2 hardware. Of course, you'll still be able to play certain titles through software emulation -- although even that may be dodgy, judging from the US and Japanese experience -- and there's always the possibility of non-compliant games coming out over PlayStation Network, but Sony has already admitted that the backwards compatibility offered by these new rigs won't be on par with that of PS3 Rev A.

I especially like this LED Mini Menorah, available for \$10.Open source hardware gift guide [Makezine.

he hardwareIndustrial designWe're just going to come out and say it: the iPhone has the most beautiful industrial design of any cellphone we've ever seen. Yes, it's a matter of taste, and while we imagine some won't agree, we find it hard to resist the handset's thoughtful minimalism and attention to detail

The "Open Handset Alliance," or OHA, a group of mobile hardware and software manufacturers who are participating in the Android project, includes HTC, Motorola, T-Mobile, and Qualcomm.From the Android description page: Android does not differentiate between the phone's core applications and third-party applications.

.. n to new software titles best left to another fine publication], a video download service and [PSP] hardware refresh are expected later this year." While both tidbits sound like potentially big news, Sony was ..

Of course, you can try on-screen virtual keyboard on touchscreen devices or hardware keyboard but the buttons on them are too small to be comfortable. There are Bluetooth keyboards for this matter, but they must be carried along with the device.

It will not be very useful for regular user because it is hard to tell, when you need to copy such amount of flash drives at one time. The huge price of /\$7999 confirms that you better use PC rather than a special hardware to duplicate someone's flash drive.

Special hardware is capable of calculating the "depth map" according to the data captured by this sensor. This distance data is a result of work of special image-processing software, which analyzes slight differences between the positions of the same elements on neighbor sub arrays.

The Pico Drive ST is different since it comes with AES 256-bit hardware encryption method. It ensures that anyone who comes across your lost USB flash drive (on purpose or otherwise) will have a pretty hard time cracking it to access the contents within.