Posted Mar 9th 2008 7:28PM by Joshua TopolskyFiled under: Laptops In a recent interview, Asus CEO Jerry Shen talked up the company’s newest edition to the Eee family, and also dropped a few more details on the forthcoming laptop. Apparently, the new set of miniature PCs will carry SSDs as opposed to the flash memory we saw in previous iterations, with sizes ranging from 8GB in the XP-equipped model, up to 12GB or 20GB in the Linux versions — though it’s hard to say why the smaller-footprint Linux would need more drive space. Shen also revealed that there are tentative plans to release WiMAX and HSDPA-enabled models sometime in Q3 of 2008, and he confirmed that come May the company will trade up from VIA CPUs to Intel’s Diamondville (er, Atom) chips. (Read the full post about ‘Asus spills more details on the 9-inch Eee’…)

Epson’s RX 595 all in one printer has it all. It prints, it scans, and can even read memory cards and print directly to CDs. After opening the box, I quickly set up the printer and scrounged around for a USB A male to USB B male cable (which, unfortunately, was not included with the printer) and popped in the software CD. I was a bit disappointed that my MacBook could not automatically detect and use the printer, but installing the software was for the best. Though this is probably not a universal problem, the unit I received had a problem during its initial setup with paper jams. However, after a few aggravating minutes, the jams stopped and printing was smooth as could be. (Read the full post about ‘Gadgetell Review: Epson RX595 printer’…)

Duck Fadar Any jokes about us going quackers, will not - we repeat - will not be permitted. Now, here are the fundamental features that make these two deserving of a place at you bath side. See price Tags: DVD, Gadget, gaming, speakers (Read the full post about ‘Duck Fadar’…)

Posted Mar 9th 2008 3:35PM by Joshua TopolskyFiled under: cellphones Finally, iphone owners no longer have to mope around with a feeling of shame and embarrassment in their hearts: AT&T has blessed them with an “unlimited” calling plan. That’s right, if you so desire (and you do so desire, don’t you?), you can latch a $119.99 all-you-can-eat plan onto your super-device. Sure, it looks peachy, until you notice that despite your “unlimited” status, you still only get a measly 200 text messages, which is like a three-course steak dinner with no dessert. At least you’ll never again have to end a conversation with Mom because you’re worried about overages — though you’ll want to keep a close watch on those SMSs, si (Read the full post about ‘AT&T iPhones get an “unlimited” calling plan’…)

At last week’s Apple event, Steve Jobs went over the SDK release and how they hope to manage it.  Job’s lightly reviewed reasons Apple would reject an iPhone application; things like privacy concerns, content, or interfering with their business plan.  Somehow, Sun believes they’ll build a Java version for the iPhone. According to InfoWorld, Java is planning on running the Java Virtual Machine on the iPhone.  However, according to the iphone SDK documentation, the use of plug in architecture isn’t allowed.  It will be interesting to see how Sun works around this. From InfoWorld: Sun came to the conclusion it could make a JVM work on the iPhone after taking 24 hours to look at information on Apple’s SDK. (Read the full post about ‘Sun:iPhone to get Java | Apple: no way’…)

Vigor Gaming has announced the latest addition to its high-end desktop lineup, Colossus. The Vigor Gaming Colossus is the most powerful system offered by the company and it can currently support up to eight processing cores, up to 8GB of fully-buffered DDR2 memory clocked at 800MHz, 2 Terabytes of Hard Drive space in RAID-0 configuration, a 1000W power supply and four graphics cards. Colossus is capable of running up to two XHD (2560×1600 resolution) monitors Based on Skulltrail, Intel’s first Dual Socket Extreme Desktop Platform, the Colossus features full support for two Intel Core 2 Extreme QX9775 quad-core processors. (Read the full post about ‘Vigor Gaming Colossus’…)

The social networking sites numbers for the US are in and the year to year comparisons are pretty telling.  MySpace is down 1% while FaceBook is up 77%.  The biggest movement is by some new comers, namely Fubar.com who grew by, get this, 3272217%.  Fubar is billed as “the first online bar and happy hour,” with free well drinks all night long.  OK, I made up that last bit. All but two on this top 20 list had positive year over year gains confirming the general feeling that social networking is far from done.  Newcomers like myyearbook and linkdin saw triple digit growth proving these smaller, segmented markets have lots of growth potential. (Read the full post about ‘MySpace loses ground, Fubar.com gets hot?’…)

Posted Mar 9th 2008 7:08AM by Paul MillerFiled under: Storage Samsung promised it was coming in March, and here she blows. The Spinpoint M6 is the first standard-height 500GB 2.5-incher available, at a lean 9.5mm, meaning you can cram it into most existing laptops unlike the 2.5-inch 500 giggers from Fujitsu and Hitachi. Samsung’s using some Perpendicular Magnetic Recording tech to cram everything in, stuffing three 167GB platters into the 5400rpm drive. The M6 goes for $299 and is shipping now. If DVD burning is more your pace, Samsung also just announced an “industry fastest” 22X DVD burner, the SH-S223. The SATA drive can stamp a 4.7GB disc in 12 minutes, and does dual-layer discs at a respectable 16X. (Read the full post about ‘Samsung’s 500GB 2.5-inch drive arrives, alongside 22X DVD burner’…)

Lavalamp Phone Charm You can have this for ?5.95 Tags: games, tech, gadgetry, CD (Read the full post about ‘Lavalamp Phone Charm’…)

Plug and Play Snowboarder Yo dude, the powder's up. Forget consoles, now you can hop into a virtual pipe, like, for real. You can have this for ?39.95 Tags: speaker, Hi-fi, cable, game (Read the full post about ‘Plug and Play Snowboarder’…)