Dr. Augustine Fou's Online Scrapbook

Sunday, March 09, 2008

Eurocom's M860TU Montebello 15.4-inch laptop rocks the Centrino 2

Source: http://feeds.engadget.com/~r/weblogsinc/engadget/~3/248021695/

Filed under: Laptops

In case you missed it, it was Eurocom's Phantom-X that managed to swipe that "fastest tested laptop" mark from the MacBook Pro last year -- and totally ruin a perfectly good commercial. Now the company is back for more with the M860TU Montebello 15.4-incher. We'll have to wait for the benchmarks to see how this one stacks up against the recent crop of Penryn laptops, but what's new here is that the Centrino 2 "Montevina" chipset is under the hood, which should support faster Penryn processors, lower power consumption and some new fancy security features. Other specs on the M860TU include a 15.4-inch 1920 x 1200 LCD, 512MB NVIDIA 8800M GTX graphics (with a future option for 9xxxM GTX chips once they're announced), 4GB of RAM, HSDPA and external eSATA and HDMI plugs. Yeah, pretty hot. No word on price, but the laptop is slated to ship May 1st.

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Intel patents cosmic ray detectors on-a-chip. What a relief.

Source: http://feeds.engadget.com/~r/weblogsinc/engadget/~3/248214898/

Filed under: Misc. Gadgets

That great perpetrator of worldly ills, the cosmic ray, has at last met its match. Intel has patented the concept of an on-chip detector of cosmic rays which would auto-correct for soft errors caused by the cosmic ray's interference. Apparently Intel is concerned that cosmic rays -- those perky particles from space that blast through the Earth's atmosphere and tamper with your precious bodily fluids -- are going to become "a major limiter of computer reliability in the next decade" as chips get smaller and smaller. The rays have already been proved to interfere with electronics in small ways, so while Intel doesn't have method for building an actual cosmic ray detector yet, they're certainly getting a jump on the problem with this patent. We know we'll certainly be sleeping better at night.

[Via Slashdot]

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Samsung's 500GB 2.5-inch drive arrives, alongside 22X DVD burner

Source: http://feeds.engadget.com/~r/weblogsinc/engadget/~3/248305466/

Filed 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. No word on price yet for that one.

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Teclast's M25 PMP has love for lots of formats

Source: http://feeds.engadget.com/~r/weblogsinc/engadget/~3/248360344/

Filed under: Portable Audio, Portable Video

No sense in forcing someone to stick with the tried and true MP3 / WMA regimen when formats such as OGG, APE, FLAC and AAC are out there, right? Apparently, the folks at Teclast are nodding their heads in agreement, as the firm's latest PMP handles all of the aforementioned files alongside WAV, AVI, RM and RMVB. Additionally, the 7.9-millimeter thick PlayFX-compatible unit features a 2.4-inch QVGA (320 x 240) resolution display, 2GB / 4GB / 8GB of capacity, a built-in FM tuner / recorder and a text viewer. No word on price or availability, but considering the dearth of integrated WiFi, we can't actually see Mariah being interested.

[Via PMPToday]

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Asus spills more details on the 9-inch Eee

Source: http://feeds.engadget.com/~r/weblogsinc/engadget/~3/248563940/

Filed 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. In addition, more colors are on the way, and the base price in the US will be $499 at launch -- though that figure is expected to drop in the following months.

[Via Eee Site]

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