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Saturday, October 16, 2010

Iomega serves up adorable 1.8-inch External USB 3.0 SSD pocket drives

Some might say that you have somewhat of a problem when calling a solid state drive "cute," but what do they know, anyway? Iomega's newest batch of external SSDs are easily the most adorable we've seen, as these 1.8-inchers can just about slip into any oversized Fifth Pocket that you may have. Available in 64GB, 128GB and 256GB sizes, the diminutive drives support USB 3.0 and are built to be lugged around and occasionally dropped, stepped on or used as a stress-relief tool. Specifically, the metal enclosure is engineered to handle drops from up to ten feet, and the 256-bit hardware encryption ensures that only you and your cronies will see what's inside. The company's also tossing in its Protection Suite (loaded with anti-virus, cloning and backup applications), and it'll be hawking these in early November for $229, $399 and $749 from least capacious to most. Oh, and that noise you hear? A hundred million USB 3.0 flash drives getting all sorts of perturbed.

Gallery: Iomega External USB 3.0 SSD drive

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Iomega serves up adorable 1.8-inch External USB 3.0 SSD pocket drives originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 15 Oct 2010 11:49:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Samsung Transform review

With Epic 4G styling, a front-facing camera and a $150 post-rebate price, it's easy to mistake the Samsung Transform for a high-end phone. Don't. The reality is that it's a evolution of Samsung's mid-range Moment and Intercept more than anything else -- you're paying an additional $50 here to get a front-facing camera, an LED flash and a few welcome tweaks, but the same ho-hum performance plus a few new annoyances to boot. Where does it improve and where does it fail? Find out in our full review.

Gallery: Samsung Transform unboxing and hands-on

Gallery: Samsung Transform and Epic 4G, sized up

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Samsung Transform review originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 15 Oct 2010 12:18:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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AppleInsider: New MacBook Air 'certain' to be 11.6-inches, may have flash-based instant-wake ability

Rumors of an 11.6-inch MacBook Air refresh are nothing new at this point, but AppleInsider says it's confirmed a smaller version of Apple's ultraportable is coming at next week's "Back to the Mac" event, and that units are rolling off factory lines right now in preparation for near-immediate delivery. AI also says it's been told that the revised machine will feature a novel new storage system called "SSD Card" that looks like a stick of RAM -- a smaller form factor that would obviously allow the new Air to be even smaller, and possibly sport instant-on wake times, something that's been rumored from other sources this week as well. We'll be at the event live next week so we'll see what happens -- keep it locked right here.

Update: CNET's chiming in with rumors of a "significantly lower" price than the current model's $1,499 starting point, which is always fun to hear -- the catch is that it might still use an older Intel Core 2 Duo chip and NVIDIA chipset, which is far less fun. We'll see!

AppleInsider: New MacBook Air 'certain' to be 11.6-inches, may have flash-based instant-wake ability originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 15 Oct 2010 16:47:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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CyberPower gets diminutive with LAN Party EVO SFF desktop family

Look out, Shuttle -- CyberPower's getting all up in your territory with its new LAN Party EVO series. Introduced today, this foursome of minuscule monsters relies on mITX and mATX motherboards and plenty of high-end internals to deliver solid gaming performance in a desktop that's at least somewhat portable. The Party EVO Mini is wrapped in a Silverstone SG-07B enclosure, while the Xtreme, Commander, and Ultra tout In-Win's Dragonslayer. Aside from integrating its Max Airflow Package to keep things a couple of notches below "Molten Lava," the whole crew is equipped with a 64-bit copy of Windows 7, a three-year warranty and free lifetime phone support. As for specs, the Mini ($1,079) gets a Core i7-870 CPU, 4GB of DDR3 memory, a 1GB ATI Radeon HD 5770 GPU and a 1TB HDD, while the Xtreme ($799) steps down (oddly enough) to a Core i5-760 and an HD 5670 on the graphics front. The Commander ($999) includes a Core i7-950, 6GB of DDR3 RAM and NVIDIA's GeForce GTS 450 (1GB), and finally, the Ultra ($759) branches out with an AMD Phenom II X4 955 CPU, 4GB of DDR3 memory, ATI's Radeon HD 5670 GPU (1GB) and a full terabyte of hard drive space. So, which is going to be, buster?

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CyberPower gets diminutive with LAN Party EVO SFF desktop family originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 15 Oct 2010 21:07:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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