This product might be the next big thing from Asus but it has certain design lines from the Nintendo Wii and Apple Mac Mini, although its nothing like the Wii as it wants to handle your desktop computer needs. This is the new Asus Eee PC desktop that could end up competing with the Mac Mini for your desktop computing needs in a small space.
The product has been named the Asus Ebox and we are hearing that this Mac Mini competitor will be on show at the Computex trade show, and that’s not long away as it’s all happening from the 3rd of June in Taiwan. The real question is why would you want an Ebox and not an Apple Mac Mini?
For starters the price of the famous Asus Eee PC laptop is only around $230.00, with that in mind, what could the Ebox sell at? It’s bound to be on the cheap side and if the design does not get you, then the savings in your pocket could end up taking some of Apple’s Mac Mini market share.
With the Credit Crunch in full swing, most peoples spending budgets are getting very tight and cheaper products are needed for both the consumer and the business if they want to keep selling them. Asus knows this and they are planning ahead with computer products that give great value for money.
We are hearing that the new Ebox will be sold as a standalone computer, and to keep costs down it will not include peripherals like a keyboard or monitor. Other features will be a 160GB solid-state drive, so this is confusing, considering they cost a lot of money still. The Ebox should have 2GB of RAM and measure around 8.75×7 inches and about one inch thick. We will update you when get more information.
Source: Read
When I first moved from a wired network at home to a wireless network, it was such an improvement that the power of wireless gave you. Now in 2008, its funny how I have moved away from wireless networks and towards a wired network via the home electrics, this is more secure and gives higher data speeds of 200MB plus.
These days it seems that “wireless” does not give all the freedom you hope it will, in some cases it can give you more hassle than enhancements. Recently I was looking at wireless options for the Nintendo Wii and found some interesting products that are going to come out soon and also some that are out already.
When I visited my local computer store, I found a couple of wireless senor bars for the Nintendo Wii and one was priced at £20 and the other at £10. Thinking, “lets get the best”, I went for the dearer of the two.
After trying the wireless sensor bar for a few weeks, I can now tell you that it does give more hassle than the wired version that comes free with the Nintendo Wii. This model will make a loud buzzing noise if left on for so many minutes and does not detected any Wii remote activity. Now this is great for saving battery life, but its not good if you are playing games such as Wii Fit. When you’re using the Wii balance board you do not always need the Wii remote, so the wireless senor bar keeps buzzing. Other devices include the Nintendo Wii Wireless Nunchuk Kit that aims to give you more movement, thanks to no wires between Nunchuk and Wii remote.
This year we will see many more wireless devices launched for the Wii, but how many of these will we really need? In most cases, the wired versions are good enough.
Lenovo have come a long way since changing their name from Legend back in 2003, but what has this $13 billion brand done with the ThinkPad X300 Notebook and its 64GB Solid State Drive. Tweak Town have taken the laptop for a ride and reported the results over eight pages, in their summery they said, “Lenovo is an excellent brand. It is consistent in manufacturing products of high quality and durability. The company sticks to its strengths, which are business platforms, and so it excels at delivering the end-user what he or she wants.
The notebook has heaps of features, starting from a 64GB Solid State Drive, which has been proven to be considerably faster than traditional HDDs, not only in the speed of access, but also in general performance. The 7mm DVD burner on such a small device is an engineering feat worth mentioning, as well as the thin profile of less than 2cm wide, the host of wireless communications and standard LAN, Bluetooth and WAN capabilities.
The multimedia aspect is solid and capable, with good working speakers, good connectivity options and also an integrated web camera for VOIP conference calls with families or colleagues while traveling. All in all, the entire product exudes quality and craftsmanship.
We have been extremely impressed by this product, mainly due to the engineering feats such as very small profile and footprint, while retaining all the essential ingredients for the target customer. In this case the target customer is a business person on the move, and with almost every aspect of functionality geared towards portability, ease of use and convenience, we have no doubt that it deserves the “Best Features” award.
The only area that it is let down in is the price, but since it is a premium product, the above $3000USD price tag is to be expected. What should also be noted is that it doesn’t have an SD card reader, or PC Card slot, but these are essentially legacy devices and are seldom needed since most media devices, from cameras to cell phones connect directly through the USB port anyway.”
Read the 8 page hands-on review.
When it comes to motherboards, the consumer has never had so much choice and Intel have now got a total of 12 different chipsets. This gives you a great range of performance levels and features for all types of users. NVIDIA have entered the market with its nForce 790i and 780i chipsets to increase this choice even further, and with Intel’s P45 replacing the P35 and becoming the brands mainstream chipset…the motherboard world is looking good.
Tweak Town have created a 17-page report on the specifications, benchmarks and more for two-GIGABYTE motherboards based around the P45 chipset. In their final thoughts they said “Intel’s P45 Express chipset hasn’t officially hit the market yet (it will launch shortly at Computex in Taipei), this is why we haven’t been able to give a huge amount of detailed features on the P45 Northbridge or its ICH10R companion chip, however, what we were able to get is based on testing as well as early information from our board provider.
P45 in its early form looks the goods! While it’s early days, we haven’t been able to test its overclocking ability, and this is something that will really determine if the board is able to take the crown away from the P35 – we are just waiting for the final revision boards to start arriving for testing. We have been able to hit speeds beyond 550MHz with P35 based boards, so P45 has some big shoes to fill, that’s for sure.
Some of the major changes are welcomed especially the inclusion of PCIe 2.0 interface, increased DDR-2 speeds of 1066MHz, matching the speeds AMD is now supporting with its Phenom X3 and X4 processors, making Intel still a major player in DDR2, even though they are still pushing for DDR3.
GIGABYTE’s EP45-DS3R and EP45-DQ6 in our early tests have proven to be fantastic. We managed to get the system perfectly stable, running Vista without any problems. We were very happy with the feel of the board as well as the initial performance. We will continue with overclocking tests and power usage using the DES as soon as we are able to get more time with the boards. For now we hope you enjoyed our preview into some upcoming P45 boards and there will be plenty more on this subject from us once we are finished at Computex early next month.”
Read the 17 page review.
When collectors keep products they feel will be worth a lot of money in time or want to keep a piece of history intact, most times its best to keep these products in their original packaging as this increases the products value. When someone has been careful enough to keep a 20th Anniversary Macintosh sealed for ten years and then it’s been decided to open it after all that time, how does that make you feel? This topic is wide open for discussion, but is it right or wrong?
There will be different views on that question, some will feel it’s a waste keeping a product that does nothing and others (normally collectors) will cry at the sight of this mint piece of history being touched. You can see an unboxing video below this post; it shows the owners unbox a piece of Apple history.
Although you cannot do much these days with such an old Apple Mac, unboxing of vintage equipment like this is very rare and something that has been shared with the world thanks to the YouTube video below. This new in box 20th Anniversary Macintosh cost a massive $7,500 back in 1997 and with that kind of price, it must have been hard to just leave it sitting untouched for more than ten years.
Take your time to watch the 23-minute video; don’t skip any as this product has waited ten years to see daylight. If it hurts too much to watch, then we understand but remember to share your view on opening products that have not been touched for so long.
Griffin iMate / Universal ADB to USB adapter (Electronics) newly tagged "macbook"
As you know SSD are now being used in a number of our mobile technology products like the Asus Eee 900 and the Apple MacBook Air, but the downside is that they still have limited storage capacity. The Asus at the moment only has a 12 - 20GB SSD, and the Apple MacBook Air comes with a larger 64GB SSD. The latter has a larger capacity, but it is still not enough for what people need in their laptops and UMPC’s. However; this could be about to change towards the end of the year, as PC World reports that Samsung Electronics who are the largest consumer electronics company on the planet are to release a 256GB solid-state disk, which should be on the shelves by the end of the year.
If Samsung do keep hold of their promise to release the larger more reliable hard drive, then future owners of mobile technology like the Eee PC and the MacBook Air will be hoping that both Asus and Apple decide to go with the larger SSD. It is not just laptops and UMPC’s that could benefit from such a device, even MP3 players might get a smaller version of this larger solid-state-disk, and I would put money on it that Apple will be the first to use it on their iPod range.
SSD as we know is the future in storage solution as there is nothing spinning like a conventional hard drive, this will save power which is the holy grail in portable technology, as well as reduce the risk of failure. However; there is one problem with the solid-state-disc, and that is the price. There is one problem with all new technology, the price is always high but as time goes on the price will become lower. If you do not believe me, just look how the price of Cell Phones have reduced in price, who would have thought 10 years ago that you could purchase as a cell phone for les than $10.
Standard maps are boring and limited, so why not go beyond the map with the Schmap City Guides and Schmap Local Search manages to come to life on the Apple iPhone with this unique Rotate ‘n Map feature, all you need to do is turn your iPhone sideway to see places on a map, as well as scroll through a list and the map will dynamically update. With City Guides you can choose from 100 worldwide cities, as well as browse reviews and photos of the sites and attractions they you are interested in, from bars, galleries, hotels, parks, museums, theatres and much more. Maps are just a turn away with their unique Rotate ‘n Map feature.
The there is also local search, where you are able to search locally for places such as banks, coffee shops, dentists, florists, golf courses, hair-dressers, restaurants and much more. You are then able to scroll through the results that come up, you can then call them with just one click, or you can also turn the Apple iPhone sideways to see these places on a map.
Just try out Schmap City Guides and Schmap Local Search, if you thought that your Apple iPhone and iPod Touch were great now, this new feature improves your best loved gadget better than a host of other apps.
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BRAND NEW Nintendo Wii Fit Balance Board + Games
Do you want to be the best at Nintendo’s Mario Kart Wii? Well you have got to check out the latest revolutionary homemade training wheel. We have a video below of the homemade training wheel in action but let me chat about it for a little bit. The Wii Wheel is pretty hard to handle and obviously this person in the video thought so as well and that is why the Wii Wheel housing was made.
Nintendo Wii Fanboy’s Revolutionary columnist Mike Sylvester is the one behind this revolutionary do-it-yourself training wheel and we think he might have hit the jackpot, hey get it into shops quick. He just wanted to make racing games much easier to handle, he says that when he was writing for GlovePIE script for MotoGP 2 he wanted to be able to twist the Nintendo Wii Remote for throttle whilst tilting it to steer and this is when he found a simple way to do it.
For all the details on the revolutionary homemade training wheel please visit here, you can watch the video of the homemade training wheel in action with the Mario Kart Wii. I really do like this idea because it in simple, cheap and easy to build, yes ok it is ugly but hey who cares as long as it works.
R4 - R4DS English V2 MicroSD Adapter newly tagged "nintendo"
It seems that NVIDA have been making some big noise of late about slimming down their product line of graphics cards, and are also going after Intel and some of their business. With that kind of announcement, you would have thought that the new summer line-up from NVIDIA would be something special, but I am afraid to say that it is much the same as what they already have. NVIDIA have two new graphics cards coming in their summer line-up, the GeForce GTX 260 and the GeForce GTX 280, both of which are next-gen cards.
Both will use the D10U graphics core; however the GTX 280 is the full fat version of the processor which uses all of the 240 unified stream processors. The GTX 260 will only use 192, so is a watered down version. Both the 260 and 280 GPU’s support three-way SLI, NVIDIA are also planning to incorporate PhysX support however; as yet there are no details on this, we will just have to wait until the June 18 launch.
As we mentioned above, both cards will use the D10U processor, these are said to be 50% better than the shaders which were used on the older D9 GPU’s. One thing that you need to know about the D10U chipset though, it does not offer support for DirectX extensions above 10.0. It does seem to me that with the launch of both the GeForce GTX 280 / 260 next-gen cards, NVIDIA are not doing enough to go after Intel.
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ATI Radeon X1600 Pro 512 MB AGP (Electronics) newly tagged "nvidia"
When you’re looking at getting a new CPU cooler, its great to read a detailed comparison of some of the best and worst designs. This is Sunbeamtech’s Core-Contact Freezer and its been compared to AMD, Intel and other models in a hands-on by Tweak Town. They found that the Core-Contact Freezer has a brilliant design that leads to great performance, and the retail and e-tail availability are holding this product back, so hopefully Sunbeamtech will make this product available before you sacrifice it for another cooler.
In the hands-on review, they said this in their final thoughts “By now, you want a Sunbeamtech Core-Contact Freezer and I don’t blame you. If not, well I have no idea why because it is a great cooler that performs with some of the best coolers on the market. Getting one is another story. I spent another hour today looking to actually purchase the cooler and came up empty handed.
Lack of availability might lead to the coolers downfall. If you can’t actually purchase the product, you can’t use it. I am sure that in time Sunbeamtech will get the coolers out to the masses. Sunbeamtech has many retailers that carry their products so it won’t be long before the world is swimming in Core-Contact goodness.
An availability problem aside, the construction quality is spot on. I would have liked to receive a sample that was not damaged during shipping. What that really means is that someone needs to work on a better way to protect the cooler during shipping. Since nearly 90% or more of the coolers I have tested over the last ten years came with similar packaging, it is difficult to hit Sunbeamtech with a deduction in score, that is, until it actually happens, like this case.
Brilliant design leads to great performance and the Sunbeamtech Core-Contact Freezer has both. Retail and etail availability are holding this product back so hopefully Sunbeamtech makes this product available before you sacrifice for an available cooler.”
Read the seven page review.
HP Pavilion TX2510US 12.1" Laptop (2.10 GHz AMD Turion X2 ZM-80 Processor, 3 GB RAM, 250 GB Hard Drive, DVD Drive, Vista Premium) Black (Personal Computers) newly tagged "amd"
