In case you missed the official announcement, ETQW Linux Client is now available to download. You do need the full retail DVD to complete the installation though. The client itself is really small at 18MB, so need to work out if they actually preloaded some OS compatilibty stuff on the DVD pre-release.
Sure, Apple's profitability and viability is based on any number of factors, but there's one figure that analysts have been training their calculators on for months that has finally seen the light of day: Apple sold 1,119,000 iPhones in Q4 2007, which ended on September 29th, bringing the grand total to 1,389,000 since launch. That might meet or miss your expectations, but other sales bringing a smile to Jobs' face and a cha-ching to his wallet include a 34% growth in Mac sales year to year and a 17% growth in iPods year to year -- with 10.2 million iPods sold last quarter. The earnings call hasn't started just yet, so hopefully we'll get a few more juicy details on how much AT&T is chipping in to the bottom line these days.
Gallery: Microsoft announces Xbox 360 Arcade, goodbye Xbox 360 Core
Label us Luddites for resisting Windows Vista, but there’s no arguing the point that the new OS currently offers very little you can’t get faster with Windows XP. That goes double for games, which is why we’re baffled by HP’s decision to run Vista Ultimate on the groundbreaking Blackbird 002 gaming rig it sent us.
We’re equally surprised that HP sent us a machine it knew would blue-screen when going into suspend mode (and then leave it to us to discover this). Those two decisions are unfortunate because nearly every other facet of the Blackbird is utterly brilliant. Here’s proof that HP’s acquisition of VoodooPC was much more than an opportunistic move (by a company that many gamers dismiss as stodgily conservative and more appropriate for middle-aged newbs) to glom on to the cachet of a high-profile boutique PC vendor.
Actually, we’d argue that HP shed its old-fogey image months ago when it shipped the superbly designed TouchSmart IQ770 (reviewed April ’07). Although that desktop system is also limited to Vista, the embedded 17-inch touch-screen LCD justifies the decision (and you wouldn’t play games on it anyway).
The Blackbird is a different story. Although HP tells us consumers will be able to order machines with either XP or Vista, we review rigs as they are sent to us. As for the blue-screen issue, HP says it’ll have it fixed before you read this review.
Those issues aside, HP and Voodoo deserve high praise for building an exciting and innovative personal computer while using industry-standard parts for every key component. One glance at the all-aluminum case reveals that it’s highly customized; nonetheless, it will accommodate any ATX motherboard and any standard power supply.
Swinging open the side access panel, which easily lifts off its smooth-as-silk hinges, reveals an Asus Striker Extreme motherboard. In a ballsy move, HP adjusted Nvidia’s nForce 680i SLI BIOS to allow a pair of ATI Radeon HD 2900 XT cards to run in CrossFire mode—tweaking the noses of AMD and Nvidia in the process.
 |
| Removing the Blackbird's access panel reveals beauty that's more than skin deep. |
Each of the Radeons is outfitted with 1GB of DDR4 RAM and cooled by an Asetek LCLC liquid-cooling system. The LCLC also wicks heat away from the 3GHz Intel QX6850 (Core 2 Extreme quad core), which HP overclocked to 3.76GHz. You can order a Blackbird with an X-Fi soundcard and an Ageia PhysX card, but our unit had neither (relying on Analog Devices’s Integrated Digital SoundMax HD Audio for sound, installed on a riser card to escape electrical noise on the mobo).
The Topower Computer TOP-1100W DVT power supply is rated to deliver 1,100 watts (the 2900 XTs, you’ll recall, are insatiable power hogs). The PSU is mounted at the bottom of the case, which is elevated by a large aluminum foot to allow cool air to enter the case from the bottom as well as the sides. Cable management is simplified by modular power plugs, but there’s more to it than that. The SATA cables for the hard drives, for example, are routed to a set of sockets mounted on an internal backplane. The drives are mounted on trays that slide into a rack and plug into this backplane.
Two vertically mounted slot-fed DVD burners are hidden inside the case’s heatsink-like grill, with only LED-lit eject buttons revealing their presence. The case can accommodate a third (tray type) optical drive next to the other two. An equally well-disguised pop-up module on top of the case harbors a 15-in-1 media-card reader, jacks for a headphone and mic, two USB ports, and a FireWire port.
 |
| Close this swing-out panel and its spring-steel strips will push installed PCI Express cards firmly into their slots. |
We’re excited about many of the Blackbird’s innovations, but HP’s decision to send us a Vista PC severely undermined the machine’s gaming benchmark numbers (including a Quake 4 performance that was slower than our aging zero-point rig’s). “What about DX10?” you ask. “Pretty much irrelevant for now,” we say. And while we applaud the company’s decision to enable CrossFire on an nForce motherboard, our experience has been that Nvidia’s GeForce 8800 GTX and 8800 Ultra are both faster than the Radeon HD 2900 XT (although the GTX’s edge evaporates when running Vista).
Buy this machine and you won’t care which camp wins the next skirmish in the GPU wars because you’ll be covered either way—as rightly you should be. That’s just one of the features that endow the Blackbird 002 with such potential for greatness. Yes, this PC deserves so much better than Vista.
| SPECS | ||||
| HP Blackbird 002 | ||||
| CPU | Intel Core 2 Extreme QX6850 quad core (3GHz overclocked to 3.67GHz) | |||
| MOBO | ASUS Striker Extreme (Nvidia nForce 680i SLI) | |||
| RAM | 2GB Corsair Dominator XMS2 DDR2 (800MHz overclocked to 1,0066MHz) | |||
| LAN | Dual Gigabit LAN (Nvidia) | |||
| HARD DRIVES | Two 160GB WD Raptors (10,000rpm SATA) in RAID-0, one 750GB Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 | |||
| OPTICAL | Two TSST TS-T632L DVD burners | |||
| VIDEOCARD | Two Ati Radeon HD 2900 XTs with 1GB GDDR4 memory in CrossFire | |||
| SOUNDCARD | Analog Devices Integrated Digital SoundMax HD Audio | |||
| CASE | HP Blackbird | |||
| BENCHMARKS | ||||
| HP Blackbird 002 | ||||
| SYSmark2004 SE | WNR | |||
| Premiere Pro 2.0 | 1,380 sec | |||
| Photoshop CS2 | 131 sec | |||
| Recode H.264 | WNR | |||
| FEAR 1.07 | 130 fps | |||
| Quake 4 | 105.3 fps | |||
| Our current desktop test bed is a Windows XP SP2 machine, using a dual-core 2.6GHz Athlon 64 FX-60, 2GB of Corsair DDR400 RAM on an Asus A8N32-SLI motherboard, two GeForce 7900 GTX videocards in SLI mode, a Western Digital 4000KD hard drive, a Sound Blaster X-Fi soundcard, and a PC Power and Cooling Turbo Cool 850 PSU. | ||||
Want to get a MacBook Pro laptop? What about this 24-carat gold MacBook Pro. The case of the MacBook Pro is 24-carat Gold, including the keyboard, with the Apple logo filled with diamonds.
One more picture after the jump.
Sony Ericsson announced the new K630i cellphone, a 3G handset with HSDPA. Sony Ericsson K630i features a 2-inch LCD display, a 2 Megapixel camera, and an integrated media player supporting MP3, AAC, AAC+, eAAC+, WMA and MPEG4, WMV, H.264, H.263 videos.
K630i supports Bluetooth 2.0 and USB 2.0 connectivity. It comes with 32MB intenal storage and there is a Memory Stick Micro (M2) memory card slot.
Notebook Review has a review on the Dell Vostro 1500 notebook PC. Dell Vostro 1500 is powered by an Intel Core 2 Duo T5470 1.6GHz processor, 1GB of DDR2 RAM, 120GB hard drive and NVIDIA GeForce 8400M GS (128MB) graphic card.
The Vostro 1500 comes with a DVD SuperMulti DL burner or Blu-ray drive, WiFi 802.11a/b/g/n, Bluetooth, a 15.4-inch LCD display, and a 8-in1 card reader.
NotebookReview’s Conclusion:
The Dell Vostro 1500 is a solid notebook with an impressive set of features at a value price. As the holiday buying season jumps into full swing the Vostro 1500 will certainly be a strong candidate for a small business or school notebook. The choice of processors, graphics cards, and other configuration options means that the 1500 can serve just about anyone’s needs. While the entry-level version of the 1500 with integrated Intel graphics lacks the power for serious gaming, the dedicated nVidia graphics card makes for a capable value gaming machine and mobile multimedia center. Given the fact that the Vostro 1500 is virtually identical to the Inspiron 1520, this notebook is an amazing value if you can live with a notebook that is available in only one color.
Bottom line, the Vostro 1500 is a solid notebook at a value price … and we can’t help but say that black is indeed beautiful.
Pros
* Fast Core 2 Duo processors, and up to 4GB of RAM provide plenty of system performance
* Dedicated graphics option performs well
* Still available with XP and zero bloatware!
* Solid build quality and sturdiness
* Good keyboard and touchpadCons
* Not-so-stylish design
* Lower-resolution screen isn’t great … select the higher resolution option
* Average battery life
* A bit bulky and heavy for a 15.4″ notebook
* Bad location for built-in speakers
This Hyundai W-100 Wrist Phone is not the first cellphone in the form factor of a watch, and it's probably not going to be the last, either. Hyundai is apparently marketing this watch we showed you in the form of prototype last summer from Chinese company Cect. That's a lot of tech to pack into a small space, and this is the best looking watch phone we've seen yet, too.
It's equipped with Bluetooth so you can walk around and look like you're talking to yourself, and then you can be sneaky and take some pictures with its 1.3-megapixel onboard camera. It even has an MP3 player, and if your eyes are sharp enough, it plays videos, too.
No pricing info was forthcoming yet, and we're not sure this is going to be available in the US, either, but it's a nice design exercise, and we can expect to see more of these kinds of watches Stateside before too long.
Designed by Philips alongside Stella, a project that is developing flexible electronic substrates for the medical world, Skintile jewelry is an adhesive body adornment that can light up depending on your mood. Everything is contained in the substrate—energy supply, sensors, actuators and display, and Philips rather saucily claims that it is "arousal enhancing." Well, I guess if you wind the design below round your erect penis to signal that you've got a hard-on, then yes, I guess it is.
The Philips blurb describes it as a "semi disposable, bio compatible, non-allergenic, breathable, mass customizable, self contained body-worn accessory." And I'm guessing it's one for the ladies, although, if it really does reflect your mood, then I'd pass on it if you're prone to PMT, as it will probably turn black and start spelling out "Crazy-Assed Bitch. Leave now if you wish to survive." in Morse code. [Stella via Philips and Yanko]
The Supreme Court ruled today that Microsoft and Best Buy would have to face a lawsuit alleging fraudulent sign-up of MSN customers, a crime that violates the Mafia-busting RICO anti-racketeering act. Here's the backstory:In return for a $200 million strategic investment from Microsoft back in 2000, Best Buy promised to sign up customers to MSN when they bought a computer. Best Buy would grant the customer a free six-month MSN subscription, but they would use the buyer's credit card to secure the automatic re-bill of the subscription. In other words, they were transmitting customer credit cards and personal information to Microsoft. A 2003 lawsuit filed by James Odom alleged that this was, in fact, wire fraud.
The lawsuit has snowballed into a major class-action suit, with thousands of plaintiffs and potentially tens or hundreds of millions of dollars in damages. The Supreme Court decision didn't actually rule on the case, but it did confirm the legal legitimacy of the suit. [AP/Yahoo]
