The last time we went away on a business trip, we had to set off with a bag almost overflowing with adapters, lugging no less than five of the ruddy things for our travelling tech kit of a Palm Treo, Ricoh GR, Nikon D80, Vaio lappie and DVD burner.
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Category: Components
Components provided to OEMs
USB Roll-Up Keyboard And Drum Kit
You can always rely on Brando to bring a smile to your face with some completely daft USB gizmo, and once again they haven’t disappointed with the release of their USB Roll-Up Drum Kit and keyboard.
Ginger Baker on a mat
We can’t imagine many people sitting at home and thinking to themselves, “You know what? I could really use a plastic roll up drumkit to hit”, but if you are one of those strange people, prepare to get percussin’
Continue reading USB Roll-Up Keyboard And Drum Kit
Via Pico-ITX VT6047: The World’s Smallest Motherboard
Taiwanese chipset manufacturer Via Technologies has released a motherboard so teeny-weensy that it could almost fit in a box of playing cards.
Via claims that their VT6047 Pico-ITX form factor motherboard is the smallest fully-featured x86 mainboard in the known universe, and we certainly haven’t seen anything smaller.
Although motherboards may not be the sexiest piece of kit around, creating a board as tiny as this little puppy opens up a world of possibilities for ultra-compact PC systems and appliances.
The Pico-ITX ‘board measures up at just 10cm x 7.2cm, and is around 50 per cent smaller than the previous ‘smallest motherboard’ title holder, the Nano-ITX form factor.
The pint sized motherboard is designed to be powered by one of Via’s energy efficient processor platforms – like the Via C7 or the fan-free Eden processor in the 21mm x 21mm nanoBGA2 package – with the resultant combo delivering a hefty clout into a low heat, low power, ultra-compact package.
“The Pico-ITX represents Via’s commitment to spearhead x86 innovation through our proven technology leadership in driving down the platform size,” purred Richard Brown, vice president of corporate marketing at Via.
“As with the Mini-ITX and Nano-ITX form factors before it, this new platform has raised the excitement level among enthusiasts and customers alike, firing the imagination an almost unlimited range of what were previously impossibly small systems,” he added.
Consumer PCs built around the Pico-ITX form factor motherboard are expected soon.
Driven Mad By A Whining Asus Fan
Life in Digi-Life towers has become considerably more stressful recently after our Mesh PC started to give out an annoying high pitched whine from one of the PC’s fans.
At first, it was just an occasional background noise that would start just as quickly as it would stop. Then it started to become more regular. And louder. And more irritating.
Put the boot in
We noticed that a highly unscientific boot to the PC’s case (carry out at your own risk) often stopped the noise, but in the past few weeks the fan has become so noisy that we feared we may end up committing GBH on the machine.
With a level of grumbling that would make Mr Grumpy on Tax Return Day seem like a happy chap, we reluctantly pulled open the PC to look for the culprit.
Naturally, the machine decided to switch to ‘absolutely silent’ mode for the first ten minutes, but eventually we tracked down the culprit: the chipset fan on our ASUS A8N-SLI Deluxe motherboard.
‘No problem,’ we thought, we’ll just pop along to the nearest PC fair and grab a £2 replacement fan and silence will be, once again, truly golden.
Before shelling out for the fan, we thought we’d take a quick look on the Web to see if there were any issues about fitting replacement fans and that’s when the expletive count started to hit Gordon Ramsey levels.
It’s the chipset, Jim
It turns out that our motherboard is not only near legendary for its incessantly whining fan, but worst of all, Asus fitted the mobo (Motherboard) with a stupid, steeenkin’ non-standard fan. Aaargh!
Although we can only admire the near-Klingon-esque sci-fi looks of the Asus fan in question, its proprietary fitting means that you can’t simply slap in an off-the-shelf replacement.
According to some online forums, Asus will apparently send you a free replacement fan once you’ve filled in several forms in triplicate, but we haven’t heard back from them yet (the mobo comes with a three year warranty).
A request for help on the urban75 forums brought forth disturbing tales of folks fitting their own replacement fans, a process which involves the enormous hassle of removing the entire motherboard – not a job for an impatient journo with pressing pub deadlines.
Some had simply botched up a solution, with one user wedging in a standard chipset fan with a zip-tie, while another had manoeuvred a case fan to blow over the chipset at low revs.
Others suggested plumping for a passive cooling solution, employing a Zalman Silent Motherboard Heatsink – a bargain at under £3, but once again requiring the entire PC be taken apart.
We’ll be keeping you informed if Asus honour their free replacement fan offer (we’ve also written to Mesh, the PC makers), but for now you’ll have to excuse us if a few of our posts get a little tetchy as the ruddy thing has started making a whining noise all over again.
In the meantime, may we recommend that users looking to upgrade or build a new PC invest in a motherboard with passive chipset cooling rather than risk suffering the slings and arrows of an outrageous PC racket.
Intel Announces Solid State Drives And Green Processors
Just like clunky eight track cartridges, brick sized cellphones and desk hogging CRT monitors, the trusty hard disk could be heading for oblivion as Intel announce their first move into the flash drive market.
Yesterday, the electronics big boy elbowed its way onto the Flash Memory table clutching news of their Intel Z-U130 Value Solid-State Drive, offering USB 2.0/1.1 interfaces.
Despite its instantly forgettable name, Intel reckons that the NAND flash memory can whip the spinning botty of hard disk drives and removable USB storage devices, offering nippier boot times, embedded code storage, faster data access, silent operation and lower power consumption.
Although no one’s predicting that flash memory will replace hard disks quite yet (mechanical drives still enjoy a considerable cost advantage at large capacities), Greg Matson, product marketing manager for Intel’s NAND flash memory division reckons they could provide a more reliable and cheaper way of storing information on PCs for emerging markets.
The drives could also be fitted into PCs and servers as a way to speed up the boot process, and thus deprive workers of a good excuse to pop out for a walk, “while the PC’s starting up.”
Intel is currently keeping schtum about the pricing for their Z-U130 Value Solid-State Drives (it doesn’t get any more memorable the second time around, does it?) but the capacities will vary from 1GB to 8GB, with 8GB drive not expected to emerge until the end of the year.
Intel’s Green Xeon Processors
Elsewhere, Intel were giving their Eco-Trumpets an extra long parp with the announcement of two new Quad-Core Xeon processors – the L5320 and L5310.
Intel claims that these offer between a 35 and 60 percent reduction in power consumption on low-power, quad-core processors designed for high end users like data centres, blade servers and financial industries.
“Intel has really responded to the industry’s call to deliver unprecedented breakthroughs for datacenter energy efficiency,” frothed Kirk Skaugen, VP of Intel Digital Enterprise Group and GM of the Server Platform Group.
“IT managers can get outstanding quad-core Intel Xeon server performance today and at no premium to dual-core products,” he added.
High-k Metal Gates To Give Major Chip Advance
Both IBM and Intel have announced what they are calling major jumps forward in the design of microchips.
They both centre on building transistors using so-called high-k metal gates, which after almost seven years of industry research in the area, it’s claimed will lead to increases in the speed and power of chips for another decade.
The high-k metal gates reduce current leakage and will be used to replace the polysilicon gate electrode currently in use. It does this because the new material holds its charge longer.
It is understood that Intel is further ahead in the process, with the release of computers based on the next chip types by the end of the year. A most fortunate dovetail with Vista being released, which requires a lot of horsepower to run at usable speeds.
Intel said its new family of chips, code-named Penryn, will have 410 million transistors, using the new materials combined with the 45-nanometer technology manufacturing process. This compares with about 280 million in current chips. Intel also said electrical leakage will be reduced by about 30 percent.
Batting off the Intel claims of it being in products this year, Bernie Meyerson, chief technologist for IBM Systems and Technology Group retorted, “It’s almost meaningless to say I’m going to ship a chip first. Yes, you can do that. It doesn’t mean that you are actually going to put it into a server; there is a ton of work to get to that.”
IBM said they will be putting it “out the door in a product in roughly in the 2008 time frame.”
Intel are trotting out Moore’s law again (the number of transistors on an IC doubles every two years), claiming that these advantages will enable it to be maintained. Many people view this as somewhat of a marketing message by Intel, rather than a law.
It’s understood that the approach of IBM and Intel differ. Intel are mounting the components on top of the silicon, where IBM are mounting theirs inside the silicon. IBM’s approach potentially gives them the advantage of being able to build many levels on top of each other.
What the heck is a High-K material?
Intel’s view of it is that “High-k” stands for high dielectric constant, a measure of how much charge a material can hold. Example of High-k materials are hafnium dioxide (HfO2), zirconium dioxide (ZrO2) and titanium dioxide (TiO2).
Zoran COACH 9: DivX Record Coming To Digital Cameras: CES 2007
Everyone and their uncle are making digital cameras these days and companies like Zoran help them to do that by providing the chips for capture and processing.
The news from the floor at CES is that the COACH 9 will now support the popular DivX video format, giving the benefit of video compatibility with the tens of millions of DivX Certified DVD players.
Zoran’s COACH 9 is already capable of capture images at up to 16mpx for still images and capturing and playing back WMV MPEG-4 video of VGA resolution at 30 frames/sec including audio and 20 frames/sec at SVGA resolution.
When it first arrived, DivX was used by many to encode copied videos, including a considerable amount to p0rn. They’ve worked hard to shift that image and this support is a boost for DivX furthering its aim to become a global standard for video encoding.
Samsung Introduces One-Month Laptop Battery
The boffins at Samsung have developed a super long life fuel cell expansion dock that will keep laptops powered up for over a month.
Scheduled for commercial production by the end of this year, the company managed to get one of their Q35 ultra portable notebook computers to run for an astonishing 5 weeks using the dock, with the machine powered up for 8 hours a day.
The uber-battery runs on Methanol, a form of alcohol (no, you can’t drink it if you fancy a bevy) and can deliver a maximum output of 20 Watts, with a maximum storage capacity of 1,200Wh.
Samsung’s dock clips on the back of the laptop and measures up around the same size as a regular laptop docking station.
Apparently, fuel dock designs traditionally make a bit of racket (we’re not sure why) but Samsung say that their beefy power cell will be no noisier than regular laptops.
Samsung say that a miniature version of this fuel cell is in the pipeline too, with just a teacup’s worth of fuel managing to notch up a massive 15 hours of life.
For those of you who like the ‘science bit’ on shampoo adverts, we can tell you that the technology goes under the name of DMFC (Direct Methanol Fuel Cell) and does it stuff by oxidising liquid methanol on a catalyst to form carbon dioxide.
Or something like that.
BlueOrb: Faster Text Input For PS2 and XBox
To defeat the pain of trying to enter text using an on-screen keyboard using your gaming controller to peck out a letter at a time, Blue Orb have released Texter, a small device that sits between the game controller and the game box. Using some general cleverness, the box will appear as a USB keyboard.
Once it’s installed, you only need to click the left analog joystick (on PS2) to get it working. By moving the right and left joysticks in different combinations, letters are created. To understand where to move the joysticks, Blue Orb provide colours rings to put on your controller to train you. Using it, Blue Orb claim a five fold speed improvement.
We’ve not tried it yet, but looking at the usage diagrams it initially looks a little complex. That’s not to say that using it wouldn’t become easier after some practice. We’ve had a lot of experience in having to use different ways of putting text in, normally by having to review so many different mobile phones. Once you get past the initial pain of using the new method, some of them can be pretty fast.
There’s a brief video that tries to show the difference in using the ‘normal’ chicken picking method vs the Blue Orb method.
The PS2 version is available now, with the Xbox 360 arriving during December.
Moixa USBCell: Rechargeable Batteries via USB
UK firm Moixa have come up with a rechargeable battery that can be re-charged on a USB port, as well as more normal battery chargers.
You know what it’s like when you go on trips, you end up with a bag full of chargers and plug converters. These batteries from Moixa could lighten your load by removing a battery recharger from your packing.
It achieves this flexibility by popping the top of the AA battery off to reveal a USB connector. Charging the currently available 1,300mAh cell fully takes six hours, but we understand that quick 10 minutes charges will give results too. Moixa claim the batteries don’t suffer from ‘battery memory,’ where capacity can be quickly lost by brief charging.
We imagine that the batteries won’t be used as the primary source of power, but highly useful for a charge anywhere backup. While 1,300mAh isn’t ideal with high-drain devices like cameras, it’ll get you through a sticky patch.
It initially launched in September, but somehow we didn’t notice it. Todays announcement of their deal with DSGi, the largest electronics retailing group in the UK that includes such delights as Currys, Currys.digital and PC World, brought it back into focus for us.
Moixa have other batteries in the pipeline, including AAA, 9V and most interestingly, phone and device batteries.
A bit of background on Moixa. You may have heard of them before, they’re behind the PDA folding keyboard, which is in use in over 2 million products worldwide.
If you’re wondering where the heck does a name like Moixa come from, it’s the Greek word Axiom reversed. Used it in the following way, “Moixa rethinks market axioms and creates new technology and Intellectual Property.”
They retail for £13 and are in UK and US shops now.