Category: Platforms

MacBook Pro Upgraded: Claimed 50% Faster

MacBook Pro Upgraded: Claimed 50% FasterFollowing on from the recent upgrades to the MacBook, Apple has upgraded their Pro laptop range to run the latest Intel Core 2 Duo processors, otherwise known as Santa Rosa, at 2.4GHz.

Apple are claiming that it will run apps like Final Cut Pro 6 and Logic Pro 7, 50% faster that the original MacBook Pro with Core Duo – something that will be very tempting to many. With the internal graphics card now upgraded to the NVIDIA GeForce 8600M GT, the graphics will also display 50% speed faster.
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HTC Smartphone Launch, London

HTC Smartphone Launch, LondonThere was a large assemblage of HTC bigwigs in town for the global launch of their new Touch smartphone.

A sleek little fella sporting GSM/GPRS/EDGE, Tri-band radio (900, 1800 & &900), Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 2.0, the Touch launches in two flavours: “elegant soft black” and the truly daft sounding, “alluring wasabi green.”

The big news about the phone – hyperbolically described as, “a watershed as important as the introduction of the mouse” – is HTC’s new TouchFLO system, which lets users navigate screens by sweeping their finger across the phone.
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VIA Intros The $600 NanoBook Ultraportable Laptop

VIA Intros The $600 NanoBook Ultraportable LaptopRamping up a ton of pressure on the Palm’s new Foleo is VIA’s new NanoBook Ultra Mobile Device, an ultraportable laptop with a claimed retail price hovering around the ‘dead cheap’ price band at just $600.

Sure, the thing looks like it grew from an ugly acorn, rose to the top of the ugly tree and then hit just about every ugly branch on the way down before landing in a pile of ugly dung, but the specs sure look pretty for such a bargain basement device.
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Mobile Users Drop £342m Of Phones Down The Pan

Mobile Users Drop £342m Of Phones Down The PanAn astonishing 855,000 handsets are flushed away every year in the UK, totting up to an annual £342 million’s worth of phones flying around the u-bend.

The rather startling figure comes from the price comparison and switching service, SimplySwitch, who claim that 4.5m handsets are lost or damaged every year, with many enjoying a rather bizarre demise.

It seems that phones are particularly prone to falling down the loo as a result of falling out of pockets or being knocked off the toilet roll holder (or, we expect, slipping out of the hands of drunk blokes feebly failing to multitask after a skinful of Super-lager).
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Apple iPhone: Sales Restricted Until 2008?

Apple iPhone: Sales Restricted Until 2008?Slavering Mac fanboys anxiously counting the minutes until they can caress, fondle, drool and dribble all over their very own iPhone may be in for a very long wait.

Industry analysts are predicting that Apple won’t be able to keep up with demand and so will restrict sales of their shiny new iPhones until 2008.

A recent Merrill Lynch report sets the scene for much i-wailing and i-sobbing amongst the Apple cognoscenti with just 4 million iPhones rolling off the production line this year, with only a comparatively modest 12 million units coming out in 2008.
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Basilisk II PSP: Running PSP Mac 7.5 OS: Video

Basilisk II PSP: Running PSP Mac 7.5 OS: VideoWe know you love it when people port software on to unlikely platforms, so thought you’d like to see this video of the old (pre-osx) Mac operating system running on an Sony PSP.

How real it is, isn’t 100% clear, but it appears to be running a PSP version of Basilisk II, an open-source Macintosh Emulator project, called, unsurprisingly, Basilisk II PSP.
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SanDisk microSD 1GB: Gosh It’s Small

SanDisk microSD 1GB: Gosh It's SmallWe received our first Micro-SD memory today. The SanDisk microSD/Transflash is _tiny_. Truly minuscule.

Obviously we’d seen a few press shots of them around, but that doesn’t prepare you for actually getting them in your hands – or fingertips.

It’s not news that the capacity of memory in increasing and that the amount of physical space needed for that memory is reducing, so we thought it would be fun to do a comparison.

We dug out some old memory – NEC D41256C-12 to be precise – which was the state of the art circa 1979/1980. It has been bought on eBay five or so years back as parts insurance for the in-house Stargate Defender machine we love sooo much.

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“World’s Smallest” SMS M500 Watchfone Wristwatch Ready To Ship

World's Smallest SMS M500 Watchfone Wristwatch Ready To ShipProudly proclaiming itself as the world’s smallest mobile phone, the SMS M500 Watchfone looks to be more than a gimmick, packing in a useful slab of technology in a wristwatch sized package.

Despite its diminutive dimensions, the M500 is a fully fledged quad-band mobile, sporting audio and video player, a touchscreen, Java support, WAP, Bluetooth and SMS and MMS functionality.
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Optiarc BD-M100A: Blu-ray Burner First From Sony NEC

Optiarc BD-M100A: Blu-ray Burner First From Sony NECOptiarc, the product of the joined Sony and NEC’s optical storage divisions, has released the BD-M100A, their first Blu-ray Burner.

It burns single and dual layer BD-R and BD-RE Blu-ray discs, giving a storage capacity of up to 35Gb and 50 Gb respectively. It also supports BD-ROM and BD-AV discs.
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