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Asus Announces App Store for Netbooks, MeeGo.com

David Buckner — Mon, 31 May 2010 18:52:42 +0000

MeeGo version 1.0 now available on MeeGo.com. The store, much like Intel’s AppUp store, provides applications, games, utilities, and other varieties of programs for netbooks and other devices. Both services hope to compete with the likes of Apple’s iTunes app store.

Link: MeeGo.com

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Intel AppUp Store for Netbooks

David Buckner — Mon, 31 May 2010 18:48:31 +0000

Intel launched a application store for netbook in January. While still in beta, it’s soon being copied by other companies such as Asus. The online store let’s users download and purchases applications, games, and utilities for their netbook much in the same way that Apple iTunes serves apps for their iPhones, iPads, and iPods.

Link: http://www.intel.com/appup/

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Toshiba Satellite T115D-S1125 Nova Black AMD Athlon Neo X2 1.5Ghz 11.6″

David Buckner — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 03:07:03 +0000

With up to nine hours of battery life rating on the Satellite® T100 Laptop Series you’ll be able to keep going from the moment you boot up till you log off at night. It’s time to experience more unplugged freedom to do, explore and enjoy.

Don’t give up the performance you need for the thin and light portability you’ll love. With responsive, energy-smart, ultra-low voltage processors from AMD® and Intel®, lots of DDR3 memory and up to 320GB* of storage, this Satellite® T100 notebook will help you go far—and keep you going strong.

Includes:

AMD Athlon™ Neo X2 Dual-Core Processor L325
Genuine Windows 7 Home Premium (64-bit)
2GB DDR2 800MHz memory
ATI® Radeon™ HD 3200
320GB HDD (5400rpm)
HDMI output port
Hard Drive Impact Sensor
11.6″ HD TruBrite® LED Backlit display
1366×768 (HD), 16:9 aspect ratio, Supports 720p content
Built-in microphone, Standard stereo speakers, Headphone jack (stereo), Microphone jack (mono)
Webcam and microphone built into LCD bezel
Wi-Fi® Wireless networking (802.11b/g)
No Bluetooth (No Antenna)
10/100 Ethernet LAN
Memory Card Reader SD
2-USB (2.0), 1-USB (2.0) with Sleep and Charge

So what is the word? Excellent. This netbook gets high marks for putting everything you need into a single nice package at a decent price. The ATI 3200 graphics processor makes the netbook able to play a decent amount of games. The keyboard is not the best of the bunch, but gets good marks for ease of use. Well built and Toshiba quality round off an excellent buy.

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Gateway EC Series Cherry Red 11.6 Celeron M 743 Netbook

David Buckner — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 02:46:08 +0000

Claims up to 6 hours of battery life, includes a 11.6 screen, runs a Intel Celeron 1.3GHz single core processor, 2GB of RAM, and finally a splash of Windows 7 Home Premium . Also includes a 250GB drive.

Runs your typical Integrated 4500MHD graphics processor for average performance and a HDMI port. However, this unit is fairly snappy feeling. The full sized keyboard, well full sized for a netbook, is well laid out and easy to use. Some minor complaints of the keys are flat so you can’t get a feel for your typing position.

Nice and fresh Cherry Red makes it stand out, and it includes all the nice features of a typical netbook. For the price this is worth the look.

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Valve Announces Steam and Source for Mac

David Buckner — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 19:24:25 +0000

Valve announced today it will bring Steam, Valve’s gaming service, and Source, Valve’s gaming engine, to the Mac.

Steam and Valve’s library of games including Left 4 Dead 2, Team Fortress 2, Counter-Strike, Portal, and the Half-Life series will be available in April 2010.

The importance of this news is that it will bring gaming to the Mac platform, something that Mac users have long awaited for years. Valve will have a major hold into the Mac market with this move, and will prompt other game makes to consider the Mac a solid gaming machine.

“As we transition from entertainment as a product to entertainment as a service, customers and developers need open, high-quality Internet clients,” said Gabe Newell, President of Valve. “The Mac is a great platform for entertainment services.”

“Our Steam partners, who are delivering over a thousand games to 25 million Steam clients, are very excited about adding support for the Mac,” said Jason Holtman, Director of Business Development at Valve. “Steamworks for the Mac supports all of the Steamworks APIs, and we have added a new feature, called Steam Play, which allows customers who purchase the product for the Mac or Windows to play on the other platform free of charge. For example, Steam Play, in combination with the Steam Cloud, allows a gamer playing on their work PC to go home and pick up playing the same game at the same point on their home Mac. We expect most developers and publishers to take advantage of Steam Play.”

“We looked at a variety of methods to get our games onto the Mac and in the end decided to go with native versions rather than emulation,” said John Cook, Director of Steam Development. “The inclusion of WebKit into Steam, and of OpenGL into Source gives us a lot of flexibility in how we move these technologies forward. We are treating the Mac as a tier-1 platform so all of our future games will release simultaneously on Windows, Mac, and the Xbox 360. Updates for the Mac will be available simultaneously with the Windows updates. Furthermore, Mac and Windows players will be part of the same multiplayer universe, sharing servers, lobbies, and so forth. We fully support a heterogeneous mix of servers and clients. The first Mac Steam client will be the new generation currently in beta testing on Windows.”

Portal 2 will be Valve’s first simultaneous release for Mac and Windows. “Checking in code produces a PC build and Mac build at the same time, automatically, so the two platforms are perfectly in lock-step,” said Josh Weier, Portal 2 Project Lead. “We’re always playing a native version on the Mac right alongside the PC. This makes it very easy for us and for anyone using Source to do game development for the Mac.”

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UPCOMING: NVidia GeForce GTX 480 and 470

David Buckner — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 22:43:23 +0000

NVidia GeForce GTX 480 and 470 to be released March 26th, 2010.

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UPCOMING: AMD Radeon HD 5870 Eyefinity6 edition with 2GB of GDDR5

David Buckner — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 22:41:30 +0000

AMD Radeon HD 5870 Eyefinity⁶ edition with 2GB of GDDR5 to be released March 11, 2010.

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UPCOMING: AMD Radeon HD 5830

David Buckner — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 22:40:28 +0000

AMD Radeon HD 5830 to be released February 25, 2010.

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Will CompactFlash Hold the Entire Porn Industry in a Square inch?

David Buckner — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 22:38:51 +0000

Version 5 of the CompactFlash standard expands cards to hold 188 petabytes of data. That is about 2.7 million hours of video, or the entire porn industry video output for the last few hundred years. Then again as we get more and more high definition video, and now into 3D video that just might hold 1 movie from the future. We will see.

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Belkin Releases Expensive USB 3.0 Components

David Buckner — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 22:30:55 +0000

The new SuperSpeed USB 3.0 PCIe add-in card ($79.99) will add a couple of USB 3.0 ports to your PC, and the ExpressCard adapter ($79.99) will add two to your laptop. Don’t forget your USB 3.0 cables A-B and Micro-B both of which are “cheaply” priced at $39.99 for 4-feet of pure speed, and a “econo” 8-foot version at $49.99. For those that need the speed now rush out and spend a few hundred bucks to upgrade to the new speeds that very few peripherals actually support just yet.

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