Remember when iRex single-handedly revolutionized the e-reader industry last fall? Remember “Seeing Is Believing?” We didn’t either, until the company reminded us of its continued existence with the announcement that it’s developing a new color e-book reader that uses subtractive color mixing to display text and images three times the brightness of existing displays. While this won’t be the first color e-ink tech we’ve laid our eyes on, the promise of print-quality color e-books is certainly tantalizing. Your move, Sony.

via: Engadget

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AMD already showed us yesterday what kind of graphical prowess could be crammed into a sub-$100 GPU, and today it’s attempting to pull the same kind of stunt on the CPU front. The Athlon X2 7850 Black Edition — a 2.8GHz chip with 2MB of L3 cache and loads of overclocking potential — has just been loosed, and with a downright stunning $69 MSRP, we’d say it’ll have budget gamers across the nation paying attention. Reviewers across the web voiced their appreciation for the low price, and while the processor didn’t burn any barns down along the way, it did manage to garner a sufficient amount of praise while on the bench. NeoSeeker seemed to capture the general consensus with this: “the Athlon X2 7850 is a decent processor that is able to power even the latest games.” ‘Course, the performance-per-watt was a bit lacking given the 65nm manufacturing process, but it’s not like you can have your cake and eat it too.

Via: Engadget

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This whole global economic crisis, and its resulting massive loss of jobs got us thinking. We here at Engadget didn’t want to stand helplessly by, announcing every new round of misery without giving anything back — so we decided to take the opportunity to spread a little positivity. We’ll be handing out a new gadget every day (except for weekends) to lucky readers until we run out of stuff or companies stop sending things. Today we’ve got an 500GB Toshiba USB 2.0 portable hard drive, complete with a swank black / white motif and a nearly unlimited amount of room for, um, whatever the heck you want.

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With corporate espionage on the rise, you just cannot be too careful, right? We’ve all heard the horror stories: Someone takes a spreadsheet home to do a little number crunching on his personal PC and, next thing you know, some ne’er-do-wells in Tehran have the specs for the President’s personal helicopter. Well, the brain trust at Fujitsu Labs has put its collective heads together and come up with a pair of new technologies aimed at preventing sensitive information from getting into the wrong hands. First, the “secure USB memory device” is a thumb drive containing a processor and a battery. Data security policies can be set to delete data after a specific period of time or if the drive is accessed by an unauthorized computer — handy if the thing gets lost or misplaced. Second, the company’s “file redirect technology” restricts the data to the USB memory device itself, or to a specified server. The company is currently conducting internal trials of the technology, but we’ll let you know as soon as we see one of these bad boys in the wild.

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This whole global economic crisis, and its resulting massive loss of jobs got us thinking. We here at Engadget didn’t want to stand helplessly by, announcing every new round of misery without giving anything back — so we decided to take the opportunity to spread a little positivity. We’ll be handing out a new gadget every day (except for weekends) to lucky readers until we run out of stuff / companies stop sending things. Today we’re serving up one of the hottest giveaways yet: a second-generation Drobo (with FireWire 800), complete with twin 750GB Western Digital hard drives. You read right — a 1.5TB intelligent storage solution to get your life completely back in order.

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IBuyPower’s been on a pretty good roll of late with these new gaming desktops, and it’s keeping things interesting with its latest two. Rather than just shoving the latest processors from AMD and Intel into the Gamer Fire 640 and Gamer Paladin F830 and calling it a day, it has thrown in a 22-inch Samsung SyncMaster LCD and NVIDIA’s GeForce 3D Vision system with each rig. As for the Gamer Fire 640 specifically, it comes loaded with an AMD Phenom II X3 720 CPU, 4GB of DDR3 RAM, a 500GB hard drive, a GeForce 9800GTX+ (512MB), dual-layer DVD writer and Vista Home Premium 64-bit. The Paladin gets loaded with a Core i7 920, 6GB of memory, a Blu-ray drive and a GeForce GTX 260 GPU. Detailed specs (along with the full release) are just past the break, but if you’re scouting base prices, they sit at $1,349 and $1,999 in order of mention.

iBUYPOWER Launches Two Systems Featuring NVIDIA GeForce 3D Vision

The Gamer Fire 640 and Gamer Paladin F830 provide immersive gameplay with cutting edge 3D graphics technology

El Monte, CA – March 09, 2009 – iBUYPOWER, known for its innovative and powerful gaming PCs, is excited to launch two new systems that feature the NVIDIA GeForce 3D Vision technology. The combination of high-tech wireless glasses, the Samsung 22″ SyncMaster 120Hz LCD monitor, the most advanced NVIDIA GeForce graphics hardware and software transforms game play and movie experiences into interactive life-like adventures.

“At iBUYPOWER we are always looking to add cutting edge technology gamers crave to boost PC Gaming to the next level, untouchable by the current generation of consoles.” said Darren Su, Vice President of iBUYPOWER. “By adding systems that feature the GeForce 3D Vision we are giving our customers a chance to interact with their games in way never before imagined.”

iBUYPOWER outfitted two systems with the NVIDIA GeForce 3D Vision and Samsung 22″ 120Hz Monitor bundle: the AMD Socket AM3-based Gamer Fire 640-3D and the Intel Core i7-based Gamer Paladin F830-3D. These complete stereoscopic 3D gaming solutions start at a value-priced $1349 – including monitor, GeForce 3D vision, a 1600DPI laser gaming mouse, and multimedia keyboard. These systems are fully customizable on iBUYPOWER.com with a vast selection of upgrades such as 1200 watt-power supplies, Intel’s 80GB X-25 Gaming SSD, up to 12GB memory, and Quad-SLI GeForce GTX 295 graphics.

NVIDIA 3D vision is compatible with hundreds of existing new and old game titles, including Left 4 Dead, Call of Duty: World at War, and Mirror’s edge with GeForce PhysX support. These games require no additional software modification or patches beyond a capable system with the GeForce 3D Vision hardware bundle to display an immersive stereoscopic 3D experience.

via: Engadget

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This whole global economic crisis, and its resulting massive loss of jobs got us thinking. We here at Engadget didn’t want to stand helplessly by, announcing every new round of misery without giving anything back — so we decided to take the opportunity to spread a little positivity. We’ll be handing out a new gadget every day (except for weekends) to lucky readers until we run out of stuff / companies stop sending things. Today we’ve got a Kensington SlimBlade Trackball on offer.

Go here to enter.

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Samsung techies linked 24 of the company’s 256GB SSD drives together in a RAID with the hopes of making the fast SSD drives even faster. The system actually reaches transfer speeds of 2GBps. What’s that much speed mean to you?

• All of Microsoft Office opens in .5 seconds.
•53 programs from the test rig’s Start menu open in 18 seconds.
•The complete system defrags in about 3 seconds.

Basically, we all know that hard drives are holding other components in computers back, slowing down our day to day usage. But I’ll be honest in saying that I didn’t things were this bad. While almost no mortal could afford to build this amazing rig, suddenly that SATA3 technology isn’t looking so impressive.

via: Gizmodo

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ASUS news from CeBIT? Say it ain’t so! Just hours after the company introduced two new “Green” LCDs, we stopped by to see what all the fuss was about. What we found were two rather vanilla looking LCDs (they’re in the gallery below, we promise) sitting beside something entirely more interesting: a Wireless LCD prototype. An ASUS rep informed us that the model shown was utilizing the currently-in-limbo ultra-wideband (UWB) standard, and he affirmed that the monitor didn’t have a model name nor an estimated ship date or price; it was simply on hand to prove that wireless LCDs were possible and that they’re on the way. He noted that ASUS was looking into other wireless protocols — namely wireless HD and WHDI — and that it was “waiting things out” before making a final decision on what variation to use. Our take? We suspect it’s both testing for best compatibility / range and waiting to see if UWB will remain viable in the coming months, which likely means no shipping product for quite some time. For what it’s worth, the on-hand demo was stellar, with no visible lag, glitches or dropped frames to speak of.

via: Engadget

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Looking for something a bit more all-in-one than Onkyo’s HDC-1L nettop / HTPC? Then you may want to consider the company’s new Sotec-branded E702A9 media PC, which keeps things relatively inconspicuous while packing some decent specs all around. That includes a 1080p 21.5-inch display, a Core 2 Duo E7400 processor, 2GB of RAM, a 500GB hard drive, a 4x Blu-ray drive, a built-in TV tuner, an included iPod dock, and some seemingly slightly better than usual 8W speakers. No word on a release ’round here just yet, but folks in Japan can apparently pick one up now for ¥179,000, or just over $1,800.

via: Engadget

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