NVIDIA Ion platform

More details have been revealed on NVIDIA’s Ion platform, and this is really good news for the future of low-cost netbooks out there. Essentially, the Ion platform is like Intel’s Centrino marketing brand; it basically means it’s a pairing of Intel’s Atom processor with NVIDIA’s 9400M GPU in a small and compact motherboard packaging.

Nvidia ION

The pairing will finally break Intel’s monopoly of pairing the Atom exclusively with the 945 chipset, which has been criticized for being outdated and irrelevant. With the Ion, NVIDIA hopes to be able to bring a new alternative platform designed from the ground-up to support and expand on the Atom’s capabilities.

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ASUS AIRO sliding keyboard laptop

Some quirky stuff were shown at CES and no less is the cool ASUS AIRO, which features a sliding keyboard design that is designed (no pun intended) to impress.

ASUS sliding keyboard

When you open it up, the mechanism slides the keyboard upwards and inwards, and the keyboard literally floats up, supported only by two hinges on the side. The rationale given for the design is that the keyboard typically cover up the processor and motherboard, both of which can run pretty hot being cramped up in there. By using this design, ASUS can create thin laptops that run without melting into a puddle of metallic goo on your lap.

Of course, the picture shown here is just a prototype with no running components inside. But from a purely mechanical and design standpoint, it is a beauty to marvel.

Dell WASABI Zink printer

The Zink ink-less printing technology has been covered before, but thanks to Dell, they are about to enjoy major critical and commercial success. Nobody sells computers like Dell, and if they start offering this with their laptops as accessories, we might be seeing this everywhere soon.

Wasabi printer

The WASABI is the name of the printer by Dell, and it is a diminutive little printer in the spirit of those Polaroid cameras of past, being able to print small 2×3-inch prints on special paper which contain color crystals which are heated by the printer when “printing”.

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iPod Touch on Android?

I think it would be much easier if they marketed this as a cheaper iPod Touch running on Android. However, the unfortunately named GiiNii Movit does have some potential brewing underneath the funny name.

GiiNii

First of all the specs… it packs a 4.3-inche touchscreen goodness and a resolution of 480×272, which is a tad smaller than the iPod Touch’s 480×360 and also the touchscreen is resistive, which means no multitouch here, folks. Microphone is built in as well with front-facing VGA camera meaning this baby does video Skype right out of the box with Bluetooth and built-in speaker. Finally the internal memory is a measly 256MB with microSD support.

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Sony VAIO P smallest, lightest netbook

At the CES recently, Sony unveiled their extremely sexy VAIO P which is the world’s lightest netbook at 1.4 pounds with a screen size of a respectable 8 inches, which is to say they’re about three thirds the size of a regular 10-inch EeePC.

Sony Vaio P

The devices are branded “Lifestyle PC” and in true VAIO fashion they are offered in hues of garnet red, emerald green, onyx black, crystal white and classic black. The colors are shiny and attractive with a certain hint of quality which all VAIO’s have, in order to justify the sometimes atrocious prices they sell their products for.

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Atom to come in larger netbooks soon?

First, NVIDIA had a tussle with Intel over the Atom chipset, now HP is in discussion with Intel to bring the Atom to their larger 15 inch laptops. What is going on here?

First off, Intel is insistent that Atom be sold only as a bundle together with their own chipset, the 945. This has irked NVIDIA who is working on the MCP79 chipset which would come with an integrated Geforce graphics chip, a vast improvement over the sad graphics chip in the 945. However, Intel refused to sell the Atom chips alone, which made NVIDIA, and many consumers out there, quite angry.

Intel Atom

Now, they have done a 180 and is now in talks with HP to bring Atom to HP’s bigger laptops. Now, the Atom isn’t really powerful. Benchmarks have shown that these processors, even though running at 1.6 GHz, lose out to a mere Celeron 900MHz. Furthermore, the power consumption advantages of a smaller more power efficient chip such as the Atom is offset by the fact that the 945 which it comes bundled with is old technology, designed for the last generation of processors with no such thought to power frugality. As a result, the power savings are minimal at best.

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CES 2009: Vuzix VR Glasses

The last time Vuzix tried with a VR, they created a product which is not only ghastly ugly to put on your head, crucially it also makes you look like a supernerd, cobbled together from the remains of lesser nerds. You wouldn’t want to be caught wearing this ANYWHERE, not even in your own home. OK, well maybe it’s not that bad, but it wasn’t comfortable and definitely doesn’t look nice.

Vuzix

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FLATMII Mods Nintendo Wii, bypasses DVD-ROM drive

Nintendo have been fighting piracy ever since the days of the SNES (Super Nintendo Entertainment System). Even up to the days of the Dreamcast, they have adopted the stance that games should be on proprietary format (cartridges, special Dreamcast media, etc) but for the Wii, they have decided that maybe the reason why they’re not making as much profit and selling as much consoles is the fact that people hate proprietary things.

Nintendo Wii

Thus, they returned to the world of good old DVD ROMS, to the delight of many hackers who made every effort possible to hack the console to create “modchips” that allows running home-brew software as well as pirated games. Since then, it has been a hard battle between Nintendo and the hackers out there, as the company is so committed to battling it out. The first counterattack was a revised motherboard design that would foil modchips, but it wasn’t long before updated modchips solved that little problem.

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CES 2009: New HP Laptops

The tech industry is facing a slump, but for some that means innovation and will be the key to success. The annual Consumer Electronics Show 2009 saw a subdued reaction this year, but that had not prevented HP from revealing some new laptops coming out during the event.

In total there were five new laptops, being the Pavilion dv3z, dv6t, G70, a HP Mini 1000Mi and finally the Compaq Presario CQ60.

HP Mini 1000 MI

The most intriguing of the bunch is undoubtedly the Mini 1000Mi, which possibly stands for Mobile Internet and marks HP’s entry into the budget ultra-portable market competing with the likes of the Eee PC, Wind and others. It will be powered by a modified version of Ubuntu Linux, but I am sure most savvy consumers will have Windows XP up and running on these machines. The price is a cool $380, making it an affordable small computer, but the specs are notably absent from HP’s website. Wait and we shall see.

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Install Apple OS X Leopard onto MSI Wind Netbook

The community of hackintoshes, or Macintosh operating systems running on non-standard Apple hardware, has been a vibrant one, albeit silent but that doesn’t mean some of their great achievements should be ignored. Well the latest thing to appear from the hackintosh community is the ability to install Mac OSX Leopard into a diminutive budget netbook costing less than $600, the MSI Wind.

MSI Wind U100

The MSI Wind U100 netbook came out a few months ago and have been very popular, and it wasn’t long before hackers realize that the hardware inside the Wind are Mac-friendly, and have since cobbled together a version of the OSX Leopard that would run happily on this machine. To obtain this, you’ll have to flex your creative muscles a little and look for the exact torrent, but it’s not terribly hard and there are many sites out there for you to search.

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