Going green with iGo by eliminating 'vampire power'
LAS VEGAS - At CES this week, iGo will introduce a surge protector, a laptop charger, and an electrical outlet, all designed to conserve on power by temporarily stopping the flow of electricity to plugged-in devices once they've been fully recharged.
The company's new "green" products thereby eliminate "vampire" or wasted power, said Alison Copeland, senior direct marketing manager, talking with BetaNews tonight at the CES Unveiled press preview Tuesday night.
Pocket-sized music player / mixer to make North American debut
LAS VEGAS - This week's CES show will mark the North American rollout of a handheld device billed as the world's first pocket-sized DJ system.
Tonium's Pacemaker is not just a portable music player but a portable mixer, said Anders Friman, Tonium's CEO, speaking with BetaNews at Tuesday night's CES Unveiled press event in Las Vegas.
PowerMat intros an innovative battery charger
LAS VEGAS -- At CES this week, a company called "The Power Mat" will roll out a slick portable "mat" designed for charging up to about six mobile phones at a time.
The mat works with all sorts of mobile phones, contended officials in a booth at the CES Unveiled press preview event Tuesday night. The devices can be charged simply by placing them on the mat, which comes with its own power cord.
First look at Novatel's MiFi wireless hotspot
At the CES Unveiled press event tonight, Novatel Wireless gave a first look at MiFi, a pocket-sized WiFi hotspot for connecting up to five users in a local area to the Internet over a cellular connection.
Novatel actually introduced Mi-Fi on December 9. "But this is the first time MiFi has ever been shown outside of a lab," said a rep in the Novatel Booth.
AMD's Athlon Neo processor will take on Intel's Atom
As the netbook platform takes shape this year at CES, AMD is giving a more focused picture of what the inside of that platform could look like...but not too focused, at least not for a few days yet.
What AMD had been calling its "Yukon" notebook processing platform and will now call...something else, was officially unveiled this morning with HP effectively beating AMD to the punch. Its new dv2 line of netbooks will include AMD's new Athlon Neo processor, the centerpiece of the CPU maker's new netbook platform.
New Asus netbooks will feature Windows 7
At a press conference at CES 2009 Tuesday evening, Asus introduced the Eee 131, its first netbook with a built-in 512 GB hard drive. Asus has been working closely with Microsoft, so that the new Eee will run Windows 7.
5:59 pm PT: Both of Asus' new convertible netbooks will use Intel's Atom processors, though different versions. The 10-inch Eee will use Intel Z270 processor, which is what most netbooks use today. But the 8.9-inch model will use the Atom Z520, which provides 20% greater energy conservation.
Motorola puts a green jacket on a carbon-neutral handset
In the latest attempt to assuage consumers into buying more new stuff by telling them it's good for the environment, Motorola has announced a cell phone that it says is made out of recycled water bottles and is carbon-neutral.
"Through an alliance with Carbonfund.org, Motorola offsets the carbon dioxide required to manufacture, distribute and operate the phone through investments in renewable energy sources and reforestation," reads a company statement this morning announcing the company's new Motorola W233, dubbed the "Renew." "The phone has earned Carbonfund.org's CarbonFree Product Certification after an extensive product life-cycle assessment."
Microsoft elevates Bob Muglia's role in a changing company
The man who brought new life to the Server and Tools division, and who now challenges Ray Ozzie as the future prince of company keynotes, is being rewarded with an upgrade to his role that places him on a par with Dr. Qi Lu.
Up until recently, Bob Muglia's role at Microsoft has been to lead the Server and Tools division, making him effectively the fellow in charge of both Visual Studio and Windows Server -- two of the company's four pillars, besides Windows client and Office. (Frankly, SQL Server should be added to that list, and Muglia heads that project too.) Muglia has also been a member of the company's Senior Leadership Team, making him jointly responsible for corporate strategy. After today, none of those facts will have changed.
Microsoft claims Xbox 360 sold 8 million more worldwide than PS3
Once again just before CES week, Microsoft is claiming victory in the game console race, at least against rival Sony PlayStation 3. And once again, veteran analyst Sharon Fisher pores over the numbers.
When I was a kid, I used to love word problems. You know, "Sally is 6 years older than Jane, and Jane is twice as old as Margaret. If the ages of all three add up to 21, how old is each girl?"
Lenovo intros multimedia PCs for gaming, dual-screen laptop
With the exception of the high-end, business-oriented ThinkPad W700ds, all of Lenovo's product rollouts at this week's CES 2009 will be aimed at consumers, company officials told BetaNews.
At CES 2009 this week, Lenovo is launching an all-in-one desktop and three new notebooks, all geared to multimedia entertainment and gaming. The Chinese-based computer company, spun off from IBM a few years back, is also upgrading its W700 ThinkPad with an optional slide-out second screen and its S10 subnotebook with social networking software.
New HP Pavilion notebooks go for style, go with AMD
HP has had a reputation for delivering sturdy, competent, but unexciting hardware without a lot of pizzazz in the marketing department. As folks used to say, if HP was selling sushi, they'd market it as "cold, dead fish."
Well, somewhere along the line, Hewlett-Packard appears to have swallowed a marketing person, because the press releases for their new line of Pavilion notebooks -- including a competitor to Apple's slimmer-than-slim "Air" -- all gush about how stylish they are.
Jobs-less Macworld offers up 17-inch MacBook Pro, variable iTunes prices
Expectations were moderated after the king of the keynotes stepped aside for what he admitted yesterday to be health problems. But at a quieter, gentler Macworld, the crowd did get something to take home.
For perhaps any other company than Apple, the expectation of a world-changing product at least twice per year, if not more frequently, might be too much to ask. At what appears to be the final Macworld conference with which Apple will directly participate, Steve Jobs' stand-in, Apple SVP for Marketing Phil Schiller, showed off some software updates -- specifically, to the iWork and iLife software suites -- before premiering a new widescreen edition of the MacBook Pro.
Samsung goes solidly green
At this week's Storage Visions 2009 Conference on Tuesday, Samsung announced that it's preparing to ship a 100 GB solid-state drive with fresh green credentials.
The announcement indicates that the Samsung SS805 is expected to ship this quarter. Geared toward data-center servers, the drive has a random-read speed of 25 Krpm and a random-write speed of 6K. The company says that the drive can process as much as 100 times as many input/outputs per second (IOPS) per watt than a comparable HDD-based drive.
HP sets fire to Voodoo DNA with sleeker Firebird desktop
If the venerable desktop PC platform has any real "homebase" of customers left, it's in the enthusiast market where "cool" refers more to looks and performance rather than, say, CPU temperature.
Laying down the gauntlet ahead of CES 2009, whose first official day is tomorrow, HP this morning unveiled a slew of PCs, including a slimmed-down version of the power-packed Blackbird 002 that we profiled in September 2007. The new Firebirds will be available in two configurations, though whereas choice and extensibility were the themes for the Blackbird, the Firebird clearly appears geared toward a more budget-conscious enthusiast who may be just happy enough to be able to enter the "coolness" bracket.
Disgruntled IT guy fells blogging site
It's better than having some jerk walk back in with a gun, but it's sure not good: The journalspace.com blog site has shut down after a "disgruntled" former IT employee used his own data-backup choice to obliterate its entire data store.
Techish reader, would you rely on RAID as your sole "backup" structure for a mission-critical SQL server? That's what the now-former keepers of journalspace did. The chosen RAID setup wrote all data to two large drives, so in theory it was a perfectly redundant disk-array (not backup!) system; if one drive blew up, the other would hold everything and life would go on smoothly.
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