Gadgets Control

Mozilla had just released beta 4 of Firefox 3 a few weeks ago, and have already announced they feel its ready to go. While Firefox will remain as beta 4, the team behind the browser feel its now safe enough for just about everyone to begin using. “In many ways it (Firefox 3) is much more stable than anything else out there,” Mozilla Corp Vice President of Engineering Mike Schroepfer said in an interview. Even with the approval from the Firefox team, the download website still has the “It is intended for testing purposes only” statement, but seriously does it not seem like everything is either currently in beta or remained in beta well after it had been adopted by the public. (Read the full post about ‘Mozilla claiming Firefox 3 is now ready, but will remain in beta’…)

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Toshiba has just unveiled the Cosmic Shiner handset which is actually a standard FanFun 815T cell phone that comes studded with diamonds. There will only be a thousand of these available, which means they will be highly sought after. Models will only be issued through an invitation-only scheme, whereby owners will benefit from a Prestige Gold membership service. Each of these handsets will retail for $4,000, and chances are you will be able to fetch more during an auction. Tags: digital, plasma, Ogg Vorbis, robots (Read the full post about ‘Cosmic Shiner from Toshiba’…)

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Posted Mar 21st 2008 10:29AM by Paul MillerFiled under: Wireless No surprises here, but boy is that going to be a difficult expense to justify on the ol’ corporate card. AT&T says it’ll pay a $1.3 billion down payment to the FCC within the next 10 days to get a lock on that spectrum it just won, $500 million of which was paid up front before the auction began. The company will be pushing the remaining $5.3 billion over the counter before April 17, and is financing the purchase with funds from operations and a good bit of debt. (Read the full post about ‘AT&T forking over a $1.3 billion down payment for auction wins’…)

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This story brings together some of my favourite things: cats, design ingenuity and intelligent young women kicking ass. Plus, it shakes off the stereotype that British people don’t care about teeth. (We do, just not our own…) Seventeen year old British college student Rachel Gilbert has reached the final of a national competition, the Ideas Igloo Roadshow, with her design for feline false teeth. They look a little ghoulish, but have a noble purpose: “When animals suffer broken or rotten teeth, they have had to be removed,” Rachel told her local newspaper, The Sheffield Star. “The gum can become infected and they find it difficult to chew food. (Read the full post about ‘Teenager designs false teeth for cats (no, really)’…)

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The Nintendo Wii has just received another peripheral in the form of the Front Man Wireless Guitar from Nyko. Fully compatible with Guitar Hero III, it rides on the Wiimote for wireless power and connectivity. Some of the features include :- Accurate and responsive whammy bar Bi-directional strum bar Responsive and durable fret buttons Two interchangeable pick guards in designer colorsThe Nyko Front Man Guitar for the Wii retails for $49.99. Tags: equipment, mobiles, lcd, MP3 (Read the full post about ‘Nyko Front Man Wireless Guitar’…)

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Intel executive, Pat Gelsinger, gave some details of upcoming Intel architectures code–named Dunnington, Tukwila, and Nehalem. The slides (PDF) gave some details, but didn’t tell us everything.

The Dunnington processor will have 6 cores and be released in the second half of 2008. It will feature 16MB of L3 cache and 1.9 billion transistors. Sun already leaked some of those details, and that’s right in the Xeon roadmap. Also, Tukwila is known to be an Itanium variant that will double Itanium platform performance with 4 cores and 30MB of cache and 2 billion transistors, but we already knew that.

We also expect that it will run at 2GHz even though Intel didn’t mention that in its slides.

(Read the full post about ‘Intel’s 2008 and beyond roadmap presentation’…)

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Earlier this week, Avi Cohen, of research company Avian Securities, suggested that a large PC vendor was seeing up to 20% of laptops with SSDs being returned due to failures and poor performance. It did not state which company it was referring to directly, but Dell seemed to be the likely candidate.

Dell has now hit back about suggestions it is the company seeing such high return rates through its blog. An excerpt from the entry is re-printed below:

Here’s the real story: the 20 - 30% failure and return rates cited by Avian Securities don’t even vaguely resemble what’s happening in our business.

(Read the full post about ‘Dell reacts quickly to SSD failure claims with facts’…)

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Going to battle with some sort of bulky headgear might be cool, but it certainly won’t add to the overall stealth of a soldier. The Pentagon has decided to push the limits of engineering, by looking for “information on technology areas for the creation of micro- and nano-scale display technologies for the purpose of creating displays that could be worn as transparent contact lenses.” Sounds pretty far fetched and something you would only see in movies and video games, but I guess where there’s a will… Tags: PDA, home theater, digital, MP3 (Read the full post about ‘Pentagon to develop Contact Lenses’…)

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Posted Mar 21st 2008 7:19AM by Thomas RickerFiled under: Laptops Ultra-portables are by the far the sexiest class of laptops. Especially when they start at just 2.2-pounds (1kg) like Dell’s upcoming 12.1-inch E4200 or 3-pounds for the 13.3-inch E4300. Both pack LED backlit displays; Centrino 2 chipsets; Firewire, eSATA, 2x audio, ExpressCard 34, and at least 2x USB ports; integrated UMA graphics; DDR3 800MHz with Intel Turbo Memory 2.0; DisplayPort; and a host of security features to keep corporate IT types happy. The E4300 differs with a higher WXGA+ resolution, modular optical bay, peppier CPU options, and a choice of beefier hard disk drives instead of the 32GB or 64GB SSD restriction of the E4200. (Read the full post about ‘Up close with Dell’s Latitude E4300 and E4200 ultra-portables with DisplayPort’…)

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Apple has at last divorced RAW camera support from operating sytem updates, a frankly clunky and ridiculous way to add compatibility for new camera models. With digital camera RAW Compatibility Update 2.0, a slew of new models have been added, and in a download of just 2.3Mb. While the update quashes some security issues, what we care about is the list of updated models, copied and pasted below for your reading leisure. You’ll need the latest version of everything for the update to have any effect, but if you do, this miniscule download will let you view RAW files in Aperture 2, iPhoto and directly in the Finder. I tried it with Nikon D60 NEF files and everything worked. It doesn’t even require a restart. (Read the full post about ‘Apple Updates RAW Camera Support’…)

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