Isaiah's Tech

AMD has announced the new ATI FirePro 2450 graphics card which has quad-monitor support. "The FirePro 2450 comes equipped with 512MB of GDDR3 memory, variable speed fan sink, maximum resolution of 1920 x 1200, DirectX 10.1 and OpenGL 2.1 support, native PCI-E x16 and x1, and [like I said] support for up to four independent DVI or VGA monitors." That's incredible, seeing how it only takes up one PCI-E slot in you computer. "The new card consumes less than 18W on average for 2D business usage, and no more than 32W when fully stressed." The FirePro 2450 is now available for just $499 USD.

I don't know the speed of normal SSDs, but A-DATA is reportedly rolling out a "high-speed" SSD line for notebooks. "The 300 Plus series takes advantage of a new memory controller to maintain constant 250MB per second read speeds as well as 160MB per second while writing data. It also has an uncommonly large 64MB cache to keep the system fed with information even in characteristically slower sequential reads." There will be 4 versions of the SSDs: a 32GB, 64GB, 128GB and a 256GB. They will all be available soon, but A-DATA hasn't given a shipping date or a price for that matter.

If you can't manage to fork over at least $1,000 USD on LG's watch phone, you can always go for the alternative. The Hyundai MB-910 watch phone has a 132 x 176 resolution (which is slightly larger than LG's), but only has 65K colours. The Hyundai watch phone also has: a 400mAh battery (enough for 70 hours of standby / 3 hours of talk time), SMS, MMS, email, video / music playback, but it lacks 3G. A watch phone without 3G may not be as big as a loss as we think it is, since a watch phone is new technology and may not even entirely take advantage of 3G anyway. If you're still interested in this watch phone by Hyundai, you're looking at spending only £200 ($277 USD) and this includes a Bluetooth headset.

MSI VX600 (and picture): http://www.engadget.com/2009/03/10/msi-announces-the-vx600-15-4-inch-notebook/
ATI FirePro 2450 (and picture): http://www.maximumpc.com/article/news/amd_announces_ati_firepro_2450_graphics_card_with_quadmonitor_support
A-DATA's SSDs (and picture): http://www.electronista.com/articles/09/03/10/a.data.300.plus.ssd/
Hyundai MB-910 Watch Phone (and picture): http://www.boygeniusreport.com/2009/03/10/hyundai-announces-mb-910-watch-phone/

A new rumour has it that this is the Samsung A877 and it will be released later this month, March 29th to be exact. The A877 will have a 3.2-inch AMOLED touchscreen (WQVGA resolution with TouchWiz), a 3MP camera with geotagging, GPS, HSDPA and, as you can see, a slide-out QWERTY keyboard. Like i said it will be released later this month (March 29), through AT&T.

In Lenovo's attempts to go green they have introduced their new ThinkCentre A58 and ThinkCentre M58e desktop PCs. While there is a lot of bickering going on, flaming the author of the article on Engadget, because of his biased opinion on these desktops, these actually look decent to me at least. These 2 desktops have up to 1TB of HDD storage, up to 4GB of RAM and their fastest processor is the Core 2 Quad CPU, which is pretty fast. Of course, there is the optional Blu-ray optical drive, if that's what you're looking for. These desktops will start out at a base price of just $399 USD, so they're worth a second look. Remember that these desktops are leaning towards the green side.

IBuyPower is known (or unknown for some) for their gaming desktop PCs. Today is no different, but with an added bonus. The Gamer Fire 640 and Gamer Paladin F830 has the latest processors from AMD and Intel (respectively) combined with 22-inch Samsung SyncMaster LCDs. The bonus? They are both packing NVIDIA's GeForce 3D Vision into each of their rigs. The Gamer Fire 640 has the "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, on the other hand, has Intel's Core i7 920 CPU, 6GB of RAM, a Blu-ray optical drive and NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 260 GPU. The base prices for the Gamer Fire 640 and the Gamer Paladin F830 are $1,349 USD and $1,999 USD, respectively.

Do you simply adore computer gaming mice with adjustable weights? Well if you do, this Sharkoon Rush FireGlider gaming mouse may be for you. It has a no-slip grip, a "flame covered paint job", 6 programmable buttons and a maximum resolution of 3,600 DPI. The bottom of the mouse has teflon so that your mouse will glide nice and smooth on your mousepad or whatever surface you lay the mouse on. You can adjust the weight of the mouse to be anywhere from 118 - 135 grams and the mouse itself will cost about €25 ($32 USD).

Samsung A877 (and picture): http://www.engadget.com/2009/03/10/samsung-a877-with-amoled-touchscreen-coming-to-atandt-this-month/
Lenovo ThinkCentre A58 and M58e (and picture): http://www.engadget.com/2009/03/10/lenovo-intros-small-green-thinkcentre-a58-and-m58e-desktops/
IBuyPower's 3D Desktops (and picture): http://www.engadget.com/2009/03/10/ibuypower-trots-out-geforce-3d-vision-equipped-desktops/
Sharkoon Rush FireGlider (and picture): http://www.engadget.com/2009/03/10/sharkoon-rush-fireglider-gaming-mouse-comes-with-weights-flame/

The new RTS (that i've never even heard of) BattleForge is available for the public today, thanks to it being in beta starting now. The game is scheduled to be released on March 24, later this month. "The open beta players will have access to all 200 BattleForge cards and all maps in the game. Everyone who takes part in the beta will get the bonus, upgraded Firedancer unit that will be available after launch. Players who pre-order BattleForge from participating retailers will receive four, exclusive units, one from each faction to jump start their decks." BattleForge is supposedly a "breath of fresh air" for the RTS genre combining an MMO-feel and the mechanics of an RTS into one game. The only breath of fresh air that will be going through my lungs is the likes of Starcraft 2, but thanks anyway.

Google Labs India has launched a new service called Google Noticeboard, it "intends to improve the way Indian communities to share information online." "Noticeboard uses a Firefox extension and requires to enable IMAP in Gmail to send messages." Since this service is extremely new, there's not that much information on it. Since it uses a "Firefox extension" i'm not sure if it would work on any other browser, but i'm guessing that it does, in its own different way. I don't even know if this service was worth mentioning today, but i did it anyway.

Firefox 3.1 was supposed to be released in January, but has been continually delayed because of certain issues and bugs. Yesterday, the Mozilla team had a weekly meeting and i have the scoop for you, thanks to ZD Net. The Firefox 3.1 Beta 3 is now finished and Firefox 3.5 Beta 4 is scheduled to be released on April 14. Firefox 3.1 is having its version number changed to Firefox 3.5 to represent a bunch of changes, including their "New Tab" page which i will have more information on at a later date.

To wrap up this post, i'll talk about new content that is available on the PlayStation Network. Obviously, if you read the title you already know what it is. It's NBC content that is now available on PSN. NBC and Sony have announced that some NBC content will now be available on PSN, including shows like The Office and also movies. "Pricing is ballpark with the competition: $2.99 to $5.99 for SD and HD rentals, and $9.99 to $14.99 for SD and HD purchases." Engadget points out that they should push for Hulu on the PSN, now that could be a seller.

BattleForge Beta (and picture): http://scc-tds.net/blog-discussion/10617-ea-launches-open-beta-online-real-time-strategy-game-battleforge.html
Google Noticeboard (and picture): http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2009/03/google-noticeboard.html
Firefox Betas: http://blogs.zdnet.com/open-source/?p=3694
NBC Universal On PSN (and picture): http://www.engadget.com/2009/03/10/nbc-universal-content-now-available-on-playstation-network/

Due to the economic crisis, OLED technology is suffering. OLED is scheduled to replace LCDs in the near future, but that might be pushed back a couple of years because of the economic crisis. While Sony put out their 11-inch OLED TV with a $2,500 price tag, Samsung looks to release their 14.1-inch OLED display in the second half of this year. OLEDs will start off slow, similar to SSDs in computers, but hopefully will gain ground on those LCDs. There is still a lot of research to be done for OLEDs to be perfected and you can read this article here, which talks about exactly what research needs to be done. I'm going to leave the discussion up to the professionals on Ars Technica because i would be spited if i misunderstood some of their article. 32-inch OLED TVs are delayed to a "maybe" for 2010, so we could be looking at 2 more years into the future here.

Microsoft is releasing their first product in the "new notebook accessories category" and it is the Microsoft Notebook Cooling Case (left). It does just what it says, cools down your notebook. The base / case is 1.16 inches thin and will be available this July for $30 USD. The Cooling Case will be available in black and white. Microsoft's next hardware product / peripheral to talk about is their Arc Mouse (right). These will be available later this month for only $50 USD. It will be available in 4 colours: Marine Blue, Deep Olive Green, Eggplant Purple, and Frost White.

At Sony Ericsson's press conference in China they announced their new flip / clamshell phone. The Sony Ericsson T707 (Elle) will have a 2.2-inch screen, Quad-band GSM connectivity / HSDPA 2100 connectivity, a 3.2 megapixel camera and it will also come with a 1GB card in the box. The phone looks kind of feminine, hence the name 'Elle' (French word for girl). There is no word on the price, but the phone itself should be available by the end of the year.

Tonight is the season premiere of the 13th season of South Park and it looks like they'll finally be taking their shot at the Jonas Brothers. It airs 10 p.m. / 9 p.m. Central tonight, so be sure to watch it!! I know i will, even though i'm not a huge fan of South Park. I did love their 'Make Love, Not Warcraft' episode though, but everyone and their mother did, so that's nothing too special to be bragging about. Maybe i'll need to torrent their seasons at a later date.

OLED Technology Suffering (and picture): http://arstechnica.com/hardware/news/2009/03/the-32-oled-tv-a-possible-new-downturn-victim.ars
Microsoft's Cooling Case (and picture): http://i.gizmodo.com/5167303/microsoft-notebook-cooling-base-could-be-cooler
Microsoft's Arc Mouse (and picture): http://i.gizmodo.com/5167312/microsoft-arc-mouse-special-edition-colors-salute-vegetables-nature
Sony Ericsson T707 Elle (and picture): http://www.techtree.com/India/News/Sony_Ericsson_T707_Elle_Revealed/551-99920-893.html
South Park Season Premiere (and picture): http://ccinsider.comedycentral.com/2009/03/09/south-park-to-skewer-the-jonas-brothers/

This is the Dell Latitude E6400 XFR rugged laptop that looks just about bulletproof. It's pretty thick, 2.2-inches to be exact, and weighs 8.5 pounds. There is no word on the price (Update: starts at $4,299 USD) or the availability, but it is apparently 15% thinner and 5% lighter than the last Dell Latitude XFR laptop. The laptop itself has a sunlight-readable WXGA display and inside you get Intel's Core 2 Duo "paired up with both a 256MB NVIDIA Quadro NVS 160M and an integrated 4500MHD." In Engadget's post, it looks like there are a couple of errors, one being a "265MB" graphics card and also a "1.41 WXGA display". I'm going to guess that the decimal place should be slid over to the right one spot, making it a 14.1-inch touchscreen sunlight-readable display.

New Dell Adamo Teaser Video (and video): http://www.engadget.com/2009/03/10/dells-adamo-teased-sweetly/