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Posted on Thursday, April 21, 2011 4:34 PM
Apple just announced its earnings for the second quarter of the year,
and it's once again beat estimates, with it reporting earnings of $6.40 a
share, a total of $24.67 billion in revenue, and a net profit of $5.99
billion. As for the sales breakdown everyone's waiting for, Apple says
it sold a whopping 18.6 million iPhones in the quarter (up 113 percent
over the previous year, and ahead of estimates of 16 million), plus 4.69
million iPads (actually less than the expected 6.29 million, apparently
due to supply issues), and 3. |
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Posted on Tuesday, April 19, 2011 4:08 PM
Laptop makers seem to enjoy making our lives difficult by sneaking "buy
now" labels onto their latest products and Lenovo has kept up that
tradition by making its 12.5-inch ThinkPad X220
available without telling anyone. It's now ready to purchase at the
company's online store, starting at $849 with a Core i3-2310M processor,
and its convertible tablet sibling, the X220T,
is also eager to be snatched up, though its starting price is $1,249
with the same CPU on board. Eight business days will be required for
delivery to reach you, but we'd wait a whole lot longer than that for
the gorgeous IPS display and extreme battery life on offer. Sadly, you
can't upgrade beyond the 1366 x 768 resolution nor away from the Intel
HD Graphics 3000 "option," but then we hear that PowerPoint
presentations should be blindingly fast on these machines anyhow. Hit
the source links to see just how high you can raise the price by maxing
out the rest of the specs. |
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Posted on Monday, April 18, 2011 9:40 AM
When Apple released its redesigned MacBook Airin October 2010, much was made of the switch to flash storage using a custom-builtMini PCI Express form factor SSD drive. It took a few weeks but these
SSDs would ultimately be released as the commercially available Toshiba Blade X-gale SSDmodule, model TS128C. Now we're seeing user reports showing MacBook
Airs equipped with a second, even faster SSD with a SM128C part number
-- the "SM" hinting at its presumed Samsung manufacturing origins. |
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Posted on Friday, April 15, 2011 9:47 AM
There are endless flavors of "Linux on a stick," tasty downloadable
versions of that OS which run from removable storage and let you take
Linus' progeny for a spin without dedicating any of your partitions to
the cause. There have been ways of making this work with Windows, too, but now Microsoft is getting into the game properly. That leaked version of Windows 8
we looked at recently contains a feature called Portable Workspaces,
which enables you to take a 16GB (or greater) external storage device
and dump a bootable, runnable copy of Win 8 on there. It remains to be
seen just how many copies one could create, and whether they ever expire
or, indeed, whether they can themselves be copied onto an HDD like a
ghost image, but it's easy to see this as a boon for support personnel.
Well, support personnel of the future, anyway. |
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Posted on Thursday, March 31, 2011 12:50 PM
The new Logitec( notLogitech) LAN-WH450N/GR offers four Gigabit Ethernet ports, 802.11a/b/g/n wireless networking that maxes out at a theoretical 450Mbps,
and just about the wildest router design we've yet seen. Yes, it's
justified by improved wireless throughput as a result of having three
antennas sprouting out of the thin-bodied device, but who is Logitec
trying to kid? It's a futuristic, desktop-straddling robocopter and
everyone at that company knows it. Should you or the geek in your life
be interested in obtaining one, the new routers are going on sale in
Japan in mid-April for ¥19,000 ($230) |
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Posted on Wednesday, March 30, 2011 2:48 PM
The vagabondsof Google's Street Viewteam have struck again, this time conquering classical French and
Italian landmarks for their mothership's immense pictorial collection.
As of today, you're able to drop your little yellow avatar in Google
Maps right atop such famous locales as the Colosseum of Rome or
Florence's Basilica di Santa Maria del Fiore, whereupon you'll be
transported right to it (or, in the case of the Colosseum, insideit) in the same way as if they were any old street addresses. This follows, of course, Google's introduction of an intriguing |
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Posted on Tuesday, March 29, 2011 9:30 AM
They're a far cry from being beautiful, but they're also tremendously
more powerful than that joke-of-a-machine you're using now. In an effort
to help those who live and breathe within Excel experience a life
filled with fewer frustrations, Lenovo
is cranking out a pair of new desktops for the working world. Both the
ThinkStation E30 and ThinkCentre M81 can be outfitted with Intel's Sandy
Bridge CPUs, and the E30 can be equipped with an 80GB or 160GB SSD,
NVIDIA's Quadro / NVS graphics, up to 16GB of memory, USB 3.0 and a SATA
III interface. The M81 steps down a bit with integrated Intel graphics
(or a discrete ATI option), but both rigs are optimized for fast start
up and shut down time under Lenovo's Enhanced Experience (EE) 2.0 for
Windows 7 program. The bad news? $629 and $599 starting points in order
of mention, and you'll have to wait until late April / early May to get
your grubby paws around one. Full release is after the break, per usual.
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Posted on Thursday, March 24, 2011 4:06 PM
1,024 total CUDA cores, 94 ROPs, and 3GB of GDDR5 RAM on board. Yup, the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 590is indeed a pair of GTX 580chips spliced together, however power constraints have meant that each
of those chips is running at a tamer pace that their single-card
variant. The core clock speed is down to 607MHz, shaders are only doing
1.2GHz, and the memory clocks in at 3.4GHz. Still, there's a ton of
grunt under that oversized shroud and reviewers have put it to the test
against AMD's incumbent single-card performance leader, the |
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Posted on Wednesday, March 23, 2011 11:48 AM
We noted Firefox 3's spectacular eight million downloads in a day when discussing the recent launch of IE9,
and that mark shall live on as a record for another day. Firefox 4
looks to have a had a thoroughly successful debut, going past the five
million milestone within the first 24 hours of its release, but it
hasn't quite been able to overshadow its predecessor. And before you go
comparing its numbers to the latest Internet Explorer, do be cognizant
that FF4 released on a wider set of platforms,
rendering direct stat comparisons a little dicey. That's not stopping
StatCounter, however, who notes that the latest Firefox already has a
1.95 percent share of the browser market, almost exactly double what IE9
can claim so far. Better get working on that XP compatibility, eh
Microsoft? |
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Posted on Tuesday, March 22, 2011 7:23 PM
Energizer makes single-device Inductive charger for singles looking to wirelessly mingle
Standardized inductive charging with the Qi standard is a beautiful thing, but previously Energizer's only charging pad had room for not one but two
devices. If your independently-minded smartphone just still isn't ready
for that kind of commitment the pink bunny has you covered with a new
single-pad Inductive charger. Like before it supports the Qi standard
and offers compatibility with a variety of devices -- if you don't mind
using a variety of goofy sheaths and backpacks. No word on price or
availability, but really it shouldn't take long to get this to stores. |
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