Otaku Gadgets

You what I like about the recent years when it comes to home entertainment? NVIDIA Ion! That’s right, the combination of Intel’s Atom an NVIDIA’s ION is the perfect combination that gives you extremely low prices and pretty high performance. And things just got better too, thanks to NVIDIA finally getting around to making the ION 2 official. We are already seeing the ION 2 pop up on several devices and here we have something that should please anyone who is looking for a slim, stylish (relatively), quite and powerful rig to use as an HTPC. This is the Shuttle X325, a slim nettop that looks a good thing in the making.

Continue reading “Shuttle X325 Is A Cool And Slim ION 2 Nettop” »

Well, here’s another example of bad controlled leaks/bad control of accidental leaks. There’s a new Studio series laptop starring right beside the Studio 1749 Touch on Dell’s own online catalogue. So this isn’t an accidental leak by a partner either, this is Dell itself. There are no mentions of this new model anywhere else, so it has to be treated as an accident.

Continue reading “New Dell Studio 1558 Touch Makes An Appearance Prior To Official Launch [Dell]” »

While the name will remind people of certain fictitious alien robots that change shape, NVIDIA’s Optimus technology is something that works on improving graphics performance on notebooks without straining the battery. The basic premise of this technology is that it switches between integrated and full blown graphics options as required and it does it at a hardware level. This basically means you are not frying your battery while simply editing a text document. Smaller graphics needs are handled by the integrated chip and the games are handled by the dedicated part. Asus has decided to use this technology in their latest consumer multimedia notebook — the N71JV-X1. They still can’t be bothered to come up with names that people can remember. Specs follow.

Continue reading “Asus Uses NVIDIA Optimus In New N71 Notebook [Notebooks]” »

Well, in what seems like yet another tired old don’t-tell-me-them-too piece of news — Nintendo has announced that they are putting eBooks in their latest offering — the Nintendo DSi XL. However, if the company is to be believed, they are not really serious about entering the e-book market in a big way. They are just adding value to their product. But that doesn’t really stop it from being a serious competitor now, does it? Continue reading “Nintendo DSi XL Becomes The Latest To Offer e-Books, Here We Go Again? [E-Readers]” »

Before I begin today’s deluge of tech updates, just let me say that it feels really great to be back. The large gap in the interim has been due to a gosh darned infection in my throat that kept temperature a steady 100ºC. Well, at least now I have something to tell people who I am not consistent! Anyhoo, now I am back and champing at the bits to go. So lets begin!

Steve Jobs has made the headlines again but this time is a more indirect manner. You see, if you remembered correctly, we had reported about an iTunes contest that was going on at Apple. It was about celebrating the 10 billionth iTunes song download and the 10 billionth downloader getting a whopping $10,000 iTunes gift card. Well, that has happened and the winner a 70 year old called Louie Sulcer, who was just buying some good ol’ country music.

Continue reading “Steve Calls iTunes Contest Winner Personally, Who Didn’t Even Know About The Contest! [Apple” »

Okay, I will jut put into very simple words for you. If you manage to download the 10 billionth song from Apple’s itunes store, Apple will give you a $10,000 iTunes gift card. Yes, they love to show off that a) they have a lot of money now and b)they have sold a lot of songs. Apple is of course pretty chuffed about this whole thing.

Continue reading “Win $10,000 From Apple By Downloading The 10,000,000,000th Song [Lotsa Zeroes]” »

There seems to be something up at the TiVo HQ and we have only clues to look at it with. Of course, I speak thus because I was merely revisiting some Sherlock Homes stories and it has a its rather charming effect on me, as usual. So TiVo’s been going around inviting people over for an event on March 2nd and the flyer above certainly puts the bar quite high. TiVo, as you all know and understand by now, completely changed TV watching by allowing you to record your favorite shows at a convenient time and watch it later. A lot has been added later but that remains the basic premise of its popularity. Now if they call that a mere ‘warmup’, they are clearly either up to something quite magnificent or need to change their marketing department. Either way, something’s up and there are several things to speculate about.

Continue reading “TiVo Is Has Something Up Its Antennas And It Is Coming Soon” »

3D movies and games seem to be the next big thing coming in the next years both to theaters but also private homes. Needed for 3D playback are a device that is compatible with 3D movies and a TV that supports that as well.

Sony Playstation 3 owners will be happy that the PS3 will receive two 3D updates in this year that will make it capable of playing 3D movies and 3D games, something that many other hardware players are not capable of delivering through firmware updates.

Continue reading “Sony Playstation 3 Will Get 3D Updates” »

It’s either that or Amazon is trying to divert our attention with an orchestrated hype generating move so that they can quietly work on their world domination plans in the background. Although not as exciting as an evil corporation bent on world domination, we will go with the Kindle supposition. So Amazon has been beefing up its arsenal in order to better compete with Apple’s threat. I can just imagine their emergency board meeting — “We have to do something. Let’s buy a touch company and get a good Manager with a great track record. Forget the cost, we are sinking here!”.

Continue reading “Amazon Buys Touch Company, Hires Ace Manager, Plans Uber Kindle? [eReaders] [Tablets]” »

Now this is something that you don’t get to see everyday. The carrier that is famously scared of dark magic 3G network overload is allowing a famous dark sorceror app that know for data hogging (bad joojoo) thanks to its streaming nature! Yeah, AT&T is allowing SlingPlayer to work over 3G! It is hence lifting the artificial WiFi-only limitation that AT&T forced on the iPhone version of the player when it was first launched last year.

Continue reading “AT&T Allows SlingPlayer 3G, Streaming & VoIP Taboo Lifting Slowly [AT&T] [3G]” »