TechSpot - PC Technology News and Analysis

If you happen to own an Inspiron Mini 9 and want to boost the measly 4GB of storage space that comes as standard, then you might be interested to know Buffalo is now offering 16GB and 32GB drives for Dell’s netbook. The company is also selling 32GB and 64GB drives for the Asus Eee PC since July.

Due out sometime this month, the 16GB should set you back around $57, or you can shell out $101 for the 32GB version. We should note that Dell themselves recently began offering upgrades as well, with their 16GB and 32GB modules going for $75 and $100, respectively.

Virtually every desktop PC on the planet uses a mouse and a keyboard for input, and yet it is still surprising to hear that one of the biggest names in computer peripherals has shipped its billionth mouse – especially when considering the figure is close to the alleged number of active computer users in the world at the moment. Logitech announced the staggering milestone today coinciding with the same month that the industry celebrates the 40th anniversary of the world’s first computer mouse.

Logitech certainly has come a long way, introducing their first retail mouse in 1985 and producing its 100 millionth unit in 1996. Today the company manufactures an average 376,000 mice per day, amounting to 7.8 million every month, and sells their products in 100 countries worldwide.

The company will celebrate the milestone with a global competition to find the supposedly lost 1-billionth mouse, which rolled off the production line in the middle of November, offering a reward of $1,000 of Logitech products going to the winner. Clues regarding its whereabouts will be posted on the company's blog.

OCZ has introduced a new flash drive to their hardware lineup, this one a “Crossover” USB flash drive that contains both storage capacity and the ability to read from other cards. The new product, which comes in capacities ranging from 2GB to 8GB, plugs in via USB and integrates a microSD adapter on the chassis to plug additional cards into. The very small profile of the device makes it no more cumbersome than what you'd expect from a flash drive and the idea is that the card reader integration will reduce the need for multiple devices in a laptop bag.

MicroSD is fairly popular on newer devices, especially PDAs and many cameras, so OCZ at least picked the right standard to support. The actual demand for such a “combo” device could be debated, though, as most laptops already include card readers and most devices that support microSD can plug into your machine anyway. Regardless, it's now available.

Acer seems to be working non-stop after catching up with Dell and HP in the top three slots for notebooks sales worldwide. The Taiwanese manufacturer is now setting its sights on other niche markets with new products coming out next year.

Acer will be seeking to compete with Apple's all-in-one iMac, as well as bringing additional heal on Asus and other netbook vendors with the introduction of competing products in both categories. For the former, Acer is looking to release a low-cost, simple desktop, on par with the iMac or Asus Eee Top. While details are still scarce, the device is rumored to be sporting a Core 2 Quad processor, hinting that the unit won't be light on performance.

In the ultra mobile category, Acer will be releasing another sub-notebook that won't directly compete in the current netbook price range, but above that of the Acer Aspire One. This one is rumored to come equipped with a 320GB HDD, which suggests it won't be shipping with the Windows XP for embedded devices, but probably Windows Vista.

Nvidia is said to be planning an assault on AMD’s high-end Radeon graphics cards, with the launch of its 55nm GT200 graphics chips next month, and Expreview has posted one of the first pictures to prove it. Specifically the picture shows the model number etched on the metal as “G200-103-B2,” with the “B” supposedly indicating a 55nm shrink, whereas another code reads “0833B2” to indicate that the chip was manufactured in the 33rd week of this year (or mid-August).

In line with rumors that have been doing the rounds for some time now, Expreview claims a 55nm GeForce GTX 260 with the same specifications as the current “reloaded” card (the one with 216 shaders) will make its debut this January along with a 55nm variant of the GTX 280, and a dual-GPU GeForce GTX 260 GX2. The chip should have drastically lower power consumption and overclock better as well – hopefully we won’t have to wait much more to find that out.

The next generation of Asus' Eee Box units won't be featuring an Atom processor, with the company now making a switch to Celerons. Starting with the Celeron 220, Asus' next lineup of Eee Box desktop units will feature the more traditional desktop CPU in an attempt to increase sales, on top of a reduction in sticker price.

Celeron may not be as power-friendly as the Atom, but definitely has a performance advantage, even when dealing with slower clock speeds. As the Eee Box is a desktop box, power consumption may not be as big of an issue – but then again, you lose the “cool” factor of using an Atom in a desktop with this switch. With Asus expecting to sell over a million of the devices next year, though, a small drop in price and a boost in performance may be much more important than other factors.

Pioneer has been working on its 400GB Blu-ray disc for a while so it is no surprise that it showed up at the IT Month Fair in Taipei. The key to the storage boost beyond the current Blu-ray 50GB limit is an increase in the number of layers to 16 on each side and most importantly they’ve managed to do this while retaining backwards compatibility with existing Blu-ray players.

Not only did the company showed off the format for the first time since it announcement back in July, they also produced a road map for its introduction to the market. According to Pioneer, read-only versions of these so-called super multi-layer optical discs will arrive before the end of 2010, with a rewritable version set for a release before the end of 2012. After that, we’ll see 1TB discs in 2013.

The implications of such massive storage capacities are very interesting to say the least. Essentially, if Pioneer can make good on its word, in the next two years developers could use that 400GB of space to include full high-def audio and video with no compression, publishers could release entire series of games or TV series on a single disc, and the PS3 long-term appeal could be enhanced as well.

Intel is teaming up with Hitachi Global Storage Technologies (GST) to collaborate on the development and production of a new generation of solid state drives designed for use in servers, workstations and storage systems that require “extremely high” input/output operations per second (IOPS) and power efficiency.

The agreement will see Hitachi incorporate Intel’s NAND flash drive technology in its Serial Attached SCSI and Fiber Channel drives, with the first batch expected to roll out in early 2010. The drives will be branded and exclusively sold and supported by Hitachi GST, marking a strategic shift for the world’s third-largest hard drive maker, which until now had not made a solid commitment to SSD technology.

Hitachi said the new solid state drives would complement its existing enterprise-class hard disk drives, rather than replace them, while Intel stressed that it will continue to develop and sell its product lines of high-performance SATA SSDs.

Earlier this year, AMD faced a nasty CPU bug that required them to hold off their processors until new ones with some necessary workarounds became available months later. As you know already, this hit AMD pretty badly.

It was hinted Monday that they weren't alone in this situation and that Intel's Nehalem core had also been identified to be suffering from a TLB bug. The news widespread quickly but within the same 24 hours Intel came to respond and clarify that none of the shipping Core i7 processors suffer from any troublesome errata.

According to Intel's version, they did discover some issues before Nehalem's release, all of which were resolved via BIOS updates before launch. In fact, related issues were also found in Core 2 Duo processors back in the day, but we never heard anything about this because, again, it was all sorted ahead of release.

AMD’s plans for 45nm deployment had not been solidly confirmed until just recently, with the announcement of the new Phenom II processors being due early next year. After the initial Phenom II's planned launch on January 8th, AMD will introduce six additional 45nm-based AM3 CPUs in February, all in the Phenom II line. It seems with the initial 45nm launch, AMD is going to be focusing on their flagship CPUs rather than the low-end CPUs.

Later down the road, in April, they'll introduce additional 45nm-based CPUs for the Athlon family. The chips will lack the L3 cache that other 45nm CPUs have and will likely be priced significantly lower than the Phenom IIs. The AM3 platform holds a lot of promise, so hopefully AMD can stick to their release schedule.

Atheros, manufacturer of one of the most common wireless chipsets in the world, has made a bold move towards embracing open-source driver development for their cards by letting the final piece out into the open. That piece is the Hardware Abstraction Layer, an important component they had to date still kept under a proprietary wrap.

The company has commented that they want to see future updates and fixes for the driver to be a community effort, and plan to use Linux as a platform to provide a reference code base for other platforms.

Many laptops and wireless devices contain an Atheros chipset, with their principal competition being Intel and Broadcom. This move may serve to help them in capturing a larger market share, giving them a small advantage over Broadcom and putting them on more equal grounds with Intel in terms of development. The MadWifi project in particular could benefit greatly from this move, which in turn could lead to Atheros chipsets having a much more stable base of support on Linux-based systems.

Asus has announced the newest addition to its netbook range, the Eee PC 1002HA, featuring essentially the same system specifications as its 1000H sibling but with a slimmed down brushed metal external shell and front mounted speakers. The new Eee PC 1002HA’s design is a cross between the sleeker yet more expensive Eee PC S101 and the older Eee PC 1000H, which might just be the happy middle ground.

It gets a 10-inch display, a 160GB hard drive – and another 10GB of online file space courtesy of Asus’ Eee Storage – a 1.6 GHz Intel Atom processor, 1GB of RAM, and Windows XP Home. It also appears to have a tiny 2-cell battery, but the company claims it should be enough to deliver over four hours of battery life using its Super Hybrid Engine technology. The new netbook from Asus should be available immediately through the company’s global network resellers for $499.

Netbooks are all the rage these days and Intel has no doubt become the de facto standard engine powering most of them. Considering the success of its Atom processor, one would think that the company is enthusiastic about this rapidly growing market, but apparently Intel is re-evaluating the whole netbook thing and has recently stated that these machines are not good for extended usage.

The company says that they first thought netbooks would be for emerging markets, but as it turns out, they are particularly popular in Europe and the United States among people who just want to grab and go with a notebook. This of course has the companies behind these low-cost devices worried as they are beginning to into traditional notebook sales and ultimately their bottom lines.

The company’s comments also partially echoes AMD’s take on the subject that the low cost and small form factor comes at the expense of the users’ computing experience – some of you might agree with that perception. Despite this, AMD does plan low-power chips for ultra portables and larger netbooks.

In the end, the netbook form factor will likely morph into something more akin to entry level notebooks, compromising a bit on the portability side but vastly improving their usefulness when working on them for longer periods. Case in point: the new Dell Inspiron Mini 12.

Following the announcement of three nettops intended to rival the Asus Eee Box, MSI has unveiled a new product into its Wind range that takes a different and rather unique approach to the all-in-one segment. The un-creatively named MSI Wind Box is a nettop crammed inside a slim black, fanless enclosure designed to be VESA-mounted to the back of your monitor, saving precious desk space and giving you a very inexpensive all-in-one of sorts.

Like virtually every other nettop in town, the MSI Wind Box will boast an Intel Atom N270 processor and either 1GB or 2GB of RAM under the hood. Other specs include a choice between a 160GB or 250GB hard drive, a multi-format memory card reader, three USB 2.0 ports, 802.11b/g wireless, audio ports with 7.1 surround sound support, VGA output and Windows XP. The entire system weighs just 500g and is expected to cost around €200 ($258) when it ships in early 2009.

Battery life has long been the Achilles heel of laptops, and whole-day duration a promise yet to be fulfilled, but a new start-up is taking a different approach to solving this issue by working on laptops so energy efficient they'll supposedly be able to run on a standard battery for 20 to 40 hours before needing a recharge.

That could be possible through ultra-low power screens developed by Mary Lou Jepsen, the former head of Intel’s display division and chief technology officer at OLPC. Such screens are one of the key features on the XO laptop, they cost a third that of traditional LCD screens and use about a tenth of the power. Increased battery life is just one of the advantages this technology brings, however, as they are also touted as being readable in direct sunlight and having a fully saturated HDTV-quality color mode.

The company, Pixel Qi, expects to begin shipping the screens for laptops and e-books as soon as the second half of 2009 and plans to develop entire laptop and PC designs around its new technology to create the most power efficient models possible.

It seems that VIA isn’t in a hurry to step up competition in the netbook market. Even though their Nano microprocessor has shown to beat the single-core Atom in a number of applications and benchmarks, the rapidly growing market is still dominated at large by Intel, and that may continue to be the case for a long while if a recently leaked roadmap is to be believed.

According to the roadmap, VIA is planning to release its dual-core Nano chip as late as in June 2010, whereas Intel has already begun shipping its first dual-core Atom part. In all fairness, the Atom 330 is aimed at nettops (low cost desktop computers) and Intel is yet to announce plans for a dual-core Atom processor aimed at netbooks, but one can only expect them to have a solution ahead of that schedule – and let’s not forget AMD also plans to enter the market sometime next year with a dual-core chip dubbed Conesus.

Unfortunately, the leaked image does not reveal much of VIA's plans with the new chip, only that it will feature a “new process technology,” bring “further performance enhancements” and that the first samples will be available by December of 2009.

Gigabyte is looking to expand its netbook line next year with plans to introduce models that carry built-in 3.5G modules. These netbooks will be aimed at the ultra-mobile sector, though it remains unclear how the device will function with existing cell services, whether they will work with any carrier's SIM or if the device will be tied to a certain service provider.

As the line between smartphones, netbooks and so-called 'mobile Internet devices' blurs year after year, the technologies each one of these can employ increases. You can get cellular data cards for laptops and most smartphones have Wi-Fi access and some even have VoIP clients. This trend doesn't seem to be looking for a stop next year.

Gigabyte also took the time to talk about hardware, claiming they want to focus more on branded products and not so much on OEMs where margins are narrower. The company expressed concern about shipment forecasts for motherboards and graphics cards in the coming quarters, though that's nothing out of the ordinary considering the current economic climate.

No one doubts that the iPhone is a cool device, but there has been a growing group of people around the globe angry at Apple for misleading them as to what it is truly capable of. It has become such an issue that, in the UK, Apple has pulled ads before that were allegedly misleading – and now a second ad has come under fire.

The company has been recently forced to pull an ad for the iPhone 3G, after the Advertising Standards Authority sided with a group of people who deemed it to be misleading when it comes to how fast the phone can browse the web.

Anyone who has used a smartphone before knows that web performance can be very erratic, and certainly doesn't compare to what you get from a broadband connection. But while Apple does indeed leave disclaimers in their ads, people are more focused on how lightning-fast pages seem to load in the ad as opposed to reality. This is certainly not the first time Apple has been criticized for the claims they make about the iPhone 3G's speed and what actually happens when it's in the hands of consumers.

Although rumors came out that AMD was planning to drop the Athlon name altogether since the introduction of their number-based CPU naming scheme, it turns out that some chips will still retain the name. Specifically, the dual-core K10 based CPUs will continue to be called Athlons, adding yet another kink into their product line.

AMD has renamed many of their products in recent years, from introducing the Phenom and renaming many of the Athlons, to changing the Radeon naming scheme and more. Most recently they introduced a five-digit naming scheme that was hinted at earlier. Why all the name changes? Many are encouraged by the performance aspects of AMD's recent 45nm CPUs, but the company could end up hurting themselves if they make actually buying one a confusing task.

The world of solid state drives is supposed to be getting a huge boon in the not too distant future, at least if you believe what Micron says. The company apparently has some hot hardware in the works, with new SSDs that promise to deliver a massive increase in performance. That would certainly be welcome news – while SSDs do have some performance advantages over mechanical disks, it certainly isn't something to write home about just yet. Micron, however, says their new technology can hit speeds as high as 1GB/s, with a sustained data throughput of 800MB/s, vastly exceeding what standard SATA drives do today.

Their new technology does not rely on SATA interfaces, bypassing the bandwidth limit of SATA II, which is 300MB/s. The drives they are touting instead have PCIe interfaces and include flash data management enhancements. If Micron makes good on their promise, SSDs could find themselves enjoying a huge performance advantage. Though, like all things that sound good on paper, we'll have to actually see it in action to believe it. There is a short demo video demonstrating the technology, though it's hard to take much from it.