Best computer news

With roughly 70 days until the 2010 World Cup championships, A-data has a special flash drive for you to help cheer for your team. These 4GB World Cup commemorative flash drives are suited up and ready to play, in the team jersey of six of the top football (soccer) teams this year. Brazil, Germany, Italy, Korea, Mexico, and the United States are ready to score on your USB port. The six team jerseys house a small USB plug preloaded with some of the usual suspects in trial software.

Sadly, the USB drives don’t contain themed content or team photos. There’s also an appalling lack of connection between the cap and drive. The jersey/cap does have a lanyard which can be secured, but the drive/feet could easily run off on you. So pick one up and flash your national pride at everyone in your local area.
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There’s quite a few of these USB drink coolers popping up lately, but this one is a little special. Unfortunately, it’s special in both the good and the bad way. This semiconductor and carbon fiber constructed cooler is able to wick away heat and rapidly drop the temperature of an enclosed liquid container. Recent reviews of similar USB beverage chillers have returned surprising results. It seems these too-good-to-be-true coolers actually do appreciably lower the temperature. The ad claims to drop your drink down to -10 C in 5 minutes. We aren’t sure if this is even possible without tapping into an alternate dimension. Perhaps it was measured somewhere in Antarctica, where -10 degrees is no big deal. Initial reviews do tend to confirm the company’s claims.

The other cool feature is the long cord and that this wraps around your drink which can be handled and imbibed without removing it from it’s cold wrap. The only real drawback is that this isn’t the most stylish PC accessory you’ve ever seen; it gives one the sense of a sweater on a dog. While dog clothes are accepted in some cultures, most places view them as just odd. If you can get over the eye-sore problem this could really make a nice impact on your workday drinking.
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Buffalo, one of the better but lesser known drive accessory manufacturers, has released a new thin external USB 3.0 2.5″ drive, a follow-up to the DriveStation. The Ministation Cobalt USB 3.0 version has all of the classic Buffalo quality, and throws in SuperSpeed USB as well as a nice software suite. The included Buffalo Tools comes with a RAM Disk utility which is a concept that is been around for ages, but is seeing some resurgence in the netbook era. Slow hard drives with ample fast RAM can take advantage of RAM disks for browsing and other drive intensive tasks. We keep a portable version of Firefox installed in a RAM disk for crisp browsing. This eliminates the slow writing of all the tiny temp files to the hard drive and visibly improves browsing. RAM disks are deleted upon reboots but retained during suspends. This is one of the best ways to keep from leaving browsing history traces on a computer. If you’ve gotten in to the habit of shutting your PC down to suspend instead of off, you can easily reduce the number of times you have to reinstall. Installs to a RAM disk only take seconds though.

The sleek MiniStation Cobalt USB 3.0 2.5″ drive is supposed to see benefits from the Turbo PC software in copy speeds. Buffalo claims up to 30% speed boosts on USB 3.0 transfers and a whopping 70% increase on USB 2.0 transfers. This is likely accomplished with RAM buffering, which will appear to complete transfer to the drive while remaining bytes are transferred from the software behind the scenes. While this might seem sneaky, feeling fast and being fast are effectively the same thing for the majority of real world drive uses. The MiniStation Cobalt drives are available in 500 and 640GB sizes, and should happily run with USB 3.0 bus power. USB 2.0 users may need to attach a power cable as drives that size may tax USB 2.0 power past its limit. Shipping should begin early next month, but prices have not been released yet.
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It doesn’t seem all that long ago when Corsair first unveiled their Padlock USB flash drive, a secure drive with a nifty keypad to unlock the storage by PIN code without the need for platform-specific software. Too bad the security was bypassed in less than a year by a group of dutch engineers armed with a simple 10K resistor. Corsair’s not one to take such humiliation lightly, however, and has jumped back into the game with the Flash Padlock 2, now backed by 256-bit AES hardware encryption. Better still, the Padlock 2 is now housed in the same rubber casing as the ever-durable Flash Voyager, meaning it’s practically begging to withstand much more than its fair share of flagrant abuse. So how did this new contender fare in the hands of a crazed reviewer? Read on to find out…
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Eclipse has a pair of Star Trek-style keyboards called the LiteTouch that come with touchpanel in place of a regular keypad. The keyboard scissor keys are backlit along with the touchpanel for easy use at night or in other low light situations like HTPC uses. The company is launching two models this Spring, a USB wired and a wireless version with a rechargeable lithium ion battery built-in using 2.4GHz RF communication for up to 30 ft. range. The LiteTouch keyboard also bears a miniature trackball, think Blackberry Pearl, with two mouse buttons so you can go completely mouseless if you need to.

The LiteTouch’s touchpanel, while not the same as having a complete Atom PC in place of the numpad, has three overlay modes for different needs. The first is the simple number pad nothing special there, except for the whole uber-cool backlit touchscreen part, totally boring. The second is a media control panel with stop, play, next media control buttons. The third is a programmable macro key layout that let’s you assign websites or program links to the buttons. There’s a volume slider and brightness control that are available within all the overlay modes. One thing to note, the LCD display panel does not seem to have any graphical abilities at all. The LCD moniker is a little misleading as the icons for each of the overlays look like they are just on or off depending on which mode you choose. If you look closely at the overlay images, you can see that each of the icons for each mode has it’s own area of the key’s face. So while this isn’t quite an Optimus, it still packs a bunch of cool for the price. MSRP is set to $130 for the wireless and $80 for the wired version; both should be available in the next few months.
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On the heels of the notice of Gigabyte’s mega-volume announcement, Asus has shot back with its own pedigree and the breadth of their commitment to innovation. The company has definitely been a major player in the adoption of new technologies and new form factors. Gigabyte may hold the title of most, but Asus asserts, and we agree, they have always been first. First motherboard with USB 3.0 certification from the USB-IF, first nettop with USB 3.0, first to integrate USB 3.0 into their full range of products, not a long list, but definitely an impressive reminder of how hard they have been working to make the best product possible.

Asus has always had our loyalty since the early days of consumer PCs. We’ve gladly ordered products that were the first and best in: tweaked motherboards, Dual CPU capability, SLI support, integrated IO systems, small form factor machines, the EEE PC. That list goes on quite a bit longer and reads like a greatest-hits list of personal computing. We expect sharks with lasers to be built in to their next system at this rate. If you have a few days, try a search for Asus on our site, and you can see for yourself how often we find them newsworthy. One thing is for sure, “new” and “hotness” are words that will be associated with Asus for a long time to come.
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This notebook stand may not be much to look at, but it’s like no other stand we’ve seen. This all aluminum stand raises your laptop about 2 inches off the ground, and packs a water cooling system. You heard it right… water cooling. A USB-powered pump sitting under the stand circulates water through copper a radiator in mounted over a fan. The water flow is constantly wicking away heat from the copper radiator and any air that passes through it is cooled.

This unique cooler should provide a significant increase in cooling over conventional fan-based cooling pad. It’s definitely something for those with gaming laptops or for people serious about heavy multitasking. Water cooled systems are very nearly mainstream now (at least on desktops), so you shouldn’t worry about leaks or catastrophic failures. The only worry you should have is the aluminum edges look a little sharp and might not travel well. There’s not much indication of when these might hit the shelves or for how much. Given how smart the design is our guess is that competitors will be popping with similar devices very soon.
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That’s something we don’t see everyday. Victorinox challenges British hackers to crack its Secure Pro – the company’s new biometric USB swiss knife. The competition, as of this writing, is being held at Victorinox’s flagship store in London and will end the same day at 6pm. Contestants, however, are given only two hours to hack their way into the drive’s data. More of interest to us is what makes Victorinox so confident that it’s willing to give away £100,000 to prove that its Secure Pro swiss knife to invulnerable to hacks.

For starter, the Secure Pro employs fingerprint reader with additional thermal and oxygen sensors to confirm that the pattern actually comes from a live finger. The drive also employs a single-chip architecture with 256-bit AES hardware encryption engine to minimize the chance of being intercepted on the circuit. To further improve security, any brute-force attempts will be dealt with by Secure Pro’s self-destruct, which literally speaking, fuses memory chip beyond recovery with USB bus power. All these different layers of defense is designed by MKI, a security chip specialist. This sounds like IronKey has finally met its match.
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Saelig is releasing a USB flash drive adapter, called Mobiadapter, with the sole purpose to connect your flash drive to your cellphone, but the dongle will only be able to connect to a handset equipped with a SD card slot. The matchbook size adapter requires no batteries, but instead uses the power from the PDA or cell phone. It may be challenged by a few things, but could definitely come in handy. The most obvious problem is that the regular Secure Digital (SD) is not showing up on many new devices except cameras and laptops where it does still reign supreme. Brace yourselves, most laptops already come with a USB port or two.

Camera’s and MP3 players are going to be the best market for this handy adapter. Most phones use microSD nowadays, which may limit their market, but they already have a miniSD adapter a microSD adapter may not be far off. The only other setback is the precarious juggling you may have to do to get the whole contraption lined up and usable. That’s assuming that your device can function with the SD card door open and protruding. The Mobiadapter is definitely a life preserver type of device that is probably perfect for a specific set of uses. At only $59, this may be a touch too expensive to have just-in-case but for those of you that have been searching for this little guy your wait is over.
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By the time you figure out what time this watch says, it will be that time tomorrow. Tokyoflash, who makes some very hip trendy watches, has a new e-Paper watch that they are getting a bit crazy with. The sleek concept watch incorporates a slick eInk face that wraps around half of the band. They have modeled four different methods of displaying the time and date that may give you a migraine as you try to learn the system. Some of their watches are binary-ish and some are downright bizarre. Our favorite is the one that shows the numerals in the negative space formed by random numbers.

This sleek watch stands out from many other offerings from Tokyoflash in that it is not overly gaudy. The company also plans to allow it to be charged by USB. The large display will require more than just a simple watch battery to run. The only other major problem is that the binary watch only shows the time with a button press. They are great fashion accessories and can be great for showing off your geek cred but they take effort to read and both hands. They are still feeling out their concepts so guessing on a price range or release would be premature. If you can’t wait to have an e-Ink watch you can find a few here.
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