Best computer news

Jesus.
It’s a USB 2.0-compatible, 4-port chicken burger hub. And it actually looks pretty appetizing as you can see in the image after the break.

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Samsung is the third hard drive manufacturer to jump onto the USB 3.0 bandwagon, following Seagate and Western Digital. The new STORY Station 3.0 is a follow-up to the last year’s minimalist 3.5″ external drive. The two shares the exact same distinct brushed aluminum chassis with the front of the drive sporting an old-school power knob that is nothing more than a switch. The same jog dial controls the LED brightness level which seems somewhat unnecessary. Interestingly, the LED lights up in blue when the STORY drive operates in USB 3.0 mode and green under USB 2.0.

As a “green” drive, power saving mode kicks in after 5 minutes of inactivity. And dine the metal chassis proved ineffective at dissipating heat, there are vent holes on the rear and bottom. A full-sized USB 3.0 female connector can be found in the back. You can expect read speed to hit upwards of 100MB/s as other 3.5″ USB 3.0 drives have also managed that as well. The Samsung STORY Station comes in 1TB, 1.5TB and 2TB, carrying a price tag of $155, $195 and $270 respectively.

After this announcement, that only leaves Fujitsu and Hitachi without their official USB 3.0 external drives.
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Digital distribution continues to defy expectations by a few hold-outs. Most of us, however, aren’t the least bit surprised that when Lady Gaga’s hugely successful Fame Monster album came out on USB, that it sold out in less than 24 hours. The USB drive album contained all of the original songs on the original release plus a handful of remixes. The mega-hit ‘Telephone’ is also there. The Beatles’ album met with a similar absorption upon its release, but either everyone is totally gaga for Gaga or Universal didn’t do a very good job of anticipating demand.

The meager 250 copies sold contained more than just music, all of Lady Gaga’s videos were also included. There’s a bevvy of photos, most of which should be easily found on the intarwebs but the music and videos are what real fans seemed to jump to. With any luck, they will release another round of these drives and we can get our hands on one to find out what the bitrate and format of the videos are. The 800MBs of digital content on the custom designed 2GB drive went for roughly $70. Cross your fingers and toes that they do another run of them and that you act quicker next time.
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Plustek has a revealed a new scanner – SmartOffice PL1530 Scanner – with some new features that may appeal to a whole new group of people. The company includes the usual suspect in terms of scan quality and speed but builds on the standard home scanner with an ADF system. Able to load up to 50 pages in the auto document feeder system, scanning a 50 page document just should become much less of a chore.

The other standouts are the pair of USB connections that allow for two users to be connected to the scanner at the same time. The SmartOffice PL1530 scanner features buttons for quick transfer to either machine in addition to quick scan to PDF or print. The included software is able to scan direct to PDF while OCR software pulls content and attributes the document. This method makes the content of the pdf is searchable and indexable by search engines. With the dual connections, very small offices should find use and the PDF content indexing should appeal to large offices.
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Wanna know what it would be like to be a billionaire playboy, genius engineer and armored crimefighter instead of some pasty dude sitting at a computer? Well now you can,virtually speaking, with the Iron Man augmented reality online app. Read more on Fashionably Geek…

Webcams have found a new home outside LCD monitors and notebooks. Panasonic and Samsung both have debuted other own USB HD webcam add-on that can be mounted atop of their respective high-end HDTVs. Since nearly all high-def flat panels sport USB interface for media playback, firmware, or WiFi, re-using the same port for adding a HD webcam is the logical path for these companies.

The Panasonic Y-CC10W web camera is designed exclusively for VIERA flat TV series of the same company. Panasonic likely makes sure it won’t work on any Windows, Mac or competitors’ TVs with custom firmware, which has a copy of the Skype software. The USB 2.0 webcam itself has a 1/4 CMOS sensor with a 56.8 degree coverage; it isn’t surprising that there are four microphones to pick up all the different voices from around the living room. A built-in H.264 compressor handles all the video encoding but it can only feed video to the other party at 22fps.

The other Skype HD webcam comes from Samsung and like the aforementioned video camera, the FreeTalk TV is a USB add-on exclusively built for LED 7000 and 8000 series models of HDTVs. These two models both have access to USB 2.0 port that allows H.264 MKV and DivX HD playback and that also accepts external WiFi 802.11n installation. This model does support 30fps streaming at 720p, but oddly, the webcam does only manual focus. For $150, we would have expected something more in line with the current crop of HD webcams for PCs.
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With Light Peak blitz happening anytime next year, Asustek’s wholly-subsidiary ASMedia is going all out to push USB 3.0 to mainstream by offering per chip pricing below $3. This move will compete with NEC’s $6. (NEC was making a killing at $9 per unit between 2H 2009 and 1H 2010.) Asustek has already transferred all orders to ASMedia, followed by MSI, Gigabyte and Elitegroup within the year. Backed by all these Taiwanese motherboard manufacturers, ASMedia is expected to hit the 10 million USB 3.0 chip milestone in 2010.

Granted, this still may not be enough since chipset integration by Intel would make USB 3.0 free for everyone, yet the silicon shipment number alone may just create more incentive for peripheral makers to jump onto the SuperSpeed bandwagon. Besides NEC and Asustek, Texas Instrument, VIA and even Intel have planned to start mass shipment of USB 3.0 hosts beginning Q3 2010.
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External storage naturally falls into the commodity category for obvious reasons. We’ve seen all kinds of improvements from USB 3.0 to encryption and shockproof feature to differentiate their drives from the rest of the pack. Now, you can have all three in a single package. The Transcend StoreJet 25D3 sports a shock dampening design that can absorbs force resulted from a free fall with its piano black finish case. However, we need to confirm whether it has the same ratings as some high-profile anti-shock flash drives.

The Transcend is a USB 3.0 compliant, yet the 2.5″ drive inside is the bottleneck, limiting the transfer speed to 90MB/s which is still close to 3 times faster than a USB 2.0 counterpart. USB 3.0′s 900mA power supply makes sure the drive is definitely bus-powered under all circumstances. There’s also 256-bit AES encryption, but it’s not hardware accelerated. In contrast, the Seagate BlackArmor PS 110 USB 3.0 comes bundled with a USB 3.0 ExpressCard, a full backup suite and hardware encryption.
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It’s been some three years since Corsair has given us the rugged Flash Survivor GT-series flash drives. Now the company has finally updated the tough drive with a new quad-channel controller implementation, identical to that found on Flash Voyager GTR. The upgrade – limited by the Hi-Speed USB interface – isn’t going to be particularly helpful in winning a race against the current crop of USB 3.0 flash drives, but you may find it insanely faster than most other competitors during small file writes. Corsair goes on to say that you can now use it as a true bootable USB drive without compromise.

While the GTR made some progress in the speed department, the drive remains largely unchanged in terms of ruggedness. Each Flash Survivor GTR is encased inside aircraft-grade aluminum shell filled with a shock-dampening collar and EPDM seal, providing water-resistance to a depth of 200m. Corsair also claims the GTR prices will start a MSRP 20% lower than the GT because it uses the cheaper MLC instead of SLC. The advances in the flash controller make it possible for the GTR to excel the competitions. The Flash Survivor is backed by a 10-year warranty, and will become commercially available anytime now.
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Now this little beauty may not appeal to any, but the most dedicated photographers. Leica’s latest V-lux 20 compact digital camera has some very serious features and company’s pride shows through in the price. Sadly, $699 price tag is the most noteworthy feature of this otherwise lovely new entrant in Leica’s compact line up. It has wide angle capabilities at a 25mm comparable focal length as well as an amazing 300mm (12x) optical zoom. Most cameras start cheating at around 4x to 5x optical zoom and start using a digital zoom to get closer. Digital zoom rapidly degrades image quality compared to optical. It’s best to turn off digital zooming in your camera and crop/zoom within your image software later. They do fall short on video recording. While it is capable of 720p recording, it only records in the space-consuming motion-jpeg format.

Once you get past the sticker shock, you might notice that you have the new and fun geotagging options available in this as well. (Though, some cam whore would think dual LCD camera like the Samsung DualView gives more bang of the bucks.) A tiny GPS works inside the V-lux 20 to attach your actual geographic location and time with every picture. You can then use this information to locate all your pictures on a map and track your trip through your photos. So if you’ve got the money to burn for Leica’s high quality system, you can pick one up in May in the UK with worldwide shipments following sometime afterwards.
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