Digital Trends
If you’ve ever dreams of reading literary classics on your iPhone or Android device instead of buying a Kindle or working to shoehorn free etexts onto your phone, Google has some good news for you: the company has launched a mobile version of Google Book Search (point your phones here) that provides mobile access to more than 1.5 million public domain books—at least in the United States. (Outside the U.S., selection is currently limited to half a million titles.)
With the current election and the cratered economy making it real clear that we need to conserve gas, I picked up my first second generation Electric Bike from a company called (E +). I have two of the first generation high performance electric bikes from a company called Wavecrest who built them for the US Military and these puppies, while expensive, blew away everything else that was out there.
The Wavecrest TidalForce IO
It’s simple and reliable, and you can fill it with tons of hi-res music files so most fans will never know you’ve gone digital. It’s like having the biggest box of vinyl you could imagine, but in your pocket — and you can search it by keyword. It’s also compatible with an increasing array of digital DJ gear. (Check Prices)
Cortex HDTT-5000 Media Controller DJ, $1499.95
This recently firmware-upgraded digital media controller has 5 USB ports for hooking up your iPod, USB drive, QWERTY keyboard and accessing them all at the same time. The 45-size scratching/controller platter and LCD (for visual cueing) helps you create loops, match beats, drop the needle, and raise the roof. (Check Prices)
It was interesting that Apple announced their new eight core workstation during CES rather than waiting for MacWorld. This may have simply been to keep folks thinking about Apple during a week where most of us were overwhelmed with product announcements from others. Apple always likes to remind writers that they have something big too. But this new Apple system, while impressive, was no iPhone and the buzz this year for this week stayed with CES.
Are We Seeing the Beginning of the End for CES?
Several weeks ago I argued it was time to take a look at an all-in-one computer, this week let’s revisit this topic and talk about the latest, the Gateway One.
The first all-in-one PC I ever had was by Panasonic and it was portable. Weighing in at a whopping 32 pounds, it had a build in printer, and it cost around $2,500 – and this was in the mid 80s which would have made it over $5,000 by today’s inflation. It had one of the very first flat panel displays and was colored both shades of orange. It even had a “turbo” button that, when pushed, would have still made it incredibly underpowered when compared to an average Smartphone today. But, it was easy to set up, looked kind of cool (for its time) and performed flawlessly for the 3 years I used it.
Although there’s no real way of knowing for certain, most folk agree that today marks the 25th anniversary of the smiley, long an icon of online culture. Carnegie Mellon’s Scott Fahlman lays a credible claim to having produced the first smiley on September 19, 1982, on one of Carnegie Mellon’s internal bulletin board systems. From there, the fad quickly spread to other institutions via academic computer networks, bulletin board systems, and nascent online services.
For the last several years, consumers have gotten the sense that they can save a little money by shopping online for many types of goods, rather than going to traditional brick-and-mortar retailers and taking their chances with on-hand selection and getting door-dinged in the chaotic parking lots. Now, figures released my online merchant services firm Vendio claim to back up that idea, finding that consumers can spend as much as 44 percent more for consumer electronics products from offline sources when compared to purchasing online.
When it comes to the Macintosh, let’s face it: Microsoft is better known for what it doesn’t do rather than what it actually does. Mac versions of its Office productivity applications have been money makers for coming up on two decades, but, gosh, where’s Outlook for Macintosh? Business tools like Access? Heck, even cute consumer services like MSN are missing in action! Internet Explorer? Mothballed. Windows Media Player? Gone. Games? None. Virtual PC? Acquired, digested, and >burp< done.
Here at Digital Trends, there are some items we sit on for a while. Sometimes news is embargoed by a company; sometimes we have to hold something waiting for images or information. Heck, sometimes things aren’t sourced well enough that we feel comfortable running with it, and, sometimes, things just don’t seem important enough to write up.
Then, there are items we hold back as
Quote from the review at MonkeyReview:
“The Albatron Gigi Geforce FX5900 blew away everything we had here at the office, though no other 5900 cards were displayed in our benchmarking line up, we’ll be making comparisons to the ATI 9800XT core later in the month. This should give us a closer price/performance comparison. For the time being I’m giving the card full marks for its performance.”
Albatron appears to give you a lot for your money including a carrying bag, and several full version games. Heck they even give you video cables.
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