Overpriced Gadget of the Week: $101,353 Dell Laptop

It may be another mistake by Dell or, a joke, or a complete rip off. Either way Dell is selling a Intel Core i7 Laptop for $101,353.

The Studio XPS 16 with a 1.6 GHZ i7 chip costs $101,353, but if you want to upgrade to a 1.73 GHZ chip you only have to pay about another $350. The good news is that they are taking $100 off faster memory, but frankly Dell I don't think that helps.

Sphere: Related Content

China Gets iPhones Early, But Wi-Fi is Disabled

China Unicom will likely be selling an iPhone sooner than expected, but it will not have Wi-Fi capabilities.

The Government of China, which controls the 3 major cell phone networks in China said in the past that it objected to Wi-Fi in phones, perhaps because it's harder to sniff local packets than ones drifting through a wide-area network.

According to unconfirmed reports, China Unicom plans to sell a GSM based iPhone, but its licence is for something where Wi-Fi is blocked. As TradingMarkets.com puts it: "Apple has to cancel the Wi-Fi function without changing other components."

The good news is that, China has been waiting for the iPhone for a long time and they are finally getting it now. I just wonder how adept the Chinese jailbreakers will be at reactivating that Wi-Fi.

Sphere: Related Content

PSP2 to be More Powerful than Xbox

Sony’s PSP Go was a god attempt to smother PSP2 rumours but it failed miserable. A new rumour is out saying that the PSP2 will have the PowerVR GPU, which is just as powerful as iPhone 3GS GPU. The SGX543MP cited has four cores, and generates 113 Polygons per second on the low end potable 200 megahertz model. What's interesting is that GamesIndustry.biz calls the PSP2 just a "ballpark match" for the original Xbox. They also point out that Imagination Technologies calls the chip a GP-GPU, capable of handling computing tasks in addition to graphics, and potentially giving the PSP2 the power savings of not needing a separate CPU to operate.

Sphere: Related Content

Carbon Ring Storage Provides 1,000 Times Higher Memory Density

There is terrifying news. We've almost maxed out the density limits of magnetic memory, as it becomes increasingly harder to shrink the necessary grains in the process. In simple terms, we’ve maxed out on the amount of memory a computer can have. Don’t start fretting about this, because there may be a solution. A team of German scientists, have been doing more than just standing around and watching this happen. Colbalt (an element responsible for keeping you’re data safe) usually needs around 50,000 atom fleet for each grain, but boffins from Dresden have found a way to shrink that to 50 (that's good). Without the geeky technological details, attaching carbon rings to the cobalt reproduces the requisite hexagonal close packed structure, which leads to reduced space requirements. If this is viable, we can expect another race which hard drive makers try to make the competitions capacity look measly. The details are here.

Sphere: Related Content

Windows 7 Running on a Pentium II Based PC

The moment I herd that Microsoft was designing Windows 7 to run on netbooks I was wondering what hardware it would run on.

A Windows Club Forum member that goes by the name of “hackerman1” has impressively installed Windows 7 on an ancient PC.  He installed it on a system packing a 266MHz Pentium II, 128MB of RAM and a 4MB graphics card. After succeeding, he decreased the RAM capacity to 96MB, which also handled 7. His experiment came to a temporary halt after dropping the RAM to 64MB. Hackerman’s fun won’t end there, though. He plans to try and get Windows 7 up and running on a 166MHz Pentium I and 1MB graphics card next.

Hackerman1 did not say how long it takes Windows 7 to boot or how long the install took. Other forum members said that on an ancient PC it took 17 hours to install, and 17 minutes to boot.

Sphere: Related Content

Intel Simplifies it Core Structure With i7 i5 and i3

Intel has wisely chosen to simplify its overley complicated brand structure by creating only three main categories of chips: i7(high level) i5(mid level) and i3(entry level).

...we are focusing our strategy around a primary 'hero' client brand which is Intel® Core™. Today the Intel Core brand has a mind boggling array of derivatives (such as Core™2 Duo and Core 2 Quad, etc). Over time those will go away and in its place will be a simplified family of Core processors spanning multiple levels: Intel® Core™ i3 processor, Intel® Core™ i5 processor, and Intel® Core™ i7 processors. Core i3 and Core i5 are new modifiers and join the previously announced Intel Core i7 to round out the family structure. It is important to note that these are not brands but modifiers to the Intel Core brand that signal different features and benefits. For example, upcoming processors such as Lynnfield (desktop) will carry the Intel Core brand, but will be available as either Intel Core i5 or Intel Core i7 depending upon the feature set and capability. Clarksfield (mobile) will have the Intel Core i7 name. - Intel spokesman Bill Calder

Celeron, Pentium and Atom are staying put, but the famous core brands will be broken into the ones above. Intel said that the transition will take time, and will most likely be done in 2010.

Sphere: Related Content