Thursday, August 13, 2009

Lenovo IdeaCentre Q700 Wants To Be Your Lounge Room's Black Box [PCs]

Source: http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/gizmodo/full/~3/0oMM50Hjxro/lenovo-ideacentre-q700-wants-to-be-your-lounge-rooms-black-box

The Q700 looks like a nettop, but has a little more balls thanks to a 2.5GHz Pentium Dual-Core E5200. Top specs include a TV tuner, HDMI, 4GB RAM, 1TB hard disk, and Intel GMA X4500 graphics. Prices start from $499.

About the size of a DVD player, the compact HTPC sits either horizontally or vertically (with stand), and has a metal liner to shield against electromagnetic radiation. Lenovo also says it'll support 1080p.

On the front you'll find a slot-loading DVD writer, four-in-one media card reader (SD/MMC/MS/MS Pro), four USB 2.0 ports, plus microphone and headphone jacks.

One the back: eSATA and HDMI connections (nice!), VGA, four further USB 2.0 ports, and a variety of audio connections, including S/PDIF-out. Ethernet is standard, while options include 802.11g Wi-Fi, the TV tuner, and various flavors of Windows Vista. [Lenovo via Nexus404]




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Manhattan's Population By Day vs Manhattan's Population By Night [Data Visualization]

Source: http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/gizmodo/full/~3/QRjDK5XMAl0/manhattans-population-by-day-vs-manhattans-population-by-night

I love NYC to bits. But when I see the millions of people shifting in and out Manhattan in a pretty pretty graphic like this, I feel vertigo. And then, when I see the subway statistics, I feel panic:

From 8:00AM to 8:59 AM on an average Fall day in 2007 the NYC Subway carried 388,802 passengers into the CBD [city business district] on 370 trains over 22 tracks. In other words, a train carrying 1,050 people crossed into the CBD every 6 seconds.

Absolutely mindblowing. Now, off I go to get a bagel. [Frumination—Thanks David]




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Samsung Reclaim Corn-Fed Ecophone Impressions and Gallery [Cellphones]

Source: http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/gizmodo/full/~3/9mfKunR-o6I/samsung-reclaim-corn+fed-ecophone-impressions-and-gallery

Yes, it's a dumbphone, but it's a dumbphone with ideals. The Samsung Reclaim is as much an environmental statement as it is a slide-out QWERTY messaging phone.

The first thing you'll notice about Sprint/Samsung's $50 green blue handset is its size—it's adorably small and pebble-like when it's closed. Actually wait, no, the first thing you'll notice is the packaging. Remember all that talk about minimizing cardboard waste, and not including a manual? This is what we got:

To be fair to Samsung, the packaging is apparently recyclable and made with "soy-based" ink, and I'm pretty sure that notebook full of paper was just an ill-advised PR gift, but even so, they didn't exactly go all the way with this. (Thanks to tipster Shiron for inspiration!)

Anyway, minor quibble, back to the phone. This Pre-shaped texter runs a proprietary in-house OS, which, aside from slight input lag, is par for the course for its category—you know, not-so-hot on the browser front, but it gets phone'n'text duties done just fine. and texting comes fast and easy on the rubberized keyboard. An no, no part of this phone feels like it's made from corn, even if it is.

We've been ! thinking about how to review this thing, and we're not sure. Do we treat it as a feature phone with environmental tendencies, or an exercise in environmentalism with feature phone tendencies? Mark says we should bury it for a few months and see if it biodegrades; I say we should break it down and make cornbread. Any ideas? [Samsung]




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Google Chromium on Mac Kicks Every Other Mac Browser's Ass [Browsers]

Source: http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/gizmodo/full/~3/LQcJVMJ2c5s/google-chromium-on-mac-kicks-every-other-mac-browsers-ass

Google Chromium 4.0, the pre-alpha version of Chrome, may still be buggy and crashy as all hell, but it's also incredibly fast, according to benchmarks: 34% faster than Safari, for one, and more than twice as fast as Firefox.

These numbers are based on Javascript benchmarks, which don't give a total view of a browser's speed but do tell us how adept a browser is at dealing with intensive code. Chromium scored 657ms on the test to Safari's 886ms. Firefox scored 1,508ms and Opera 10 Beta 3 (my personal browser of choice) lagged way behind with 5,958ms. Keeping in mind that Chromium is pre-alpha and thus better seen as a fun dev project than an actual candidate for a primary browser, we're pretty excited. Once Google irons out the bugs and gets some damn extensions, Chrome on Mac is going to be a stiff challenger to Firefox. [CNET]




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Corsair's Flash Voyager GT: The World's Fastest 128GB USB Flash Drive [Flash Memory]

Source: http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/gizmodo/full/~3/OPtg0_Dg9EM/corsairs-flash-voyager-gt-the-worlds-fastest-128gb-usb-flash-drive

Corsair, who seem to spend all their time finding speed records and then breaking them, announced their Flash Voyager GT USB flash drive at the droolworthy 128GB capacity. Even better, the speeds totally don't suck: 32MB/s and 25.6MB/s read/write, respectively.

The first 128GB USB flash drive we say, the Kingston Datatraveler 200, was mostly a proof of concept, with relatively slow read/write speeds of 20/10MB/s. It was also prohibitively expensive at nearly $550. Corsair's drive has the speed to be really enviable, and it comes in even cheaper than the Kingston drive. Note, however, that we didn't say it's affordable, at all—Newegg is selling it for $400. Still, it's pretty great to be able to carry around even a massive music collection in the change pocket of your jeans. [Corsair]




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