2006 July - SlashGear

Archive for July, 2006

Radeon X1950 to Feature New Cooling System

Benjamin Nied, Jul 21st 2006 Discuss [0]

Apparently, people are sick and tired of the high-end ATI Radeon cards have small engines mounted as cooling systems, so ATI has set out to fix the problem. On the company's upcoming Radeon X1950 graphics processing unit, ATI will redesign the entire cooling apparatus in order to make it quieter without losing efficiency. As it stands now, the new card is due out next month, complete with DDR4 RAM and a dual-slot design (evil evil evil). No details on either price or what the new cooling system could look like, but if you're interested in one of the new cards, now is the time to start saving up; high-end Radeons are usually $500 or so. Time to choose between that and the PS3! [via Gizmodo]

Intel to Launch Quad-Core Chips This Year

Benjamin Nied, Jul 21st 2006 Discuss [0]

While this doesn't come as any great surprise (especially after AMD's post-Core 2 Duo "4x4" announcement), Intel has nonetheless announced the that a quad-core version of its Core 2 Duo desktop chips (dubbed Kentsfield), as well as a quad-core edition of the Xeon server CPUs (dubbed Clovertown), would be available as early as the end of this year. It seems somewhat weird to me to launch what is essentially a massively-upgraded Core 2 Duo (the new processors are two Conroe or Woodcrest dual-core processors on one chip) so soon after the line was just launched, but that's technology for ya. Start saving now, all ye interested parties; I guarantee that this processor won't be cheap. [via MacNN]

Nintendo Offers Free Fix for Damaged DS Lite Hinges

Benjamin Nied, Jul 21st 2006 Discuss [0]

Well that didn't take long. One day after Kotaku posted their findings that 14% of their readers were the victim of DS Lite Hingeitis, Nintendo has agreed to fix units which are affected, although they still maintain that this is a minor issue and that only a very small fraction of users are actually affected. While my Lite has thus far managed to escape injury (and I haven't met anyone with a broken DS Lite yet), it's comforting to know that Nintendo is willing to clean up after their errors. Read The Full Story

Samsung BD-P1000 Player Wracked With Issues

Benjamin Nied, Jul 21st 2006 Discuss [1]

If you've read any reviews of Samsung's new BD-P1000 Blu-ray disc player, you've heard that it has a number of issues, including video playback softness, DTS decoding issues, and more. Well, apparently Samsung is well-aware of these issues and has traced the video playback issue to a faulty setting on the player's noise reduction chip. The really fun news is that, if you bought one of these defective boxes, Samsung might take as long as September before they release a firmware update that will fix your issues. No word on whether the sound issues have been fixed or not, but Blu-ray's launch will go down in history as one of the biggest rushed foul-ups ever; NO Blu-ray player was released without some sort of show-stopping issue. With Sony's track record of proprietary media formats already horrible, they really can't afford to have their collaborators screw up this badly this soon. [via Ultimate AV Mag]

Developers Avoiding the PS3?

Ewdison Then, Jul 21st 2006 Discuss [0]

When it comes to the next-generation gaming consoles, if there was one console that developers were going to ignore, you'd figure it was the Wii, right? Wrong. Developers are actually beginning to avoid Sony's upcoming PlayStation 3 console, as the price tag for the system has a lot of developers wondering if there will be a large enough consumer base to warrant making games that possibly may never sell. Even in Japan, where the PSOne and PS2 are both huge, 90% of developers felt that the console's price was too high and, as a result, are shifting gears away from Sony towards Nintendo's Wii and Microsoft's Xbox 360. Read The Full Story

PS3 Delays at an End?

Ewdison Then, Jul 21st 2006 Discuss [0]

In what has to be the biggest wave of relief to hit Sony in a good, long while, Asustek Computer Inc. has finally begun shipping PlayStation 3 consoles to Sony Corp., meaning that the delay we've heard about may not happen after all. This coinsides with Asustek's goal of shipping 200,000 of the next-generation consoles by the end of this month, and gradually increasing their output to 2,000,000 consoles per month by October. Read The Full Story

GoldVish $1.3M Cell Phones

Vincent Nguyen, Jul 20th 2006 Discuss [0]

GoldVish, an uber-luxury communication company out of Geneva Switzerland manufactured what may be the most expensive cell phone in the world; costing $1M. That’s enough o feed a relatively small country for a few weeks. The one of kind GoldVish phone is plastered with 120 carats of VVS-1 grade diamonds, while the casing is made of white gold. The “Piece Unique”, as it’s called is the brainchild of Swiss watch designer Emmanuel Gueit. Read The Full Story

Two Faucets In One

Vincent Nguyen, Jul 20th 2006 Discuss [0]

The Intellect Faucet is unique in two ways: it can be split into two separate faucets with each delivering filtered and non-filtered water simultaneously. Now why anyone would need to go through such measures for this feature is beyond me. It also measures the exact amount of water used from the time it’s turned on to when it’s flipped off. Nifty, again do we really care how much water we use? Yanko Design

Artec T14A USB TV Tuner: For HDTV on the Go

Benjamin Nied, Jul 20th 2006 Discuss [0]

If you love your HDTV, but hate not having the ability to utilize it everytime your on the go (or simply on your laptop), then Artec's T14A USB TV Tuner might be just what you need. While it requires you to have a normal analog TV Tuner card already installed, this little device llows you to pull HDTV streams right over the air and retails for $89 at the lowest, which is still one helluva lot cheaper than buying an HDTV, an HDTV-ready set top box, and any of the hundred accessories or addons that you may or may not decide to need. Read The Full Story

DS Opera Browser Demoed

Benjamin Nied, Jul 20th 2006 Discuss [0]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RbSq-tCHXmI Just in case you've had the urge to do some web browsing on your Nintendo DS/DS Lite's tiny, tiny screens, then you might be in luck (at least, if you have access to Japan). Dubbed the Nintendo DS Browser (how original), the browser will come on a DS or DS Lite memory expansion cartridge (which fits into Slot 2, the GBA port) and makes full use of the DS's touch screen, as you can see in the above video. Read The Full Story

Samsung Unveils Digital Camera with Helmet Attachment

Benjamin Nied, Jul 20th 2006 Discuss [0]

Samsung, known for their wide variety of extremely cool (and sometimes downright weird) gadgetry, has unveiled their latest sports camcorder, complete with a wireless helmet camera. While it only has a rage of 15 feet or so, you'll still need to keep the camera handy at all times in order to utilize the nifty helmet attachment; what you won't need to do is worry about getting tangled in the helmet cam's wires. Read The Full Story

Dell Joins the Flaming Notebook Discussion

Vincent Nguyen, Jul 20th 2006 Discuss [0]

Is it that big of a deal that one out of countless Dell laptops in existence catch on fire? The obvious answer is yes. It’s been the topic of discussion through out the blogosphere, since the initial report back on June 22. It’s official; Dell has joined in on the discussion a week ago. They believe it’s the fault of the lithium ion battery cell. It takes two to tango, and a battery alone doesn’t catch on fire without the help of the laptop that it’s attached to. And by the way, we care to be reminded that there are billions of lithium ion batteries used in electronic products – what we do care about is not being torched by a flaming laptop. Thanks Jason!