SlashGear Week In Review - Week 34 2008

Intel have been holding their annual Developers' Forum in San Francisco this week, and quite a few prototypes and commercial products have come out to play. Of the former, most exciting seems to be the UrbanMax Tablet PC concept; of the latter, Viliv's S5 MID and S7 UMPC both promise to crank the netbook market up a gear or two.

That's probably not what Acer want to hear; the company has snipped pricing off of their Aspire One netbook, presumably remembering (only a little late) that the ultraportables are meant to be cheap. Not far from the shelves, Fujitsu's Amilo Mini and Dell's Inspiron 910 continued to leak information, but still no official word from the tongue-tied companies themselves.

Intel also announced their new consumer and enterprise SSDs, together with confirming that the dual-core Atom 330 CPU is back on track for a September launch. Plus there was an unexpected showing of the new Classmate Tablet PC, and a new IPTV system in association with Yahoo!

In gaming, Sony came clean on the long-expected PSP 3000, which has a much improved display over its predecessor. They also announced a 160GB version of the PS3 and gave hope to people whose houses contain more music game peripherals than food or chairs by brokering a compatibility deal.

We've some new Tablet PC news this week, with the launch of the HP 2730p (alongside their military-spec 2530p ultraportables) and leaked photos and FCC confirmation of the Lenovo ThinkPad X200t. Calling themselves Tablets, but more like internet-enabled PMPs, Archos finally unveiled their new HSDPA-compatible touchscreen media players, the Archos 5 and Archos 7; they went on sale this week.

Finally, it's not a normal week without some sort of Apple rumor, and this time around it was the future of the iPod range under the microscope. Facelifts, extra storage, new versions of iTunes; we've heard it all. If the rumors are true, expect to see price reductions as stores aim to clear end-of-line stock.