GizmoScoop

Pioneer will unleash its Blu-ray secret weapon in October.  That is the Pioneer Blu-ray player, BDR-205.  Skip the 8x and 10x burn speeds from the Chinese Blu-ray burners, Pioneer jumped ahead with the 12x burn speed.  The secret behind the technology is a 450 mW pulsed-operation blu-violet laser, which is significantly stronger than the 200 mW lasers that are commonly used in today’s Blu-ray players.  At 12x burn speed, its ability to burn data into the Blu-ray disc is about 54MB/s.  This is equivalent to burning 25GB of data in about 8 minutes, and that is really fast.  DVD speed can reach up to 16x and Blu-ray rewritable speed is only at 2x, which is roughly about 9MB/s to the disc.  The Pioneer BDR-205 is connected with a SATA 3.0 cable, so no more parallel clutter cable in your computer box.

The  Pioneer BDR-205 12x Blu-ray burner will be available in black or white version, and will include softwares such as PowerDVD 8, Power2Go 6, and InstantBurn 5.  The price is about $249.

Freecom, a Mitsubishi Kagaku Media company announced the  hard drive called Hard Drive XS 3.0 – the first external hard drive in the world to offer ‘SuperSpeed USB’ technology. Using USB 3.0, the Hard Drive XS3.0′s transfer speeds can reach up to approximately 130 MB/s; this is significantly faster than existing 2.0 USB drives.  The Hard Drive XS3.0 allows users to back up and upload information in a matter of seconds.   This is ideally for both home and industrial usages.  People with the need for speed can transfer large files quickly and have their data on-the-go.  In addition,  the Hard Drive XS 3.0 is also the smallest 3.5” desktop hard drive available, in a sense,  it is slimmer than conventional hard drives.

The Freecom Hard Drive XS 3.0 is also backwards compatible with all USB 2.0. As of right now, USB 3.0 is not readily, abundantly available to the public.  Most of the computers today are currently operating under USB 2.0, and you will need a USB 3.0 controller to take advantage of the USB 3.0 transfer speed.  For comparison, the USB 3.0 theoretical transfer speed is about 5 Gbps and the USB 2.0 interface is 480 Mbps.  But as we all know, theoretical transfer speed is different from the real world speed.  As you can see that the USB 3.0 highest transfer speed for the Hard Drive XS3.0 is about 130MB/s, and the transfer speed for USB 2.0 is about 40-50 MB/s in real world applications.

The price of the 1TB Hard Drive XS 3.0 is about $190.

Finally, somebody has the gut to made a dual Intel Atom processor netbook.  Well, that somebody is from a small company called Haleron Technologies.  The dual Intel Atom processor netbook is called Swordfish Net 102, weird name I may add.  It comes with two Intel Atom N270 1.6GHz processors (this is not the same as dual core like the Atom N330 found in desktop), 2GB of DDR2 memory, a 160GB hard drive, and a 10.2 inch LCD display with a resolution of 1024 by 600.  The base model comes with a skimpy 3-cell 2450mAh battery; now how is this battery capacity going to fit into the dual  processors spec?  One question will come up is that does the dual processors has the power management system?  The ability to shut down one processor when the system is under load is important to save battery life.  Other specs include WiFi, 3G, dual Bluetooth, 10/100 LAN, and a 1.3 megapixel camera.

The Swordfish Net 102 netbook is not available in retail stores yet but is now available at Haleron for $499.  At $499 and netbook spec, that is kind of steep.  It is treading into the economy notebooks realm.

The new Dell Latitude Z laptop will be available today for $2,000.  The Dell Latitude Z laptop is a pretty laptop with slim design that you can do business and looking good at the same time.  Hey, who says you that you can’t mix business with pleasure?  The Dell Latitude Z600, one of the thinnest, lightest, with the  most innovative features of business laptops.   It is thin yet the Z600 is very sturdy. The  casing is made from a magnesium alloy, while the interior is laced with brushed aluminum metals.

The Dell Latitude Z  carries a big 8-cell battery, which gives about 8-9 hours in normal usage.  The stunning 16-inch widescreen, which has a 1,600-by-900 resolution,  let you both work and play at the same time.  The Z600 comes with the Intel ultra low voltage processors: the Intel Core 2 Duo SU9600 or SU9400. It supports up to 4GB of DDR3 memory.   One neat thing about this Dell Latitude Z600 is that it can instant boot on to access emails.  This feature was accomplished with a separate mini computer system installed on the motherboard.  The mini computer system comes with its own memory, ARM processor, and Linux operating system. This allow you to access mail clients that support Microsoft’s Exchange Server 2003 in just a few seconds.

At a $2000 price tag, you’re paying for innovative technology and features in the Dell Latitude Z600 that you would not find in any other business laptop computers.

Western Digital, the largest manufacturer of hard drives, will ship the industry first one terabyte hard drive.  For those of you who don’t know, one terabyte is equal to 1000GB.  That is more storage than you may ever need to digitally store everything in your lifetime, well sort of, if you don’t store movie files.  But with one terabyte on a 2.5″ mobile hard drive, laptop components’ abilities in terms of storage and speed, are becoming equivalent its desktop brethren.   Western Digital accomplished this task with the 333GB-per-platter technology, which stacked three platters on top each other in a 2.5-inch casing with the unconventional 12.5 mm form factor (height of the hard drive, conventional hard drives is  9.5mm).  Soon desktop computers will be reserved for industrial use and laptops will replace desktops in the consumer use environment.  As for pricing, it will be around $250.00.  Here is a copy of the announcement from Western Digital.

The new Intel’s  25-M G2 SSD, code named Postville, may arrive by the end of this July.  The 320GB  X25-M G2 drives will be built on  the 34nm NAND flash .  Rumor has it that the  X25-M G2 SSD will be faster and cheaper;  you don’t see that go hand and hand much anymore these days.  Intel will offer three different capacities: 80GB, 160GB and 320GB.  The write speed of these drives will be around 90MB/s with AES 128-bit encryption, advanced NVQ features, status aggregration, and 32MB buffer to ease of the reading time.

As for pricing of the starter model – 80GB, it will be somewhere in the $270 range according to the net.  There is the server version that will be offered also, and it will be faster than the consumer version.  The prices of SSD are starting to creep down, and we would like to see in the near future that it would be near the conventional hard drive prices; 80GB for $270 is still very expensive in this economy.