GizmoScoop

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.

It’s a bird, it’s a plane, no wait, it’s the jumbo 256GB USB thumb drive from Kingston.  Talk about Moore’s law in action, doubling the memory capacity almost every two years.  We’re pretty sure at some point in time that you might need 256GB of data storage.  Say like, when you need to copy a bunch of videos from your friend’s house or CAD drawing plans or 3D modeling project for a movie studio. At 256GB capacity, you can store over 50,000 images, 54 DVDs, or 365 CDs. The Kingston Data Traveler 300 can transfer data at a rate up to 20 MB/sec and read at 10 MB/sec.  At this speed, it is relatively slow compare to a typical 7200rpm desktop hard drive has a sustained “disk-to-buffer” data transfer rate of about 70 megabytes per second.  Too bad, this product is only available custom made in Europe and UK, and it will cost you a whopping $924 for each stick.  No thanks, we would rather stick to SSD drives with a portable enclosure.  The SSD drives not only have 10X faster transfer rate, but also cheaper at one fourth  the cost of the Kingston Data Traveler 300.  We’re guessing this is just a show model to see how much Kingston can push the technology.  Check out the full spec here Kingston Data Traveler 300.