Intel yesterday and now Sandisk today. We know that Flash drives will play an increasingly important roll in laptops as the year rolls on and we also know that they’ll cost you your first born child. Sandisk has just announced its 32GB solid state drive (SSD) for laptops and indications are that the drive could cost a lot less than previously thought.
The new 2.5in SSD which can be used as a drop-in replacement for hard drives in laptops will cost under £200, approximately. OK, this is helluva lot more than you’d pay for current hard drive technology [£6 per Flash Gb versus 40p per regualr Gb] but it’s less than originally thought. So what’s the big deal?
According to Sandisk the drive can boot Windows Vista Enterprise in about 30 seconds and read and write data to the drive 100 times faster than existing drives. It’s also nicer to your battery and runs silent.
The price rules it out for the majority of us but more of these Flash drives are coming this year [Cebit starts tomorrow, after all] and I expect that this technology will become affordable to a greater number of us laptop junkies in 2008. Hopefully.-Martin Lynch
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Making its debut at Texas' SXSW music fest is Slacker, a new hybrid music service that delivers music online, via satellite, or from any wireless hotspot. It's a pretty big package so we'll break it down to its simplest forms. So first let's check out the service. It's already up and running and free to anyone after a quick sign up. The service makes money through video ads, so naturally there's also a premium plan sans ads that goes for $7.50/month. Users in both camps can tune into any Slacker station (their DJs cover all the genres just like XM and Sirius) and you can vote to "heart" or "ban" songs from the station's playlist by simply pressing the appropriate icon. As an extra perk, you can also republish your music channels to your blog/website. Next comes the device, a sexy little player with enough features to put many of today's DAPs to shame....
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iPod docks are two-a-penny these days, ranging from the cheap and nasty to the expensive and sometimes good. Arcam makes some great home entertainment kit and has decided to shrink its expertise in its first iPod dock, the rDock.
Touted as the first “audiophile dock for the iPod”, this is not the first high-end dock we have covered, claiming such lofty things. At around £130, it’s in the right price range but what do you get? It’s built from heavy die-cast alloy for zero vibration and sports a built-in preamp for iPod audio with “high performance op-amps and low noise, double regulated power supplies”.
There’s a smart charging system that can be programmed to switch-off when the juicing is done - good for your battery – and the ability to turn-off charging during playback to improve sound quality. Out now. -Martin Lynch
[More]
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Cebit will be all be rage from tomorrow’s kick-off so here’s one product that will, no doubt, garner a bit of the spotlight. It’s the GGW-H10N “Super Multi Blue” drive from Hitachi-LG Data Storage (HDLS), which can record on Blu-ray discs and read-back HD DVD discs.
According to the specs, it can read, record, or re-write CDs and DVDs and single and dual-layer Blu-ray discs (4x or 3.5x speed). The kicker is in having HD DVD p[layback which helps mitigate the consumer rip-off, otherwise known as the high-def format war.
LG will be offering 4x blank Blu-ray discs too which will allow for a full 25Gb disc to be filled in 23-24 minutes. The drive will not ship until May and will cost – wait for it – around £600.-Martin Lynch
[Techamok]
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These TIE Fighter speakers come to us from a company called Question Mark Entertainment, and as far as their specs go, that company name is just about right. We have no idea what sort of drivers are in these two, dare we say, satellite speakers and their accompanying subwoofer, but if looks could kill, our Death Star would be completely exploding just about now.
Hit up the jump for another view of these speakers that look realistic enough to have some tiny bad guys inside, but looks aren't everything—let's hope they sound good enough so we won't want to immediately shoot them down. Plus, we'll solve part of the mystery of this company that's a bit more than a Question Mark, after the jump.
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The Tryane II is an example of fine craftsmanship by a guy who is aptly named Friend Wood. He spent 2000 hours building the car; a key part of that process involved gluing and stapling together strips of mahogany veneer, and then buffing it to a mirror-like finish.
It's gorgeous, and weighs just 900 pounds. It actually has an internal combustion engine inside that's said to be capable of 70 to 90 miles per gallon. Wouldn't that be a fire hazard? And, we'd hate to see what would happen if this thing got into an accident, splintering up like so many pieces of balsa wood.
But those practical considerations are beside the point. The car will probably end up functioning as a really unusual, one-of-a-kind coffee table, or at least in a coffee table book. – Charlie White
How he did it [Friend Wood, via Born Rich]
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If you care at all for the environment, you're probably taking 2 minute showers, using recycled paper, and drive a hybrid car, which leaves plenty of water, paper, and fuel for those of us who are too lazy to care. But for you, the environmentally conscious bunch, we present the Sinkpositive. It's a sink on top of a toilet, which uses the tank (is that what it's called?) water for hand washing before using it again for poop flushing.
Of course, we only recommend this for married people, since most non-hippy women would probably bolt when seeing this mounted on your toilet. On the other hand, imagine how much fun it would be to pee into the top and bottom and see urine be used to flush urine. – Jason Chen
Product Page [Sinkpositive via Core77]
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Editor and Contributor | Martin Lynch
Contributor | Tamlin Magee
