When the Centrino 2-equipped ThinkPad X200 waltzed into our Labs and demonstrated not only impressive performance but also jaw-dropping battery life, we wondered when our other favorite ThinkPad, the X300, would be spruced up with Intel’s latest components.

Turns out we won’t be waiting long: today Lenovo announced the ThinkPad X301, a component refresh to its popular 13.3-inch laptop. The new version will incorporate an ultra-low-voltage Core 2 Duo processor that’s expected to be unveiled at the Intel Developer Forum this week. The ThinkPad X301 will also come equipped with DDR3 RAM, which (combined with the new processor technology) will make it “20 percent more powerful than the X300,” according to the company. Read more » »

Toshiba on Monday introduced technology that enhances the picture quality of DVDs, Toshiba this year lost the high-definition format war with Sony,

XDE, or extended detail enhancement, will be in Toshiba’s new XD-E500 DVD player, which will ship this month. The player will be priced at $150, about twice as much as regular “up-converting” players.

Toshiba claims the higher price is justified because XDE takes DVD picture quality to a higher level, but not quite as high as Sony’s Blu-ray high-definition format.

Toshiba had tried to rally the industry around the HD DVD format as a better choice than Blu-ray. The latter, however, gained broader support from movie studios, prompting Toshiba to stop making HD DVD players this year. Read more » »

In one of the most significant legal rulings in the tech industry this year, a Superior Court judge in California has ruled that the practice of charging consumers a fee for ending their cell phone contract early is illegal and violates state law.

The preliminary, tentative judgment orders Sprint Nextel to pay customers $18.2 million in reimbursements and, more importantly, orders Sprint to stop trying to collect another $54.7 million from California customers (some 2 million customers total) who have canceled their contracts but refused or failed to pay the termination fee.

While an appeal is inevitable, the ruling could have massive fallout throughout the industry. Without the threat of levying early termination fees, the cellular carriers lose the power that’s enabled them to lock customers into contracts for multiple years at a time. And while those contracts can be heinously long, they also let the carriers offer cell phone hardware at reduced (subsidized) prices. AT&T’s two-year contract is the only reason the iPhone 3G costs $199. If subsidies vanish, what happens to hardware lock-in? Could an era of expensive, but unlocked, hardware be just around the corner? It’s highly probable. Read more » »

The AMD for penetration market in visual computation now was launching the World First Teraflop Graphic Chip via ATI Radeon HD 4850 and first graphic card in the world that carries memory with the very big bandwith, GDDR5, ATI Radeon HD 4870.

“ATI Radeon 4800 series shows double better performance compared with ATI Radeon HD 3800 GPU, the biggest enhanced since the launching of Radeon 9700 that presented game revolution in 2002, ”

ATI Radeon 4800 series, said Dommy, is creating the new industrial standard such as performance-per-watt, performance-per-mm2 of chip die size, and performance-per-dollar.
Read more » »

So i have a BlackJack i607 and it chargers on the computer and everything but it wont detect the my phone. i would like to take pictures of my phone and put them on the computer. i have done so in the past but now for some odd reason it isnt working.

Maybe your connector is jammed even if it charges .
It’s a frequently problem on Samsung phones.

A rare computer virus case involving the Managing Director and an employee of Trans World Movers, a freight moving company, will procede for trial after a Colombo Magistrate upheld an objection by the complainant over the Attorney General intervening in the case.

The Attorney General had sought to discharge the accused without trial by terminating the proceedings. Counsel for complainant, Global Trans World Relocation had challenged the AG’s orders. Colombo Magistrate Manjula Thilakaratne issued this order considering an application made by Counsel Jeevantha Jayathilake and assisted by his junior Thilanka Polgampola who watched the interest of the aggrieved party.

The suspects Suresh Marcellus, Managing Director and Rohitha Silva, an employee of Trans who are on bail, had allegedly ‘transmitted’ a virus to the computer of Global Trans World Relocation of Modera by an email with the intention of destroying the system and decoding the computer. The Modera Police and the IT division of Police headquarters conducted investigations. Read more » »

The latest version Symantec of their corporate anti-virus software, codenamed Hamlet. The Beta versions have been in closed testing since March 2007. Symantec has not yet announced the official name for this new next-generation product that integrates firewall, zero-day protection and network access control features into this all-in-one anti-virus product. Read more » »