Monday, September 27, 2010

ASUS upgrades G53 and G73 gaming laptops with 1.5GB NVIDIA GTX 460 grunt

Ready to splash the cash on NVIDIA's fresh new mobile Fermi graphics cards? ASUS is the first company to take the veils off its GTX 460M offering, which it has seasoned with a most welcome addition: 1.5GB of dedicated GDDR5 graphics memory. The ROG G53JW and G73JW machines are the beneficiaries of this upgrade, with both capable of 3D work should you ask them nicely, and offering such tasty options as quad-core Core i7 CPUs, up to 8GB of DDR3 RAM, 750GB of storage, 16:9 displays (1,366 x 768 on the 15.6-inch G53 and up to 1,920 x 1,080 on the 17.3-inch G73), Blu-ray-writing optical drives, and 8-cell 5,200mAh batteries. The lighter of the two laptops weighs in at 3.6kg, but if that doesn't put you off, both are available right now at online retailers.

Via Engadget

Sunday, September 26, 2010

New Ford Fiesta


The Fiesta ST is dead. Too niche, says Ford - no one outside the UK cares about hot little superminis. For us, the hot hatch-hooked minority, this is sad news: the new Fiesta has a cracking chassis and could be a proper flier with a bit more power than the 118bhp of the top-spec 1.6-litre engine.

Enter Mountune, Ford's official tuning arm better known Stateside as Roush, who'll take your 118bhp Fiesta Zetec S and, in exchange for about £1,300, bump it up to a healthier 138bhp with a big new exhaust system and a bunch of ECU tweaks. It won't invalidate your warranty, but it will turn your Fiesta into a noisy little scrote; a coughing, snorting, phlegming little monster that'll have you tiptoeing from traffic light to T-junction with your hoodie pulled down low over your baseball headwear, eyes set to 12 o'clock, ignoring the disapproving headshakes from suburbia's newly deafened moral guardians.

It's a car completely lacking in subtlety in the noise department. So hell, you might as well bury the accelerator, wind it up to 4,000rpm and enjoy the howling, sonorous scream of a fat-piped, naturally aspirated little four-pot battering into the redline. It sounds great.

Unfortunately, though, you won't really be going fast enough to justify all the shouting. Though the Mountune kit cuts two seconds off the Fiesta's 0-60mph time, bringing it down to 7.9 seconds, it's still well short of the proper hot superminis, the Renaultsport Clios and the Corsa VXRs. Even the last-generation Fiesta Mountune - based on the 150bhp Fiesta ST - put out 180bhp, and this newer, bigger car is a full 42bhp down. The problem is the absolute paucity of torque from the Fiesta's naturally aspirated engine, leaving you languishing in the inevitable traffic-light drag race until the Fiesta works itself into a mental, thrashing fury at the top of the rev range.

Even then, there's barely the pace to exploit the chassis. However hard you push the Mountune, it still feels not-particularly-fast. Nicely balanced, yes, a bit lairier than a standard Fiesta, yes, but just not quite enough fun to be a proper hot hatch.

There's nothing wrong, of course, with small hatches being warm rather than hot. On a semi-rational level, the Mountune makes a whole lot of sense: it's no worse on economy or emissions than the un-Mountuned Fiesta Zetec S and, if you take advantage of Ford's deals, no more expensive to insure. But such is the noise the Mountune makes about its performance credentials that it really needs to be quicker than it is. More racket than rocket, then.

Sam Philip

Saturday, September 25, 2010

Motorola Announces The Droid 2


Motorola has announced the sucessor to its popular Droid Android mobile phone, the Motorola Droid 2. The Motorola Droid 2 featires a 3.7 inch display, plus a slide out QWERTy keyboard and it comes woth the latest version of Google’s mobile OS, Android 2.2.

The Motorola Droid 2 is the first Android smartphone to be released that features native support for Adobe Flash, and it supports the latest version of Flash, 10.1.

Storage wise you get 8GB of built in storage, there is also a microSD card slot that can take up to 32GB cards, giving you a total of 40GB of storage.

The Motorola Droid 2 is available from today from Verizon, prices start at $199 with a two year mobile contract.


via Geeky Gadgets

Saturday, September 18, 2010

Samsung Epic 4G Available On Sprint From August 31st



The Samaung Epic 4G is Samsung’s latest Android smartphone, and looks like it may be their most impressive to date, it features a 4 inch Super AMOLED touch screen display, plus a five megapixel camera and an LED flash.

The camera can record HD video in 720p and there is also a front facing video camera, which means that the Epic 4G can be used for video calls.

Other features on the Samsung Epic 4G include, integrated 802.11 b/g/n WiFi, a six axis accelerometer, and a 1GHz processor, plus EV-DO Rev and WiMax, there is also a full QWERTY keyboard.
The Samsung Epic 4G will be available for $249.99 on a two year contract with Sprint, after rebates, and it can be reserved for store pick up on the 31st of August 2010.


Friday, September 10, 2010

MSI GX660R Gaming Notebook


MSI has added another gaming notebook to its range with the launch of the MSI GX660R, which features an Intel Core i7 processor, up to 12GB of DDR3 RAM, and a ATI Mobility Radeon HD 5870 graphics card with 1GB of RAM.

Other specifications include two 500GB SATA hard drives, a 15.6 inch LED backlit display with a resolution of 1920 x 1080 pixels, which can display Full HD video.

There is also a four in 1 card reader
, integrated 802.11 b/g/n WiFi, plus Bluetooth 2.1+EDR, a HD web camera and support for DirectX 11.


There are no details on pricing or availability as yet on the MSI GX660R gaming notebook.


via Tweak Town

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