The company started recently to show off this so called “metro notebook”. The laptop appears to be a pretty decent unit, measuing just 0.7 inches thick and packing a Core 2 Duo processor, along with Bluetooth, WiFi, and WiMAX connectivity.

From slashdot.org

“According to an article from PC World, a source close to the CSS Managed Recording forum said that technology which allows movies to be downloaded and burned to blank DVDs, using the same content-protection system as commercial discs, received official approval on Thursday. ‘The technology will require discs that are slightly different from the conventional DVD-Rs found in shops today. The burned discs will be compatible with the vast majority of consumer DVD players … Despite Thursday’s approval, services that allow consumers to legally download and burn movies in their own homes are unlikely to appear quickly. The DVD CCA said it will be initially restricted to professional uses. These might include kiosks in retail stores where consumers can purchase and burn discs in a controlled environment.’”

AMD has publicly demonstrated a Barcelona system with a pair of 200W R600 cards running in Crossfire mode which is capable of hitting one teraflop. This achievement represents a ten-fold performance increase over today’s high-performance server platforms, which deliver approximately 100 billion calculations per second. Researchers at Stanford are already writing supercomputing applications for R600 and that R600 uses 320 multiply-accumulate (MAC) units which could imply 40 vec4 per GPU and ~800MHz clock. The reasons for R600 delay cited by Henri Richard: “R600 is doing very well and there’s a reason we’re going to launch it when we’re going to launch it…I’ll take the blame.

In general, Google’s hard drive population saw a failure rate that was increasing with the age of the drive. Within the group of hard drives up to one year old, 1.7% of the devices had to be replaced due to failure. The rate jumps to 8% in year 2 and 8.6% in year 3. The failure rate levels out thereafter, but Google believes that the reliability of drives older than 4 years is influenced more by “the particular models in that vintage than by disk drive aging effects”.
Breaking out different levels of utilization, the Google study shows an interesting result. Only drives with an age of six months or younger show a decidedly higher probability of failure when put into a high activity environment. Once the drive survives its first months, the probability of failure due to high usage decreases in year 1, 2, 3 and 4 – and increases significantly in year 5. Google’s temperature research found an equally surprising result: “Failures do not increase when the average temperature increases. In fact, there is a clear trend showing that lower temperatures are associated with higher failure rates. Only at very high temperatures is there a slight reversal of this trend,” the authors of the study found.

Full story can be found here.

More info and pictures here.

Australian SMS Technology sent out several new pretty hi-res photos of their soon to ship M300 GSM mobile phone watch.В  This tri-mode GSM/GPRS phone has all the hallmarks of a fully functional mobile, including a speaker phone, Bluetooth, USB port, an MP3 player, and large-quantity phonebook. What it also has going for it is the Bluetooth data transfer and dial up networking, an internal antenna, and a USB port, so you can transfer files, tunes, and spy plans from your PC to your wrist. Talk time is a cool 200 minutes, and standby time is an amazing 80 hours. The screen isn’t exactly huge, since it’s a wristwatch, but it’s a color OLED one, so at least you’ll be entertained a bit.

A revolutionary way to print pictures without ink has been invented by a US company called Zink Imaging. The company, a spin-off of Polaroid, says it will use the technology to make hand-held printers that can be integrated into mobile phones and digital cameras, with the first products available at the end of 2007. The key to creating the devices is doing away with ink, using a new type of digital printing that changes colour of paper when heat is applied. The company recently demonstrated a working prototype of the camera phone printer at the DEMO 2007 technology conference in California, US. The printer is expected to cost $200 while 100 sheets of paper will cost $20.

Full story here.

iPhone covered with many pictures.

The Best products on Consumer Electronics Show 2007 hand-picked from the overwhelming sea of tech gadgets by Popular Science magazine editors. Check them out here.