Supreme Commander

Don’t adjust your screens folks, as this actually isn’t a year-end case of déjà vu. Rather, we’re looking to give you an(other) imaginary shot at tweaking the OLPC XO now that it has moved beyond the initiative phase and been productized for the general consumer. In case you’ve been parked squarely under a rock for the last few months, you should know that the XO’s journey through production has been quite a lengthy one, and while a few countries have made substantial bulk purchases to inject these machines into their respective school systems, we’re interested in seeing how the average joe / jane located in a developed nation sees things.

Needless to say, One Laptop Per Child’s “Give One, Get One” program has been quite the success, and by now, we’re confident that some of you have already received your own. ‘Course, we’re sure there’s at least a few of you that chose this over that other low-cost laptop (and many that chose it over this), and we’re curious to know how you’d improve the newly commercialized XO now that it actually has a rival. Yeah, we too would love an even skimpier price tag, but beyond that, what hardware / software changes would you like to see on the next version? Could you stand to have a few more megabytes of RAM? Still yearning for dual-boot capability out of the box? How’s about a design scheme that doesn’t involve opaque white and bright green? As stated, we’re well aware that these things weren’t designed with LAN partiers in mind, but now that NickNeg is offering ‘em up to these very citizens — not to mention every other type of user in North America — why not toss out a few suggestions for making it more suitable for you?

We’re not sure what else there is to know about the WiBrain B1 UMPC — we’ve seen it hands-on, unboxed, and even slightly redesigned — but true gadget pr0n connoisseurs crave only the sweet nectar of FCC reports, and it looks like today is your special Friday. Yep, there it is, and there’s not much of the way in details we didn’t already have — except now you can tear up over both the beautifully ugly lines of this thing and the massively boring RF test results.

You may remember the lovable yet rascally ioDrive PCIe card from Fusion which we told you about back in the sun-drenched, salad days of September. Well, we’ve gotten a few more details on the “SAN in the palm of your hand,” and we thought we’d share. As you’ll recall, the card is meant to deliver very high, sustained read / write speeds, allowing the ioDrive to perform “nearly a thousand times faster than any existing disk drive.” Well, the good folks at Fusion have now given the system a price — the card starts at $2,400 — and offered up some fresh info, like that the ioDrive is NAND flash-based, will support multiple terabytes of virtual memory, and has access rates on par with DRAM. Which is real fast. Hit the link for a lot more info, and don’t be afraid to peruse the company’s .pdf data sheet.

The homebrew scene hasn’t gotten a whole lot accomplished with this latest round of home consoles — which isn’t surprising given the difficulty of the task and lack of incentives to succeed. Especially with the PS3 shipping with Linux compatibility, the Wii boasting VLC, and the 360 being such a chore to hack and keep hacked, there’s really not much of a point. The Wii was compromised pretty early on to be able to play burned discs and GameCube homebrew such as Linux, but until now Nintendo has managed to isolate Wii hardware such as the extra horsepower of the console and wireless connectivity from hackers. But the walls are coming down. Some hackers from Germany have just showed off their fully hacked Wii at the 24th Annual Chaos Communication Congress. Nothing fancy is running yet, all they’ve achieved so far is a proof of concept that they’ve bypassed the Wii’s protection with some encryption codes they swiped from the Wii’s memory. Apparently a bootable Linux DVD is on the way, and we can’t wait to see what homebrew coders manage to pull off with that Wiimote pointed where it belongs.

[Via WiiNintendo]

You know it’s close to Macworld when even the New York Times is slinging rumors with the best of ‘em, and the Gray Lady is reporting today that Apple has deals in place with several studios for iTunes rentals — not just Fox, like we’d been hearing. Of course, it wouldn’t be an Apple rumor unless it somehow managed to make something as mundane as renting a movie sound like a super-classified state secret, and the NYT says that while it got the info from people “familiar with the negotiations,” they weren’t “authorized” to name the companies involved. We’d obviously expect Disney to have an interest, since Steve’s on the board — but as with all these rumors, only time will tell.

Quite honestly, it’s hard to know where to start with this one. Should we bash on the totally unlicensed Mercedes-Benz logo curiously adorning the front? Or should we begin by trying to put into words just how hideous this device truly is? The QKfone G998 is reportedly a GPS-equipped handset with a built-in microSD expansion slot, a 2-megapixel camera, an internal (2.8-inch) and external (1.8-inch) display and a world map plastered on the back for an extra dash of classiness. Apparently, the phone sports tri-band GSM connectivity, Bluetooth 2.0 and a full-fledged media player to keep you occupied when not hiding this thing away from public sight. No word on a price, but trust us, it’s for the best.

[Via PMPToday]

This one looks to still be a good deal away from showing up at a store near you, but if a group of designers have their way, their so-called MPillow could one day be working its magic to lull you to sleep (although it will have quite a bit of competition on the high-tech pillow front). Helping it stand out are some built-in wireless capabilities that’ll let you stream MP3s from your PC or pull some presumably relaxing sounds off the MPillow servers, as well as some soothing lighting that changes color and intensity along with the music. As you can no doubt guess, however, there’s no indication that the pillow is actually headed for commercialization, so you’ll just have to make do with some of the current music-playing pillows for the time being, or not.

Look, the LCD monitor market is hot. How hot, you ask? Well let’s just say that panel manufacturer Chunghwa Picture Tubes (or CPT) has decided to circumvent the battle for ultimate supremacy in the 19-inch market by creating a totally new size of monitor: an 18.4-inch widescreen display. The new size will feature a 16:9 aspect ratio, 1366 x 768 resolution, a contrast ratio of 1000:1, and a response time of 5ms. The benefit of the slightly smaller size is that the cost to consumers will be lower than its 19-inch brethren, thereby giving CPT a cleaner shot a some market share. The first company to bite on the new size is Acer, which will be using the new panels in a Quanta-made laptop set to hit Europe in the second half of 2008.

We’ve seen a number of large-capacity SSDs, but 64GB seems like the current sweet spot, and A-Data’s aiming to fill it out with a quartet of new 1.8-inch and 2.5-inch PATA and SATA drives. That’s pretty much it on the outside — it is just a big flash drive, after all — but don’t worry, there’s plenty of sexy once you actually get an SSD inside your machine.

[Via PC Launches]

Intel seems like it’s going to be making a bigger push at gamers with the launch of Penryn, and HotHardware managed to score some deets on the company’s upcoming “Skulltrail” platform, which is built-around server-class hardware reconfigured for gaming. The new mobo pictured here supports dual quad-core Penryn Xeon processors, SLI graphics, and four PCI Express x16 slots, as well as two standard PCI slots. You’re also looking at a whopping six internal SATA ports, dual eSATA ports, six USB ports, a lone FireWire port, and Gigabit Ethernet. That’s quite a foundation for a gaming rig — let’s just hope pricing is at least pretend reasonable, eh?