Month: January 2006

The Western Digital Raptor IDE hard drives are probably the fastest IDE drives out there currently, with 10k rpm, 5ms seek speed, and Serial ATA 150 transfer.

Up until now they only shipped in 36GB and 74GB capacities, but WD now also have a 150GB drive… with a transparent window so you can see the platters spinning and the drive head moving. How cool is that. Presumably you’ll need a transparent PC case also, or at least a window…

Bill Gates showed off some of Vista’s new features yesterday during his opening keynote at CES 2006. Some of the features he demo’d did not sound that earth shattering, and in particular new features like the Sidebar sound suspiciously like Google Desktop.

Other interesting announcements:

• Gates also mentioned a partnership with DirecTV to allow subscribers to download content to Windows PCs, XBox 360 and other Windows media devices in the ‘Plays for Sure’ range of products.
• The Treo 700w was announced, running Windows Mobile operating system, instead of Palm OS (which Treo’s have been using up until now – consumers can now either choose Windows Mobile, or the Palm flavour)
  

CES is one of the largest consumer electronics shows, and it opens tomorrow in Las Vegas.

There is always a bunch of new gadgets that get announced by all the major vendors at the show, plus some additional surprises.

The big thing I’m looking for announcements on this year is anything from the company called ‘Atom Chip’, who earlier last year announced they would be appearing at a booth at the show to demonstrate their supercomputer of a laptop. They claim to have developed ‘Quantum-Optical non-volatile RAM’ which allows them to build a laptop with 1TB of RAM, and 2TB of non-volatile secondary storage. This is quite impressive if it is true, but was dismissed at the time it hit the news websites as a hoax. Well if they are at CES then hopefully we’ll find out whether this is for real or not – if it is real then it certainly sounds impressive.

Interesting to note – if you go out to their website and look at the specs of the ‘non volatile memory laptop’, the specs seem to have decreased slightly… now its 100GB RAM and 256GB storage – still impressive, none the less.

Google have denied rumours that they are considering entering the hardware market with low cost consumer PCs.

Yesterdays comments on News.com seemed to originate from Robert X Cringely’s comments in his blog back in November, where he discussed a concept he calls ‘Google Cubes’ – small consumer PCs to integrate with every media device you can imagine and connect to your TV in your familiy room. It’s not clear from his blog whether this is speculation or based on fact, or just plain rumours.