Hasta La Gadget!

Great news! Sony will drop the price of the PlayStation console today by almost a quarter. The catch? It’s the PS2, not the PS3 — the big brother will remain at a customer-repelling $400.

The PS2 will, from today, sell for $100, down from the current price of $130, a 23% drop. This is, according to Reuters, to "woo budget-minded families," although the price reduction has been made possible by increased efficiency in making the console — squeezing more components onto less chips, for example. This means that Sony will still be making plenty of cash selling the PS2.

Speculation has therefore turned to an imminent PS3 price-reduction. The difference, we think, is that Sony is making little on the machines, or even still losing money trying to get the white-elephant Blu-ray player into homes. While this continues, don’t expect any price cuts.

In fact, one thing really confirms Sony’s plans to keep the PS3 cost high — when asked for comment, the company gave none. As soon as a Sony executive denies the rumor, we’ll know it’s true.

Sony cuts price of PlayStation 2, not PS3 [Reuters]
Sony cuts PlayStation 2 price by 25 percent [Network World]

Sound ID 300

(Credit: Sound ID)

Sound ID 200

(Credit: Sound ID)

Sound ID has just announced two new Bluetooth headsets at CTIA 2009, the Sound ID 300 and the Sound ID 200. We’ve been quite impressed by Sound ID Bluetooth headsets in the past, especially since they’re …

Originally posted at CTIA show

These PCIe SSD drives can’t arrive fast enough for our needs… ok, wants considering the thousands they cost. The latest announcement comes by way of Super Talent Technology with its new 2TB RAIDDrive. The card slips into a PCIe x8 slot and ships in Enterprise (battery backed), Workstation, and Gamer (!) configurations with MLC (cheap, fast) or SLC (expensive, faster) NAND and optional RAID 5 capability. Super Talent claims that its RAIDDrives “are capable of delivering sequential Read speeds of up to 1.2GB/s, sequential Write speeds of up to 1.3GB/s.” Unfortunately, no ship date or price was announced, only that we’ll get more “performance details” in June. Presumably that means something useful like random IOPS benchmarks.

[Via Impress]

Filed under: Storage

Super Talent’s 2TB PCIe RAIDDrive promises 1.3GBps sequential writes, 1.2GBps reads originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 01 Apr 2009 05:31:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Direct TV released its own iPhone app this week, and just like competing apps from set-top boxes like Vudu, it allows customers already paying for an in-home video service to schedule programs remotely.

The free app works with the latest DVR and HD DVR boxes from DirectTV (models R15, R16, R22, HR20, HR21, and HR23), as well TiVo Series 2 boxes with the DirectTV registered software update.

You can browse TV schedules two weeks in advance through your phone, record single episodes (or set up a full-season recording schedule), and of course, can check out detailed descriptions and ratings of every show.

But the best reason to download the Direct TV app is that you can also use it to schedule Pay Per View recordings ahead of time. I think that will be the favorite option of a few people who will inevitably borrow their friends’ iPhone ‘for a quick call’ only to have them find out later that a few interesting movies have shown up on the TV and the monthly bill.

Wait, today is April Fool’s isn’t it? I think this crispy new app needs to be broken in, if you know I mean.

Theses new colorful Inspirons take the “dull" out of “Dell", and at the same time add even more confusion to the PC buying process. The new candy-coated desktops can be had in any of the juicy colors seen above, colors which actually make my mouth water to look at them.

Like the current Inspiron mini-towers, you’ll be offered an almost endless list of configuration options. Here are the choices for the CPU alone:

Intel® Celeron®, Intel Core™ 2 Duo and Intel Core 2 Quad options or AMD Sempron™, Athlon™ X2 and Phenom™ X4 processor options

It’s pretty much up to you to spec your ideal machine, but the bottom line is that they start at $300, and rise from there. We love the colors, but we wonder just who is buying a desktop PC for the home these days. Isn’t it all netbooks? Still, I wish those netbooks would also come in Flamingo Pink. China only until May.

Press release [Dell]

Photo: Dell/Flickr