Hasta La Gadget!

When PC lover Will Urbina was finally forced to switch to a Mac by market forces (he’s a video editor, and most everyone these days wants you to use Final Cut Pro), he didn’t give up easily. In fact, he spent the next few months kicking and screaming his way through a rather painful process, a process which finally gave birth to a mutant: The OS Xbox Pro.

Faced with “the distasteful choice of either setting foot in an Apple store” or building his own, Urbina went the home-made route, building a PC into a first-gen Xbox Dev Kit he picked up for pennies, and then hackintoshing it. The case of the Dev Kit is taller than the retail box, which turned out to be helpful: Urbina wanted to match the specs of a $2,500 Mac Pro.

With some literal hacking and rebuilding, he managed to squeeze in four hard drives (a pair of 7200rpm, 500GB drives in RAID 0 configuration for Final Cut, plus slower 160GB drives for both OS X and Windows 7), external USB SATA, and Firewire ports and even a rather odd-looking Apple logo on the top. The hackintoshing aspect was taken care of by the amazing EFi-X dongle, a little plug-in widget that lets you install a retail copy of OS X onto any PC hardware.

Urbina made a few curious decisions, especially given that OS X 10.6 is moving towared moving much of its heavy lifting to the GPU, or graphics card. Because the case is so small (even an optical drive was left out), Urbina had to use a 300 Watt power supply, 100 Watts short of the juice needed for his chosen NVIDIA GeForce 9800 GT card. Instead, he popped in a lesser card and beefed up the CPU to an Intel Core 2 Duo Q9550s. This reliance on the CPU to do the work clearly shows his PC bias. The specs:

Intel Core2 Q9550S @2.93GHz

Gigabyte GA-EP45T-UD3LR

Sparkle GeForce 9800http://www.willudesign.com/OSXboxPro/osxboxpro9.jpg GT

8GB Crucial Ballistix 1333MHzhttp://www.willudesign.com/OSXboxPro/osxboxprotopless1.jpg

Highpoint RocketRAID 2640×1

2x 160GB 5400rpm Seagate Momentus HDD

2x 500GB 7200rpm Seagate Momentus HDD

16GB 1.8” Super Talent MasterDrive KX SSD

EFiX USB V1

Not bad for $1,500. Urbina says that the equivalent Mac Pro would run to $4,500. We think it a little odd that a professional would go down such a route to build a work machine, though: If your wages rely on a working machine, a hackintosh is a little scary. Still, this thing looks awesome, and with all that hardware inside such a tiny case, we imagine that the fans will stay true to the noisy, leaf-blowing Xbox original.

OS Xbox Pro product page [Will U Design]

See Also:

• Psystar 'Rebel EFI' Patch Installs Snow Leopard on Any PC
• EFiX Dangles Hacking Dongle Before Apple’s Lawyers

If you missed getting in your Nook pre-order there’s still hope to nab the dual-display Barnes & Noble reader in time for the holidays. A Wall Street Journal piece says that Nook will be “available for sale or for demonstration purposes” in select, high-volume B&N stores starting December 7th — a week later than expected as B&N tries to fulfill unexpectedly high consumer demand following the ereader’s October 20th announcement. Of course, it’s impossible to say if the sell-out translates to high sales or just poor planning on B&N’s part as it dips a tentative toe into the fickle waters of consumer electronics. Nevertheless, anyone who ordered before November 20th will still receive theirs for Christmas while everyone else will receive theirs on January 4th as we already heard. Now if only Barnes & Noble would clarify what it means by “high-volume stores” we could plan our road-trips accordingly.

[Thanks, Arthur]

Nook begins shipping, in select Barnes & Noble stores on December 7th originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 30 Nov 2009 03:41:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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When NTT Docomo launched the “osaifu keitai” service in July of 2004, it revolutionized the way people thought about their mobile phones: using Sony’s contact-less FeliCa technology, these communication devices could now function like e-money cards and train passes. Five years later, exactly who and how many are actually using the service?

According to statistics released by Docomo, about 60% of Docomo users were signed up for osaifu keitai as of the end of May. This translates into about 34,800,000 handsets. That number first hit 10,000,000 in January of 2006, reached 20,000,000 in March of 2007, and passed the 30,000,000 mark this time last year. Take users of all mobile platforms into account (AU, Softbank, and Willcom now all offer osaifu keitai too), however, and the number drops to 26.1%. The highest user rates in general are for men, in their teens through 40s, and women in their 30s.

How do brands get in on the action? It’s not as complicated as you may think, but it takes some creativity and innovative spirit…for which we can help!

This article was written on December 19, 2005 by CyberNet.

Speculation is that Apple may be releasing its Yonah powered laptops in January of 2006, while the NEC has no rumors of the release date. The NEC LR700D should have a 14″ screen with a resolution up to 1400×1050 and a 100GB hard drive included. This Apple computer with the Intel processor should be a dual-core running at 1.5GHz and faster processors to be released shortly after the fact (after they hurry to get their foot in the door first). Let the race begin!

News Sources: Engadget – Apple Laptop, Engadget – NEC Laptop

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Apple Commands “Premium” Computer MarketApple Employees Will Help Sell Macs At Best BuyMac Sales Up, iPod Sales Level Out in Q2Apple’s New 13-inch MacBook and 15-inch MacBook ProApple Computer Market Share Progress Report

A little later than mid-November, sure, but ASUS has finally unleashed to the US masses its 12.1-inch Eee PC 1201HA. Available at Best Buy for a penny under $330, it’s got all the standard affairs: 1.33GHz Intel Atom Z520, 1GB RAM upgradeable to 2GB, 160GB HDD, WiFi, and a touted 6 hour, 38 minute battery life. The catch here is Windows XP — sorry 7 lovers, but if you’re feeling particularly adventurous, there’s always Chrome OS.

ASUS Eee PC 1201HA now on sale in the US originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 30 Nov 2009 00:01:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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