Hasta La Gadget!

Better late than never. SanDisk has begun shipping its G3 solid-state disk drives to retailers in both North America and Europe, the company said on Tuesday.

The G3 ships in two capacity points: 60 and 120 Gbytes. The drives cost $229.99 and $399.99, respectively. Unfortunately, the drives have arrived more than a year after SanDisk announced them, and more than six months after they were originally supposed to ship.

According to SanDisk, the 120-Gbyte version of the drive can tolerate up to 80 terabytes of data being written to it over its lifetime. The drive contains SanDisk’s ExtremeFFS technology, “that
has
the potential to accelerate random write performance and thus
extend
the endurance of SanDisk G3 SSDs inside computers that use
operating
systems such as Microsoft Windows XP and Windows 7,” the company said. They’re backed by a 10-year limited warranty.

A spokeswoman said the delay was due to a desire to “optimize” the
product, specifically the blockpage-based ExtremeFFS architecture, which
replaced SanDisk’s previous pageblock-based file system. The shift was a
“once-in-a-decade transition,” she said.

Performance-wise, the drives read data at 220 megabytes per second and write up to 120 MB/sec.

The drives support Macs and PCs (XP, Vista, and Windows 7) as well as Linux.

What, it wouldn’t be a camera convention without Nikon (and everyone else, for that matter) showing off a basket of new point-and-shoots. We knew what the company was bringing — selections from its “Style” and “Life” series, as well as the P100 superzoom we covered earlier this week — and now we’ve gotten our hands on the L22, S4000, L110, and S8000. There isn’t much to say, frankly — a collection of pocket shooters of various feature sets and various price ranges to cater to various demographics and psychographics. Still, we know you need to get that “fix” when it comes to pictures of gadgets, so let’s get on with it, shall we?

Nikon CoolPix ‘Style’ and ‘Life’ series hands-on originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 23 Feb 2010 18:31:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Each week Ross Rubin contributes Switched On, a column about consumer technology.

In its introductory press release, here’s what Sony has to say about the Dash, a “personal Internet viewer” that it announced at CES: “Featuring a vivid 7-inch color touch screen… Dash utilizes an existing home wireless connection to continuously deliver Internet content to its viewers.” And according to its SonyStyle.com site, here’s what that Dash has to say about itself: “I use over 1,500 free apps and your Wi-Fi connection to deliver the information and entertainment you crave… right to your bedroom, kitchen or office.” But Dash also has something to say about Sony, and for the most part, it’s an encouraging message.

Dash was one of the more distinct category-blurring products to emerge from Las Vegas in January. Its hardware is a hybrid between an alarm clock and digital picture frame and its content is a content mashup between Chumby widgets and Sony’s Bravia Internet Video Link offering. Dash was introduced just a few months after HP introduced its DreamScreen, another product that provides “glanceable” information from the cloud.

Continue reading Switched On: Sony’s forward Dash

Switched On: Sony’s forward Dash originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 23 Feb 2010 17:59:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Results of our retail budget desktop review roundup for spring 2010

Missing FM radio on your iPhone or iPod Touch? This app offers more than 10,000 streaming stations plus some really cool visualizations. pOriginally posted at a href=”http://news.cnet.com/8301-13526_3-10458380-27.html” class=”origPostedBlog”Digital Noise: Music and Tech/a/p