Hasta La Gadget!

Well, keep your computer cool, anyway. Corsair has just announced the Corsair Cooling Air Series A70 and A50 CPU coolers. The A70 (at left) is meant for people who demand state-of-the-art temperature management. If you’re an enthusiast looking to squeeze every last megahertz of performance out of your high-end Intel or AMD processor, but don’t want to sacrifice noise levels, this one is for you.

The A50, on the other hand, is meant for PC builders and hobbyists who want to upgrade from the stock Intel and AMD coolers. The A50 series delivers lower CPU temperatures than stock coolers, resulting in a cooler, quieter, and more reliable PC.

The A70 series uses four direct-contact 8mm copper heat pipes, integrated into an aluminum base. The A50 series offers a compact design with three 8mm heat pipes integrated into a base placed in direct contact with a CPU. For more information, check out Corsair’s Cases and Cooing page.

After the name of the Apple iPad was made public, a wave of feminine-hygiene jokes and puns followed. This period has yet to let up, but the Hip Hand Maids want to help contain the flow, with the new iMaxi iPad cover case (with protective wings!).

The iMaxi Pad ($30) has a durable vinyl outer layer and a quilted inner cotton sleeve. It folds neatly into a tight square, so you can easily store it in your bag or backpack. When open, the protective case measures 22.5 by 26.5 inches. The outer part of the pad is white, while the inner part of the pad can come in either red or white, depending on your squeamishness threshold.

These fresh images and details of Microsoft’s Courier paint a slightly different device than the one uncovered a few months ago—tinier seeming, perhaps less genre-busting, and a more direct iPad fighter.

This take is built on the same mobile OS core as Windows Phone 7 and Zune HD, powered by Nvidia’s Tegra 2 hardware. It’s supposedly thinner than an inch, under a pound, and about the size of a 5×7 photo when closed.

As you can see, the device seems even smaller (Update: maybe not), the interface, though still pen-based, seems less whizzy based on these stills than the wildly complex and sophisticated (or maybe just complex) interface shown earlier:

Is Courier progressing or regressing? It’s hard to tell—we’re not sure where in Courier’s development these concepts are from vs. our initial reportage. But if they are newer, a few things stand out.

• Courier’s grown to be more realstic and less different, which is not uncommon for mind-bogglingly radical-seeming products. (Our mind was blown by the original interface, anyway, for better or worse.)

• Shifting from using Windows 7 as its core as Mary Jo Foley first reported to Windows CE6 and mobile guts puts it more squarely against the iPad, using a similar philosophical approach of scaling up to a tablet, vs. scaling down as Microsoft’s always done before. (Which makes sense, given that this is supposedly J. Allard’s project—he’d want to use E&D’s own goods to power his tablet.) Also, mobile guts are cheaper than low-power laptop guts.

• This could be one of the several prototype tablets J. Allard’s got—which would explain why there’s versions that seem more like full Windows 7 vs. Windows Phone 7.

• Engadget pegs the launch date later this year, though we’ve heard separately that Courier won’t show up anytime in 2010.

• We’re still pretty excited.

[Engadget]

Lamborghini launches the 2011 Gallardo LP 570-4 Superleggera at the 2010 Geneva auto show. pOriginally posted at a href=”http://reviews.cnet.com/8301-31346_7-10464442-252.html” class=”origPostedBlog”Geneva Auto Show 2010/a/p

This monstrosity is the Casio G-Shock MAN BOX, and it is the ugliest watch you will see. Ever.

The plastic timepiece, possibly conceived after a Casio designer accidentally drank a box of crayons and then vomited, is shock resistant, waterproof to 20 meters (65-feet) and anti-magnetic (?). That line-up of ruggedized features means that when you inevitably try to smash this thing to tiny, single-colored pieces, you will fail. In fact, if someone buys this for you as a gift, the two year battery life dictates the minimum period you will have to wear the MAN BOX before being able to legitimately toss it away.

There are other functions built-in, too, from the time (apparently), some alarms and a stopwatch. These will remain unused, however, as the face is so frickin’ cluttered that it is impossible to make out anything other than the eye-searing colors.

Amusingly, Casio seems equally embarrassed by the design. When I tried to drag the product shot to my desktop for this post, I found that it had been covered up by a transparent 1×1 pixel gif. Oh, and that MAN BOX name? It’s not what you think: There is actually a little plastic, identically-colored man in the box with the watch. The insults continue with the price, which is an equally eye-popping ¥19,000, or $210.

Finally, the inevitable, and tortuous, pun, trading on the product description (”embody the fusion of art and technology”), the name (”MAN BOX”) and the hideous splashing colors. To sum up, “art”, “MAN BOX”, colors: It really is a load of old Pollocks.

G-SHOCK MAN BOX [Casio via Akihabara News]