Hasta La Gadget!

It’s difficult to thrive in the solid-state drive world. Unless you’ve got just the right controller and flash memory, most performance-minded PC users will rarely give you a second glance. Samsung muscled its way into that narrow view with the SSD 830 last year; it intends to lock our attention with the new SSD 840 and SSD 840 Pro. The Pro’s 520MB/s and 450MB/s sequential read and write speeds are only modest bumps over the 830, but they don’t tell the whole story of just how fast it gets. The upgraded MDX controller boosts the random read access to a nicely rounded 100,000IOPS, and random writes have more than doubled to 78,000IOPS or 90,000IOPS, depending on who you ask and what drive you use. The improved performance in either direction is a useful boost to on-the-ground performance, as both AnandTech and Storage Review will tell you. We’re waiting on details of the ordinary triple level cell-based 840 model beyond its 120GB, 250GB and 500GB capacities, although there won’t be an enormous premium for the multi-level cell 840 Pro over existing drives when it arrives in mid-October — the flagship line should start at $100 for a basic 64GB drive, and peak at $600 for the ultimate 512GB version.

Filed under: Storage

Samsung SSD 840 Pro caters to speed seekers with faster random access originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 24 Sep 2012 21:16:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Vizio has started selling the new Cinemawide 58-inch 21:9 HDTV for just $2,000. For your info, the original price was $2,500. As a reminder, the Vizio Cinemawide HDTV is equipped with Edge Lit Razor LED backlight technology, offering a resolution of 2560 x 1080 (1080p) and 1.07 billion (10-bit) colours. The HDTV also features built-in dual-band WiFi and the enhanced Bluetooth remote with keyboard. [Geeky-gadgets]

The new Denon AH-D400 “Urban Ravers” over-ear headphones feature a 50 millimeter driver, a built-in headphone amplifier and a rechargeable battery that offers up to 12-hour of operating time from a single charge. Weighing at just 305grams, the Denon AH-D400 “Urban Ravers” over-ear headphones are currently available for $399.99. [Denon]

As more details leak out about the investigation on Kim Dotcom, the more embarrassing it gets for government officials. After thinking Dotcom had a doomsday device, it’s now known that government spies illegally bugged Dotcom at the behest of the US government. More »

Not content at stopping with its recent European tour, Google Play Books has made the trip to Japan and brought back a handful of new features. In addition to support for reading Japanese books in a vertical, right-to left layout, Mountain view now lets users tap on names of geographical spots within text and see them pinned to a Google Map alongside the option to find more information using Larry Page’s favorite search engine or Wikipedia. A freshly added translation feature takes user-highlighted words and phrases and spits them out in the reader’s language of choice. Particularly studious literature lovers can now mark up their digital books with notes and highlights that sync to the web and across their personal fleet of devices. A new sepia tone theme also joined the existing day and night views on their journey abroad. Hit the source links below for more details and the download.

Filed under: Cellphones, Mobile

Google Play Books app arrives in Japan, adds translation, place info, highlighting and more originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 24 Sep 2012 20:07:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink   |  Official Android Blog, Google Play  | Email this | Comments