Hasta La Gadget!

Innovation isn’t dead among laptops. Check out the Lenovo Power Hub Transformer. It’s a 65-watt transformer for most current ThinkPad laptops. But’s also a 4+1 port USB hub. Four of the USB jacks work like any other USB expansion hub, providing signal and power to devices. The fifth, with white markings on the jack, is always on when the transformer is plugged in, letting you recharge a cellphone or iPod when the laptop itself isn’t on. Brilliant! It’s $75 direct and marginally bulkier and heavier than the standard ThinkPad transformer.

To provide the USB signal, the transformer/hub also plugs into an open USB slot on your notebook, so the net gain is plus-three USB jacks, plus that charging jack.

Thus far, Android has been been primarily rolled out on smartphones and tablets. NEC bucked the trend by debuting a netbook in Japan that runs the OS, called LifeTouch Note. While NEC didn’t offer a release date, it announced the price: ¥45,000 ($540 USD).

LifeTouch Note has a keyboard, seven inch touchscreen, 2MP Webcam, Wi-Fi, GPS, SD, SDHC slots, can support up to 8GB memory, Nvidia Tegra 2 GPU, and Android 2.2 (Froyo). Not bad for a netbook, but those specs come at with a premium price tag. 

Via Engadget

MSI has confirmed the release of a new GPU called R6870 Hawk, however the bigger news is the cooling system that it will use. MSI has adopted the Twin Frozr III cooling solution for this new GPU. The company also claims that with the new cooling system, the R6870 Hawk will be the fastest GPU yet.

The dual fans allow for more air flow to and from the GPU. MSI of course, is claiming that it was built with first class Military parts, a typical claim for most of their GPUs. The R6870 Hawk will have 930MHz core clockspeed, 1024MB of GDDR5 memory clocked at 4200MHz on a 256-bit bus. MSI has yet to release a price or a date.

MSI sounds pretty confident in this new GPU, let’s hope that it can stand up to claims. I suspect that it will be pretty pricey. I do wonder if the Twin Frozr III will become a common cooling system option for GPUs.

Via Hot Hardware

Hacker Hexxeh (known for his custom builds of the ChromiumOS project, the open-source version of Chrome OS) has managed to get an AT&T SIM card running on the Cr-48 using a little bit of hacking. This type of thing is likely frowned upon by AT&T, but it definitely shows that Google is only a few software changes away from letting you surf with ease on the network. T-Mobile and Vodaphone are both apparently valid options in the software as well, though neither has been confirmed to work so far.

Because of the unofficial, totally hacked-on nature of GSM support right now, there’s no data counter. And no guarantee that it won’t “break totally unexpectedly,” according to Hexxeh himself. Probably better off waiting until the carriers give their okay.

[via Hexxeh, Engadget]

Hey, it’s another notebook from Toshiba! What’s that you say? The Dynabook isn’t just another notebook? It changes color, you say? Yep, the lid of the Dynabook Qosmio T750 looks different, depending on the angle it’s viewed from. From one angle it’s blue. From another it’s blue/green. From a third, it’s kind of a purplish. 

Toshiba says the color was created using a technique called “Picasus.” The lid is also apparently fingerprint-proof, for all of the touching that will surely occur after onlookers realize that it’s turned from blue to purple. 

Inside the Dynabook packs a 2.66GHz Core i5-480M processor, a 750GB hard drive, and 4GB of RAM. The screen is 15.6 inches. The laptop is current set for a Japanese-only release.