Hasta La Gadget!

Here comes another large memory maker
entering the growing SSD market with a pair of products, each offering
high speeds and the company’s own flash memory chips under their
pearly-white hoods.

We’ve seen SSD prices tumble down over the past year, but if you want the best performance possible you’ll still have to cough up a significant amount of cash. ADATA has a high-speed SSD that might take your fancy, the XPG SX910. The company says the SSD is 7% larger than drives that use a SandForce controller, and thanks to optimized firmware can hit 4k random read/write speeds of 50,000 and 85,000 IOPS.

The SATA III 6Gbit/s drive has sequential read and write speeds of 550 and 530MB/s respectively. There will be three capacities offered: 128GB, 256GB,. and 512GB. Whichever option you spring for, you can rest assured knowing that the drive is covered by a five-year warranty. Putting it in a desktop rather than your aging laptop? The company is throwing in a 3.5-inch adapter too, so you can slide it straight into your tower without any troubles.

The 128GB model will set you back $189.99, the 256GB runs $379.99, and the 512GB commands a high $749.99. ADATA say the drives are available now at various retailers across the United States and Canada, so start searching.

ADATA XPG SX910 SSDs feel the need for speed is written by Ben Kersey & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

It’s all about the need for speed in the world of the smartphone, and we’re certainly not going to say no to anything that makes the overall experience faster. Qualcomm and Akamai have teamed up to try and further optimize mobile page load times across devices. The duo are working on new protocol optimizations that will improve page load performance and save on bandwidth in the process.

Akamai will provide content via its Aqua Mobile Accelerator system while Qualcomm will serve it up on its now famous Snapdragon processors. Pages should load faster as Akamai caches the newest content from various websites, with Qualcomm’s hardware optimizations helping to keep everything moving along.

The two companies say that consumers will start to see the benefits of the partnership in Android devices starting from the fourth quarter of this year. If you crave every ounce of performance out of your smartphone, you’ll just have to sit tight until then.

Qualcomm and Akamai aim to reduce mobile internet load times is written by Ben Kersey & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

Discovery Expedition isn’t looking for a new kind of hiking boot –
unless it’s electronic.  But it is looking for new ways to enhance
hiking, sky-diving, camping, mining, surfing… whatever, your outdoor
lifestyle needs to take it to the next level to improve your outdoor
experience.

When it comes to FPS gaming, I don’t think anything can top the ol’ mouse and keyboard combo if we’re looking at functionality. The sheer number of keys plus the accuracy of the mouse just can’t be beat. But if we’re talking about comfort, you can’t beat the console’s sidekick, the gamepad. What if there was a controller that combined the best of both worlds?

Sadly, Peter Von Buskirk’s Trackball PC Game Controller is not that perfect amalgam. But it is a compromise with potential.  If you’ve used either a gamepad or a trackball then you know what to expect from this concept.

I like the controller a lot, but I have two complaints about it. First of all, why is this only being made for the PC and not for consoles? I think this will benefit not only the fans of the annual Shoot of Shooty: Men of Shooting fps games, but also strategy games and other games that require lots of pointing and browsing, games which are hard to implement on the console partly because of the lack of a mouse.

My second complaint is the location of the trackball. By placing it on the right, it exacerbates the weakness of gamepads – now you’ll have access to even less buttons because your right thumb is making sweet love to that sexy trackball. It would be fine if the left half of the controller had buttons, but there’s still a D-pad there.

Von Buskirk setup a Kickstarter fundraiser for the controller; unfortunately as of this writing he’s only managed to raise about $12,000 (USD) out of his $125,000 goal, with only 8 days remaining to fulfill the quota. You can still pledge for the controller if you want – $36 is enough to reserve a unit – you won’t be charged if the fundraiser doesn’t meet it’s quota anyway so you don’t have anything to lose. I hope Von Buskirk keeps working on his controller even if his fundraiser fails. Maybe he’ll find the perfect compromise someday.