Hasta La Gadget!

HP isn’t being shy about spending cash and taking big steps to reinvent itself lately: it just spent $1.2b on Palm in order to strengthen its consumer device portfolio, and now it’s announcing another billion-dollar outlay designed to streamline its enterprise services business and fully consolidate its $12.5b acquisition of EDS. Part of the process will involve laying off some 9,000 workers over several years as HP moves to automate more and more of its data centers and integrate more of EDS, but the company is planning to add some 6,000 jobs in different areas over the same period of time, so the hurt isn’t too bad. Taken together with the Palm acquisition, this means that both HP’s enterprise and consumer divisions will undergo some radical changes in the next few months — we’ll see how things pan out.

HP cutting 9,000 jobs during billion dollar enterprise services restructuring originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 01 Jun 2010 10:40:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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We’ve been hearing about / poking fun of ITG’s xpPhone since June of last year, but amazingly enough, we’d yet to actually see one in the flesh until today. Slyly stuck in the back corner of Microsoft’s Computex booth were a trio of xpPhones, at least one of which was shockingly functional. As the story goes, the company has decided to axe Windows XP in favor of a much more lightweight version of WinXP Embedded, and responsiveness seemed suitable enough given the circumstances. And by “circumstances,” we mean “the outrageous size.” You see, we’ve no qualms making and receiving calls on an ultra-sleek Dell Streak, but this bad boy was pushing a solid inch in thickness. Sure, there’s a slide-out QWERTY keyboard, optical sensor and integrated Bluetooth, but that hardly makes it viable in a world where smartphones are thinner than wallets and full-fledged laptops are rolling in at under 10mm. During our time with the device, we found the display to be surprisingly crisp, and while our finger presses were easily recognized, the omission of an accelerometer, the tremendous size, inexcusable weight and the tremendous size kept us from falling head over heels. We will say, though — it’d make a darn good weapon should someone pull a fast one in the alley, and we’d probably buy one for kicks at under $150. Comedy ensues after the break.

Continue reading ITG xpPhone functioning at Computex, we go head-on (video)

ITG xpPhone functioning at Computex, we go head-on (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 01 Jun 2010 10:08:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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It’s easy to forget that E Ink is an actual company and not just a display technology, but the company was out in full force at the recent SID 2010 conference to remind folks of that fact, and show off some of its latest and greatest prototype displays. Chief among those is a new color display that promises crisper, brighter colors, though still not quite full color — something that’s apparently achieved by applying a filter on top of a regular black and white E Ink panel, which itself has blacker blacks and whiter whites than before. Also on display was a new “fully flexible” display (not color), and another black and white display that was apparently able to playback Flash video — although E Ink curiously wasn’t allowing anyone to film it in action. The folks from MIT’s Technology Review did manage to capture a brief look at the rest of them on video, however — hit up the link below for their report.

E Ink shows off brighter, crisper, more flexible displays originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 01 Jun 2010 09:46:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Notebook storage is a conundrum, and not only because of the confusion of acronyms and abbreviations (see headline, above). Your hard-drive is capacious but slow compared to an SSD (solid-state drive). The CD/DVD drive is used barely once a year, but it is used. And an SSD will let your computer boot and launch applications in no time, but you’ll only fit half you music library on there.

Hitachi-LG comes to the rescue with a hybrid optical and SSD drive which is a slot-in replacement for your existing DVD player. The HyDrive combines a battery-sucking, disk-spinning drive with a quiet and fast SSD of either 32GB or 64GB (with higher capacities to come). This way you get to put the computer’s OS and applications on the speedy solid-state section, keep all your movies and data on the slower HDD and keep that old-fashioned optical drive around for the odd DVD-rip or software installation. Everyone’s a winner.

Everyone except your pocketbook, that is. While prices haven’t been confirmed for the global September launch, Hitachi did let slip to Engadget that the HyDrive would add around $200 to the price of a machine thus equipped.

The other route is to lose the CD/DVD altogether and replace it with an SSD, either hacking it yourself or paying somebody to do it for you.

Hitachi-LG Data Storage Inc. (HLDS), today announced HyDrive [Hitachi-LG via Engadget]

See Also:

• ExperCom Ships Any MacBook With a Solid State Drive
• Hacker Replaces MacBook Optical Drive With Speedy SSD

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