Asus recently announced the M70 notebook, which combines a number of unusual features. The M70 is the first to offer a 1TB hdd (2×500GB), a Blu-ray disk player with a 1920×1200 resolution screen. The product is positioned as an entertainment appliance and described as having the ultimate high-def feature combo.

ASUS M70 Redefines Full HD with Ultimate HD Feature Combo - Asus news release, April 14 2008

HP researchers are earning their pay these days. They’ve found the elusive Memristor - apparently they were poking around in the basement & found it hidden in a corner.

Actually, prof Leon O. Chua theorized the existence of the memristor back in 1971 in a paper entitled “Memristor-The missing circuit element“. HP’s work proves that electronic circuits have 4 fundamental components: the familiar resistor, capacitor, inductor, and now the memristor (aka memory resistor).

The memristor should find practical applications as a possible replacement for D-RAM and in AI.

Demystifying the memristor - HP Labs news release

Grand Theft Auto IV went on sale yesterday and some gamesites have already reviewed & rated it. Most give it an enthusiastic ten.

Gamespot for example says the game has a “superb character-driven story - Liberty City really does feel alive”.

And IGN sez “Grand Theft Auto IV is ..a big leap forward” & “a ‘10′ is not a score we give out very often”. IGN also provides a handy Google-style clickable map of GTA IV missions, secrets etc…

Trusted Reviews tested 4 inkjet printers with 5 papers and 5 different inks, looking to see how well printed images stood up after 12 months.

Their conclusion: the best results came from the Canon Pixma MP600 printer with original ink - paper didn’t seem to matter much. And if you’re too cheap to buy brand names and insist on generic/3rd party ink to save a few pennies, try Cartridge World.

The Inkjet Investigation Part 3 - Trusted Reviews, 29th Apr 2008

A diner in Hong Kong artfully poses his brand new black Eee PC 900 with the main course. Still life with grouper. Fish, yum.

黒いEee PC 900

ComputerWorld put some traditional hard disk drives up against a couple of those new-fangled solid-state drives and got a bit of a surprise. SSDs are supposed to shine in the areas of power consumption, weight, faster data access and lower boot times, as compared to those ancient electro-mechanical HDDs. However, CWorld’s test show that there’s not a lot to get excited about, as the 2 technologies deliver roughly similar results. And after factoring in the higher costs for the solids, CW’s conclusion is that they’re not quite ready for prime time … ’bout the same as what Walt Mossberg said a couple of months ago.

Performance showdown: Flash drives versus hard disk drives - ComputerWorld, April 29 2008

Interesting and mildly ironic of Microsoft to use Apple hardware, in this case a MacBook Pro, during a Microsoft-sponsored event. The event was entitled “Business Leadership and Digital Innovation for Future Graduated” with Event ID: 1032372709 held in Belgium April 24 2008 and featured Steve Ballmer as keynote speaker.

Might be a trend - a while ago MacBooks were spotted at IBM. Image thx to Flickr.

The New York Times reviews the state of the smartphone in the U.S. and finds that the 40% market share enjoyed by Research In Motion to be in some jeopardy. The rival Apple iPhone has grabbed a 17.4% share in just 6 months, and, even worse, a 79% customer satisfaction rating, compared to 54% for the BlackBerry.

But not to worry, as R.I.M. is fighting back. First by dissing the all-glass keyboard-less iPhone by saying “It’s hard to type on a piece of glass”, and by developing the next-gen 3G BlackBerry code-named the Meteor.

…not that this matters to the rest of the world, which is overwhelmingly Symbian, with some Linux.   

BlackBerry’s Quest: Fend Off the iPhone - NYT, April 27 2008 

Nokias’s new 5320 XpressMusic music phone features voice recog where one can request a song by saying the artist’s name or the song title.

XpressMusic is of course Nokia’s brand for music phones and features things like “great audio quality”, dedicated music keys and a standard 3.5mm jack. The 5320 implementation of XpressMusic supports MP3, M4A, eAAC+, and WMA music formats.     

Nokia 5320 XpressMusic 

iPodObserver speculates on what the forthcoming iPhone might look like.  Basically a shiny black plastic back replaces the current shiny metallic back.

Not big news, but other sources say the second-gen iPhone will have GPS, and a flush headphone jack. Dimensions to be 115×63x12.5mm, as compared to 115×61x11.6mm for the current model. And have 3.5G. 

Rumor: New iPhone to Sport Case Redesign - iPodObserver, April 3rd 2008