All the big names are in that list!! Including Jaguar, Mercedes-Benz AND Porsche! o.O
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These high-end rides prove that you don’t always get what you pay for.
From Reviews Tom’s Hardware US: Upgrade Advice: Does Your Fast SSD Really Need SATA 6Gb/s?
Are you mulling the potential benefit of an SSD upgrade on a system without 6 Gb/s SATA connectivity? We run the benchmarks on several different solid-state storage architectures in order to determine how much performance you give up on an older machine.
From Popular Science – New Technology, Science News, The Future Now: Testing the Best Audiophile-Quality Headphones
Audiophile Headphone Battle Sam Kaplan
Our friends over at Sound + Vision rounded up six of the best-sounding over-the-ear headphones out there. Put away your packaged Apple “White Plastic Circles of Pain” earbuds–these will fill your earholes with some of the finest-quality audio on the market. The headphones include some of the best offerings from Sony, Grado, Sennheiser, and Audio-Technica–definitely worth a look if you’re serious about your music.
from Popular Science – New Technology, Science News, The Future Now
Asus Transformer Review
So thanks to Chase’s cash back program, we got an Android tablet! It’s got Tegra 2 dual core processor, 1 GB memory, 10.1″ IPS screen, 16 GB storage. Yeah, it sounds like every other tablet, but this one has some unique features.
Though I haven’t got it, this tablet has an actual keyboard that you can attach to it. It then becomes a laptop. Ta da… It has transformed!! 😛 Anyhow, it also has a microSD card slot and mini HDMI. And let me just say that it’s beautiful! Text, contrast, graphics are all great.
What makes it even better is that Asus has included two awesome apps: MyCloud and MyNet. The former is a DLNA media sharing app and the latter can access Asus’ cloud AND your own computer! That was ingenious!!
I upgraded it to 3.2 soon as I got it up. It’s perfect! Battery life is awesome too!! So far so good!
Score: 9/10
Motorola Droid X: Review
My old HTC Touch (in Verizon, it’s called XV6900) has been acting up and battery doesn’t hold charge anymore and the Internet is intermittent at best. So when I heard that the new Motorola Droid X was coming out on July 15th, I started to wait. My 2-year contract ended back in June so at midnight of the 15th, I pulled the trigger and got i on Friday!
Others seem to be not as lucky as now, it won’t ship till the 25th. 😀
Here are the box shots and Droid X shots… The camera is an old Sony that doesn’t seem to take good shots so please do excuse me.
Now the shot out of the box…
The battery came fully charged! And since I output all my contacts into CSV file and then imported it into Gmail account, syncing and updating my contacts was a breeze! Not to mention that once you set up all your social networking accounts, Android 2.1 updates all the Facebook friends as well! It was even sweeter once I learned that from the contacts list, you can see all the social networking friends’ updates!
Here are some of the generic shots…
There are 7 windows where you can swipe through for different types of “setups”. One for weather, one for social networking widgets, one for media etc. I like that. I also enjoyed the screen. 4.3″ screen is quite an ample size. And yes, it has 512 MB of ROM memory, 8 GB internal & 16 GB SD card storage, along with 1 GHz processor! On top of that, Verizon’s 3G network was a champ! Android Marketplace worked just fine and all the apps installed quickly and w/o any hassle.
Default browser wasn’t very attractive. So I installed Opera Mini from the Market and I was happier then! 🙂 Also it did play DivX file just fine but I wanted better support so I searched for MKV in the Market and found a player called Rock Player. Almost no hiccups at all, even in playing large MKV 720p files. I am loving this!
The screen is beautiful. Pictures don’t do justice. aGPS works well and with Google Maps, it went well! MP3 works well. And since I have unlimited 3G, I gave Slackware a try. Just search for it on Android Market! 😉 The music will download and play seamlessly. The overall experience was great. However, there are two things that I didn’t like…
First is the heat. When in use, it gets hot! Especially where you are holding it. Dang it. Second is the battery. It doesn’t last very long. Yeah, they say you can talk for very long and such… but I gave it a moderately heavy usage and after 7 hours, battery color changed from healthy green to uh-oh orange and then to flashing green top bar and it was unresponsive from there. I will probably carry the USB cable with car adapter and charge it in the car and at work. So I suppose it won’t be terribly bad but still…
So my final score? 8.5 / 10
This thing delivers! Here is the summary…
The Good: Everthing. 3G, widgets and apps, Android Market, seamless integration, smooth multimedia playback.
The Bad: It gets hot! And battery drains fairly fast.
Broadcom’s Crystal HD mini-PCI-E Decoder Review
Anyone that follows computer and tech industry should’ve heard about Broadcom’s mini-PCI-E based HD decoder called Crystal HD last year. I decided to try it out. I mean, how can you say no to HD hardware-decoding for $20?! My Acer Aspire One netbook has been great except in that department. If I threw anything 720p or higher, it played like a slow slideshow! Currently, only HP offers this Crystal HD decoder as an option in a netbook, HP Mini 110 as a $35 option.
So I got one off eBay for $24 or so and decided to find out for myself if this really does wonders! Before you proceed, since you won’t have Internet for a bit, download latest Crystal HD drivers (ver. 3.1.0 as of this writing) and drivers for your WLAN USB adapter (for Airlink AWLL607, get it from here)
1. First thing first, I had to take the netbook apart. Youtube is awesome for that.
This Youtube video above shows you how to take apart the Acer Aspire One to upgrade memory. You don’t have to go through all the way to the end, but just to get to the WLAN mini-PCIE adapter.
2. Remove power connectors to WLAN adapter and replace it with the Broadcom’s Crystal HD decoder. This means that you won’t have WLAN. I got a mini-WLAN USB adapter for $16 (Airlink101 Wireless 11N) from Meritline. Close it up.
3. Upon closing it up and booting, once you are in Windows (I have XP Home on the netbook), it will ask to install drivers for the Crystal HD. Click Cancel! Install the drivers via the setup msi file.
4. (Optional) Install WLAN USB adapter like I did with Airlink 101.
5. I have been using CCCP codec pack so it uses Media Player Classic Home Cinema Edition and Crystal HD supports that! Also GOM player, KM Player, Windows Media Player 12, Arcsoft TotalMedia Theatre, Cyberlink PowerDVD, and Adobe Flash 10.1 are supported! Also, on that Broacom’s driver page, Linux drivers are listed and supported.
Performance
Did it work?!! Heck yeah! For 95+% of the time, it played things just fine. That 5% of slight delay/skip may be due to the fact that I was playing the HD files off another PC on my network (and not on the netbook itself). Airlink101 did drop signals couple of times over the past two days so you get what you paid for but I am happy with it overall. I didn’t have any 1080p source files to play but all my 720p videos played just fine. Just don’t forget that you do have to configure your softwares to use hardware-decoding.
Summary
For any video watcher out there that wants portability at its best, this is a no brainer! Sure you may lose your PCI-E WLAN card (some like Samsung has second available mini PCI-E slot), but for video enthusiasts like myself, it’s all worth it! Note however, that the palm rest area on the right side (where the Crystal HD lies underneath) gets really hot when it is working… but I won’t be typing when I am watching HD video so I don’t see this as an issue…
EDIT: It seems that newer Media Player has to be installed and/or re-configure it as instructed here.
Star Trek Movie: The Bittersweet Review
I grew up on scifi. It started with Mazinger Z. Galaxy Express 999. Future Boy Conan. Gundam. Robotech.
Then I discovered Star Trek. The original TV series with Capt. James T. Kirk. Spock and others made the show rather enjoyable. And then the Next Generation came! Capt. Jean-Luc Picard is da man! He made Star Trek cool! I didn’t care much for Deep Space Nine and the Voyager series… but then Star Trek: Enterprise returned and it was awesome again! However, it wasn’t popular enough and they pulled the plug.
The movies weren’t great most of the time and Star Trek seemed to disappear… until this movie came around! The reason why the review is bittersweet is because of what the movie is doing to the entire Star Trek license! Just like “Dark Knight” did to the original (and lame) Batman from the ’60s, this movie kickstarted the Star Trek into the 21st century, so to speak. The movie was good. Lots of action and effects with a decent plot, it gave what the license needed to enter the mainstream. It was great if you weren’t a fan of the original.
So to someone like me who has been a fan, but not a fanatic, it was rather… bitter to swallow. The plot threw the entire history upside down, like Chung had warned me yesterday. The original series and some of the movies had always done one thing and one thing right: addressing a load of ethical and cultural issues and differences. It had its own … traditions and history of sorts. Now, it was all thrown away for the sake of making the series popular again.
It still was a good movie and the twist was… intriguing. I suppose it was a necessary evil of sorts. I mean, I’d rather have it back this way than to have lost it forever. Bittersweet, indeed. Bittersweet.