Western Digital has known that Seagate was toiling away in hopes of being the first to market with a standalone 2TB hard drive, and evidently it has chosen to work its engineers that much harder. In a presumed effort to beat Hitachi (and everyone else) to the 2TB barrier, WD is reportedly aiming to launch its Caviar Green 2000GB WD20EADS later this week, and with it will come 32MB of cache, an 8.9-millisecond seek time and an expected price tag of around €170 ($224). Best of all? It should be “available immediately” just as soon as it’s outed for real.

[Via Electronista]

Filed under: Storage

Western Digital about to ship 2TB Caviar Green hard drive? originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 13 Jan 2009 23:49:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Filed under: Culture, CES, Peripherals, Casual, Galleries

The author burnt out several synapses levitating the ball for this photo.

Mattel had a booth at CES pimping out things like U.B. Funkeys, a Barbie nail design automatic applicator contraption, and Mindflex, a game that claims to harness the untapped power of your brain’s beta waves. These are waves that the brain generates when you’re busy solving problems, concentrating, or trying to decipher what the sales chart trends on Joystiq are pointing toward.

Mattel wants to channel said waves into a franchise of games under the Mindflex banner, the first of which offers a “float the ball with your brain” challenge. To play, you slap on a funky headband, attach little butterfly clips to your earlobes and then concentrate really hard. If you do it well enough … the ball floats. Relax your brain or close your eyes, and it hovers down.

Continue reading CES 2009: Mattel’s MindFlex gives you Jedi mind powers

CES 2009: Mattel’s MindFlex gives you Jedi mind powers originally appeared on Joystiq on Tue, 13 Jan 2009 23:45:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Filed under: Humor, Cult of Mac, Odds and ends, Found Footage

I don’t really watch NCIS, truth be told — my wife does, and I nod appreciatively when the situation calls for it. I was half-watching tonight’s episode when a familiar shape caught my attention… and then a jolt of cognitive dissonance made me sit straight up on the couch and exclaim “What did he say?!?“

Resident NCIS geek Tim McGee (the same character who, in a past episode, managed to download a taxicab security video directly onto his iPhone) unpacks a boxful of his childhood computer gear; he proudly announces the computer you see above as his “Mac SE,” when you don’t need HDTV to know that it’s a Mac Classic — but if you do have an HDTV, you can clearly see “Macintosh Classic” printed on the front of the machine. McGee either can’t read, or he has a delusional disorder of some kind that prevents him from properly recognizing vintage Mac gear. Later in the episode, he gets taunted for his childhood Macloverdom. It’s just trouble from Jump Street on down.

McGee also unloads a PowerBook Duo and a nondescript PC laptop from his magic box. You can see the entire video, including the SE/Classic flub, in the continuation of this post.

Continue reading Found Footage: Good grief, NCIS, do you take us for fools?

TUAWFound Footage: Good grief, NCIS, do you take us for fools? originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Tue, 13 Jan 2009 23:15:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Filed under: Nintendo Wii, Casual

There ain’t no party like a Medieval party ‘cuz a Medieval party don’t stop. Of course, that likely has more to do with rampant dysentery than any measure of fun, something we hope won’t come packaged with Medieval Games, a new collection of minigames casually heading to the Wii.

The game is being hammered out by the ye olde blacksmiths at N-Fusion Interactive, with Bethesda sister company Vir2L Studios set to publish. Medieval Games promises to bring waggle to the Middle Ages with bite-sized dragon slaying, castle sieges and archery contests as players suit up as one of several “colorful” playable archetypes such as the knight, princess, bard or wizard. No release date or even screens from the game have been revealed, meaning we’ll just have to learn to make do with the hojillion other minigame collections collecting dust on Wii shelves for now.

Wii minigames going medieval originally appeared on Joystiq on Tue, 13 Jan 2009 22:45:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Comically enough, Samsung didn’t even bother telling us the panel size of its P2370L, but we’ll go out on a limb and assume it’s 23-inches diagonally based on the cryptic model name. The latest member of Sammy’s Touch of Color family sports a LED backlight, a depth of just 0.65-inches, 2,000,000:1 contrast ratio, two-millisecond response time, DVI input, 1080p native resolution, a swivel stand and “Starlight” touch controls. If in fact we’re looking at a 23-inch LED-backlit LCD for just $399, we’d say it’s quite the bargain — particularly when compared to Apple’s 24-incher (which runs $899). Guess we’ll find out when it ships later this quarter.

[Via SlipperyBrick]

Filed under: Displays

Samsung’s LED-backlit P2370L LCD monitor looks good for $399 originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 13 Jan 2009 22:40:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Well, it looks like there’s been yet another development in the exoskeleton arms race between the US and Japan, with this latest entrant from the Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology promising to help farmers and gardeners deal better with old age and increasingly unwieldy crops. This one weighs in at a somewhat hefty 55 pounds but, like most such exoskeletons, it’s able to offload most of its own weight thanks to the use of eight motors and 16 sensors, which also, of course, help to give its wearer some super-strength. Better still, the researchers say the suit could be available in as soon as three years, and cost somewhere between $5,000 and $10,000.

[Via Engadget German]

Filed under: Robots, Wearables

New robotic exoskeleton aims to help farmers combat age, mutant plants originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 13 Jan 2009 21:50:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Filed under: Sony PlayStation 2, Business

Buck up, Sony. Sure, the PS3 might be taking on water in stormy seas and you’re facing a fairly dramatic corporate shake-up, but at least you can take solace in the fact that you done real good with the PS2. Heck, you said so yourself today, announcing that 50 million of them have been sold in North America.

The future of last generation’s best-performing console also looks bright, with new releases in the pipeline for 2009 — and possibly beyond. Even SCEA’s hardware marketing head, John Koller, said, “We don’t intend on discarding the system anytime soon.” (And with a return of backwards-compatibility on PS3 via software emulation still but a rumor, we don’t imagine many PS2 owners will be discarding the system anytime soon, either.)

PlayStation 2 reaches 50 million sold mark in North America originally appeared on Joystiq on Tue, 13 Jan 2009 21:45:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Looks like Sony Insider caught some footage of those flexible OLED Walkmans in action during a CES promo video hidden away in the booth. Looks like a pretty sweet riff on the Cover Flow-esque interface that’s due to arrive on the NWZ-X1000, but there’s not much else to go on — let’s hope Sony’s spending more time getting the X1000 ready to leave that impenetrable glass housing than it is mocking up videos of fantasy tech. Video after the break!

Continue reading Sony shows off flexible OLED Walkman concepts on video

Filed under: Portable Audio, Portable Video

Sony shows off flexible OLED Walkman concepts on video originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 13 Jan 2009 21:02:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Filed under: Nintendo DS

IGN reports that “multiple sources close to Nintendo” have told the site that the Big N’s latest handheld will make the trip across the Pacific in April. “The company has allegedly relayed to its partners that DSi will ship stateside in early April, most likely on April 4,” IGN writes.

These same sources have put a $179.99 price tag on the DSi for its domestic release. In contrast, DSi retails for ¥18,900 ($210) in Japan, where it launched on November 1, 2008. If true, an April release would contradict Nintendo of America president Reggie Fils-Aimé’s assertion last October that the system wouldn’t launch Stateside until “well into 2009,” although Nintendo head, Satoru Iwata, has said it would arrive here before summer ‘09. Then again, he also said Nintendo expected one pre-order per every member of every family on planet Earth … or did we just dream that?

Rumor: Nintendo DSi coming to US on April 4 at $179 originally appeared on Joystiq on Tue, 13 Jan 2009 20:45:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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So rumors of Dell doing a smartphone have been around forever, but they’ve started heating up again today — word on the street is that the company is planning a handset launch as early as next month at 3GSM or Mobile World Congress. That’s just chatter we’d ordinarily dismiss as nonsense, but we couldn’t help but notice most of the Dell people at the Adamo event were carrying G1s — and Dell’s director of consumer products was super-quick to pull out a Nokia E71 and gush over how well-built it was compared to other devices when we asked him where the Adamo line would be positioned. That jibes with long-standing rumors that Dell’s working on Android and/or S60 devices — rumors that Michael Dell himself refused to put to bed back in July. What does it all mean? Well, we have no idea, but we’d say that Dell’s new focus on consumer-oriented design suggests that WinMo isn’t really in the running if it is in fact planning a handset. We’ll see how it plays out over the next few months — we could be right, we could be wrong, but either way it should be interesting.

Filed under: Cellphones

Dell smartphone rumors flare up — Android or S60 phone in the works? originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 13 Jan 2009 20:23:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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