Klipsch made tiny waves with their original Image headphones, saying they were the world’s smallest. We took their word for it and moved along. Now Klipsch has given up on the size game with its new X5 headphones, boasting that the 2mm-bigger X5 headphones are “light but heavy in sound.” Anyway, the Image X5 use a full-range armature driver, tuned bass-reflex system, and sport a long-enough 50-inch cable. The housing is electroplated aluminum and Klipsch says the black “tail” reduces cable stress and dampens cable noise. The X5 is iPhone compatible and comes in at a more wallet-friendly (but still slightly alarming) $249 later this month. For that price you’ll get the headphones, carrying pouch, airplane adapter, five multi-sized ear gels, and an ear gel cleaning tool.

AMD’s on a roll at Computex, and it’s keeping the stream alive with two more decently important announcements. First off, the company is making the ATI Mobility Radeon HD 3800 official, which is said to “triple top-of-the-line graphics performance in comparison to the previous generation ATI Mobility Radeon GPUs.” The unit also enables laptop makers to include CrossFireX technology for the first time, so yeah, there’s that. Moving on, we’ve got the low down on its PowerXpress technology, which enables users to “double or triple the performance of the integrated graphics processor when plugged into a wall socket or extend their battery life by over an hour while on the go.” In actuality, it’s a variant of ATI Hybrid Graphics Technology for lappies, giving folks the option to switch between a Mobility Radeon HD 3400 series GPU and an integrated AMD M780G without the need for a reboot. If your eyebrows just perked up, you can snag said tech on select Fujitsu-Siemens machines right now. All the gory details are linked below — enjoy!

Read – ATI Mobility Radeon HD 3800 gets official
Read – ATI PowerXpress shipping on select Fujitsu-Siemens laptops

The more cells you can pack onto a NAND chip, the cheaper the storage, so we’re excited about Hynix’s recent announcement of triple-level-cell NAND flash. You might have noticed that MLC-based SSDs are cheaper than SLC units, and TLC keeps the trend alive — Hynix says the cost of TLC production is some 30 percent lower than current chips. On top of that, the 32GB chips themselves are 30 percent smaller than current NAND chips, meaning device manufacturers will be able to cram more storage into our PMPs and phones. We’ll have to wait a little while though: production is going to ramp up in October, and Hynix hasn’t committed to using the new chips in SSDs quite yet.

Mio’s got quite the interesting duo set up at Computex: the Windows Mobile 6.1-packin’ G50 and the two-faced LEAP K1. As for the former, you may know it better as the Lovebird, but it seems a more corporately accepted monicker was chosen at the last minute for the quad-band GSM handset. As for the latter, this mysterious creature actually has two faces to fondle — one of which packs a traditional numeric keypad, while the other features an expansive panel perfect for serving up routes. Check the links below for more details on both.

Read – Mio G50
Read – Mio LEAP K1

Sapphire Technologies is showing off some new 3D gear at Computex this week, with a pair of 3D monitors and a new stereoscopic graphics driver on display. The driver works with ATI graphics cards to send a polarized image to the dual-layer monitors, which displays a 3D image to viewers with special glasses. Details on the monitors are pretty sketchy, but Sappire says it’s not working with Zalman and that it’ll have something on the market in the “next couple of months.” Great — now just ditch the shades and we’ll be all good.

Although it physically hurts to suffer the synaptic explosions required to slap out yet another netbook post, this one might actually be worth it. Laptop had the chance to go hands-on with the ECS G10IL at Computex and came away impressed by the 10.2-inch “Wind-esque” Atom-based ultra-portable. No price or dates were provided, although with a promised HSDPA data capability we’re not expecting anything close to $300. Hit the read link for plenty of pics and video.

Dell and MSI talk of their upcoming mini-notes

ASUS may have created the low-cost, mini-note category with its Eee PC 701 4G, but more and more companies are looking to jump in with their own entries. Over the past week, Dell confirmed the existence of its “Inspiron Mini” and MSI officially announced the Wind which will be available June 16.

Dell recently gave some in the media a chance to look at a pre-production Inspiron Mini that was decked out with a glossy black lid instead of the glossy red lid featured in the original press photos. The pre-production unit also had some minor difference in the keyboard lettering and Function modifiers.

Speaking of the keyboard, Dell Consumer Group Senior VP Alex Gruzen went on to discuss the missing feature that had many potential customers up in arms when the firsts images were revealed online: the lack of a top row of Function keys.

“This was a trade off so the rest of the keys could be bigger,” said Gruzen. “The reason we were later to the market is we’ve been working on getting the right keyboard.”

The keypad design accommodates as best as possible the best user experience for this class of products.”

Maybe Dell knows something that the rest of us don’t, but the lack of a top row of function keys could be a deal-breaker for some people in what looks to be an otherwise attractive machine. In its current iteration, the Function keys are eliminated due to the intrusion of the battery.

In other mini-note news, MSI is already talking about the next generation Wind. The current model, which was officially announced earlier this week, has seen rave reviews from around the web.

The 10″ notebook is already quite small, weighing only 2.2 pounds in its base configuration. MSI is not content, however, and wants to launch a thinner, lighter version during the first quarter of 2009. The new version would be targeted at business customers and will use the same processor/chipset as the current Wind.

MSI is also looking at yet another variant that would be even smaller and more in line with Mobile Internet Devices (MIDs). The device is expected to have a screen of 7″ or smaller along with a slide-out keyboard.

Aw, snap. Our Chinese branch just happened upon Acer’s totally unmistakable new gaming rig at Computex, and while they couldn’t spend enough time with it to confirm or deny whether it really was faster, better, stronger or longer than anything else, they did manage to capture a few shots. Granted, that little “Don’t Touch” sign technically makes this a hands-off, but either way, we’re sure you’ll enjoy the close-ups found in the read link below.

Sun is betting big on the SSD in enterprise environments

Sun has put its weight behind solid state drives (SSDs) and is in the initial stages of planning a business strategy around the emerging technology. Sun executive vice president John Fowler believes the SSD is the future of enterprise computing.

Fowler and other Sun executives told reporters today that Sun would be integrating SSDs into the majority of its hardware and software offerings. Looking back, Sun was on this path before this announcement since it already has a version of its Solaris ZFS software available that is optimized for use with SSDs.

Sun announced that it will offer its own line of SSD drives later this year intended to give users of its hardware and software improved performance, power savings and reliability. Sun will offer 2.5” flash-based drives by the second half of 2008 and 3.5-inch drives will be introduced later. Fowler is quoted by eWeek saying, “Flash today is not about bulk storage … but it’s about performance. The question for us is going to be adoption rate … because people’s adoption rates of storage is really variable.”

According to Fowler, Sun expects the adoption of SSDs in the enterprise environment to begin in earnest this year for customers running high-performance computing environments. Mainstream enterprise will begin adopting SSDs later.

Illuminata analyst Gordon Haff told eWeek, “It’s possible all this will occur. But these things don’t happen overnight, particularly in storage, where enterprises are very conservative.” The risk in Sun putting so much weight behind SSDs according to Haff is that enterprise customers may not buy the products.

Sun isn’t the only major league manufacturer betting big on SSDs for the future of enterprise computing. Intel’s own line of SSD drives were going through in-house testing in April and should be on the market later this year.

New chip design uses only 0.3V of power

Back in February a group of researchers from MIT and Texas Instruments designed a new chip for portable devices that uses a mere fraction of the power required in similar chips today. The researchers were able to design a chip that may be up to ten times as energy efficient as current technology.

Current chips operate at about 1 volt and the new design from the MIT researchers operates on 0.3 volts of power. Anantha Chadrakasan, Professor of Electrical Engineering told MIT Energy Initiative, “Memory and logic circuits have to be redesigned to operate at very low power supply voltages. Chadrakasan directs the MIT Microsystems Technology Laboratories, where the work was conducted.

Simply reducing the voltage required for the chip to operate wasn’t the only trick the researchers used to get energy savings for the chip. The researchers also optimized the energy processing circuitry to account for several factors including environmental conditions and variations in circuit demands.

One key to the efficient nature of the new chip design according to Chadrakasan says was a high-efficiency DC-to-DC converter used to reduce voltage to lower levels built right onto the chip. At this point the chip design is only a proof of concept and significant obstacles remain to be overcome before the chip can enter production and ultimately end up in your cell phone. Researchers say that one of the biggest problems they had to overcome was the variability in chip manufacturing.

Lower voltage levels mean that differences in variations and imperfections in the chip building process are magnified and become a problem. Chadrakasan says that commercial applications for the new chip could be seen in five years or sooner. The researchers are also looking at applications for the low voltage chip other than in electronics.

Since the chip can operate on such low power requirements, the researchers also believe it could be used in implantable devices like pacemakers. In this application the chip would be able to get all the power it needs from body heat or the movement of the person with the implant. This would allow implantable devices to be powered indefinitely. Battery life is currently a very big concern for implantable medical devices.

One of the main reasons cited for the lack of encryption on telemetry data sent from pacemakers and internal defibrillators is the added strain encryption would put on the battery inside the devices. A low power chip that gets all the power it needs from the body may be just what is needed to allow stronger security in implanted medical devices.

These researchers aren’t alone in their quest for lower voltage, less power hungry chips and processors. Intel recently introduced its Atom processor which is a full x86 processor and requires only 0.6W of power. The Atom processor still consumes more power than the 0.3V design from MIT.