If you’re looking for a model of the quintessential home theater, Star Wars creator George Lucas’s theater he calls “The Stag,” located at his Skywalker Ranch in California, would probably be a good place to start. That’s what home theater installer Johann Peters did, spending $100,000 to build a 16-seat demo theater with a dozen speakers, 12,740 watts of amplification, a high-end JVC 1080p projector and even a mixing console.
After visiting Lucas’s Skywalker Ranch theater seven years ago, Peters decided to pick and choose some of its best ideas for his own theater, and while he toned down the color scheme a bit and didn’t quite need the 300 seats of The Stag, his final product still manages to kick some serious ass. Check out the gallery below and take the jump for a full spec list of this dream theater.
galleryPost('thestag', 4, 'The Stag Theater');
Hyrbid laptops have officially arrived, and Samsung‘s R55 is the company’s first to feature both an 80GB 5,400rpm drive alongside an additional 256MB flash drive. Samsung claims the hybrid hard drive consumes 32% less power, offers a 26% increase in data reading and boosts data-writing speed by 71%. That kinda talk makes the 15.4-inch notebook worth the $1,923 splurge. – Louis Ramirez
Samsung R55 Hybrid HDD Laptop Launched [PC Joint]
Lexar‘s ExpressCard solid state drive is an interesting proposition: 4 to 16 gigabytes of non-volatile memory in a slot form factor. That’s not only more storage than typical USB flash drives can offer, but more than most based on microdrives can, too. For those with lappies with ExpressCard slots, it would seem like a sweet piece of storage, and even as a cache for Vista’s ReadyBoost, since its not hanging off the side of a laptop like a USB thumbdrive would. So what’s the catch?
Unfortunately, I found write performance to be a lot lower than I’d have liked.
It read a fair 15MB per second on several machines, confirmed using both synthetic and MP3 file copies. But only wrote at 3MB per second.
For comparison, the laptop drive in the DV9000 HP Pavilion churned about 30MB per second in both reads and writes, and the Lexar Lightning, the fastest USB drive I had on hand, scored 17MB and 14MB per seconds in reads/writes.
In a nutshell, write speeds really need to be much better before I can recommend it.
galleryPost('lexarexpresscardssd', 7, 'Lexar ExpressCard SSD');–Brian Lam
Home Page [Lexar]
This is Bubble Gear‘s multimedia handbag, which consists of a “Scrag” (that’s what I call a bag-screen hybrid) with built-in MP3 and DVD player. This bag is described as an “attention magnet”—thief magnet, more like—that will have people crowding round you as you sit in the mall watching the Teletubbies DVD bought by your latest boyfriend to keep you quiet on long journeys.
And when you’re bored of that, you can either listen to that Pussycat Dolls track that you know all the dance moves to, or set up a slideshow of photos for your newfound friends. “And this is my boyfriend… And this is my brain cell. Nope, just the one… Here are my favorite shoes… And this is the last picture of my mom and dad… no, it’s just a back view of the car, they didn’t say where they were going, but yeah, they were in a hurry…”
There’s a rechargable lithium battery, two sets of headphones, a car charger and a remote control, all included. The bag will cost you $399 and all the self-esteem you ever had. Find out after the jump where true gizmo girls stash their gadgets.
Nope. Nada. Zilch. No idea. Beats us, kiddoes. All we know is that this tantalizing clip—five seconds, at most—of a new Sony Ericsson was put up over the weekend. And nothing on the SE website in Japan seems to correspond to it. Curioser and curioser, said Alice. – Ad Dugdale
Video of mystery Sony Ericsson phone [Mobile Mentalism]
This is the NAC-HD1 250GB HDD digital music server, Sony‘s new sound system component. The included CD player will rip your albums onto its hard drive, with space for up to 125,000 tunes. The system can also stream content to other hardware compatible with the DLNA (Digital Living Network Alliance) standard. And although it looks nothing like this thing that we featured last month, you’ll be interested to know it’s the Giga Juke’s brother, who got bigger and more capable after a short vacation at Godzilla’s beach home.
The NAC-HD1 also boasts a AM/FM tuner and lets you to schedule the recording of radio programs. There’s a 4.3-inch color LCD display and USB port on the unit’s front. Unfortunately, the NAC-HD1 needs a Wi-Fi adapter to get into your wireless network. There are plans to release this in Europe around late Spring or early Summer, but no plans for a US release. Boo. Full specs and prices after the jump.
Aside from the obvious storage bump, there are plenty of reasons why you’d wanna upgrade your MacBook Pro‘s hard drive. The guys at ExtremeTech have come up with a hand-holding guide for replacing your MBP’s 5,400rpm HDD for a new 7,200rpm drive, which will give you a noticeably faster MBP. There’s a lot of unscrewing involved, so you’ll need a Phillips-head screwdriver and a T-6 screwdriver before you begin. Like the other HDD upgrade guides we’ve seen, this one is worth a read, even if you’re the queasy type. – Louis Ramirez
Upgrade Your MacBook Pro’s Hard Drive [ExtremeTech]
Kohjinsha has added touch capabilities to the 7″ 800 x 480 screen on its Japan-only SA1F00 UMPC tablet computer, letting you massage your way through Windows XP Home even when it’s running as slow as Keanu Reeves putting frozen Heinz Ketchup on a bullet-time burger.
That’s because rather than jumping on the Ultra Mobile 2007 platform bandwagon with their new model, they just decided to keep the same 500 MHz AMD Geode LX800 processor. At least they painted it KITT black, probably hoping that the new color will add some TurboBoost to it (replacing XP for Linux would have achieved the same without the need for leather pants). In fact, all the specs remain the same, with 40GB HD, 2 USB 2.0 ports, SD, MMC and Compact Flash slots, 802.11b/g Wi-Fi, Ethernet and Bluetooth 2.0+EDR. All except the extra 30 grams that push its fighting weight up to 990 grams (2.18 pounds). One pic of the white model, its release dates and prices are after the jump.
Unlike that last one, this is just plain cool. Some very clever CG at work, and the Sony folks even told me there is a really sexy half green suit floating around… man, I’d love to wear that to a party some time.
The real question is, did they pick the correct side to use as the ‘creative side’? Should it have been the left side? Or is right right because that’s where the brain half is? But doesn’t the right brain control the left?
Great, now my brain hurts. Thanks again, Sony! -Seamus Byrne
For those who haven’t seen it, Sony’s new Handycam commercial has a wow factor for some, and a total gross out factor for others. Seriously, who wants to have that weird feeling of watching someone go from kissing their hot gf to suddenly kissing their Nan.
Thanks, Sony. Thanks a lot. -Seamus Byrne
