We learned in May that there would be delays to Intel’s Centrino 2 chipset for notebooks, but today it gets an official launch from Intel. That certainly tallies with the slew of notebooks hitting the news which have the chips inside. Alongside the Centrino 2, Intel gives us word on the Core 2 Extreme, which runs at 3.06 GHz and the Mobile Intel 45 Express Chipset and wireless Intel Wi-Fi Link 5000, and the WiMAX/Wi-Fi Link 5050 chipset that supports the Centrino 2 to support WiMax and Wi-Fi operations. Since Intel plans to release eight processors over the next 90 days, there’ll be lots more news like this. Press release below.
UPDATE: It’s now viewable in Australia, and it’s great, if a little weird. What did you guys think?
The Good news: The first act of Joss Whedon’s new internet-only show Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog has gone live.
The Bad news: For some god unknown reason, the site decided to use Hulu as their online video service of choice, which is not available to view outside of the United States.
So, all that amazing internet hype and the freedom the networks that comes with releasing a show online has been rendered completely useless, as fans in Australia and around the world instead have to enjoy a floating black box which tells them, point blank, that they need to be in the US to view the show.
Apparently they’re working on a fix, but considering the whole program is only available to watch for five days (before it makes its way to iTunes and DVD – although whether that will include iTunes Stores outside the US remains unclear) this is a major setback.
It seems like this is something that should have been thought of in the planning meetings.
There’s only three full working days left that you can win a Nokia N78 from Giz AU. We gave one away last week, and this week we’re doing it again. It’s not hard to win – all you need to do is answer one little question in 25 words or less – pretty simple, huh?
Just go here to the original post and answer the question in the comments section. Then, on Friday afternoon, I’ll pick the best answer. The person who wrote it will have a new Nokia N78. And it could be you. So go on – enter now![Nokia N78 comp on Giz]
Lenovo launched the 13.3″ IdeaPad U330 laptop tonight at Intel’s Centrino 2 launch event, and it looked pretty nice. As far as specs go, they only mentioned the Centrino 2-powered device is 2.2cm thick, under 1.8kg and has five hours of battery life. galleryPost('u330', 3, '');
Noticing a pattern with Centrino 2? For Toshiba’s part, they’ve got a biz-set triple bump: The Satellite Pro S300, Tecra A10 and Tecra M10 all have Toshiba’s EasyGuard with shock and spill protection, a business card reader, a combo USB 2.0 eSATA port, and sleep-and-charge USB ports. A point of differentiation is that the Tecra A10 and M10 both rock Centrino 2 vPro, which has tech for the enterprise set so IT can fix your comp wirelessly, even when it’s frozen.
newVideoPlayer("/genkill.flv", 475, 376,""); We cover a lot of high-end military gear here on Giz, but just one of the things that Generation Kill, a great new miniseries that premiered on HBO last night, does well is remind everyone that in the real world, the military is not all UAVs and lasers just yet. Instead of morphing robots to peer under doors, microwave insanity guns or even current-gen tech like Blue Force GPS consoles in every Humvee, the Marines of the First Recon Battalion depicted in the show are lucky if they can get batteries for their nightvision goggles.
Lenovo officially announced its Centrino 2-based X200 ultraportable notebook today, confirming what we have known for a while now. Namely, that it’s the smallest member of the X-family (12.1-inch screen, 0.8-inches thin) and very powerful. Powered by the new Centrino 2 platform, it’s got a full arsenal of wireless communication interfaces (including WiMax, WWAN with GPS and Ultra-Wide Band for peripherals), yet it’s a slight 1.9kg, a hair less than its older brother or perceived competitor. (No optical drive helps there.) And it starts at a much more affordable US$1199. But where the hell is the trackpad?!
Today doesn’t seem to be a good day to be an Optus customer, with a broken fibre optic cable on the Gold Coast leaving their landline, mobile and internet services borked throughout Queensland and parts of NSW.
The cable was broken at about 8am, although how is still not known. And although Optus believe services should be back to normal soon, it hasn’t stopped delays from hitting Brisbane airport and countless other businesses.
Anybody out there experiencing problems?
[via News.com.au]
Being able to use the iPhone or iPod touch for basic data storage and file browsing has been a missing feature for over a year now. But an app called DataCase, available July 28, claims it will finally turn the iPhone or iTouch into a “handheld wireless drive.” DataCase uses Bonjour in the same manner as Air Disk—which means the iPhone’s drive will automatically appear in a Mac’s finder. Once you have files on the iPhone, you can browse, view and even delete them. Since the app works with any “wirelessly capable computer,” PCs and Linux are also supported. For only US$7 bucks this apps sounds way too good to be true. Let’s hope it isn’t. [DataCase]
One of the new features in Apple’s MobileMe suite is the push services, allowing users to get near instant notification of incoming emails, as well as instant changes to address books and appointments. There are grumblings, however, that it isn’t true push. For example, when settings are changed in the MobileMe control panel on a Mac, it doesn’t initiate an automatic sync, so the handset isn’t updated till the next scheduled sync, which is every 15 minutes. It’s really more of an annoyance than anything else, but is a sync every 15 minutes really true push connectivity?[MacRumors]
