The LaCie LaCinema Classic HD is, at its heart, a 1TB hard drive with HDMI-out. You can load up media through USB from a PC or Mac (or flash drive). Then you can carry the drive to your television and watch DivX or MKV H.264 movies.

But it’s always a DLNA-compliant HD media player. In other words, you can hook it in to your network through Ethernet (Wi-Fi dongle available) and stream media without copying the files over.

Time will tell if LaCie’s player can compete with the rest of the competition (see our full Battlemodo here), but it’s available now in Australia for $299, and it’s certainly the best-looking media streamer we’ve seen to date.

[LaCie]

There’s no price yet on the USB 3.0 PCI Express card (IFC-PCIE2U3), but it’s expected to be about $US60. The drive itself will be $US200 (1TB), $US250 (1.5TB) and $US400 (2TB), and ships with Memeo AutoBackup software for the Mac or PC. [Buffalo]

Designed and built by NetComm, the BigPond Elite Wireless Broadband Network Gateway is essentially a 3G modem/router with the same HSPA+ technology used in its mobile broadband sticks. Telstra is touting typical download speeds of up to 8Mbps, although speed tests on servers in Canberra reached 11Mbps.

The device is well suited to people who don’t have a landline, people who don’t have access to ADSL/cable, or people who move frequently, such as travellers or renters. The ideal situation – at least for Telstra – would be to turn the whole house into a Wi-Fi hotspot, thereby feeding the addictions of power-hungry families. There are four Ethernet ports and two USB ports, so you can plug in printers, external hard drives, etc. But that’s not ideal if you want to use the BigPond Elite as a mobile broadband device.

Executive Director Telstra Consumer, Jenny Young: “The Gateway also helps keep families entertained on holidays and while on the move. All that’s required is power and Next G network coverage and parents can quickly and easily access all their online must-haves, from instant messaging and email to YouTube.”

The BigPond Elite is compatible with Windows XP, Vista, Windows 7 and Mac OS X 10.4 and 10.5. Snow Leopard users, however, have to wait for a patch which is expected to roll out on December 1.

It’s available now for $399, and if you sign a 24-month contract, you’re eligible for a $200 rebate and 50 per cent off for the first 12 months. In fact, you have no choice. There is no prepaid option.

Is it worth it to you?

Datel maintains that Microsoft is “disabling or erecting technological barriers to Datel accessories” and thereby favouring its own products. For reference, Microsoft’s 512MB memory unit is about $US30, while a 2GB version from Datel is $US40. Sounds like it might be worth supporting the little guy in this one. [Techflash]

The i9 doesn’t extract significant advantages from its pumped core count (which brings processing thread count up to 12) in a lot of day-to-day tasks, so don’t expect to see an increase in game performance, Windows startup speed or other single-core optimised tasks. It’s when you start rendering video or doing 3D modelling – tasks that are suited to parallelisation – that the i9 flexes its muscles.

That’s roughly a 50 per cent increase in video-encoding performance over a similarly clocked i7 – already no slouch by any existing standards.

The i9 processors won’t ship until sometime in early to mid 2010, and when they do, expect them to be a bit on the expensive side. But man, 50 per cent. I think I can stand to save up a few more bucks, honestly. [PCLab via Electronista]

PC Perspective tested one of OCZ’s 256GB Colossus drives and found “read and write speeds are about as fast as SATA 3Gb/sec will go!” It’s nuts that our drives are finally catching up with the plentiful, SATA pipelines, even if OCZ has hacked speeds a bit by essentially building one giant drive out of four smaller SSDs.

Whatever works. Now to sell a spare kidney for the $US3300, 1TB configuration. Read the full testing results at: [PC Perspective]

[Fudzilla via MaxConsole]

[Drobo]

According to separate reports from different parts of the country, Apple denied coverage for two users in 2008 based on the fact that OSHA lists cigarette smoke as a biohazard. Both techs refused service to the computers not because the smoke damaged them, but because it’s considered hazardous to a tech’s health to work on a contaminated unit.

Both owners tried to appeal their cases, even going all the way up to Steve Jobs. Unlike this guy, they weren’t as lucky.

These are just two isolated incidents though, and in the comments at Consumerist some smokers are reporting having no trouble getting their computers serviced by Apple. It appears to be on a case-by-case basis, not a hard-set policy. Any smokers out there ever run into trouble getting Apple to repair hardware? [Consumerist via Slashdot]

According to Fudzilla, the platform will include a new memory controller to accommodate DDR3 RAM which, despite supporting two slots, will remain single-channel. Pineview, the next Atom before Cedarview, hasn’t even shipped yet — that’s expected to be the beginning of next year — so it’s interesting to glimpse this far into the future, where Atom, such as it is, will remain positioned almost exactly where it is now. Oh well! [Fudzilla]

Disclaimer: That Atom sitting on the penny up there is an older version (not that the new one will look any different).