In the surest sign yet that HD-DVD is going for all out price slashing in its attempts to claw back the hi-def initiative, Amazon in the US has dropped the price of the Xbox HD drive to a mere $80. That’s forty round pounds!
£40 for a decent hi-def drive ain’t half bad, right? Well, add to that six free HD-DVDs and you’re looking at the best bargain on the web.
Seeing as discs are shifting for $25 in the US, it works out that HD-DVD is losing out to the tune of $70 to keep the format alive.
We’re all for a spot of price cutting, but it strikes us that things really are starting to get desperate in the battle for your hi-def virginity.
Still, at this price, you can probably afford to back both sides and tidy up when it comes to the inevitable sell off when HD-DVD loses out for good.
We’ve been on the phone to Microsoft and Amazon about whether this deal extends to the UK, but have had no word as yet. As soon as we hear, you’ll be the first to know.
We were already pretty enamoured by 3 and PC World’s latest discount offering, giving users who sign up for the network’s mobile broadband £350 off a lappie.
Now though, it’s got even better, with the pair confirming that the MacBook Air is included in the deal. The discount is £250, so 100 nicker less than it could be, but it does bring Apple’s size zero newbie down to £1,050.
Although it makes the Air the deal’s flasgship gadget, although we still reckon the Vaio AR51J at £499 is a great deal and definitely not to be sniffed at. After all, it packs in a Blu-Ray drive and looks the business.
We’re hoping that PC World adds more lappies in the future. How about the imminent MacBook Pros guys?
Web savvy (read hopelessly addicted) punters, including our good selves, have got accounts on every IM service and VoIP network they can get their techie hands on these days.
Which is why we’re pretty bowled over by Fring, which unites all your accounts on your mobile, whether they’re trusty Skype, Google Talk, MSN Messenger or their very own VoIP brew.
It’s a free app that you can snag online, from the link down below, uniting all your contacts in one place and letting you see who’s online, what account they’re using and how strong the signal is where they are.
It all means you can make cheap calls using your cell, as long as your data charges aren’t exorbitant or you’re using WiFi.
Best of all though, you can fire over documents and images using P2P transfer rather than sluggish MMS. So it’s handy for high-powered business types too.
There’s support for some 450 blowers. You can check if yours is supported over on the official site, either by typing in the name or looking for an image of the model you’re packing.
Filed under: Portable Audio, Portable Video
Let’s break it down TV junkie. Sony’s new ¥38,000 (about $355) XDV-D500 features a 3-inch, 432 x 240 pixel resolution display with 160-degree viewing angle, 500:1 contrast, and a battery capable of about 8-hours of TV reception. It can even record up to 10 hours of scheduled programming to 2GB of internal memory. The itty bittier XDV-G200 brings a 2-inch LCD to the show, AM/FM radio too, then ditches the EPG and recording function. This is Japan mind you, so these sets receive digital 1Seg TV — in other words you can kiss your import fantasies goodbye.
[Via Impress]
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Filed under: Wireless, Networking
If you’ve been at it long, you’re probably tired of forking over $100 or so every year for the latest and greatest in wireless networking. The TEW-637AP, thankfully, takes a different approach. Instead of chucking your current router, the 300Mbps Wireless “Easy-N-Upgrader” just jacks into an extra Ethernet port on your existing router, and relies on that old box to do the “routing” part. The TRENDnet unit deals with blasting the 802.11n with MIMO, for theoretical speeds up to 300Mbps. Seems a bit silly, but the $64 pricetag certainly bests your average 802.11n router, so it might work out for you if you’ve got a good thing going with your existing setup, and just need a little extra push in the bandwidth department.
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