The 3D TV boom isn’t ending. As announced back in April, Toshiba Japan today showed [press release in English] a total of three new Cell Regza LCD TVs, and all of them are 3D enabled and full HD. These are the “CELL REGZA SLIM” 46XE2 (46 inches) and CELL REGZA SLIM 55XE3 (55 inches) plus another 55-inch model, the CELL Regza 55X2 (pictured). → Read More
Toshiba organized a big press conference in Tokyo today, and the company did not only unveil a total of 15 new REGZA LCDs for the Japanese market. Perhaps more importantly, Toshiba also announced the development of a new 3D TV. It seems Toshiba can’t afford to let Sony, Panasonic, NEC, Sharp and Hitachi be the only Japanese tech companies try to create a new business for themselves. → Read More
Yesterday we noted a test where a stripped-down Cell processor beat the pants off an Intel Core2 Quadro at an h264 transcoding task. Well, now that doesn’t seem so surprising, as the Roadrunner supercomputer built by IBM primarily with Cell processors is now calculating at the rate of one petaflop. That’s a quadrillion operations per second. I never thought I’d see the number quadrillion attached to anything real at all, but here it is. It uses 13,000 Cell engines and 7,000 AMD dual-core Opterons, all mounted on IBM Blade servers. The statistics are impressive (for instance, it weighs 500,000 pounds) but I’ll let you check them out for yourself. I think they’re going to using them to “extend the life of our nuclear stockpile.” What a noble endeavor! → Read More
Recently, Corel showed off a Cell-optimized version of DVD Movie Factory on a Toshiba’s SpursEngine 1000 (SE1000). The board transcoded 1080p H.264 video to a smaller resolution in about half the time as an Intel Core2 Quad. It’s even more impressive when you read that the li’l Cell is about half as powerful as the big daddy Cell found in the PS3. If you’re thinking, “Wow, how does that happen?” remember this was a situation where the application was optimized for that specific board. So you wouldn’t get results like this in every situation. Still, it shows that Intel is far from untouchable and while they may rule the desktops right now, these little optimized processors are still excellent choices for more specific systems. → Read More
Having just cleared the FCC gauntlet, the Moto RIZR Z3 is set to launch on T-Mobile on March 12. The new version will feature a 2-megapixel camera, music playback, stereo Bluetooth, quad-band, speakerphone, voice recognition and a 220 x 176 resolution display. It has not yet been announced how much the RIZR Z3 will sell for, but given the proximity to launch, I’m guessing we’ll know soon. Reaper [via Engadget] → Read More
Due to some terrible scheduling oversight, as we stalked around CES, we somehow missed Sanyo. Through our neglect, we managed to miss Sanyo showing off two products that couldn’t be more different from one another: the Sprint Power Vision M1 and the Zero-Gravity Massage Chair. While I certainly saw my share of phones at CES, I definitely could have used a go on the chair (although I’m probably too misophobic to have sat on it after all the greasy CESers). So what’s the deal with these new products? → Read More
comes CellSwapper, a service that lets you transfer cell contracts to desiring parties. The service is particularly useful since essentially every phone now comes with an oppressive two year contract. The service takes advantage of the termination clauses that allow users to end their service if they can find someone willing to take on the remainder of the contract. It also lets the transferee avoid activation fees. CellSwapper charges $15 for successful transfers. It’s sort of limited at the moment because there aren’t many people swapping yet, but hopefully that’ll change before June. CellSwapper Solves A Very Annoying Problem [TechCrunch] → Read More
