There’s a ton of upcoming laptops and devices based around Intel’s Atom processor, and it looks like all the early interest is causing that best of all possible problems for the chipmaker: it’s gotten too many orders. Intel told the WSJ that it’s planning on producing “millions” of Atom chips this year, but that it’s “seeing better-than-expected demand” as production begins and that it’s “we are working quickly to address it.” Still, it looks like manufacturers are expecting a shortage to last for a while — ASUS predicted that supply would be constrained until the third quarter during its quarterly conference call, for example — and various Chinese trade publications have reported the same. That’s definitely not encouraging news, and with AMD’s Puma and VIA’s Isaiah nipping at Atom’s heels, Intel might want to kick things into a higher gear.
In case you didn’t know, Iron Man—probably the most gadgety movie ever this side of James Bond—is arriving in theaters today, May 1st, at 8PM. Not tomorrow at 12AM, but this evening. Yesterday, all our West Coast editors had the opportunity to see it at the TechCrunch screening. I caught Jason just before he went to sleep in his crotchless pajamas, and I asked him if it was truly pantsworthy, like we predicted after the trailer. He said “yes, better than Spiderman and X-Men.” Oh boy. [Superhero Hype—Thanks Lindsay]
This Kohler Fountainhead toilet looks so not like a conventional toilet that we’ll probably have second thoughts about putting our asses on it and letting fly. Not only is there a glowing LED mechanism on the back to illuminate your business, but buttons on the lid allow it to automatically open up for #1 or #2. For the eco-maniacs, there’s the 1.28 gallon per flush system, saving water and dehydrating sewer crocodiles at the same time. How much would you pay for this? $3,800? It’s yours in June. It’s the closest thing you’ll get to taking a dump on Ayn Rand’s work without resorting to defecating in the fiction aisle at Barnes and Noble. [Kohler via DVICE]
DigiFi’s new Digital Opera headphones use the high-efficiency, high-quality Kleer wireless tech to get your tunes from your iPod to your ears. We’re also digging the neat over-ear design with curly cable, which looks like it’ll be good non-tangler, and the fact that up to four people can listen to the same feed, as long as they have the earphones too. They have over 10 hours play time, and have “CD-quality” audio, or so says DigiFi. We’re not sure about the “iPod adapter” part though, since it looks a lot like there’s just a headphone jack there but no iPod socket, doesn’t it? Hey ho. It’ll be available worldwide, starting in Korea from now, for about $98. [Aving]
Dell just announced its new high-end XPS 730 H2C gaming desktop, and get this — they claim it can run Crysis at 1920 x 1200 resolution at 30fps. Now that is a figure more impressive than any stats about the guts of the tower, right? OK, OK, those are interesting too.
This monster of a tower weighs nearly 50 pounds, stuffed as it is with goodies. It’s based on Nvidia’s nForce 790i Ultra SLI chipset, and you can choose to load it with chips ranging from the Intel Core 2 Duo up to the 45nm Core 2 Extreme. You can also put in up to four 1TB hard drives for some ridiculous reason, a whopping 8GB of RAM and Sound Blaster X-Fi Xtreme Music.
To keep all this crap running without burning down your house you can either choose two-stage ceramic H2C air cooling or just go nuts and get water cooling.
Obviously, all this stuff is going to set you back something serious. In fact, the air-cooled model starts at $3,999 while the liquid-cooled model will allow you to start adding components at the low, low price of $4,999. Start saving your pennies, gaming nerds. [Dell]
It seemed like it would never happen, but the impossible has occurred: Apple’s iPhone is coming to Canada. The news was quietly slipped into telecom giant Rogers’ latest earnings report, with the simple statement that the company was “thrilled to announce” a “deal with Apple to bring the iPhone to Canada later this year.” Apparently, lips are sealed on all other details, but we’ll keep you posted as news gets our way.
Do you enjoy gangs of tiny, spider-like robot insectoids swarming all over your house, car, or personage? If you answered “yes,” you’re going to love what BAE Systems is cooking up. The company recently received an infusion of $38 million from the US Army Research Lab to fund the Micro Autonomous Systems and Technology (MAST) consortium; a team of scientists and researchers hell-bent on developing an “autonomous, multifunctional collection of miniature intelligence-gathering robots that can operate in places too inaccessible or dangerous for humans.” Sure, that description (and accompanying photos, straight from BAE) does give you the impression that whoever came up with this really liked Minority Report, but won’t it make you feel safer at night knowing a swarm of metallic spiders are looking out for you? No? Huh, weird.
We’re still hearing reports of MacBook Air overheating woe, well after an EFI update in April that was meant to address some of those problems. While hot computers are nothing new, the MacBook Air starts shutting down cores and offloading processes when things get bad, which means users are faced with aggravating stop-start freezing until they can manage to cool the computer off — or just put it to sleep and let it “rest.” Apparently some people have traced this back to the age-old misapplied thermal grease problem, but that’s hardly a solace for the average consumer trying to convince Apple to fix this thing for them. We took a MacBook Air that was acting up into the Genius Bar and Apple claimed it couldn’t reproduce the problem, though we have heard cases of Apple replacing the computer for users. We’d be curious to know just how many Air users are having trouble, and if the X300 is experiencing anything similar, so let us know in the comments.
Apparently, HTC is having a little trouble keeping people with cameras out of its offices, as evidenced by this totally great spy shot of a what appears to be a bunch of (or two) new phones. We’re familiar with quite of few of these devices, like the TyTn II,Touch Cruise, and Touch you see in the upper row, but things get a little stickier down below. Save for that P3470 that’s second from left, we have no clue what those slick looking square numbers are. The far left model and the far right might be the same device, but its hard to tell. It also looks like all the devices in this picture are using Windows Mobile, but we’re holding out hope that maybe the model on the far right boots Android… and soon.
Update: So we figure that one of the two on the right is likely the MDA compact IV for T-Mobile, although that still doesn’t explain the generous QWERTY board depicted over there on the left. Can’t you just feel the excitement building? Thanks, Marios!
Toshiba TVs (in Japan) will be the first to feature good old Dubbly’s newest technology, Dolby Volume, a smart system aimed at leveling off eardrum-shattering sources and content—hopefully eradicating the twin evils of loud-ass TV commercials and poorly-mastered MP3s. Here’s how it works:
The system “continually monitors (or ‘listens’ to) the audio at all times and performs content-dependent processing…[on] all types of audio.” The processing isn’t just straight-up compression, it’s more of a smart EQ that takes dialogue and music into concern, and adjusts many frequency bands. This has the benefit of keeping funky artifacts out of the process, but it does of course take more horsepower to do, hence the slow roll-out. The first TVs to have it will be Toshiba’s REGZA ZH500 and ZV500 series LCD HDTVs, which will be out in Japan next month. No word yet on the US arrival.
In case you’re wondering, Dolby Volume does have an advanced “night” mode that lets you hear everything in big epic films without waking the significant other kind enough to put up with your midnight epic marathons. That’s all we know for now—when it hits the US (hopefully this year) we’ll test it with American broadcast TV, a boatload of DVDs and Blu-rays, and an iPod, to see for ourselves how it fixes those nagging problems. [FAQ via Press Release]
This Kohler Fountainhead toilet looks so not like a conventional toilet that we’ll probably have second thoughts about putting our asses on it and letting fly. Not only is there a glowing LED mechanism on the back to illuminate your business, but buttons on the lid allow it to automatically open up for #1 or #2. For the eco-maniacs, there’s the 1.28 gallon per flush system, saving water and dehydrating sewer crocodiles at the same time. How much would you pay for this? $3,800? It’s yours in June. It’s the closest thing you’ll get to taking a dump on Ayn Rand’s work without resorting to defecating in the fiction aisle at Barnes and Noble. [
DigiFi’s new Digital Opera headphones use the high-efficiency, 
Dell just announced its new high-end XPS 730 H2C gaming desktop, and get this — they claim it can run Crysis at 1920 x 1200 resolution at 30fps. Now that is a figure more impressive than any stats about the guts of the tower, right? OK, OK, those are interesting too.
Toshiba TVs (in Japan) will be the first to feature good old Dubbly’s newest technology, Dolby Volume, a smart system aimed at leveling off eardrum-shattering sources and content—hopefully eradicating the twin evils of loud-ass TV commercials and poorly-mastered MP3s. Here’s how it works:
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