Christmas Gift Guides

With Christmas approaching many of our favorite sites have been publishing their gift guides and they all seem to have much in common. It seems that the Apple iPhone, Sony PlayStation 3, the Nintendo Wii rank high in all the listings. Here are a few links to my faves: The arstechnica holiday-gift-guide-2008 engadgets-holiday-gift-guide-2008 The extremetech geek gift guide

Dell Mini 9 with 32GB SSD an Extra $100

Mini 9 buyers can now opt for a decent 32GB solid state drive and all for only a $100upgrade over the cost of the standard 4GB SSD. Thats a pretty decent deal by any standard.

RED to announce "Big Change" soon

RED's Digital Still and Motion Camera (DSMC) system looks like it will be announced sometime soon. The Camera promises to be an interesting hybrid which offers HD video and high megapixel still image capture.

Apple Burning Developers?

Apple appear to be playing a dirty and underhand game with their Apps Store. There have been a number of instances where they have let apps be released and sold through their App Store only to be cut and then have a very similar feature announced in one of their firmware updates. This kind of behavious will only engender a distrust and induce a great deal of antipathy to the company and it's product. If true then will start to see quite a few people becoming quite rabid in their aversion to dealing with apple. Come on Apple, you can do so much better than use other peoples ideas.

T-Mobile's Android Based G1, Jailbroken

It appears the Android-based G1 phone has been jailbroken. The G1 jailbreak is just the first step toward opening the system up. There will most likely be a full suite of Unix tools which will enable the customization of a whole range of features on the phone, including backgrounds and icons, custom apps and a whole lot more. Jailbreaking the G1 was relatively easy compared to the iPhone, which initially required remote access tools that emulated iTunes' mobile device management calls. By comparison, the G1 jailbreak is simple because it consists of using a Terminal program, starting a background process and issuing a few standard Unix commands. There will most likely be less fallout too because google are not as litigious or protectionary as Apple.

SanDisk claim hundredfold increase in flash write speeds

A new technology from SanDisk is claimed to boost flash's random write speeds by up to 100 times under certain conditions. SanDisk are also proposing two new metrics which may help customers compare flash to magnetic storage alternatives. SanDisk has called their new technology ExtremeFFS. I'm not going to try and explain this technology but it aparrently uses a version of the TrueFFS technology which SanDisk acquired when it bought M-systems, a flash technology company.

Intel Reveals Nehalem Performance Info

Ars technica have published an article listing the virtues of their new Nehalem chip. All things considered it's apparently blindingly fast and well worth the cost. The new Core i7 chips are something to read about and as much as I'd like to reiterate what ars technica have said just visit their site to find out more.