Men Free Blog

Like your laptops to be over-achievers? Like, the so much annoyingly stacked variety of over-achiever? Enter Lenovo’s new outrage — the ThinkPad W700. Containing sufficient computational artillery to total number a miniature village, presently for-creatives-only behemoth is intended for sheer pixel pushing… and miniature else. The method packs in two portions aimed at graphic artists and photographers that are quite different to a laptop: a put up in Wacom digitizer simply to the correctly of the trackpad, and an on-board color calibrator. But what is taking place short of the hood you ask? Well for starters the 17-incher sports the chiefly regularly Intel Quad Core Extreme CPU in a laptop (no word on speeds at such point) as favorably as the first and foremost coming of NVIDIA’s Quadro FX 3700 graphics chipset (with a hefty 1GB of memory on-board). The workstation in addition serves up double hard push bays configurable as RAID 0 or 1 (SSD or traditional disk, naturally), up to 8GB of DDR3 RAM, and an optional Blu-ray burner. Of course, that is totally kitted out — the W700 starts at $2,978 and moves skyward from what i read in there. Take a check at our hands-on underneath and see the beast for yourself.

Times haven’t been so great at Helio, but it looks like the troubled MVNO could be snapped up by Virgin Mobile. mocoNews did a little digging after Virgin’s recent Q1 conference call, and says that the two companies are currently in merger talks. Since both companies use Sprint’s network, the tech would be compatible, and the deal would give SK Telecom a way to keep Helio going as it tries to gain a foothold in the US market. Nothing’s set in stone yet and the two companies aren’t talking, but we’ll definitely keep an eye on this one.

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While not quite as exciting as March’s week of Latitude scoops, we’ve got ourselves some infos on what look to be Dell’s upcoming Inspiron 1435, 1535 and 1735 consumer laptops. Seems they’ll all be sharing the same basic design language, pictured above, and will be privy to some rather expansive aesthetic customization options if you’re into that type of thing. Specs are the typical Dell smorgasbord of options, but all three laptops start at around 1-inch thick and taper up to 1.5 inches thick. All three also sport slot-loading drives, with a Blu-ray option, and processors ramp up to Core 2 Duo T5850 2.16GHz chips. 3G options are also available across the lineup, and just about anything else you might find useful in a mid-range laptop. Apparently the 1435 isn’t due until October, but the 1735 is coming on June 9 and the 1535 on the 26th of this month.

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The Criterion Collection’s long-awaited HD debut — delayed by that annoying format war — finally has a date, as well as a list of the first movies getting a definitive release in 1080p. If that wasn’t enough, try this bit on for size: They won’t charge viewers extra for the privilege. That’s right, according to the e-mail that went out to subscribers today, all Blu-ray releases will feature HD picture and sound (no word on what codecs, although we expect nothing but the best considering the company has been mastering and restoring all releases in HD for years now), all the supplemental content and a matching (unspecified) price to their standard DVD editions. The complete email and list of a dozen movies follows after the break, along with a note that The Last Emperor will also be released in its original theatrical version on both formats for $39.95, while Walkabout will be an all-new edition.

[Thanks, Erik]

Dear Criterion Collection Newsletter subscriber,

We’ve got some exciting news for this fall, and we wanted you to hear it first.

Our first Blu-ray discs are coming! We’ve picked a little over a dozen titles from the collection for Blu-ray treatment, and we’ll begin rolling them out in October. These new editions will feature glorious high-definition picture and sound, all the supplemental content of the DVD releases, and they will be priced to match our standard-def editions.

Here’s what’s in the pipeline:

The Third Man
Bottle Rocket
Chungking Express
The Man Who Fell to Earth
The Last Emperor
El Norte
The 400 Blows
Gimme Shelter
The Complete Monterey Pop
Contempt
Walkabout
For All Mankind
The Wages of Fear

Alongside our DVD and Blu-ray box sets of The Last Emperor, we’ll also be putting out the theatrical version as a stand-alone release in both formats, priced at $39.95. Our Blu-ray release of Walkabout will be an all-new edition, featuring new supplements as well as a new transfer; we will also release an updated anamorphic DVD of Nicolas Roeg’s outback masterpiece at the same time.

As a special thank you to our newsletter subscribers, we’d like to offer you all $10 off any order of $60 or more placed on on criterion.com through Monday, May 26.

Enjoy spring!

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One of the worst-kept secrets in Verizon’s stable is finally getting official today; that’s right, ladies and gentlemen, meet the Glyde from Samsung. Wearing CDMA guts underneath its F700 clothing, the fashion-friendly QWERTY slider offers a 2 megapixel cam with flash and autofocus, GPS, the full range of Bluetooth profiles, microSD slot, and a true HTML browser. Unlike its crosstown competition — the LG Voyager — the Glyde doesn’t offer support for Verizon’s VCAST TV service, but we imagine most folks will consider that a minor (read: nonexistent) inconvenience. Look for the phone to start circulating into retail channels this week for a princely $249.99 on contract after $50 rebate. Have a quick gander over on Engadget Mobile for a few shots of the Glyde doing what the Glyde does best — posing for press photography, that is.

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iRex has a new consumer e-book reader out today, which incorporates some of the company’s higher end specs and makes them available in something a little more palatable for end users. Although it doesn’t have the Kindle’s pervasive connection, it can still sync RSS feeds, as well as take notes with its touchscreen. Check out the specs:

8.1-inch XGA display, 16 grayscale 400MHZ XScale CPU, 64MB RAM Wacom-based touch input 256MB flash memory, USB, MMC, and CF slots Reads PDF, HTML, TXT, Mobipocket, JPG, BMP, and PNG 3.5mm audio out Travel-hub add-on with… Ethernet! Oookay. 8.5 x 6.1 x 0.63-inches, 15.3 ounces It launches May 9th in Europe, and will sell for a very hefty sum of €499 ($770 US).

But hey, it does come bundled with 50 public domain classics, so, um, that’s something. Some more shots after the break.

[Via MobileRead, thanks Adam]

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Vodafone’s just got a tiny, minor, insignificant announcement to make this morning: it’s signed with Apple to sell the iPhone in ten markets, including Australia, the Czech Republic, Egypt, Greece, Italy (so much for Telecom Italia), India, Portugal, New Zealand, South Africa and Turkey. Expect the phone later this year — that’s all we know for now. Score one (or ten?) for Voda.

[Thanks, iB3nji]

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Here we are in London at the Soho Hotel with HTC, and we are among the first to see their new Diamond handset. While we thought we may see three new products in three different form factors, HTC Prez and CEO Peter Chou led-off the event by mentioning that they would be launching just “one” product today. He peppered his intro by talking about the Touch, so we were prepared to see an update on that product utilizing their TouchFLO tech.

The device has some pretty nice interface tech that they’re calling TouchFLO 3D, with elements similar to Apple’s CoverFlow swipe tech. They emphasized web accessibility and zoom-in navigation with “just one hand” and not too many fingers, a clear swipe at the iPhone.

As expected, the Diamond is loaded with prettiness and specs, including (coming as we get them, so refresh for more, including pics!):

Quad-band HSDPA 7.2

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Microsoft has quite a bit in store for the Zune faithful with its new Zune version 2.5 software update. The high points are the new Zune Card integration and the addition of TV show downloads on Zune Marketplace, but much-requested features like gapless playback, improved syncing controls, meta data editing, auto playlists and other tweaks have also been included. On the marketing front, Microsoft is really pushing the Zune Pass going forward, and will be launching a new TV commercial to help plug it. Subscribers will particularly benefit from the new Zune Card sharing, which lets you automatically score copies of your pal’s favorite songs, artists and recent plays — non-subscribers can view that Zune Card info, but will have to buy the tracks if they want to have a listen. Unfortunately, news on the video store front isn’t so compelling: Microsoft is only adding TV shows at this point, no movies, and there’s no way to pull video you’ve bought on your 360 over to your Zune. There’s no reason Microsoft can’t close this loop and turn some scattered media offerings into a compelling ecosystem, but until then we suppose we’ll have to thank our lucky stars that we can shell out 160 MS Points ($2.00) for TV shows we can watch for free online. The 2.5 Spring Update is a free download and should be available nowish.
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Vodafone’s just got a tiny, minor, insignificant announcement to make this morning: it’s signed with Apple to sell the iPhone in ten markets, including Australia, the Czech Republic, Egypt, Greece, Italy (so much for Telecom Italia), India, Portugal, New Zealand, South Africa and Turkey. Expect the phone later this year — that’s all we know for now. Score one (or ten?) for Voda.

[Thanks, iB3nji]

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