Motorola announce Backflip Android phone

It's been a quiet CES for Motorola compared to the big Milestone and Dext announcements from last year. The Backflip is the handset maker's big thing this year, and it's looking pretty good.
The Backflip gets its name from it's hinged screen, allowing it to sit on a desktop for accessing your calendar, or watching videos or your Twitter feed. There's a discrete touchscreen on the back so that your fingers don't obscure your view of the screen and It even doubles up as an alarm clock.
Much like the Nokia N97, there's a full QWERTY slider tucked under the screen too.
That screen is a 3.1 inch HVGA offering, with a MotoBlur skinned vresion of Android under the hood. There's also 3G and Wi-Fi options, as well as a 5MP camera.

Ion launch the iType full QWERTY keyboard add-on for the iPhone

What is it with peripheral manufacturers turning perfectly portable devices into hulking behemoths with their (often unneeded) accessories?
Enter the iType, Ion's full size QWERTY iPhone add-on.
Still there's a use for this one I suppose. Laying your iPhone inside landscape wise, the iType doubles up as a charger and will be useful for those who Tweet or SMS a lot from the handset, or even use their iPhone to blog on.

Office 2010 Beta Draws 2 Million Downloads 

 Microsoft is looking forward to strong sales of Office 2010 when the productivity suite ships later this year, based on what the company called "record interest" in the beta version of the product. Users have downloaded more than 2 million trial copies of the software in just seven weeks, according to Microsoft Office general manager Rachel Bondi. "The Office 2010 beta is generating record interest and use, surpassing the previous Office 2007 beta download rate," said Bondi, in a blog post Tuesday. "It's a rate of 40,000 downloads per day," said Bondi.

            

Microsoft Office sales could use a boost. Sales of the product to consumers plunged 34% in the most recent quarter, while enterprise sales dropped 4% as some companies opted for less expensive offerings from Google and other competitors.
Microsoft on Tuesday also released a detailed pricing plan for Office 2010, which includes popular applications like Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint.
For 2010, Office will be available in four editions.
The standard Office Home and Student version is priced at $149 for packaged software, or $119 for those who wish to download the software and activate it with a key card.
For home office workers and small businesses, Office Home and Business is available for $279 boxed, or $199 for a key card. Office 2010 Professional, which includes a number of tools geared toward enterprise environments, is $499 boxed, or $349 for a key card.
College students and professors can get a price break by purchasing Office Professional Academic. It's priced at $99 and will be available at campus bookstores and other selected retailers.
All versions of Office 2010 will include access to Office Web, which is a pared down, Internet-based version of the software. Microsoft also plans to make Office Web available for free to the public through its Windows Live portal. The software, however, lacks all the bells and whistles of the pricey desktop versions.Microsoft last month confirmed that Office 2010 will be available sometime in the middle of this year, but did not provide a more specific timeframe.
Among Office 2010's enhancements over previous editions are beefed up video and image processing tools that let users edit photos and videos from within their Office documents. New collaboration capabilities, meanwhile, will allow multiple users to access and edit a single document over the Internet.

AMD's ATI Radeon HD 5670

In a discourteous endeavor to dominate every segment in the DX11 market ATI is covering all the bases with very strong products in the high-end and mid-range segment. The slowest DX11 card one can buy is in fact the Radeon HD 5750 and good gosh man, that card oozes performance.
It's therefore not exactly a surprise or even secret that there is a gap left in the now very wide range of ATI DX11 card lineup. Yes my fellow Guru's today we are going second base in the upper budget segment. Cards that typically can be found in a 75 EUR / 95 USD price range often offering a somewhat below average gaming experience. However with the right monitor resolution and settings, one is almost always getting most bang for buck. 

Today ATI releases thus the Radeon series 5600. Actually Radeon HD 5650 and 5670 today to be specific -- we'll be looking at a couple of these cards. These cards offer a wide variety in functionality, but even in the new budget products, ATI put in enough transistors to allow you to play modern games well -- if you give them the right circumstances that is. The card we'll be testing today is lined up directly against NVIDIA's GeForce GT 240 products, with the Radeon HD 5670 being slightly faster, DX11 compatible and sure .. ATI threw in Eyefinity as well.
But wait -- there's more though. Obviously we will all agree that a new trend that has been up and coming over the past two to three years are HTPCs. And that's exactly an area where the Radeon HD 5670 will rise and shine hard, as it has more than enough shader power to post process your high-definition content and it's armed with the very best in image quality outputs with the digital HDMI and DisplayPort even supporting 7.1 audio and Dolby True HD and DTS Master Audio as well.
Overall features? Much like the rest of the Radeon HD 5000 family ATI has been focusing on three primary features, and key selling points for the series 5000 products. First off, the new graphics adapters are of course DirectX 11 ready. With Windows 7 and Vista being DX11 ready, all we need are some games to take advantage of DirectCompute, multi-threading, Hardware Tessellation and new shader 5.0 extensions. DX11 is going to be good.

Another big feature of the product that you already learned about is Eyefinity, the ability to connect one to up-to six monitors (depending on AIC/AIB choices in outputs) to your videocard and use it in a desktop environment, or to create an incredibly wide monitor resolution to play games in. It's nice, it is niche and yes... certainly not an option many of you will use... but really it is breathtaking as well. Though really too little power to do so, the card does support Eyefinity up-to 4 monitors.
Though ATI's Series 5000 cards have been hard to get, due to yield issues at TSMC's 40nm node, things seem to be slowly picking up now and as such that was a good for AMD to cease the moment and add a new product series to their already extensive DX11 lineup.

New iPhone to have Magic Mouse-style touch sensitive casing

Apple’s next iPhone will take some influence from the Magic Mouse’s touch-sensitive smarts to add a gesture sensitive casing, according to the latest raft of rumours winging around the web. Plus we’re told to expect a Google Nexus One battling 5MP camera.
Bloomberg claims sources have told it that the new iPhone will have a touch-sensitive casing using similar technology to the Apple Magic Mouse. That sounds cool but we can’t quite work out what the benefit would be of gesturing on the back of the phone when the touchscreen UI is already pretty intuitive.
A more down-to-earth rumour suggests that the new iPhone will pack a 5MP camera and head to manufacturing in April in time for a release in June. That seems likely as the iPhone’s camera is in need of an upgrade and new iPhones usually arrive in the summer.
It’s also suggested (and it seems likely) that the iPhone OS will be updated at the same time as the new iPhone launches. That slightly contradicts yesterday’s rumours that the Apple Tablet has delayed an iPhone OS update.

 

Intel to tap 32-nanometer chips for 2010 growth

                                         Intel CEO Paul Otellini

      (Credit: Intel)

Intel's plan for growth in 2010 can be summed up in one esoteric term: 32 nanometer. That's where Intel's chips are going across the board--laptops, servers, and even new markets like smartphones, according to chief executive Paul Otellini and chief financial officer Stacy Smith, who spoke during the company's fourth-quarter earnings conference call Thursday afternoon.
Intel reported earnings Thursday that were unusually strong, blowing past even upbeat Wall Street forecasts.
And what's the secret of Intel's success? Process technology. Intel is in the midst of moving the bulk of its chips from a 45-nanometer manufacturing process to an industry-leading 32-nanometer process. Generally, the smaller the geometries, the faster and more power efficient the chip. Intel is better at executing these critical process transitions than any chipmaker on the planet.

"What we're doing...is moving 32 nanometer into the mainstream more quickly than we did with 45 (nanometer)," Otellini said during the earnings conference call. "Looking ahead over the next three months, we are planning to refresh our entire server product line with new 32-nanometer Xeon (processors)."
CFO Smith echoed this sentiment, saying that "mainstream and value versions" of 32-nanometer chips will appear later in the year, thereby completing an across-the-board transition to this new technology.
And Intel telegraphed this transition at the Consumer Electronics Show last week when it rolled out dozens of new processors based on 32-nanometer technology. These new chips include the latest versions of the Core i3, Core i5, and Core i7 processors. The mobile version of the 32-nanometer Core i5 has already made it into new laptops from Hewlett-Packard and Dell and is expected to make an appearance in new MacBook Pros from Apple.
What else is hot at Intel? Atom. This processor powers Netbooks and Intel's very large but mundane "embedded" chip business. "Atom design momentum is very strong with our new 'Pine Trail' platform in over 80 Netbook designs. In the embedded space, we now have over 600 Atom-based design wins," Otellini said.
In 2009, Atom and Netbooks became a $1.4 billion business for Intel, Smith said.
Eventually, 32-nanometer chips will also drive Intel's push into smartphones. "At CES we demonstrated progress with handhelds...built around Atom cores. We demonstrated for the first time the LG GW990 (smartphone) built with our yet-released Atom 'Moorestown' platform," Otellini said.

New Sony W350 14.1MP Camera Is Available For Pre-order

The New Sony W350 premiered at CES 2010. It features the professional-quality Carl Zeiss Vario-Tessar 4x optical zoom lens which can bring distant images closer for great outdoors, sports, and travel shots. It has a 2.7-inch (230K pixels) Clear Photo LCD display which features sharp, natural color that makes it easy to compose shots, read menus, and view photos even in bright sunlight.
A powerful 14.1-megapixed, ½.3-inch Super HAD CCD image sensor helps you capture gorgeous images with superb contrast and clarity down to the finest detail. With 14.1 megapixels, you can create stunning, photo-quality print up to A3+ (13x19-inch) size, or crop your images and still come away with high resolution shots. The W350 also features a Sweep Panorama mode which allows for wonderful panoramic shoots that you stitch together to make one stunning picture.
The Sony W350 features iAuto mode which allows for adjustments of settings in different situations and Intelligent Scene Recognition (iSCN) Mode which automatically detects different types of scenes and within seconds selects appropriate camera setting for several possible choices. It also has Optical SteadyShot image stabilization which uses a built-in gyro sensor to detect camera shake and automatically shifts the lens to help prevent blur without sacrificing the picture.