Mad Catz Cyborg M.M.O. 7 Gaming Mouse Now Available for Pre-order

At $129.99, the Cyborg M.M.O. 7 Gaming Mouse might be the most expensive rodent you ever buy. It's also one of the most flexible. Now available on pre-order from Mad Catz, the Cyborg M.M.O. 7 is a funktastic looking mouse for gamers with an adjustable weight system, ergonomic finger resting places, multiple buttons, and a high DPI sensor.

The DPI is adjustable from 100 to 6400 in increments of 25, allowing you to fine tune the mouse's behavior based on whether you're charging through an area like Rambo or sniping from a distance. It has 50G of acceleration, a 1,000Hz polling rate, tracking speed of up to 6m/sec, slick PTFE feet, and a gold plated USB connector attached to a braided cable.

It's the adjustable weight system that's the main attraction here. The mouse ships with five 6-gram weights with a storage canister to hold the ones you opt not to use. This is supplemented with two additional pinkie finger rests and two additional palm rests, all of which adds up to what Mad Catz claims is the world's most adjustable gaming mouse.

Clear Introduces Spot Voyager And Hub Express 4G Modems

Clearwire may be biting into LTE in the near future, but WiMAX is at the company's core, and evidently, so is sleek design. The company just launched the Clear Spot Voyager, one of the smallest 4G hotspots on the market. It offers unlimited 4G data plans, and if that one isn't in your wheelhouse, there's also the Clear Hub Express, a combination 4G modem and wireless router to give your home or office high-speed wireless internet.


The Voyager offers 4G sharing with up to eight Wi-Fi devices at the same time, and brings up to six hours of battery life in a form factor of 2.6" squared. The CLEAR Hub Express provides users 4G internet and is the only piece of equipment needed to set up a 4G internet hotspot in a home or office. With the device's built-in wireless router, users have an instant wi-fi network with no set-up or installation required. Unlike service plans from traditional wireless carriers which cap data usage, CLEAR offers unlimited* 4G usage plans that do not require long-term service contracts.

CLEAR offers unlimited* 4G coverage starting as low as $34.99/month for either a home or mobile plan. CLEAR service is currently available in areas of the United States where approximately 130 million people live. A detailed map of service availability can be found at www.clear.com/coverage.

The CLEAR Hub Express is manufactured by Gemtek, costs $99.99 (plus tax and shipping) and is 6.1" x 9.3" x 3.7". The CLEAR Spot Voyager and CLEAR Hub Express both currently are available -- the question is, are you still into WiMAX?

Kinect Sensing Technology Rumored To Hit Notebooks

It didn't take Microsoft long to realize that they had more than they bargained for with Kinect. While originally intended only for use with the Xbox 360, the motion sensing device soon found a home with PC hackers. After first rejecting the notion, Microsoft soon changed their tune and began to embrace the hackerspace. Earlier this month at the company's CES keynote, Steve Ballmer officially unveiled the Kinect for Windows package, which will be fully compatible with Windows PCs and enable hackers to do nearly anything with their Kinect, so long as there's a PC and USB port nearby. Now, The Daily is reporting that the Kinect could soon be coming to notebooks and other portable computers.

Lenovo Quietly Launches IdeaPad Y470p Laptop with Radeon HD 7690M Graphics

If you're looking for a well equipped laptop sporting AMD's new generation graphics technology, Lenovo may have exactly what you've been pining for. Lenovo quietly slipped out its IdeaPad Y470p, a 14-inch notebook with an Intel Core i7 2670QM processor (2.2GHz, 6MB cache), 8GB of DDR3-1333 memory, and AMD Radeon HD 7690 graphics with 1GB of video memory. That's a solid foundation, folks.

It also has a 750GB hard drive (5400 RPM), DVD burner, 2MP webcam, 802.11b/g/n Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 2.1 + EDR, GbE, HDMI, premium JBL speakers, three USB ports + USB/eSATA combo, 6-in-1 card reader, 6-cell battery, and Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit wrapped in a "real metal cover with brushed-metal effect."

The Y470p lists for $1,499 MSRP with a Web price of $1,249. That seems a bit much for a 14-inch laptop, but don't despair if this happens to be your dream laptop, Lenovo currently has it listed for $799 after eCoupon (WKLYDEALSY470P), or about the price of a lower end Ultrabook.

Estimated ship date is February 13, 2012.

AMD Quietly Adopting "Tick-Tock" Model for Micro-Architectures.

Intel Corp.'s so-called "tick-tock" model  of transitioning to new manufacturing processes and micro-architectures has proved to be very efficient in making Intel the maker of the highest-performance microprocessors. Apparently, its smaller rival Advanced Micro Devices is also plotting something similar, but a bit differently.

As it appears from AMD's documents observed by an X-bit labs reader (in the comments for this news-story), starting from Piledriver micro-architecture and going forward, AMD's Fusion accelerated processing units (chips that integrate both x86 and stream processing cores) will feature "reduced", or "early" micro-architectural feature-set, whereas central processing units (CPUs) based on new designs will feature "full" or "late" feature-set. As a result, x86 performance of the former will be lower than x86 performance of the latter.

SanDisk Sees 2012 as Inflection Point for Solid-State Drives.

SanDisk Corp., a leading supplier of NAND flash-based products, believes that this year the demand for solid-state drives (SSDs) will start to grow rapidly as a result of lowering prices, better user experienced and maturity of technology. Even now SanDisk considers its consumer and enterprise SSD businesses a success, going forward the company expects further growth.

"We expect 2012 to mark the inflection point of SSD growth for SanDisk, with both the enterprise in client markets becoming strong contributors to our revenue growth in 2012 and beyond," said Sanjay Mehrota, chief executive officer and president of SanDisk, during the latest conference call with financial analysts.

Imagination Technologies May Introduce Standalone Ray-Tracing Accelerator.

Imagination Technologies, which could not popularize its graphics accelerators for PCs in early 2000s and decided to concentrate on mobile graphics adapters instead, may return to PCs and bring-in real-time ray-tracing accelerators.

Imagination Technologies tried to popularize its tile architecture for graphics processing units (GPUs) in the late nineties and the early thousands. While some products, e.g. Power VR Kyro, managed to boast respectable levels of performance, ImgTec could not capture significant share of the market due to very fast progress demonstrated by ATI Technologies and Nvidia Corp. and the lack of ties with PC OEMs. But the company may get back to discrete accelerator cards for personal computers already this year when it launches real-time ray-tracing accelerators.

Nvidia Lowers Revenue Expectations Due to Hard Drives Shortages.

Nvidia Corp. on Wednesday announced that it expects revenue for the fourth quarter ending January 29, 2012, to be lower than the company's previous outlook provided back in October. The developer of multimedia chips blames shortages of hard disk drives as well as lowering demand towards Tegra 2 system-on-chips for the lowering revenue.

 

WD Does Not Expect Ultrabooks to Boost Popularity of SSDs.

Ultrabooks are projected to capture a considerable part of the notebook market and redefine it in many ways. Many analysts as well as Intel Corp. believe that ultrabooks will boost the demand towards solid-state drives considerably thanks to higher performance and lower power consumption compared to hard disk drives. But Western Digital is confident that HDDs will continue to be popular even inside ultrabooks thanks to low price and high capacities.

 

"I expect ultrabooks to have traditional hard drives, hybrid hard drives and SSDs. [...] We think that the SSD penetration profile will be in very low single digits in a mature ultrabook environment. We see an emerging position for hybrids a little early to develop a view on exactly what percentage of penetration, but we see hybrids as a very compelling alternative on the performance side to solid-state on bang for the buck. We anticipate that in large capacity environments, traditional hard drives will continue to be the compelling solution," said John Coyne, chief executive officer of WD, during the most-recent conference call with financial analysts.

Micron Takes Over Virtensys to Boost Enterprise SSD Effort.

Micron Technology and Virtensys have announced that the companies have signed an agreement for Micron to acquire the assets of privately held Virtensys, a provider of PCIe-sharing solutions based in Manchester, England and Beaverton, Oregon.

The transaction would further strengthen Micron's enterprise storage portfolio by combining Virtensys' award-winning PCIe virtualization technology with Micron's solid state drives (SSDs), enabling data centers to share local storage across multiple servers. The agreement would enable a combination of enterprise technology solutions that have the opportunity to virtualize SSD storage on the path to a more flexible and dynamic data center.

"Virtensys' PCIe-sharing technology has helped change the way data center operators manage and deploy their virtualized I/O resources, and Micron's enterprise PCIe drive delivers market-leading speed, reliability and power efficiency," said Edward Doller, Micron vice president and chief memory systems architect.

The transaction is subject to closing conditions and is currently anticipated to close by the end of the month. Specific terms of the proposed agreement are confidential.

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"Virtensys has served as an OEM focused company working to deliver innovative solutions with some of the world's leading server, storage and I/O adapter manufacturers. Our technology complements Micron's enterprise products as we strive to empower the virtual data center, and we are delighted to join the Micron family," said John Nicholson, chairman and chief executive of Virtensys.