Personal Computing

For those of us who want a little more oomph out of our computers’ sound systems, USB-powered speakers certainly offer a simple solution, although they tend to be less powerful than speakers that incorporate the more traditional 3.5mm jack. Well, today XtremeMac unveiled its Tango Bar – a 10-watt USB sound bar for Macs or PCs, that reportedly delivers twice the output of most of its competitors. Read More

Looking to build on the success of its original PB oneTwo all-in-one desktop computer solutions, Packard Bell has announced two new slimmed-down revamps in the shape of the 21.5-inch PB oneTwo M and the 23-inch PB oneTwo L. Both space-saving, touchscreen models will feature second generation Intel Core i processor options, a choice of NVIDIA or AMD discrete graphics, a high definition webcam and the option of a Blu-ray optical drive, when they go on sale later this month in Europe. Read More

If you’ve got fat fingers, then you probably find it difficult to peck at the tiny keyboards – virtual or physical – on mobile phones. You could just use a traditional stylus, although doing so kind of takes away from the intuitive “hands-on” aspect of finger typing. Well, that’s where the iDigiTip comes in. It’s got the fine tip of a stylus, but because you wear it on the end of your finger or thumb, you can still type like the slimmer-fingered folk. Read More

It's only been just a few short years since the Roadrunner supercomputer broke the petaflop processing performance barrier - that's a quadrillion floating-point operations per second. Shorter still since Fujitsu 's K computer secured the world's top ranking with an incredible performance of 8.162 petaflops. Now, the company has announced global availability for its PRIMEHPC FX10 supercomputer, which can be scaled up to a 1,024 rack configuration for 23.2 petaflops of theoretical processing power. Read More

Surely one of the greatest fears of modern parents is that their child will fall prey to an online sexual predator. It's estimated that there are over 15 million photographs of child abuse victims in circulation online, and the very nature of the internet makes stemming the spread of such material a difficult and laborious task for criminal investigators. The development of an automated assistance system for image and video evaluation by Fraunhofer researchers is set to make that task a little easier, and a lot quicker. The desCRY software uses complex algorithms to determine if an image or video from a suspect's confiscated storage medium depicts child abuse, in a fraction of the time currently taken to manually trawl through the hundreds of thousands of files often stored on a typical computer's hard drive. Read More

Ideum has just given its 55-inch MT55 Platform and Pro multi-touch tables an Intel i7 processor upgrade that sees them benefit from a performance boost of 30 percent and 20 percent respectively. Both tables also gain more onboard storage and improved connectivity options. The company has additionally taken the opportunity to put the Platform model's ruggedness to the test - video after the jump. Read More

While Solid State Drives (SSDs) are seen as the way of the future for computer data storage and their prices have started to come down as their capacities increase, they still can't compete with traditional Hard Disk Drives (HDDs) in terms of bang for your buck. Now a team of researchers from Singapore has moved the goalposts yet again and shown traditional HDDs still have some life in them by developing a process that can increase the data recording density of HDDs to six times that of current models. Read More

Aimed at heavy combat gaming, AZiO's new Levetron Mech4 is a modular keyboard design that enables the numeric keypad and macro D-pad with six programmable keys to be configured to suit your style. Mech4 also has comes special seals and drainage gutters that prevent spills from ending your virtual battle and the keyboard's life. Read More

If you’re like me, you’re waiting for storage capacities to increase and prices to decrease before ditching the traditional platter-based hard drive and jumping on the SSD (solid-state drive) train to take advantage of lower power consumption and faster boot up and access times. Having already released the world’s first 3.5-inch 1 TB SSD in 2009, OCZ has now removed the capacity hurdle for laptops with the release of the world’s first 2.5-inch SSD that is available in capacities up to 1 TB. Read More