Filed under: HDTV, Home Entertainment, Storage

Ah, the sweet aroma of competition in the air. That’s what we’ve gotten a whiff of after catching an (admittedly grainy) shot of what appears to be an internal Blu-ray writing / HD DVD reading combo drive from Hitachi. The GGW-H20N should have no issues playing your favorite high-definition films on either format, and it can also burn 50GB dual-layer Blu-ray discs, BD-R, BD-RW, and the typical flavors of writable DVDs and CDs. Reportedly, the drive will also boast a speedy SATA interface and will posses a read rate of up to 6x and burn rate of 4x, but the most important detail (read: worldwide release details) was unsurprisingly omitted. Bring on the price drops.

[Via FormatWarCentral]

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Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!

Filed under: Gaming

As much as we’d like to believe we’d act as bravely as 15-year old Damian Fernandez in the face of burglars ransacking our house, the sad truth is that even equipped with Fernandez’s samurai sword, we probably would have ended up more like his sister Deanne — watching the action through slits in the closet door. Damian and Deanne were home alone in Hialeah, Florida earlier this month when a pair of young male assailants forced their way inside and began swiping valuables such as their parents’ jewlery. But when one of the men busted into Deanne’s room looking for her PlayStation 3 only to find an empty box, Damian was waiting outside with his blade of steel (artist’s rendition pictured above), ready to deliver a crushing “strike” to the guy’s chest. Long story short, Damian chased both idiots out of the house and down the street, where a police K-9 unit was later able to locate 21-year-old Javier Cotera cowering behind a palm tree. It’s not clear if Cotera — who’s now out on bail — has flipped on his buddy yet, but we can be pretty sure that both dudes are now the laughingstocks of the rest of their criminal associates.

[Via digg]

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Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!

Filed under: Handhelds

We already had a pretty good handle on General Dynamics’ ruggedized, Flipstart-like GoBook MR-1, but the company’s now gotten official with it, and is providing a few more specs and clarifications. While the MR-1 shares much in common with the Flipstart, it has gotten a few significant upgrades, including a 1.2GHz Core Solo U1400 processor, some new wireless options (including WWAN by the end of the year), and a hard drive boost to 80GB, with 16GB and 32GB SSD drives also available as an option. Of course, perhaps the most significant upgrade is its newfound ruggedness, which meets or exceeds MIL-STD 810F specifications for temperature, drop, and vibration tests, as well IP-54 specs for dust and humidity. Getting the biggest boost, however, is the device’s price, which will come in a hefty $4,450 when it’s released in September.

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Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!

Filed under: Features

Each week Ross Rubin contributes Switched On, a column about technology, multimedia, and digital entertainment:

Last week’s Switched On discussed Lala.com’s introduction of free music locker services that sync directly to the iPod (and only the iPod). However, because it believes the sampling capabilities of the original Napster days were key to driving music purchases, Lala is also developing something that is bound to shake up subscription music services such as Napster and Rhapsody — free and unlimited streaming of user-selected music from major labels.

Once agreements are secured, Lala will essentially be giving away the rough equivalent of Yahoo Music’s Unlimited’s $5/month PC streaming service.. While Lala’s version will have some offline functionality with cached tracks, it doesn”t yet offer tethered or a la carte downloads the way that Yahoo! Music and other PlaysForSure services do.

At its preview launch, Lala will offer access to the complete Warner Music library — hundreds of thousands of tracks — and is pursuing agreements with the other major labels, as well as independents. It expects to pay approximately $140 million on licenses in the next few years to spur huge increases in music sales via viral and social network marketing; something that Napster.com’s limited free listens were unable to do.

Continue reading Switched On: I’m in ur site, hearing ur t00nz

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Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!

Filed under: Meta

Here’s your chance to show some love for our very own Pete Rojas, who made the dynamically shifting Business 2.0 Who matters now list. He’s trailing behind some serious bigwigs, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try our damnedest to push him up the ranks. Seriously, let’s see some hustle for the man who redefined hustle!

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Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!