Wassup 2008 - the more things CHANGE, the more...

*had* to share this with you all. too funny, and nostalgic as well.




and, you remember the Super Friends one, right?



and for those too young, here's the ORIGINAL


this was the second...WASABI

Give me Storage!!

The latest rage in Japan is using solid state memory as a hard drive. Sure, there are the standard SSD drives which are crazy expensive.

These are more economical solutions. Like this SDB25CFS/R5 which lets you build RAID 0 with 2 CompactFlash cards! Pretty neat. SATA and IDE models available (in Japan).

There are other ones that allow both CF and SD cards.

As Ben Kingsley puts it in Sneakers, "It's all about the information!"



Lust rating: want it

A flurry of UMPCs! (well, at least in Japan)

The King of all UMPCs at least in sales is still the Asus Eee PC pictured to the right. In fact, it's at a price point below $500 in Japan! About $300. Comes with WinXP as well. Looks good, but lacks OneSeg for me.

The second best seller is the Fujitsu FMV LOOX U/B50N on the left. It's available with OneSeg tuner, and also can be used in Tablet (PC) mode which is great. There's also a SSD version out there.

Kohjinsha has their own take on the UMPC craze. It's pretty cool looking, but as the company's history with PCs in general is relatively short, the problems show. Many people have been returning their machines and "trading up" to a LOOX. Too bad, as I was even tempted in getting one. :(

Has the same features as the LOOX: OneSeg and tablet mode. Big issue is that it comes with Vista pre-installed. Even with the Intel Atom chip, just not enough juice.
Dell is also in the UMPC game. Funny, I haven't seen this here in the U.S. In any case, I tried the PC myself, and was deeply not impressed.

The keyboard feels very cheap, the trackpad isn't really responsive, and overall, it just feels ghetto. It's a shame too. I think Dell just put this out there to see what happens.






Lust rating: of all of these, I could take the LOOX. :)