Kingmax Releases World's First Transparent Flash Drive

Kingmax figured it may as well use this year's edition of Computex (Computex 2012) to show off something it can honestly say no one else has tried to market so far. We are, naturally, speaking about the world's first transparent flash drive, although the term is utilized in a somewhat misleading fashion, all things considered. We say this because the product is not actually see-through. Not exactly. Instead, the case is made in such a way that the internal flash chip and wire-bonding can be seen through a clear glass “window.” Kingmax UI-05, as the newcomer is called, has a streamlined look, a metal housing (with the aforementioned glass section on the top side) and a LED light (blue). Whether or not this makes the...

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TRENDnet's Three New PoE+ Internet Switches

Normal Ethernet switches usually have a bunch of Ethernet ports and a power input, where the special adapter goes, but TRENDnet released three switches bereft of the latter. Pretty much everything runs on electricity, this being the reason why even the smallest gizmos need to be plugged in wall sockets once in a while. Ethernet switches normally have to stay plugged in all the time, since they don't have batteries like phones, tablets, laptops, etc. There is a certain standard that removes that dependence though: PoE, short for Power Over Ethernet. TRENDnet recently put it into practice. What it did was launch three switches that get all the energy they need via the LAN cable. PoE is based on the IEEE 802.11af...

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SmartKey TV: Another Android 4.0 Dongle

Not so long after covered the InfiniTek Pocket TV, another small device shows up, claiming to be able to grant normal TVs all the abilities of a Smart TV. Of course, “normal” is used loosely here. For the SmartKey TV, as it is called, to work, the TV still needs an HDMI input. Once that condition is met though, LiquidTv, the Italian company behind the product, promises that Android 4.0 will be at owners' disposal. Hardware-wise, SmartKey TV relies on a 1 GHz ARM Cortex A9 CPU and the Mali 400 graphics. 512 MB of RAM are present too, along with 4 GB of NAND Flash storage, an USB host port, Wi-Fi radio and a microSDHC card slot. July is when sales start, for 99 Euro / $124, or 119 Euro / $150 for one with a bundled remote...

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Retina MacBook Pros Confirmed

The well-placed sources leaking tidbit after tidbit to the folks at 9to5 have confirmed the Retina-enabled MacBook Pros. They won’t be cheap, and the specs go up to 16GB of RAM with 768GB SSDs. That’s right, you’ll be shelling out as much as $4,000 (3,200 EUR) for these babies, the sources say. Here are the configurations, complete with verifiable part numbers: MC975LL/A – MBP 15.4/2.3/8GB/256GB FLASH-USA MC976LL/A – MBP 15.4/2.6/8GB/512GB FLASH-USA MD831LL/A – MBP 15.4/2.7/16GB/768GB FLASH-USA Apple is also said to be upgrading the existing range of MacBook Pros with double the RAM and platter-based storage, as well as speedier CPUs. Tim Cook will have the full details on these computers in less than two hours from now. ...

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Newport Media Claims to Have Made the Smallest and Lowest-Power WiFi Chip Ever

A gadget can only be as small as its components allow, so Newport Media's invention might garner quite a bit of interest. The fabless communications semiconductor company created the NMC1000, a 40-pin Wi-Fi SoC that measures 5 x 5 mm (0.19 x 0.19 inches). As if that wasn't enough, the company also offers 2.5 x 2.5 mm packages (0.09 x 0.09 inches). This small package needs the smallest external BOM (Bill of Materials) among WiFi chips. The NMC1000 combines all RF and Baseband circuitry required for IEEE 802.11b, g, n-compliant operation. That includes power amplifiers and switches. Volume production won't begin until the fourth quarter of 2012, but engineering samples will start shipping next month (July, 2012). “As...

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Debian Wheezy Modified for Raspberry Pi Available for Testing

After Raspberry Pi's troublesome launch and given the fact that developers still can't satisfy the demand, users will be happy to hear that a testing version of Debian is now available for the mini-pc. According to a blog post on The Raspberry Pi Foundation website, a Debian Wheezy version for Raspberry Pi mini PC can be downloaded and tested by the users (previous distributions were based on Squeeze). The modified Linux distribution comes with some interesting features out of the box such as Scratch, Python, the Midori internet browser, a configuration tool for common initial setup tasks, USB drives auto mount, omxplayer, and much more. Raspberry Pi relies on an ARM processor with a clock speed of 700 MHz, 256 MB of RAM, an...

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Time of Arrival Uncovered for AMD's Dual-GPU Graphics Card

Even though there were several Radeon HD 7970 X2 graphics card sightings or rumors floating around Computex 2012, AMD's Radeon HD 7990 didn't actually come up in any conversation or report. At this point, if we are reading right what 3DCenter.org posted, the dual-GPU HD 7990 might not appear at all, not in that form anyhow. AMD probably doesn't have a problem coming up with a board design, but it might not manage to make a product capable of matching, or besting, NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 690 in terms of performance-per-watt. Not in good time at any rate. As such, it might leave the matter in the hands of OEMs that have already exposed HD 7970 X2 (HIS, PowerColor, etc.) And here is the one problem left: the ETA is August...

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Facebook's World Domination Map Only Has a Couple of Big Holes, Russia and China

Facebook is closing in on one billion monthly active users. It's already the biggest website in the world in many places and by several metrics, page views, unique visitors and so on. Facebook dominates the space, social networking, even more than Google dominates search. Still, there are some holdouts and topping them is going to be hard or impossible in some cases, for example, where the site is blocked in the country. The big places where Facebook still isn't market leader remain the same, China and Russia. Facebook is blocked in China, so local sites dominate, QZone is the biggest there, followed by Tencent Weibo and Sina Weibo, the latter two being similar to Twitter. In Russia, the local players rule, VKontakte is...

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Sapphire’s Vapor-X HD 7970 6 GB Monster

We already know that AMD’s Radeon HD 7970 is a very capable GPU and that it currently holds the world record for single-GPU video cards in FutureMark’s 3D Mark 11 Extreme score and Performance score, as we documented here and here. The thing is that Nvidia’s Kepler is quite a lot more efficient than AMD’s Tahiti architecture and, despite it having 19% less transistors and a 33% narrower memory BUS, it is able to overtake AMD’s Radeon HD 7970 reference edition. On the other hand, it is well known that AMD’s first generation of GCN GPU is quite able to handle overclocking and has achieved very high frequencies. It’s no wonder that Tahiti is the “overclocker’s best friend,” but even AIB partners have released a heap of pre-overclocked...

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EVGA's Quad-Slot 2WIN Gemini Dual-GTX 680

Going by its Computex 2012 exhibition, EVGA is one of the companies that will launch a super-powered version of the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 680 graphics adapter. We have to say that this 2WIN Gemini video card took us by surprise, and not because of its actual performance parameters. In fact, beyond the existence of 4 GB of GDDR5 VRAM memory and two GK104 chips, the card's specs were left, for the most part, shrouded in mystery. This is not so different from how ASUS showed off the dual-GPU Mars III monster, but neglected to mention what speeds the GK104 GPUs sported.  EVGA's 2WIN Gemini is even more of a dual-chip monster. You can tell just by looking at it though. After all, it's not every day that people get to...

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AMD's Awaited Desktop Trinity APUs Detailed Fully

Advanced Micro Devices may have launched the Trinity series of A-Series accelerated processing units back in May, but the product lineup was not complete by any means. What we mean by that is that only mobile APUs were released, for laptops (with Lightning Bolt technology, of all things) and tablets. Desktop units, however, were withheld, either because they weren't ready yet or due to unripe marketing conditions. Probably both. Speaking of desktop Trinity chips, the most recent word on the matter, albeit unofficial, is that they have been delayed. Previously, they were expected to appear in August, but now it's in September or October when they are most likely to show. Whether or not this is true, we don't know...

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ASUS Rep Confirms Rumored Google Nexus Tablet

Google and ASUS have been long rumored to be getting ready for the release of a tablet PC in the popular Nexus lineup of devices, and some confirmation on the matter has just emerged. Last week at the COMPUTEX show in Taipei, an ASUS representative spilled the beans on the upcoming device, but requested anonymity. According to Android Authority, said rep confirmed that the device would be unveiled before the end of the month, and it also said that “it will be awesome.” That does not give us much, indeed, but it does confirm that the device is real, and that Google will make it official soon, most probably at the Google I/O conference slated for San Francisco at the end of the month. Previous rumors on this tablet...

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First AMD Radeon HD7970 GHZ Edition Benchmark Results

AMD’s plan to release a 1 GHz edition of the company’s top performing GPU seems to have paid off.  The Tahiti architecture appears to be well-equipped to handle Nvidia’s Kepler offensive without requiring much effort on AMD’s part. Here are the first benchmark results that have surfaced the internet. AMD’s Tahiti is not as efficient as Nvidia’s Kepler architecture. It is true that it was launched earlier and has a greater number of transistors but this and the 385-bit versus 256-bit memory interface allows it to achieve much better results in general computing. The Graphics Core Next architecture seems to have much better performance when scientific and GPU computing is involved. The company’s Tahiti GPU implementation...

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EVGA GeForce GTX 680 Classified Graphics Card

NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 680 was the ruler of the single-GPU add-in-board market for a while, but the AMD Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition and custom-made versions have hurled the title of strongest graphics card into uncertainty. At this point, there is no clear-cut winner, regardless of what both sides say. As such, prospective customers will have to more closely, and individually, examine each company's inventions. The product we are going to look at today is the EVGA GeForce GTX 680 Classified. According to AnandTech, it was brought to Computex 2012, the trade show that took place in Taipei, Taiwan last week. It is implied to be EVGA's best GTX 680 graphics adapter to date, with a non-reference PCB, tough cooling and, of course,...

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