■ The Lenovo
ThinkPad W700ds.
windows, email,
and whatever.
Until now, this
feature has been
readily available
only with desktop
boxes. But in January,
Lenovo (
www.lenovo
.com/us/en/) introduced a
dual-screen ThinkPad — the
W700ds — which it prefers to call a
"mobile workstation."
It is fitted with a 17 in LCD main
monitor plus a 10. 6 in slide-out
secondary one. The latter can be
adjusted at an angle of up to 30° for
easier viewing. You also get a choice
of Intel mobile quad core processors
and a NVIDIA® Quadro FX mobile
graphics CPU with up to 128 cores,
optional dual hard drives with RAID
configurations and/or solid-state
storage, and up to 8 GB of DDR3
memory. This makes possible a
maximum of 960 GB of storage.
As a Lenovo representative noted,
"This is the nitro-burning drag racer
of ThinkPads."
The main negative features
appear to be the machine's price
(ranging from $3,069 for the basic
unit to well over $8,000 with a heavy
helping of the bells, whistles, and
extended warranties), and weight ( 11
lb [ 5 kg]). The latter may explain why
the company doesn't call it a laptop.
233,906 of their friends
(apparently, at least one
applicant couldn't count to
10). The stampede on free
burgers isn't too surprising, given that Facebook has
something like 150
million users, most
of whom are in the
fast-food-gobbling age
group of 18 to 34 year olds.
But don't be too disappointed. A
Whopper with cheese contains 770
calories, 48 g of fat ( 16 g saturated),
100 mg of cholesterol, and 1,450 mg
of salt. At least your no-good friends
aren't likely to give you a coronary.
The website is still up and
running, and if you have been
sacrificed and aren't happy about it,
you can still send your ex-friend
an Angry-Gram that includes a
screaming animated sandwich.
Dick Tracy and other members of the
force were issued two-way wrist
radios. Now, 63 years later, LG
Electronics ( www.lge.com) has taken
it a step further with the LG-GD910
Touch Watch Phone. It's the commercial version of a prototype introduced
about a year ago, upgraded to
include a touchscreen interface, 3G
capabilities, and video calling.
According to LG, it's the first
watch phone in the world to feature
7.2 Mbps 3G HSDPA compatibility,
which enables high-speed data
transmission and video phone calls
using its built-in camera. It also has
voice recognition capabilities (with
or without a Bluetooth headset), a
text-to-speech feature, and a built-in
speaker for playing music files. The
device will go on sale in Europe
sometime this year but — sorry to
inform you — no release date has
been revealed for the USA.
CIRCUITS
AND DEVICES
PHONE WATCH
AND MORE
WORSE SPEAKERS/
BETTER SOUND
The concept dates back to 1946,
when cartoon police detective
WITH FRIENDS LIKE
THIS ...
Burger King — already known for
its often bewildering marketing
methods — last year instituted the
Whopper® Sacrifice website
( www.whoppersacrifice.com), aimed
at Facebook users. The concept is
simple. If you are willing to delete
10 of your Facebook friends, you can
download a small application, give
them the boot, and subsequently
receive a coupon for a free Whopper.
Alas, you are now stuck with your
Facemates, as well as the empty
stomach. BK decided to shut down
the program after people traded away
■ LG’s Touch Watch Phone brings Dick
Tracy’s wrist radio to the real world.
In the old days, a reliable rule of
thumb was that the heavier the
magnet, the better a speaker's sound
quality. The employment of light, rare
earth magnets has more or less
smacked that thumb with a hammer,
but it remains difficult to get decent
sound from the crappy little $2
transducers that come with low-end
audio systems. Addressing the
problem is the Sound Terminal
™
STA339BWS chip.
Recently introduced by
STMicroelectronics ( www.st.com),
it merges the company's audio
processing and class-D power
amplifier ICs into a single package
and includes multiband dynamic
range compression (DRC). DRC "uses
the latest sound-processing algorithms
to enhance the performance of
low-cost speakers, and also prevents
large bass signals from causing
vibrations and damaging small
speaker units."
The chip also incorporates a
seven-band equalizer and provides
continuous audio streaming when
changing channels or audio sources.
Output is configurable to provide
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