…Or how no one can make a decent looking PC aside from Apple.

It’s not hideous, but it’s not going to win any beauty pageants either. Take a look at the iMac. That’s gorgeous and the girls will be complimenting you for having one because it looks sleek and “posh”.

This, “Eee Monitor” from ASUS, however, looks so very cheap by comparison. It’ll probably be several hundreds cheaper when it comes to pricing, but why must PC users be forever doomed to half-hearted copies?

We were all excited about the prospects of owning an iPhone 3G in Canada. $299.99 for the device itself sounds great, but we all knew it was going to be bound to a contract and a plan? The question was: how much was this plan going to cost?

We finally have answers from Rogers. Dreams officially crushed.

$60 per month for 400 MB of data and 150 anytime minutes? Do not want. Talk about price gouging. Some of us are upset, but some are even more so.

I’ve made a graph showing the difference of price for the IPhone between Rogers Canada and other countries.

Pretty much the worst

Specifications wise, the 4870 and 4850 only differ in one area: core and memory clockspeeds. 750/900 (GDDR5) vs 625/993 (GDDR3). Everything else from transistor count to number of processors remain the same. The reason why the clockspeeds are so much higher for the 4870 is attributed to the default dual-slot cooler it comes with. More details? Check out the review from AnandTech.

It’s not a surprise to see how competitive the 4850 remains. It’s not that the 4870 is slow, it’s actually quite a bargain at $299 — it just doesn’t seem very appealing since the 4850 is so good!

Nvidia’s Geforce 9800 GTX+ for $229 is no match for the overall buffness of the ATI Radeon HD 4850. Not really surprising since Nvidia didn’t even believe the speed bump warranted a full numerical upgrade.

Interestingly, AnandTech pointed out how the Geforce 8800 GTS 512MB and the Geforce 8800 GT are at a disadvantage when it comes to pricing. They will need to either lower price or axe one of the cards from retail shelves.

Since Nvidia has no real answer to the AMD Radeon HD 4850, I guess we have new mid-range king.

Intel’s Atom based devices are slowly rolling out, but what about AMD? They have nothing at the moment. We’ll have to wait until 2009 for AMD’s contribution to this up and coming processor market. As for details, check out this quote:

“This new report still doesn’t mention a name for the chip, but it says AMD will base it on a 65nm K8 core clocked at 1.2GHz. That mostly corroborates the leaked slide, which mentioned a 1GHz AMD64 CPU with 256KB of cache, a built-in DDR2-400 memory controller, an 8W power envelope, and a 27 x 27-mm ball-grid-array package. AMD will supposedly attempt to undercut Intel’s Atom with lower prices.”

Cheaper than Atom? Not bad. Consume more power than Atom? Ooo…I don’t know about that.

The Geforce 8800 GT is a fine card at approximately $199 USD, but that’s months ago and we’re now looking ahead to the new “hotness”. The new AMD Radeon HD 4850 looks to be the next great card for that mid-range price point. The Tech Report has a great first look with AMD’s new card and I am impressed. It outpaces the newly priced Geforce 9800 GTX.

It’s a single slot and as much as I enjoy single slot cards, the high temperatures worry me a bit. Regardless, it looks like it’s our new mid-range king. Nvidia is trying to fight back with a overclocked and refined Geforce 9800 GTX+, but until we have numbers from that card and a competitive price: they’ve got nothing.

It’s huge. 1.4 billion transistors type of huge. There’s a lot of computing power in this video card and coming in at $650 USD, it better be the fastest video card in the world. Unfortunately, this is where it falls short; it isn’t the fastest video card in the world. It’s the fastest single GPU video card, but the Geforce 9800 GX2 which is available for cheaper still manages to outperform it. It’s a dual-GPU card and it probably will cause a few headaches with driver profiles, but the bottom line remains the same: it is still faster.

The performance increase is a little disappointing, however I’m disappointed by the pricing most of all. The GTX 280 will set you back the most at the mentioned $650 USD. The GTX 260 is cheaper at $400 USD, but it’s still outperformed by two Geforce 8800 GT video cards in SLI which can be picked for less than $400 USD.

Two reviews from two great sites for those that are interested in reading more and seeing benchmarks:
AnandTech
Tech Report

Update: Make that a 3 year contract.

That’s cheap. Cheaper than a iPod Touch! Unfortunately, you must sign up for a contract with either Fido or Rogers. No idea how much the plans will cost and also, no details on the contract-less unit. Bummer.

As for specifications? It’s apparently a little bit thicker and the battery life is more or less the same compared to the old iPhone. (ie: not stellar) Still, the arrival of an iPhone in Canada is enticing. Especially when I could play Super Monkey Ball on it:

(more…)

Intel has been on top of the CPU performance world for awhile now. Ever since their Conroe architecture hit two years ago, we’ve been blessed with some of the greatest processors ever. Now it’s time for Intel to show that their “tick-tock” strategy works.

It works and AnandTech has a great sneak preview of the 8-threaded monster. Here’s an abbreviated summary:

• Native quad-core design
• Hyper-threading enabled for each core. (4 physical cores + 4 logical cores = 8 threads)
• Integrated memory multi-channel (not dual channel) controller (Uses three 64-bit DD3 channels)
• 20 - 30% performance improvement over its predecessory (Penryn)
• Power consumption only up by approximately 10%
• Will require a new socket: Socket LGA 1366

Completely new CPU with Nehalem? Why not? I’m in no rush.