elite

On Monday, Western Digital introduced its new 500GB capacity portable USB drive for its My Passport Elite and Essential lines.

Features for both of the USB-powered Elite and Essential lines include synchronization software that lets users sync their changes and protect their information with 128-bit encryption, as well as plug-and-play capability with gaming consoles to make it easy to play music and view photos and video files on a TV.

My Passport Elite portable drives are available in bronze, titanium, westminster blue and cherry red. Additional features include:

Solid-state drives, if not yet ubiquitous, have arrived. You can find them in laptops big and small and as a high-octane storage option for gaming PCs.

SSDs made their mark by appearing in the trendiest ultraportables like the Apple MacBook Air and Asus Eee PC--typically as stratospherically priced options, fashion statements rarely seen in the real world.

These drives are now coming off their rarefied shelf space and appearing across a wider range of laptops and ultraportable computers.

Any new, lightweight enterprise laptop worth its salt comes with a large-capacity solid-state drive option now. Hewlett-Packard recently introduced the 3-pound EliteBook … Read more

Update with Dunnington and Core i7 photos, text.

The latest and greatest silicon and derivative products is what the Intel Developer Forum is all about. Moorestown, Tolapai, and Canmore are just a few of the chips detailed at IDF this week, while UrbanMax, new netbooks, and the first laptops based on the quad-core mobile processor were among showcased products.

Intel Chairman Barrett brought out Carnegie Mellon University's Johnny Chung Lee, who demonstrated how cheap, off-the-shelf technology--in this case a makeshift whiteboard--can go a long way. "To be interesting today, technology has to be the fastest, the best, the brightest, the lightest, but here you can see if you sacrifice a little bit of capability and performance for dramatic savings in cost, you can have a pretty dramatic impact," Chung said.

One of the more novel devices demonstrated was the 10-inch Intel UrbanMax a computer that can switch between a laptop and tablet. This by itself isn't groundbreaking because tablet PCs from Hewlett-Packard and Toshiba already do this. The novelty is the size and design: it is smaller than an ultraportable--like the Toshiba Portege--yet is designed like an oversize mobile Internet device such as Compal JAX 10. When configured as a tablet, the keyboard is hidden but can morph into a laptop by sliding out the keyboard, which tilts the screen.

An Intel official demonstrating the device said that "UrbanMax is an innovation platform from Intel. This is a product-ready concept." UrbanMax uses "Montevina" Centrino 2 small form-factor (SSF) silicon. SSF chip packaging is used in the MacBook Air and results in lower voltage and smaller size than typical Intel low-power mobile processors.

It is interesting to note that major PC makers have adopted Intel concept designs in the past. Last year, Intel offered a ultra-thin laptop concept design that was eventually adopted by HP for its Voodoo Envy 133 notebook. … Read more

Hewlett-Packard on Monday announced three notebooks, one as light as 3 pounds, that will use upcoming Intel low-power chips and solid-state drives.

The EliteBook 2530p and 2730p replace the current 2510p and 2710p models. The biggest changes are a brushed, anodized aluminum exterior casing, new wireless broadband modules, the use of upcoming Intel 45-nanometer ultra-low-voltage (ULV) processors, and the option for an 80GB solid-state drive.

HP will replace current low-power Intel processors with upcoming 45nm processors, said Keith LeFebvre, vice president and general manager for business notebooks, HP PSG Americas. However, LeFebvre did not specify which low-power processor models it … Read more

LOS ANGELES--This week's Siggraph conference attracted a diverse crowd of graphic designers, animators, and industrial designers, and both HP and Lenovo were on-site to show off their new mobile workstations for graphics professionals. I had a chance to meet with both companies at the show to talk about some of the key features of these new models.

HP started the week by announcing the 17-inch EliteBook 8730w and 15.4-inch EliteBook 8530w, both of which support Intel's not-yet-official quad-core Core 2 Extreme processors, 8GB of RAM, and Nvidia's next-generation Quadro FX cards with up to 1GB of VRAM. In addition, these latest EliteBooks feature a few small design enhancements, such as a new latch designed to reduce stress on the display and a special coating on the keys and touch pad to help prevent wear. Even cooler is the VGA camera on the display bezel, which pairs with included software to double as a business card reader.

The EliteBook 8730w is also the first workstation on the market to include an HP DreamColor display option. The RGB backlit-LED screen can display millions of colors and displays true color even when the screen is dimmed. I got a quick demo of the EliteBook 8730w and I was impressed with not only the stunning color quality but also the ease of switching back and forth between sRGB and Adobe RGB on the display.

Also remarkable: both the 15- and 17-inch EliteBooks were quite thin and sleek, especially for such high-powered machines.

After HP I moved on to get a glance at Lenovo's ThinkPad W700 workstation, which was announced Tuesday. The beast was even larger than I'd imagined; after all, Lenovo representatives have emphasized that it's a workstation first, and mobile computer second. It's obviously larger than HP's 17-inch workstation, but the ThinkPad W700 also packs some bonus features: a built-in color calibrator and an integrated digitizer pad next to the touch pad. … Read more

Kingston Technology has notified us that it's shipping its 32GB Elite Pro SDHC Flash memory card, the largest capacity in Kingston's Elite Pro line of SDHC cards, which currently includes 4-, 8- and 16GB capacities. According to Kingston, its new fast 32GB card can "capture more than 6,000 still images with a 10MP camera and over eight hours of video (for 6Mbps HD Extended recording)."

The latest and greatest high-capacity cards don't come cheap and this one has a suggested retail price of $308, though we've seen it online for closer to $200. … Read more

The Motion Picture Association of America has helped convict an administrator for EliteTorrents.org, a peer-to-peer site, of felony copyright infringement and conspiracy, the U.S. Justice Department announced Friday.

Daniel Dove, 26, of Clintwood, Va., was the first criminal conviction after jury trial for peer-to-peer copyright infringement and the eighth overall resulting from a federal crackdown called Operation D-Elite that targeted administrators and people who provided content that was distributed through the BitTorrents hub.

The case began in 2005, when federal agents raided and shut down the popular Web site that had distributed copyrighted music and movies, including Star … Read more

As part of its massive product announcement on Tuesday, HP is introducing the semirugged EliteBook 6930p, a 14.1-inch laptop that's built to MIL-STD-810F specifications for vibration, dust, humidity, altitude, and temperature. That means the EliteBook's brushed anodized aluminum casing and magnesium-alloy chassis can withstand temperatures ranging from -20° F up to 140° F, humidity up to 95 percent, and altitudes up to 15,000 feet, among other feats.

Like most 14.1-inch laptops, the EliteBook 5930p will include a full-size spill-resistant keyboard that's as useful around the office as it is in extreme conditions. The keyboard deck includes a fingerprint reader and a row of touch-sensitive media controls. Buyers can opt for a backlit-LED display; every model includes a 2-megapixel Webcam in the display bezel.

Inside the case, you'll find Intel's Centrino 2 platform, with Penryn-class Intel Core 2 Duo 9000 and 8000 series CPUs, the Intel Mobile 45 chipset (with optional vPro support), and a choice of integrated Intel or discrete ATI graphics. Based on Intel's delayed release dates for the Centrino 2 components, we expect the ATI-based EliteBook to ship in July, with the integrated-graphics version to follow in August.

Pricing starts at $1,179; a full list of specs is after the jump.

… Read more