Boost

Boost Mobile released the Sanyo Juno Tuesday, and if you think it looks familiar, that's because it's essentially a rebranding of the Sanyo SCP-2700.

The SCP-2700 is from Sprint, so we suppose it only makes sense that the company's prepaid arm would offer the same handsets. As you would expect, the Juno is unchanged from the original--it's a slate-style messaging handset with a 1.3-megapixel camera, Bluetooth, and not much else--but at least it's only $99.99 without a contract.

Ford Motor announced Wednesday at the 2010 SAE World Congress that it's incorporating cooled EGR (exhaust gas recirculation) into its EcoBoost repertoire of gas engines.

EcoBoost versions of Ford power trains incorporate the direct injection and turbocharging technology previously restricted to diesel engines to offer more power to gas engines while still maintaining the same level of efficiency. The EcoBoost version of the 2010 Ford Flex SEL, for example, offers a V6 engine that can make 355 horsepower and 350 pound-feet of torque, but get the same mileage as the base model V6 engine that makes 262 horsepower and … Read more

BitTorrents have washed away the ancient ways of file hosting, leaving a few isolated islands in a sea of peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing networks. With the sea change has come another flood, that of free BitTorrent clients and the inevitable raft of follow-on software designed to wring every drop of performance and capacity out of your bandwidth. Foxmediatools' BoostMachine is just such an app, a "universal BitTorrent downloading optimization tool" that works like a PC plumber's helper to open up your pipes and let the torrents flow freely. It's about as simple a tool, too, since it'… Read more

This program, like many others, promises to clean your Registry, make your computer run faster, and, if you're lucky, do your dishes, too. At least when it comes to cleaning your Registry, Advanced Registry Optimizer seems to do a pretty good job.

The scan process was easy to initiate and was done in about 3 minutes, although don't forget that the scan time depends on the computer system. A smart-looking row of five tabs and their labels makes navigating the program options stress-free, and the lack of lag on the system was much appreciated. The user interface has … Read more

LAS VEGAS--Boost Mobile announced at CES 2010 a new $50 monthly unlimited plan on Sprint's nationwide network to start January 13. Only a few handsets are eligible for this plan at launch, and they are Kyocera's Sanyo Mirro SCP3810 and the Sanyo Incognito SCP6760. Boost Mobile is also offering a $60 BlackBerry monthly unlimited plan for the BlackBerry Curve 8330.

The Sanyo Mirro is the only one on the list we have yet to review; it's a simple flip phone with a glossy finish, a 1.3-megapixel camera, GPS, and Bluetooth. The Mirro is $99.99, the … Read more

Boost Mobile added unlimited calls to Canada (except Northern Territories) and landlines in Mexico City, Guadalajara, and Monterrey as part of its International Connect plan today. Launched earlier this year, the International Connect plan costs $10 a month and includes unlimited text messaging and push-to-talk with Canada, Baja California, Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, Peru, and Chile for a flat fee.

To sweeten the deal even further, Boost Mobile has also lowered its handset prices to $99.99 for the Motorola Clutch i465 and $149.99 for the Motorola Debut i856.

Motorola added a new handset to its iDEN workhouse line today when it introduced the i410. Destined for Boost Mobile, the i410 has a rugged flip phone design in black and silver. The small external display sits in the middle of the etched front panel, while inside you'll find a color display and the standard navigation array and keypad.

Features are firmly on the low end. There's no camera, but you get GPS, Bluetooth, a speakerphone, messaging, an Opera browser, and a personal organizer. Pricing was not immediately disclosed.

Intel promotes the Turbo Boost technology in its new Core i7 Mobile processors as a way to adapt to the needs of the software and get more performance from the chip, but this isn't the real reason the technology exists.

The new "Clarksfield" Core i7 Mobile processors introduced at the Intel Developer Forum last week are certainly very impressive. They're huge high-performance quad-core chips with Hyper-Threading, support for two channels of DDR3-1333 DRAM, and an on-die PCI Express controller for the fastest possible connection to discrete graphics chips.

In his IDF session announcing these parts, Intel Vice President Mooly Eden said the best of these parts, the 2GHz Core i7-920XM Extreme Edition, is "the fastest quad-core processor, the fastest dual-core processor, and the fastest single-core processor"-- all in one chip.

The key to this dramatic claim is a feature called Turbo Boost technology. Basically, if the current application workload isn't keeping all four cores fully busy and pushing right up against the chip's TDP (Thermal Design Power) limit, Turbo Boost can increase the clock speed of each core individually to get more performance out of the chip.

It's easy to see how this works when just one or two cores are being actively used; whatever power the other two or three cores would have consumed can be redirected over to the active cores, allowing them to run at higher speeds.

The quad-core mode of Turbo Boost is a little more subtle; it works when the four cores aren't running a worst-case workload--for example, integer-heavy processing, since it's generally floating-point calculations that consume the most power--so they aren't bumping into the TDP limit. Turbo Boost can increase the frequency of all four cores until they're running as fast as they can for the current workload.

Eden said that the Turbo Boost controller… Read more

Full Speed promises to improve both the speed and performance of your broadband connection. Oddly, when we put it through the ringer, it did just the opposite: our computer ran at a snail's pace when the program was activated.

The program's user interface doesn't exactly exude professionalism. All of the exclamation points asking us to Get Ready to Boost Your Speed! had us looking for the catch. At start-up, our only option was to select either Internet Explorer or Firefox to run the Web speed test. Once we made our selection a new window appeared and ran … Read more