by Donald Melanson, posted May 23rd 2008 at 4:31PMWe’ve already heard about some supposed specs for ASUS’s forthcoming Eee Box desktop PC, but Trusted Reviews has now turned up some slightly different ones, which it claims come from a “very reliable” source. While that source apparently couldn’t confirm that the desk-bound Eee would in fact be an Atom-based box as many are speculating, the source reportedly did flat out say that the system would be launching with 2GB of RAM as standard, and a 160GB hard drive (not 1GB and 80GB as we had previously heard). It’ll also supposedly be running the same Linux distribution as the Eee PC, and be available in white only to start with. (Read the full post about ‘More, different Eee Box specs surface online’…)
Official word from Samsung is the Instinct—touted as the best positioned competitor of the iPhone—will hit the shelves at Sprint’s retail stores on June 20th. Instinct’s series of ads feature a head to head combat of the iphone and Instinct on various popular features—such as internet access, live TV, GPS, video shooting, music downloads, etc.—with the Instinct as the clear winner. Touted as an “amazing touch screen phone with a Network to back it up,” the Instinct is ready to go head to head with everyone’s favorite phone from Apple. Samsung’s biggest concern should be that it is taking aim at a moving target. (Read the full post about ‘iPhone competitor launch confirmed: who’s nervous?’…)
by Joshua Topolsky, posted May 23rd 2008 at 12:02PM A criminal mastermind named Mitsuhisa Kobayashi has been arrested for a series of GPS-related car thefts in Japan. According to reports, Kobayashi was responsible for stealing eight cars in the Hyogo Prefecture, five of which he sold on the internet. The man — a former auto factory worker — used two ex-wives to rent the cars, and would then make copies of the keys and install GPS units or cellphones with GPS capabilities inside the vehicles. Kobayashi would use the devices to track the cars’ locations, then steal them once they had been moved from the rental firm. Unfortunately, his accomplices used ID’s which led the authorities right to his front door. (Read the full post about ‘Japanese super-thief uses GPS to steal rental cars’…)
Guess Samsung has not ditched the Q1 UMPC idea just yet, as its engineers are hard at work on a second revision. Samsung won’t introduce anything revolutionary, but will instead build on the existing platform with a revamp of internal parts. Needless to say, we can look forward to faster and more spacious specifications, with perhaps some improvement to the current form factor. Word on the street has it that Samsung will be rolling out the third version of the Q1 UMPC at the beginning of 2009. Do you think this is a dead end for Samsung, or are they really on to something here? (Read the full post about ‘Samsung working on new Q1 UMPC’…)
