The new ultra low voltage Eden processors which were announced by VIA at a press conference on August 16th will have 21mm X 21mm packaging, will run at 500MHz and consume only 1W power.  According to Digitimes Several IPC (industrial PC) makers including Advantech have already adopted the new Eden ULV processor and products are expected to begin appearing on the market later this month, noted sources at VIA. Lanner, another Taiwan-based IPC maker, pointed out that it has already designed the CPU into several network appliances and embedded boards.

The Aurvana X-Fi headphone is Creative’s first X-Fi technology based headphone. According to Creative X-Fi Crystalizer intelligently analyzes sound and restores the highs and lows lost during MP3 or other file compression. The noise canceling technology in the headphone reduces the ambient noise by 20dB. The headphones have 40mm Neodymium drivers and a microphone concealed in the grilles for noise cancellation. The price and date of release is not known at this point.

On an eKey Biometric Entry System you can assign three different functions to three different fingers like scan first finger to control door lock, use second finger to arm/disarm security and the third finger to send a distress signal. This entry system will be shown at CEDIA and the system includes adjustable camera and intercom. It is still not known how much it would cost you to secure your house using this system.

If you are like me and don’t like the headset supplied with the iPhone and wanted to use Shure or Etymotic or Ultimate Ears earphones with your iPhone. This is the first good accessory that converts your earphones into a stereo mobile headset for iPhone. The inline VoicePort microphone delivers clear voice regardless of the background noise. The control button enables you to send and end calls. You can also use the button to play, pause and forward songs just like Apple’s headset.  You can buy the adapter online on Apple Store for $39.95.

On June 29th Jim Lynch had given ten reasons why you shouldn’t buy an iPhone. I didn’t agree with many of his reasons like tiny storage (show me a phone which has 8GB storage), Stylish and stupid (iPod or Macbook both are great products), Stuck with AT&T (using Cingular for 3 years), No keyboard (after using iPhone I can say touchscreen is good) and Crapfari instead of Firefox (I love Firefox but I just need a good fast browser on phone that works I am not going to edit my website on iPhone, actually you can do that also on iPhone). The most valid reason he gave was “I will get to the Apple store ahead of you.”
Today Jim wrote in his column ten reasons you should buy an iPhone. He writes, “ My iPhone works great as a phone and messaging system, I’ve actually gotten rid of my Vonage land line and now I use my iPhone as my only phone.” The reasons that he gives are:
    1)    Amazing video
    2)    Email and Visual Voicemail
    3)    Music and Audiobooks
    4)    Edge
    5)    Google Maps
    6)    Power Management
    7)    Multi-Touch
    8)    Safari
    9)    Pictures and iPhoto
    10)     Navigation

Well I agree with each and every reason he has given. One reason that I would like to add is storage, no phone has 8GB storage you get maximum 4GB on a MicroSD card and most phones just support up to 2GB of MicroSD only. Yes there are few phones like LG’s new Chocolate phone that support up to 4GB, but then you have to pay $100 to get that card.

The Windows Mobile 6 based Motorola Q 9M will be released by Verizon for $350 with two year contract, $400 with one year contract, and $470 with no contract. The phone has MiniSD card slot, Bluetooth 2.0, Piano style keyboard, 128MB on board memory and EV-DO. The phone supports Verizon’s V CAST Music service.

The Thomson’s V888 has a 4” screen and support almost all the video/audio/photo formats. But two of the biggest surprises are price and the slider, which reveals the control buttons. When slider is opened the panel has four directional keys, volume up and down keys, home key, select key, start key and another set of four keys marked X, Y, B and A which can be used to play games. The cost is $132 (999 Yuan) for 4GB Player.

The first gear that will be available in September for $199 is BTM630 Bluetooth enabled audio system. It has an iPod dock at top, a SD card slot and USB port. It also comes with slot-loading CD drive that can rip audio files and transfer to USB stick. A cell phone with stereo Bluetooth can play music wirelessly over BTM630 and when a call comes while playing the song, the song is paused and the caller’s number is shown on the LCD screen.

The iPod Remote is an iPod dock with Universal remote. The dock can be plugged in any audio system or TV and the remote has a LCD screen that can be used to navigate iPod menu on the remote itself. It will cost you $199 and will be available in September.

The third gear is AZ1330B, which is a shiny black boom box that comes with iPod dock, AM/FM radio, and CD player. This system will also be available in September for $99.

The third gear is AZ1330B, which is a shiny black boom box that comes with iPod dock, AM/FM radio, and CD player. This system will also be available in September for $99.

The last one is a GoGear portable media player that will be launched next month and it has 4GB of flash memory and 3.5” LCD screen. Its battery life is 20 hours for music and 5 hours for video. The price when it will be announced next month will be $149.

You can read more at CNET

Walt Mossberg has posted review of Apple’s iWork ’08 on All Things D website. His verdict: “iWork ‘08 is a nice product, capable of turning out sophisticated and attractive word-processing, presentation and spreadsheet documents. But iWork simply isn’t as powerful or versatile as Microsoft Office, especially when it comes to word processing and spreadsheets. And it suffers from a design that places far more emphasis on making documents look beautiful than on the nuts and bolts of the actual process of writing and number-crunching.” We completely agree with Walt after using iWork for past week.
You can read the complete review here: iWork 08 Review

First off let me make a confession that I don’t like any of the Stealth PCs, Stealth computer look so ugly that I can’t describe. My only question to Stealth “ is it so hard to design a decent looking case?” For a minimum of $1000 you can get a Stealth LPC350PCI with either Celeron M370 (1.5GHz) or Pentium M740 (1.73GHz), up to 2GB of RAM, 80GB harddrive, choice of DVD/CD-RW or DVD-RW drives, DVI output, FireWire and three USB Ports. The Little PC is also not little in size it 5.87” x 10” x 2.75” in dimension compare that to 6” x 6” x 2” for a Mac mini. I think we should save our $1000 by not spending it on an ugly, not very small and not at all powerful PC.