All those ultraportables using Intel’s ULV Core processors just got taken to school: Toshiba’s Portégé R700 is as light as a MacBook Air, as powerful as a MacBook Pro, and measures an inch thick with a DVD drive. Standard. Putting a full voltage processor in such a thin and light frame really is a neat trick, one that Toshiba accomplished in part with something they’re calling Airflow Cooling Technology. And while most companies are stripping ultraportable notebooks of their DVD drives—usually citing space and weight issues—Toshiba’s managed to keep theirs [...]

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In addition to the zippy Portégé, Toshiba’s also today announcing the Libretto W100. It’s a full Windows dual-screen “ultra-mobile PC” that’s not quite a tablet and not quite a netbook. In short: it’s one curious little gadget. The Libretto has the specs of a halfway decent ultraportable: a 1.2 GHz Pentium U5400 processor, 2GB DDR3 RAM, 62GB SSD, a USB port and a microSD slot. But that body isn’t really like anything else, unfolding to reveal two 7-inch multitouch displays. The screens can either be used together or independently meaning one [...]

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There are a few companies that stand in the way of Intel as it tries to make an empire in consumer electronics chips. One of them is Broadcom, the Irvine, Calif.-based chip design firm that sells billions of dollars worth of chips in the home, mobile, and communications infrastructure markets. Scott McGregor, chief executive of Broadcom, plans to dominate the markets for chips used in set-top boxes, digital TVs, modems, cell phones, and wireless networking chips. During the downturn in the past year, the company strengthened its market position on a variety of fronts, even as it buried legal problems [...]

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Although the majority of the external storage devices today are equipped with the traditional USB 2.0 interface, a coming wave of new external storage solutions are expected to be equipped with next-generation USB 3.0 interface. Thus, the Dane-Elec today’s debut of its new series So Super Speed USB 3.0 external hard drives, now available in the U.S. market was announced. New industry is a Solid State Drive (SSD), which is said to enable data transmission of up to 250MB / s, The Irvine, California-based company claims that the world’s first USB 3.0 SSD. “The long awaited USB 3.0 [...]

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The latest edition of the world’s top universities from The Times Higher Education Supplement (THES) has few surprises in 2009. The top 10 Universities are: Harvard (US), Cambridge (UK), Yale(US), UCL, London (UK), Imperial College, London and Oxford (both UK, joint 5), Chicago (US), Princeton (US), MIT, Massachusetts (US) and California Institute of Technology (US). As always, the top of the list is dominated by American and British Universities this year, together making up about 40% of the entire list of 200. The US universities account for more than a quarter, while the UK institutions [...]

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