HP promised us a mobile workstation refresh in February, and sure enough, today we are staring down the retail pages for its quartet of upgraded business laptops. The new top of the line EliteBook models come in 14- (8440p/w) and 15.6-inch (8540p/w) varieties, with the w-appended models sporting appropriately beefed up NVIDIA Quadro FX graphics with up to 1GB of dedicated GDDR5. If you want to grab one for under a grand, you’ll have to make do with the reasonably powerful Core i5-520M / 2GB DDR3 RAM combo, but we’re most excited by the future customization options, which include a low-voltage Core i7-820QM CPU with 8MB of internal cache, up to 16GB of RAM, and up to 256GB in SSD storage. Course, we can’t put prices to these spectacular beasts just yet, as HP is still only offering preconfigured rigs, but we think it’ll be less than five figures.

In the market for new desktop machinery? Gateway’s gone ahead and given its gaming-centric FX series a facelift for the new year — nothing Alienware-esque crazy, but we do like the accessible ports up top, right next to the control dial for LED-infused lighting effects. Enough about the superficial, let’s go inside: a 2.8GHz Intel Core i7 processor, ATI Radeon HD5850 with 1GB discrete memory, 1.5TB HDD with additional expansion bays, up to 16GB RAM, Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit, and a $1,299 starting price. There’s a 16x DVD drive, and if you don’t mind forking over a little extra, you can get a separate 4x BD-ROM drive. As for the rest of the lineup, while still donning old skin, the SX series has been boosted by a 2.93GHz Core i3 processor, and the DX series a 3.2GHz Core i5 and that 4x BD-ROM drive. Read the rest of this entry »

Keeping with the pre-PMA announcements, Nikon also launched the S and L series of cams just now — the S stands for “Style,” and L stands for “Life.” The Ls are the low-end of the bunch — Life is apparently cheaper than Style — and you’ve got two choices: the $280 L110 superzoom, which has a 15x optical zoom lens in front of a 12.3 megapixel sensor and a 3-inch 460,000-dot LCD, or the $130 L22 compact, which has a 3.6x zoom and a 12 megapixel sensor, and comes in many colors because low-end camera have to come in rainbow colors or the Best Buy people won’t say they’re any good. Nikon says the new $299 S8000 pictured above is the most notable of the Style line, mostly because of its 10x zoom, 720p video, 921,000-dot LCD for previewing. Yeah, not bad at all. After that it’s just incrementally sadder steps down the features scale: the $249 S6000 has a 7x lens and a 230,000-dot LCD, the $200 S4000 adds touchscreen controls to its 3-inch 460,000-dot LCD but has a 12 megapixel sensor and a 4x zoom, and the $149 S3000 has a 2.7-inch LCD, a 4x zoom, and probably isn’t interesting to you at all. Unless it is, in which case you can look at it in the gallery, read the PR after the break, and just generally party the night away. Read the rest of this entry »

Since it looks like GT5’s still another decade or two away from release, racing gamers need everything they can to survive the wait, and this is just about the most creative way we’ve seen to do that. At a glance, Nokia’s Ovi Maps Racing looks like a pretty simple, standard 2D racer with an overhead view, but its secret sauce lies in the map: it can turn pretty much any street in the world into a racecourse. The game lets you chart out your heated battle using nothing more than Ovi Maps data and your finger, meaning Manhattan, Prague, or your folks’ quiet, peaceful neighborhood are all potential targets for your high-speed bedlam. Seems like a great way to inject limitless replay value into an otherwise plain-vanilla racer, doesn’t it? It’ll work on any of Nokia’s Symbian^1 (formerly known as S60 5th Edition) devices, and — for now, anyway — it’s free. Read the rest of this entry »

Remember the OPhone platform, Open Mobile System? You know, China Mobile’s supposedly beefed up Android? Things have become even more interesting as OMS jumps from 1.5 to 2.0 — it now supports Scalable Vector Graphics UI elements and does voice recognition, but what really caught our attention was the vague mention of Windows Mobile API support. Now, our understanding is that it’s been China Mobile’s intention to make Symbian and WinMo apps run on OMS all along, but we don’t know if this update means WinMo apps will run natively in OMS through some compatibility layer, if there’ll be Symbian- and WinMo-based versions of OPhone, or that it’ll just be easier for developers to port WinMo apps to OMS. No word on what phones will be getting 2.0 or when they’ll be getting it, but considering Android’s generally positive outlook on upgradeability, we’re hoping the answers are ‘all’ and ’soon.’

It’s been a long, long while since we’ve seen any life from the OMAP4 labs at Texas Instruments, but with the sudden resurgence of the tablet, now seems just about right for the company to start showcasing the platform’s prowess once more. TI is expected to have a mind-bending showcase at Mobile World Congress later this month, but Slashgear was able to get a sneak peek at what’s to come at the outfit’s Dallas office. The device you’re peering at above definitely piqued our interest, as it’s some sort of twin-screened handheld that can actually support a third independent display courtesy of an integrated pico projector module. We’re told that OMAP4 will bring along dual 1GHz ARM A9 cores, patently ridiculous battery life figures (145 hours of MP3 playback with a 1,000mAh battery) and support for 1080p output via HDMI. Naturally, TI has no intention of ever bringing this piece of hardware to market, but it’d certainly love if some other firm stepped in and did so. Here’s hoping we’re overrun by potential suitors in Barcelona – given that the show kicks off on Valentine’s Day, we’d say the timing would be just about perfect.

The FCC spoiled the surprise on this one back in December, but Fujitsu has now finally gotten official with its new LifeBook T900 tablet PC, which is available with your choice of Core i5-520M, 540M, or Core i7-620M processors. Otherwise, you can expect the same 13.3-inch display found on the company’s earlier T5010 tablet, along with a standard 2GB of RAM and 160GB hard drive, integrated Intel graphics, and a DVD burner — not to mention some niceties like a fingerprint scanner, ambient light sensor, and even a user-cleanable dust filter. This one’s shipping right now with prices starting at $1,889.

You know, January is all but expired now. Gone are the heady (or is that headless?) days of CES 2010, and we’re nearly past the rumor euphoria of the decade, so what do we have to look forward to? According to CNET’s sources, WinMo 7. This year. Sure, we heard as much from DigiTimes, but it’s always good to put a more legitimate source to what is quite the juicy forecast. Confirmation that Microsoft is planning to finalize all code by this summer also meshes with an earlier leak of an LG Windows Mobile 7 handset set for a September release, while the latest Pink phone rumors are also reiterated. At any rate, it all kicks off in Barcelona come February 15, with Microsoft also circling its MIX 2010 web development conference a month later as the time it’ll start dishing the dirt on how to code for the new OS. So there we have it, new consumer phones and a long overdue WinMo overhaul all coming to you within the next few months.

When we received an e-mail from a very agitated reader detailing that the wireless card and the screen on his HP tx2000 stopped working just a convenient few days after his warranty expired we felt bad, though didn’t think much of it. But then we started doing a bit of research, and it turns out these issues go all the way back to the tx1000 and that there are thousands — if you can trust the petition numbers — that have been encountering these problems. The cause? Most likely the overheating NVIDIA graphics card and chipset that was used in both models, and which was actually the reason for Sony, Dell and other HP laptop recalls last year. So, what gives, especially after the warranty of these tablets has gone up? Not much, unless you are handy with a motherboard, some thermal compound and tinfoil like the guy in the video after the break (spoiler: he fixes his tx1000!) We wish we had better news, but if you’re an unfortunate owner of one of these txs your best bet is to hit one of the links and sound off. The more noise, the more likely HP will be to finally recall these puppies. Read the rest of this entry »

Okay, look, we’re not saying it’s unpossible for someone with some incredible Illustrator skill to have thrown this together after seeing the supposed leak last night — there are definitely plenty of talented people out there with far too much time on their hands. That being said, this matches up perfectly with everything we know and everything we’ve been told so far, so even if it is fake, it probably gives us some good insight into what Sprint’s terrifying beast of a phone is going to look like up close. The Supersonic is said to have a 4.3-inch display and WiMAX alongside Sense – so if it’s all true, we strongly suggest other carriers be ready to step up their Android game. Any other leaks care to step forward today?