November Nukes

Autumnal chills, gaming thrills and product frills…

Innovation follows funny timelines. Mankind took over two million years to invent the wheel. And another 5,000 years more to plug a steam engine betwixt those wheels. The downsizing from the world’s first gen, mammoth, room-sized comps to the squat little desktop PC took 35 years. But the shrinking of the desktop to the laptop took less than a decade…

We follow some gaming thrills and product frills that helped this ajeeb daastan of innovation jiggle on through November.


Microsoft Xbox 360
The Big Boy is ready to play, nutty buddies! A gig that the global gaming community has been waiting for with bated breath and fidgety fingers, X360 game console is here. The console is based on an IBM PowerPC-based "Xenon" CPU. The CPU boasts of three separate core processors clocking in at 3.2 GHz each. A 500 MHz ATI R500-based "Xenos" graphics processing unit powers the graphics. Games are required to be authored for 720p and 1080i and optimized for the 16:9 widescreen viewing ratio.

The X360 is rigged with 512 MiB 700 MHz GDDR3 RAM. It supports DVDs, CDs, DVD-R/RW, MP3s, JPEGs, and more. A wireless controller—in fact, up to four wireless controllers—provide the interface to the console. The controller has a 30 feet (9.14 m) range and holds 25 hours of juice on a NiMH rechargeable battery pack.

Go wow!

http://xbox360.com


Mozilla Firefox 1.5
I am hopelessly devoted to Firefox. Nope, no IE for me. Firefox has a cleaner, no-nonsense, “tabby” (for a number of web pages in a single window) interface. It’s more malleable. And it’s more secure than IE primarily because it doesn't run ActiveX components or VB script. Being a modular browser it lacks the extra sweet smell of excess. It banks on downloadable extensions to provide additional functionality (https://addons.mozilla.org/extensions/?application=firefox). An Extensions Manager gets you the add-ons: precise pop-up blocking, easy text zooming, faster text search, or the scent of Java etc. And it has an in-built RSS reader (joggle your RAM and you’ll recall we’ve talked about this).

Its next avatar, version 1.5 is due November 29. Not many differences visible to the naked eye for 1.0 Firefoxers in this, except some new updation, accessibility and privacy options. It’s what lies beneath that has been overhauled--to make it render better and run slicker and quicker.

Go try.

www.getfirefox.com


2GB miniSD Card
Yeah, you read that right. TEC has launched a monster 2GB miniSD for your dinky little mobile phonua. Wondering what you’ll do with such storage? With Nokia’s ma kasam to surpass the Apple iPod as the leading seller of digital music players, you won’t be wondering too long. With read speeds of 18MB/s and write speeds of is 12MB/s, this wispy TEC heavyweight is currently selling for US$ 160 in Taiwan. But space hogs in India can look forward to it landing here any day now.

Go bow.


Creative Zen Neeon
More music makers in pint-sized packs. Creative has launched three skip-free flash memory-based models (512MB, 1GB and 2GB) of its Zen Neeon portable audio players. Also on the shelves now is a new 6GB hard drive-based model--which can hoard up to 3000 songs.

All the Zen Neeon MP3 players are 79.9mm x 46.9mm x 15.9mm and feature and integrated FM radio/recorder and voice recorder, direct line-in recording from CD/DVD players, turntables, and cassette tape players. They also double-up as plug-and-play removable portable mass storage drives. The 55gm Zen Neeon 512MB, 1GB and 2GB come with a duo-tone OLED screen, re-chargeable Li-ion battery delivering 32 hours of playback per charge. And the 75gm Zen Neeon 6GB is available in 7 selectable backlit display colours and a rechargeable Li-ion battery for 16 hours of playback.

So play on pape!

www.creative.com

Tailpiece: For those of you who revel in mankind’s latest fascination, Sudoko, here are two enthralling sites: WebSudoku (www.websudoku.com/) and Sudokulist (www.sudoku.org.uk/). And pssst, for those of you who (like me) are in the league of the extraordinarily logic-challenged duh-dhakkan biradari, I have some solve-all Sudoku kunji sites. Heh heh heh! Wanna know? Mail the evil I! Cos one whisper here and I’ll be nuked for diabolical intent.