Cool Tech Reviews

Circuit City has a variety of bargains available in its 3 day Cyber Monday sale, but don’t expect super discount doorbuster specials. Examples:

Laptops:

• Acer Aspire AS5100-5023 15.4″ Widescreen Notebook PC with AMD Turion 64 X2 TL-56, 2GB RAM, 160GB hard drive, and Vista Home Premium reduced by $210 to $639.96.
• HP Pavilion dv6449us 15.4″ Widescreen Laptop Computer with AMD Turion 64 X2 TL-56, 2GB RAM, 160GB hard drive, and Vista Home Premium reduced by $210 to $739.99.
• Gateway M6817 15.4″ Widescreen Notebook PC with Intel Core 2 Duo T5250, 2 GB RAM, 250GB hard drive and Vista Home Premium reduced by $200 to $799.96.

Plasma TV - Hitachi 42″ Plasma HDTV Model #: HIT P42H401 reduced $300 to $1099.99.

External Hard Drives - Western Digital My Book Essential Edition 750GB External Hard Drive reduced $60 to $219.99.

There’s much more and note that they are offering %10 off on some items if you choose to pick them up at a local Circuit City store instead of having them shipped to you.

It’s not just processor prices that are heading down. Philipp Gollner at Reuters reports that Seagate CEO sees disk-drive price war continuing:

Seagate Technology, the world’s biggest computer disk-drive maker, expects aggressive moves by rivals to depress industry prices for another year, longer than most analysts predict, its CEO said on Wednesday.

Chief Executive Bill Watkins said Seagate was prepared to meet hard-disk drive price cuts by competitors including Hitachi Ltd. and Samsung Corp., who are hungry for market share.

“If pricing doesn’t drop for us, it’ll be an upside,” Watkins said in an interview

But good news for consumers.

There’s already Internet television programming, so what not an Internet Television on which to watch it? Apparently they’ll be arriving next year from several Japanese electronics manufacturers:

Sony, Matsushita and three other Japanese electronics makers plan to start selling Internet televisions next year, the Nihon Keizai newspaper reported Thursday.

The new TVs aim to make accessing video and similar online content easier than with current methods such as computers, the newspaper said without saying how it got its information. The other companies are Sharp Corp., Toshiba Corp. and Hitachi Ltd.

They are jointly going to be publishing a common “Internet TV” standard which ought to be interesting since there are so many competing services and digital rights management schemes today.

Hitachi plans to roll out a new line of of high density 3.5 inch disk drives in 3Q2006 according to Tony Smith at The Register:

The Deskstar T7K500 and 7K160 will both contain platters spinning at 7,200rpm and connect to the outside world via at least 8MB - 16MB on some models - of cache memory and across a 3Gbps Serial ATA bus with native command queuing (NCQ). They offer an 8.5ms average seek time and a 4.17ms average latency.

The T7K500 will be offered in 250, 320, 400 and 500GB capacities. The first two have two platters, the rest, three, with four and six recording heads, respectively, and non-operating shock ratings of 350G and 300G.

The 7K160 will ship with 80GB and 160GB of storage capacity, both based on a single platter, and one and two recording heads, respectively. They too can withstand 350G of non-operating shock.

There will also be parallel ATA versions and all will have a three year warranty. If the Deskstar name sounds familiar, it is the old IBM brand continued from the days before Hitachi acquired IBM’s disk operation. There also will be a Cinemastar brand for the same devices which apparently just indicates their intended use in consumer electronics, presumably for video recording.