If you’re one of the lucky few with a new motherboard that packs a USB 3.0 port then this new adapter is the perfect device to speed up external hard drives. The Brando Unitek USB 3.0 to SATA adapter will connect up your old (or new) SATA hard drive via USB 3.0 and a standard power jack. There is even an option to connect IDE hard drives via an extra dock.

The device will cost you US$48, which isn’t bad for a device using new technology. The upside is that the adapter will instantly turn your HDD into an external, USB hard drive with theoretical speeds of up to 500MB/s; the downside is that there is no enclosure for the hard drive so you’ll have to be careful when transporting the hard drive around.

You can grab one now from Brando, and the device will support your hard drives up to 2TB capacity on your Windows 7, Vista, XP or Linux machine.

As it turns out, this monster of a monitor has been on sale for a while now, but as it costs US$6,499 only the military and a few hardcore gamers have been able to afford it. This quad-DLP screen is huge: 43 inches in size and packing a nice 2880×900 resolution via its 32:10 resolution. The panel doesn’t require any special hardware or drivers and has a blazing fast response time of “less than .02 milliseconds.”

Of course, if you can stomach the price you can buy three of these monitors and arrange them around you for some car racing action, or as Ostendo claims, future multi-monitor CRVD applications. If you’re interested in buying one, you can right now from Ostendo, but keep in mind that US$6.5K price tag

OpenOffice has a very interesting idea about what mice should be like.  They seem to have created a monster of a mouse named the OpenOfficeMouse with 18 (yes, 18) programmable buttons and an analogue “Xbox-360 style” joystick. The mouse comes with button profiles for the latest OpenOffice as well as profiles for games and applications such as Adobe Photoshop and World of Warcraft.

One problem though, the mouse is really ugly. It reminds me of serial-port mice from 15 years ago – plain, boring and white with no button style at all; nothing at all like the latest mice from Logitech or Microsoft. Also, the eighteen buttons comes at a price: US$75 to be exact. If you fancy all the functionality, head over to OpenOfficeMouse to find more information.

Apple chose the perfect time to release new products – just before the release of Windows 7 tomorrow. Apple has released a bunch of new products today for the “holiday season” – a new range of iMacs, MacBooks and Mac Minis and also updated the Mighty Mouse (now know as the Magic Mouse) and the Apple Remote.

First off is the new iMac range (pictured above) which look much closer to the LED Cinema Displays as expected. While there still is no blu-ray in these new iMacs, we do see a nice spec bump. The new desktops come with either 21.5″ (1920×1080) or 27″ (2560×1440) 16:9 widescreen displays in the same aluminium enclosures. What really is great to see though is the inclusion of Intel’s Core i5 and i7 range in the top end models.

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One of Australia’s largest science institutions, CSIRO, recently announced that it had earned around AU$200m (US$183m) from its WiFi patent battles with some of the worlds largest computer companies. CSIRO owns the patents to the 802.11 wireless standard they made in 1996, a standard they claim is used in over 800 million devices worldwide at any moment.

Over the past years they have been battling some of the largest companies over these patents, including Microsoft, Intel, Netgear, Dell, HP and more. It looks like all this money from the court cases and settlements has finally pooled to quite a sum. CSIRO will soon announce how the money will be spent, although we’re sure the money will go towards more research within the company.

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Seven years ago 802.11n started planning and development; two and a half years ago 802.11 draft-n was released and devices begun using the spec. Now, years after we all started using draft-n and no major changes have been made, the IEEE has finalised 802.11n for all of us to use. Since there are no major changes, all of your draft-n devices will work with new finalised 802.11n equipment – and still at the 300Mbps we saw in draft-n

The finalised specification should be published sometime in October with devices to follow.

You might be aware that the next-gen DX11 cards from AMD are just around the corner, and should be quite powerful for the price they’ll sport. Well, also on the list of new features is a new technology called “Eyefinity” which allows up to six displays to be powered from a single graphics card for some amazing results – such as the 24 screen, 11,520 x 4,800 setup pictured above powered by four of AMD’s upcoming cards.

Today, multiple displays are recognised by operating systems as separate displays; with Eyefinity this is set to change. Eyefinity sets up the displays so that the OS treats them as a single display to produce some amazing results. HotHardware were lucky enough to be able to test the upcoming game DiRT 2 over six 30″ displays with a resolution of 7680 x 3200 and reported great frame rates.

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We have had PCI Express 2.0 for around two and a half years now, and might using it for a little while longer with the news that the PCIe 3.0 specification will be delayed to “maintain backward compatibility with current PCI Express standards,” or so PC Mag says. According to them, the specification wont be released until Q2 2010.

Unfortunately, this means that it’s unlikely that we’ll see a PCIe 3.0 product until 2011, which is a long time away. However, as a lot of graphics cards don’t fully utilise the full 5GT/s transfer available in the PCIe 2.0 spec, it is unlikely they will need the rumoured 8GT/s coming in PCIe 3.0

Fujitsu have announced today that they have started to ship some nice little USB 3.0 chips to go on motherboards in early 2010. The MB86C30A is a USB3-to-SATA bridge chip and can support the full 5gbps available from the USB SuperSpeed specifications. This chip is perfect for external hard drives thanks to the USB3-to-SATA bridge – meaning external storage will become much faster. The first engineering samples of this chip are expected for August.

–Source–

Ever wanted to have a touch screen, but couldn’t afford it or felt it was too desk-ridden. I have a solution for you: The Magictouch Touch Screen Add-on.

It’s a translucent pad placed over the screen of your laptop and is tied to the back of the screen. It costs 170 US dollars and it’s fully compatible with Win7, Vista and XP and fully enables touch capability. There are many different sizes; the one pictured is for a 15.4 inch laptop. If interested, go to http://www.touchscreens.com/mt15w-usb.html