Filed under: Home Entertainment

Not content with sneaking a dedicated Blu-ray player into CEDIA, Cambridge Audio has just taken the plastic off of two new HiFi systems in Milan. The Sonata, aimed squarely at audio junkies, consists of a 2.1-channel DAB receiver (£299; $547), which offers 40-watts of amplification per channel and your choice of an upscaling 1080p DVD player or a Wolfson-DAC-loaded CD unit for another £179 ($327). The all-in-one Fusion (£300; $549) includes 30-watts per channel, an integrated CD player, DAB / FM tuner, USB port, an SD slot and a customized iPod dock (which is also bundled with the aforementioned Sonata). Both units are slated to hit the UK in silver and black, though the November-bound Fusion will get a jump on the Sonata, which hits in February 2009.

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Filed under: Home Entertainment

What can we say? Intempo has launched a new pair of iPod-compatible speaker systems, and unless you’re somehow just entering the market for one in the latter half of 2008, chances are you’re already yawning. Nevertheless, the RDi-W (pictured) does distinguish itself somewhat by including support for DAB and wireless internet radio, and there’s a 30-watt internal amplifier to kick out the jams. The much drabber Fusion keeps things small and simple by offering up just 25-watts of power and DAB / FM tuners. Expect the couple to sashay into e-tailers next month for £169.99 ($316) / £99 ($184).

Read - RDi-W
Read - Fusion

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Filed under: Home Entertainment

What can we say? Intempo has launched a new pair of iPod-compatible speaker systems, and unless you’re somehow just entering the market for one in the latter half of 2008, chances are you’re already yawning. Nevertheless, the RDi-W (pictured) does distinguish itself somewhat by including support for DAB and wireless internet radio, and there’s a 30-watt internal amplifier to kick out the jams. The much drabber Fusion keeps things small and simple by offering up just 25-watts of power and DAB / FM tuners. Expect the couple to sashay into e-tailers next month for £169.99 ($316) / £99 ($184).

Read - RDi-W
Read - Fusion

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Filed under: Desktops, Laptops

In yet more news about the perpetually forthcoming Fusion CPU / GPU combos from AMD, new details have been leaked regarding the chips’ sizes, configurations, and other bits of insufferably tedious details that only Professor Frink could truly love. According to this latest report, the “first” Fusion processor will be called “Shrike,” sport a dual-core Phenom CPU, an ATI RV800 GPU, and a footprint of just 40nm. Another chip, codenamed “Falcon,” will debut in 2010 at a 32nm size, based around a platform known as “Bulldozer,” and will be launched to combat Intel’s 32nm offering. Of course, we’ve been hearing about these chips since 2006, so we’re not exactly on the edge of our seats hearing new details of what essentially amounts to vaporware.

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Filed under: Transportation

We already saw a demo of the next-gen version of Ford Sync, but it looks like what we saw was just a taste — our friends over at Autoblog scored some shots of the 2010 Ford Fusion’s interior, and it features a monster 8.5-inch touchscreen, which will also apparently make it into the 2009 F-150 pickup truck. It’s not clear how much the system will control or how much it’ll cost, but you can bet it’s not nearly as sweet as the 1979 Atari Riviera. Hit the read link for a couple full size shots.

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Filed under: Desktops, Laptops

At this point we’ve heard so much and seen so little of AMD’s Fusion hybrid CPU / GPU chip that we’re honestly starting to consider it vapor — AMD first announced it in 2006, after all. Still, the company’s VP of marketing chatted up PC World about new Fusion chips today, saying that a 45nm notebook-optimized version codenamed “Swift” based on the Phenom core would be the first off the line. That doesn’t line up with the last roadmap we saw out of Sunnyvale, which had the first Fusion chip based on the workstation-class Bulldozer core, but hey, we’ll let AMD say whatever it wants, just as long as see some actual chips sometime soon.

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Filed under: Storage

You may remember the lovable yet rascally ioDrive PCIe card from Fusion which we told you about back in the sun-drenched, salad days of September. Well, we’ve gotten a few more details on the “SAN in the palm of your hand,” and we thought we’d share. As you’ll recall, the card is meant to deliver very high, sustained read / write speeds, allowing the ioDrive to perform “nearly a thousand times faster than any existing disk drive.” Well, the good folks at Fusion have now given the system a price — the card starts at $2,400 — and offered up some fresh info, like that the ioDrive is NAND flash-based, will support multiple terabytes of virtual memory, and has access rates on par with DRAM. Which is real fast. Hit the link for a lot more info, and don’t be afraid to peruse the company’s .pdf data sheet.

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Filed under: Portable Audio, Portable Video

It’s not all just questionably-useful tween gear for Nickelodeon today — the company is also releasing a line of DMPs that would be pretty tempting if they weren’t festooned with giant pictures of The Naked Brothers Band and SpongeBob. The $40 SpongeBob player holds 500 MP3s and goes for 10 hours on the built-in rechargeable battery, while the $50 Fission Digital Music Player comes in SpongeBob and Naked Brothers varieties and features a motion-sensitive remix feature that allows you to tweak your tunes by shaking the player. The cream of the crop, though, is the $100 Fusion Digital Media Player (yeah, no hurried parents are ever going to confuse those names), which rocks a pretty nice QVGA screen with what appears to be fairly smooth video playback, 1GB of internal storage with SD expansion, and a selection of preloaded and downloadable games. Not bad — except for the terrible, terrible shame. Check ‘em all out — including some hands-on shots — in the gallery.

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