Toshiba hit it again with an expansion of the ultra small and light solid state drive. Now, with a 512GB capacity to be featured in the coming Consumer Electronics Showcase (CES) 2009, it paves the direction for more compact portable devices in these coming years.

If you have not realised, the trend for Netbooks is increasing in conjunction with increasingly cheap mobile broadband plans. So with this new SSD capacity by Toshiba, hopefully we would see Netbooks and Notebooks having reduce their weight and size.

To date, this would be one of the largest-capacity solid-state drives for use in laptops and come close to matching the size of mobile hard-disk drives.

Samsung has begun mass production of a 256GB SSD and Micron Technology is readying a 256GB drive that will ship in March.

Toshiba said it is releasing a broad family of “fast read/write SSDs” based on 43-nanometer Multi-Level Cell (MLC) NAND flash technology that will be showcased at CES. MLC technology allows solid-state drive makers to deliver higher capacity drives at lower prices.

In addition to the 2.5-inch 512GB drive, the new series of Toshiba drives also includes capacities of 64GB, 128GB, and 256GB, offered in 1.8-inch or 2.5-inch drive enclosures or as SSD Flash Modules, the company said in a statement.

Samples of the new drives will be available in the first quarter of 2009, with mass production slated for the second quarter, in the April to June time frame, according to the company.

Pricing in sample quantities ranges from $220 for the 64GB drive to $1,652 for the 512GB drive, Toshiba said.

The drives achieve a maximum sequential read speed of 240MB per second (MBps) and maximum sequential write speed of 200MBps. This is roughly the same read-write speeds offered by Samsung on its 256GB SSD.

Toshiba said it sees SSDs growing to approximately 25 percent of the notebook market by 2012.

[Source: CNET Blog: CES 2009]

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Hit with the recent recession and many xmas gifts to buy. Fret not! Its time to get creative and work on homemade gifts instead for your love ones. The bloggers from Geeky Gadgets had came out with a guide on creating your own iPhone dock that could save you USD30.

All you need is a printer, adhesive, a penknife and a piece of A4 cardboard (a foolscap backing can do the job). Possibly for a more customize approach, you can purchase those colorful cardboards or design some. hehe.

You can download and read more here.

Here is a short clip on how its simply done.

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Yes, Google has done it again. With its new Google App that hosts all its service, there is this particular one which is very interesting. You can now ask Google your queries instead of typing them. For example, you can speak “Where is the nearest bank” or “Singapore libraries”.

How is this done? When u speak to your iPhone, the sound is recorded and send as a file to Google’s servers, which will interpret the sound into text and Google search it. The results returned will be the same as what you normally see when u google. It seems like a complicated process, possibly on the Google server as it needs some for of audio-to-text matching via some artifical intelligence mechanism. But amazingly, the returned results didn’t take more than 3 seconds to display the results.

I believe that with the direction in providing human to machine communication via artificial intelligence, Google will be able to host its apps across many mobile phone platforms widening its pool of users. Also, since we all know that Google keeps record of your search items, they might possibly now keep your voice data as well. I’m not sure, but it’s possible indeed.

Back to this wonderful app, as far as I know, the queries are only in English. And I did some test queries myself and found out that it still needs more improvement in its matching. Nevertheless, its a good start. Now I’m waiting for Microsoft to launch an iPhone App, if that’s possible.

Please leave your comments.

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Before I forget, when I read the newspaper this morning, the first thing that caught my attention was about the Pop King: Michael Jackson. Well, some of you might have already know, he has just converted to be a Muslim.

Being the famous pop star, this news to some people might come in as either good or bad. The newspaper I read reported that he converted to Muslim and also included a report that he is currently being sued by a Dubai businessman or something whom I possible think, is a muslim. Other news reports online says that it is the much awaited conversion as his brother, Jermaine Jackson had embraced Islam earlier and might have influence him on the teachings.

As for what I think, having a faith is important as it is a binding factor that makes you feel more human. Please leave your comments.

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Sigh.. I shouldn’t but i must.

Have not been bringing good stuff to this blog for a long while… more of not bringing anything at all. Haha.. But looking at the stats, I do still have visitors.. probably readers googling some of my older posts.

The reason that i’ve not been blogging is because not of lack of things to talk about.. I do have plenty to talk about. Its more of bringing myself to this horribly slow web host to start writing posts. Like i said earlier, I should take up a new webhost instead of this FREE one by gofreeserve.com. Well, economy not doing well, not generating much money from google ads for me to commit to a 2-year hosting plan at $2.55/mth. Haha.. it doesn’t sound much but with the US Dollar peeking up recently, i’m more likely to stick with this at the moment.

Well, heck then.. will just stick to this for a couple of months (at least). Stay tuned. Will cook up some things for u readers. AND please do leave your comments if you have any.. even if u accidentally come across this lousy blog. Haha

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