iRiver X20 Widescreen Video Player Manhandled

CNet Asia has a pre-release sample of the iRiver X20, a widescreen portable media player that holds up the tradition of fine iRiver products. The screen on this baby is 2.2-inches and sharp as a rusty tack in your foot.

The scrollwheel, however, is a little small. But the microSD card (why not just SD?), MPEG4/WMV support, FM radio, and great sound quality make up for its shortcomings. Although it's too late to fix the scrollwheel for its February launch, everything else seems to be in order. It's no (theoretical) widescreen iPod, or even Creative Zen Vision W, since 4GB of memory won't be holding many videos.

Zune: How We've Lived With It For Three Months

After the iPod came out on top in our Zune v. iPod battle royale, we decided to keep on using the Zune so we could get a long term evaluation on how Microsoft's player stacked up. After nearly three months with the thing, we think we've got some new light to shed.

First off, we have to say that the subscription service is great. This is probably the main reason why many people wanted to make the switch to the Zune from the iPod. Being able to hop online and download as many songs as you want off their library is extremely freeing, in the same sense as walking in your underwear at your in-laws' house and letting one rip.

Hear a song in a movie and you want it? Well, you've already paid for a subscription so go ahead and download it for free. This pays off if you buy at least one CD a month, but comes with the restriction that you lose everything if you stop paying—or if the Zune store tanks.

Actually listening to songs on the Zune has been fine as well. The larger-than-iPod size is negligible (for us). The battery life is pretty great, seeing as we only listen to music in the car and only occasionally on foot. Even compared to the iPod at three months, the Zune keeps charge longer when not in use.

When we left our iPods in the car for a couple days, when we picked it up again there would be just enough power left for it to tell us that there was no power. With the Zune, we got at least a quarter—if not half—of battery life left. That's very cool.

Despite being "scratch resistant", the Zune seems to have scratched up after being taken all around Vegas during CES. It's only one large scratch instead of millions of tiny scratches like on the iPod, so we'll say that the Zune really is a bit more sturdy.

On the software side, we still don't like the Zune suite as much as iTunes, but it does most of what iTunes does, albeit in a clumsier way. The music playback does still sound better to us, even if Cooder used iTunes to master his album. The Zune store's been fine for the most part, giving us snippets of text and reviews gleaned from allmusic.com and other sites, but still suffers from the occasional untimely outage (like as we were writing this).

So would we change our recommendation of the iPod over the Zune? No. All the reasons we had to pick one or the other still stands. If you want movies, TV, a larger music library, a touch sensitive scroll wheel and more accessories, you should still go with the iPod. If you want an FM tuner, music rentals, and a larger screen, there's the Zune.

However, the fact that the iPhone is due out in a few months may change the picture again. Instead of just iPod vs. Zune, there's iPhone vs. iPod vs. Zune, which means Microsoft better come out with a Zune Phone quick.

Why ESET's NOD32?

Technology, not brand names, stops malware.

Compare

NOD 32 Compare the data against Symantec, McAfee, Kaspersky and Trend. Find out why NOD32 is the Safest, Fastest, Smallest solution.
Best Detection of Known and Evolving Threats

* Approximately 88% of threats are proactively detected using ThreatSense heuristics. For example, all variants of MyDoom, Netsky, Bagle and Mytob were detected heuristically - before most other vendors even had a signature. Compare to Symantec, McAfee, Trend, and Kaspersky.
* NOD32 receives the highest awards (ADVANCED+) in retrospective testing, due to its high proactive on-demand detection rate and low rate of false positives. NOD32 includes one of the fastest scanners in the industry, earning the status of Overall Anti-Virus product winner of 2006.
* In-the-Wild Virus Detection - ESET is the record holder of 41 VB100% awards collected over the last 7 years. These tests validate the products ability to detect known malware.
NOD32 has missed fewer In-the-Wild viruses than any other vendor in VirusBulletin testing, as shown below.

Fastest Performance

With NOD32, it's not necessary to sacrifice speed for detection. Scanning and update processes happen behind the scenes without a perceptible decrease in performance.

* 19MB/sec scanning rate under Windows 2003
* Three to 34 times faster than the leading brands under Windows XP
* Keep employees productive by minimizing the impact on their systems

Minimal Resource Utilization

NOD32 conserves resources on disk and in memory, leaving more room for critical applications. It is compact enough to run on modest systems, saving valuable memory without compromising performance or functionality, yet powerful enough to slam the door on malware intrusions.

* Utilizes approximately 22MB of RAM, one of the smallest packages in the industry
* Low RAM usage and intelligent caching reduces disk access and memory paging
* Low 4% performance overhead

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

Samsung SGH-i760: Smartphone Has Brains, Beauty

Samsung takes another potshot at the Motorola Q with its upcoming SGH-i760, a Windows Mobile 5 for Pocket PC Smartphone with an Intel 520MHz CPU inside. This one looks like it has it all, with a slide-out QWERTY keyboard, Bluetooth 2.0, a 240x320 touchscreen, WiFi, and even has a forward-facing video calling camera. On the other side there's a 2-megapixel camera, too. Plus, the thing is exceedingly light, weighing in at just 119g (that's just over 4 ounces for us metrically-challenged).

Our interest is piqued. It won't take much to slam-dunk that Motorola Q, and this might just be the ticket. Full spec list and ten gorgeous pics (courtesy mobile mania.sk), after the jump.

Gun Hidden in a Knife: It's Two, Two, Two Kills In One

Just what we need: more weapons and even better, increasingly innovative ways to murder and maim each other. With this G.R.A.D. $699 .22-caliber gun disguised as a knife, you can pull the trigger on the handle, filling someone with five holes and then cut them up into little pieces, or vice-versa.
Now all we need to do is combine this with the cellphone gun for the ultimate convergence device. Anyway, this thing looks cheap, as if it could easily blow up in your hand.–

USBCell Rechargeable Batteries

Rechargeable batteries that charge via USB? Sure, why not? The USBCELL batteries can be charged using a regular charging station as well as the USB port in your PC, laptop, Xbox 360, or USB car charger. At this point, a USB port is so readily found in your home or office it may be easier to charge it using that instead of lugging around a charger.The USBCell USB-rechargeable AA batteries have landed at ThinkGeek for $20 per pair. They could be an excellent addition if you use a wireless mouse without included-rechargeable batteries, or hell, I'm thinking about picking up a couple for my Xbox 360 controllers.