HotHardware's Two and A Half Geeks Webcast - Aug. 12, 2011
The Evolution of Solid State Drives
You know you could say evolution from hard drive to solid state, but really revolution the way it's accelerating in SSDs. I mean if you look at the hard drive guys, they've gone just crazy with density, you know evolution. But in solid state we're really talking about orders of magnitude sort of performance increases here on a regular basis and I think what's happening what's going to happen in terms of the future for SSDs is that we're going to see fewer uh bridged interfaces like SATA uh, I think we're going to see the native interfaces come to fruition across you know the mainstream much more so in the future. So that PCI Express uh is a direct bolt attached on you know, we've we've got PCI Express Edge cards you know plug-in cards now that you know the manufacturers are coming out with and that's sort of an in-between but I think you know get rid of that that SATA interface bolt flash memory right up to the PCI Express interface. I think you're going to see more of that, I think you're going to see different iterations of that um there's a new SATA spec out there now uh SATA Express which is this melding of SATA 3G or third generation say to say to 6G six gigabit per second with PCI Express I I think you're going to see a continual um you know migration and uh, sort of uh intersection of the technology so that we get right down to the bare metal to the to the solid state flash and performance is just gonna hockey stick it's gonna keep going. I'm excited about that, that's what's that's what really turns me on is you know some new SSD device hit in the lab.
Gadget Coverage
The basic gist of it is why are we guys covering gadgets so much lately? I mean hardware's you know, you think of processors you're thinking some serious desktop stuff and you guys are all like cell phone now what's up with that. Marco, you want to handle that um yeah, I will handle that so we're covering lots of gadgets right now simply because gadgets are freaking hot right now that's where a ton of the activity is right now if you look at our traditional you know if you go back 10 years when we were just covering core PC components that's still our bread and butter we still love that stuff that stuff is still super sexy um but the movement is a lot slower than it is right now in the mobile space there, there's new tablets new phones uh new OS releases just all this cool stuff happening in the mobile space and if we're not covering it I think we're doing a lot of you guys a disservice so to be able to cover it all I I think is great but we will absolutely still focus on a lot of the core stuff um, we're still hooked up with all the big OEMs and we're going to bring you stuff the day it launches whenever possible so um, I hope you like the additional coverage and uh, we'll leave it at that.
Upcoming Contest
Speaking of hooking up are any hints of any contest coming up perhaps? Yes, yes, we can hint only hint at this point um, we are going to be um pulling together the components of yet another custom-built HH rig I think we're gonna we're gonna talk about that Marco and I in terms of uh the resources we can pull together we're not sure what what the architecture looks like yet you know what the base processor and graphics uh components are but stay tuned because we will be holding yet another uh sweepstakes where folks can enter and uh through participation and being involved in the site in the community and and conversation at hothaw.com you can win yet another killer gaming rig that will just blow the doors off off of your friends systems and uh create a lot of bragging rights uh like, like Lamar Bowen has right now with his killer gaming rig that he won our our winner last contest of course you can find all that information on hotharbour.com again you can find out everything we talked about at heartharova.com or if you want to go around the web because I know you guys are like, you know this site's great and everything but sometimes I want to go somewhere else but I still want to see hot hardware we got you covered there's dick.com/hardware, there's facebook.com/hardware, there's twitter.com/slash/guess guess what, hot hardware youtube.com/hot-hardware vids for excellent videos all kinds of product reviews and you can see them in glorious moving pictures for creative types like me who likes to look at that kind of stuff.
Final Thoughts
I don't know if that was wisdom but uh thanks for stopping by.
"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: encoming up on this episode of two and a half geeks a wide drive intel throwing money at ultrabooks your questions a lot of them and a whole lot more the bar has been set wicked fast it's rocking the benchmarks we're gonna up the ante a little bit processing power i kind of understand this hey welcome back to tune up geeks i'm is actual alongside those nuts from hot hardware that's dave altavillo there in the middle and that's uh marco cipetta nodding and today we'll be talking about tech but first let's ask how the guys are doing how's it going dave i'm feeling nutty like a nut how about how about you marco do you not feel like a nut because almond joy's got nuts but mounds don't so yeah sometimes you don't i i don't feel like a nut i i feel like a geek today i feel like a geek right on that sounds about right uh let's let's let's uh stop talking about such silliness and i'd talk about hmm let's see if i look around hot hardware let's talk about hardware how about that's an idea i know it just came off the top of my head let's talk about dave about a plan the kingston y drive you guys did a review and this is a portable drive that allows you to add more space to an ios device right dave yes sir well could you explain more we're done okay that's all you need to know okay next no i'm kidding i'm kidding um yeah actually the the y drive from kingston our our our memory friends at kingston uh go figure uh assembled this device and uh looks a lot like you know uh an iphone you know sort of form factor you know nice and thin and um you know about about the same size as a handset and yeah that's exactly what it does it it enables um densities of 16 or 32 gig for 130 or 175 dollars respectively uh connected over uh wi-fi 802.11 uh n is it i'm hoping i have to look at that up but um yeah so 802.11 wi-fi connection to any ios device so that's ipad ipod uh or iphone now it's only to ios because it uses an application is there an application for android or any other kinds of phone and also could you access it on your network so yeah well let me let me explain how it works it it's it's available you know to any ios device with an app um and so you you actually need the the y drive app for your iphone or ipod or ipad device to access it and android apps are coming it's it's not available yet only ios is supported currently you can also hook it up to a pc via standard usb connection okay so does this thing have a battery in it so if you want to carry it around with an ios device is this something that you want to carry two things with and how is the battery life on this yeah so actually there is an on-board battery on the device and it'll last about four hours of continuous use so that's you know continuously reading and writing uh files to the device um but you know obviously if you're not continuously accessing device it's gonna last longer um you know just sitting idle so uh about four hours of continuous use battery life and a little bit longer you know for real world sort of idle on off type of usage this thing sounds ridiculous flat out because the iphone doesn't have an expansion i can't use an sd card or micro sd like any other phone could just do that but do you have to do this the other thing that's the other thing that's neat about it is it well actually you might think um you know this is a drawback but it has a pretty cool feature it has so when you connect to it with an iphone or an ipad what have you um you utilize your wi-fi connection to the device and therefore you can't connect to the internet you can't connect you know uh to another wireless router to get an internet connection however you can set this bridge it has a bridge mode feature you can set this up in bridge mode which will allow you to access the storage on the device and also access uh another wi-fi connection off the uh y drive so now you can connect have the y drive connected to your network uh you know getting an ip for your internet connection and then connect to it in bridge mode surf you know the internet as well as have access to storage and we actually tested it out and there was no perceived latency and we actually did a speed test speedtest.net performance test with it as well and there was no difference in overall bandwidth and throughput with the device so you know nice nice little bridge mode feature as well on to intel's crazy schemes and plans apparently intel thinks the future are ultra ultra-thin notebooks that they want to call ultra books yeah that's right i didn't come up with a name they did but apparently they've thrown 300 million dollars into the ultrabook fund marco what's this fund and what are they trying to do with this so back at computex uh i guess it was back in june that's when intel sort of announced you know these ultra books and what their vision for an ultrabook is it's basically a ultra thin ultra light notebook um with really long battery life and some sort of tweaks to either the ui or what have you the goal is to sort of meld the tablet experience with an ultra thin pc um so you sort of get the best of both worlds nothing's really happening it's just been an announcement asus has shown off a really sexy uh machine that they're calling an ultrabook i believe the model is the ux21 so what what intel's going to do with this fund as you mentioned they're gonna invest 300 million dollars you know a third of a billion dollars uh into companies that are working on technologies that would enhance the ultrabook experience so whether it be you know some sort of battery technologies ui technologies uh basically anything even you know physical uh enhancements some sort and any sort of technology that's going to enhance the ultrabook intel has 300 million dollars to throw around to try to help those companies out now wasn't intel behind the mobile internet device craze the mid that nobody seemed to care about i mean is this something can they really control the form factor i mean microsoft tried it with the tablet pc to try to push that microsoft also tried the umpc intel they've tried mids is i mean i know that the the trend is to move to these ultra portable notebooks but does can intel actually affect change with this kind of funding do you think that's possible i think so i think a lot of see my theory is that touch interfaces aren't quite there yet especially on form factors say larger than a tablet you know or i think the phones have it pretty good so i think there's still a lot a lot of movement that's going to happen in that space and if there's these smaller companies that need you know need some funding to kind of push their technology forward and have something ready sooner rather than later i think intel can help some of these people yeah of course um you know it's it's a separate arm of the company it's intel capital it's it's really a venture capital division within intel that's gonna invest in in multiple companies so i think yeah there's lots of stuff that can happen you know people developing new materials it may not be necessarily strictly for the ultrabook market but if there's a company that is developing say a new lightweight a heat resistant material that may work well in an ultrabook that's a company intel might invest in as well it's kind of you know this broad reaching fund and you know where it goes is anybody's guess i i just think it's cool that intel's throwing that much money around in this kind of economy uh we'll see if there's any tangible goods that come around hey dave you have any like tangible things that you're working on anything in your labs like i don't know ssd or some awesome speakers anything neat no i'm just sitting around eating bon bons okay that's good so i'll i'll go raid the lab myself and see what else i can find i'm lying i'm lying i'm i'm i'm working too much actually in my possession right here is the lenovo ideapad tablet k1 try not to glare the screen there and uh yeah this is a pretty cool little device um it is a standard 10.1 inch android honeycomb based tablet uh nvidia tegra 2 dual core chip on board giga ram 16 32 or 64 gig uh of rom um you know it it does have um a micro sd card slot not a lot of ports you've got the proprietary um sync and and charge port you know docking port um you know headphone jack stuff like that so you know nothing really special about it the screen's decent has a nice um rubberized coating on the back here that's actually i like it a lot it's actually one of my favorites um and it's relatively light it's 1.65 pounds not as light as an ipad 2 and definitely not as thin about 13 millimeters thin but what i really like about this device is what lenovo did with honeycomb it's a standard 3.1 android 3.1 honeycomb installation there's some little features that uh lenovo added to add to the uh accessibility and the useful usefulness of the os it's not just oh here's another little um you know whatever music app or something like that it's it's actual ui tweaks that make this tablet interesting anything else roaming around in your labs beyond the uh the idea pad well yeah but let me let me just try and show this maybe i can get it on camera so i'm going to get this right up to the screen you see the this this is the android um taskbar or essentially the multitask pane where you see here on the bottom of the screen the left of the screen you've got a number of apps fired up there's four apps fired up now in android 3.1 and honeycomb you know those you can see the apps that are running and you can just you know tap on an app and go to that app quickly it's nice but what you see here in the lenovo this is the little stuff again that i'm talking about on the on the idea pad k1 you see the little red x's you can actually kill an app now from that view from that task uh you know app manager view and so you can just click the x and kill it which is the way it should function if you know if if google was you know put their thinking caps on you know you can pull up and switch to an app real quick but you can't just quit out of an app it's still running in the background you have to go kill it manually through the app manager and the settings control panel which is cumbersome this allows you to kill off apps real quick just by hitting that x so there's little things like that which are kind of cool with the ideapad k1 now what else am i looking at um actually looking at a really cool case from thermaltake uh the level 10 gt was the case that we built the last um hot hardware sweepstakes giveaway sweepstakes rig on the gaming rig the level 10 gt black version i'm looking at the snow edition now and it's pretty badass now on to the reader questions i believe the first one i think is from omega draco what are your favorite peripheral devices of all time not just that's a marco question what is your favorite peripheral devices or devices i'll go first but i i bet your is some interesting answers here too um favorite peripherals of all time tough question i have been using pcs since the commodore 64 days um i think some of my favorite things if i go way back i want to say it was from a company called wicco they made these awesome joysticks for the c64 loved it um i absolutely love it's in front of me right now i can't show you i love my 30 inch lcd i think investing in a huge high quality screen is one of the best things any user can do um having the kind of real estate it offers is just fantastic for productivity and just to see people's faces when they walk in front of it it's great makes those 22 inch monitors look so tiny agree um i also love i'm going to pull this into the frame oh she's so sexy you hear the music okay what is it music is a racket this keyboard is from a company called ducky it is the uh 9008 g2 tiger year edition it was a limited edition um cherry mx blue keyboard with black laser engraved keycaps um it's gonna not come across well on video they have lettering but it's kind of this is this is my transitional board before i go full otaku and and have nothing on my keycaps and have a completely blank keyboard i i really love typing on that thing right now how about you dave you have a favorite peripheral is it as cool as that laser etched keyboard a blank keyboard how are you gonna type on something with that i mean i know i don't look at the keyboard when i type now either but occasionally you need a little reference point you you can go blank keycaps uh yeah it's called skill buddy yeah oh okay um you know i i would say uh lately it has been my um it actually helps the the quality of this webcast it has been my i'm gonna pick it up now my blue usb microphone high quality mic now i'm turning it away from you now so you can't hear me so well but it's what gives us decent audio quality here for the webcast and that's not easy to come by i mean we went through a few different devices to get um you know decent audio quality to get to get something that sounds you know like you're in the same room with the person and uh i like this blue snowball mic it's kind of cool let's get that chrome finish a little red light tells me i'm on air and i play radio guy it's fun for me it's got to be something really simple i'm looking right at it it's my microsoft mouse it's like the seven dollar one it is cheap it's got a scroll wheel when that first came out that scroll wheel thing i was like that's pretty freaking cool i loved that okay it was a simple thing i was just like this is that squirrel wheel because i was like you just click and used to drag i'm like this took forever like scroll wheel and then i've seen like the logitech ones that actually have inertia i'm like that's really neat i really love that but that's like a favorite all time because it's made it very convenient for like my entire uh just using a computer in general on top of that i love scanners just in general scanners the idea that you could take paper and move it into a system and get rid of the paper it's just like that's so like it's 2008 dude it said of all time okay this is a big deal to me this was like i used to have a handheld scanner from like i think visioneer and it worked off of serial ports and you have to like move really carefully i remember that slowly and you could never get it right i just thought of something else i was so fond of can i interrupt you both yes you can oh my god my obsidian x24 the dual voodoo twos on a single board everybody oh i missed my obsidian x24 yeah those were the days sorry my last one's gotta be the wacom tablet when i learned i could draw on a computer without paper again i'm a i used to do a lot of paper stuffs and to have have the wacom tablet was very happy about that you're very artsy fartsy huh i'm a creative type go figure let's move to the second question from rr play what i would like to know is a bit of your forecasting about some of the tech advances like ssd and sheer cpu slash gpu processing power as what has previously been mentioned quote as to blowing the doors off the way things are going to be happening okay i've read that word for word so i hope that made sense our our play yeah baby um you know that that's a great question uh uh asked in a very creative way uh and and i would offer that yeah these are two areas that excite both both marco and i i mean if you think about what's the the slowest you know uh bottleneck the slowest component in your system it's it's the storage uh generally the storage subsystem and i think what's happening with ssds is is an amazing um you know you could say evolution from hard drive to solid state but really revolution the way it's accelerating in ssd i mean if you look at the hard drive guys they've gone just crazy density you know evolution but in solid state we're really talking about orders of magnitude sort of performance increases here on a regular basis and i think what's happening what's going to happen in terms of the future for ssds i think we're going to see fewer uh bridged interfaces like sata uh i think we're going to see the native interfaces um come to fruition across you know the mainstream much more so in the future so that pci express uh is a direct bolt attached on you know we've we've got pci express edge you know cards you know plug-in cards now that you know the manufacturers are coming out with and that's sort of an in-between but i think you know get rid of that that sata interface bolt flash memory right up to the pci express interface i think you're going to see more of that i think you're going to see different iterations of that um there's a new sata spec out there now uh sata express which is this melding of sata 3g or third generation say to say to 6g six gigabit per second with pci express i i think you're going to see a continual um you know migration and uh you know sort of uh intersection of the technology so that we get right down to the bare metal to the to the solid state flash and performance is just gonna hockey stick it's gonna it's gonna keep going i'm excited about that that's what's that's what really turns me on is you know some new uh ssd device hit in the lab another question from our play the basic uh gist of it is why are you guys covering gadgets so much lately i mean hardware's you know you think of processors you're thinking some serious desktop stuff and you guys are all like cell phoney now what's up with that marco you want to handle that um yeah i will handle that so we're covering lots of gadgets right now simply because gadgets are freaking hot right now that's where a ton of the activity is right now um if you look at our traditional you know if you go back 10 years when we were just covering core pc components that's still our bread and butter we still love that stuff that stuff is still super sexy um but the movement is a lot slower than it is right now in the mobile space there there's new tablets new phones uh new os releases just all this cool stuff happening in the mobile space and if we're not covering it i think we're doing a lot of you guys a disservice so to to be able to cover it all i i think is great but we will absolutely still focus on a lot of the core stuff um we're still you know hooked up with all the big oems and we're going to bring you stuff the day it launches whenever possible so um i hope you like the additional coverage and uh we'll leave it at that speaking of hooking up are any hints of any contest coming up perhaps yes yes we can hint only hint at this point um we are going to be um pulling together the components of yet another custom-built hh rig i think we're gonna we're gonna talk about that marco and i in terms of uh the resources we can pull together we're not sure what what the architecture looks like yet you know what the the base processor and graphics uh components are but stay tuned because we will be holding yet another uh sweepstakes where folks can enter and uh through participation and being involved in the site in the community and and conversation at hothaw.com you can win yet another killer gaming rig that will uh just blow the doors off off of your friends systems and uh create a lot of bragging rights uh like like lamar bowen has right now with his killer gaming rig that he won our our winner last uh contest of course you can find all that information on hotharbour.com again you can find out everything we talked about at heartharova.com or if you want to go around the web because i know you guys are like you know this site's great and everything but sometimes i want to go somewhere else but i still want to see hot hardware we got you covered there's dick.com hardware there's facebook.com hardware there's twitter.com slash guess guess what hot hardware youtube.com hot hardware vids for excellent videos all kinds of product reviews and you can see them in glorious moving pictures for creative types like me who likes to look at that kind of stuff i think that wraps up this episode another fine episode gentlemen any words of wisdom before we leave the masses don't spit in the wind any wooden nickels i don't know if that was wisdom but uh thanks for stopping bycoming up on this episode of two and a half geeks a wide drive intel throwing money at ultrabooks your questions a lot of them and a whole lot more the bar has been set wicked fast it's rocking the benchmarks we're gonna up the ante a little bit processing power i kind of understand this hey welcome back to tune up geeks i'm is actual alongside those nuts from hot hardware that's dave altavillo there in the middle and that's uh marco cipetta nodding and today we'll be talking about tech but first let's ask how the guys are doing how's it going dave i'm feeling nutty like a nut how about how about you marco do you not feel like a nut because almond joy's got nuts but mounds don't so yeah sometimes you don't i i don't feel like a nut i i feel like a geek today i feel like a geek right on that sounds about right uh let's let's let's uh stop talking about such silliness and i'd talk about hmm let's see if i look around hot hardware let's talk about hardware how about that's an idea i know it just came off the top of my head let's talk about dave about a plan the kingston y drive you guys did a review and this is a portable drive that allows you to add more space to an ios device right dave yes sir well could you explain more we're done okay that's all you need to know okay next no i'm kidding i'm kidding um yeah actually the the y drive from kingston our our our memory friends at kingston uh go figure uh assembled this device and uh looks a lot like you know uh an iphone you know sort of form factor you know nice and thin and um you know about about the same size as a handset and yeah that's exactly what it does it it enables um densities of 16 or 32 gig for 130 or 175 dollars respectively uh connected over uh wi-fi 802.11 uh n is it i'm hoping i have to look at that up but um yeah so 802.11 wi-fi connection to any ios device so that's ipad ipod uh or iphone now it's only to ios because it uses an application is there an application for android or any other kinds of phone and also could you access it on your network so yeah well let me let me explain how it works it it's it's available you know to any ios device with an app um and so you you actually need the the y drive app for your iphone or ipod or ipad device to access it and android apps are coming it's it's not available yet only ios is supported currently you can also hook it up to a pc via standard usb connection okay so does this thing have a battery in it so if you want to carry it around with an ios device is this something that you want to carry two things with and how is the battery life on this yeah so actually there is an on-board battery on the device and it'll last about four hours of continuous use so that's you know continuously reading and writing uh files to the device um but you know obviously if you're not continuously accessing device it's gonna last longer um you know just sitting idle so uh about four hours of continuous use battery life and a little bit longer you know for real world sort of idle on off type of usage this thing sounds ridiculous flat out because the iphone doesn't have an expansion i can't use an sd card or micro sd like any other phone could just do that but do you have to do this the other thing that's the other thing that's neat about it is it well actually you might think um you know this is a drawback but it has a pretty cool feature it has so when you connect to it with an iphone or an ipad what have you um you utilize your wi-fi connection to the device and therefore you can't connect to the internet you can't connect you know uh to another wireless router to get an internet connection however you can set this bridge it has a bridge mode feature you can set this up in bridge mode which will allow you to access the storage on the device and also access uh another wi-fi connection off the uh y drive so now you can connect have the y drive connected to your network uh you know getting an ip for your internet connection and then connect to it in bridge mode surf you know the internet as well as have access to storage and we actually tested it out and there was no perceived latency and we actually did a speed test speedtest.net performance test with it as well and there was no difference in overall bandwidth and throughput with the device so you know nice nice little bridge mode feature as well on to intel's crazy schemes and plans apparently intel thinks the future are ultra ultra-thin notebooks that they want to call ultra books yeah that's right i didn't come up with a name they did but apparently they've thrown 300 million dollars into the ultrabook fund marco what's this fund and what are they trying to do with this so back at computex uh i guess it was back in june that's when intel sort of announced you know these ultra books and what their vision for an ultrabook is it's basically a ultra thin ultra light notebook um with really long battery life and some sort of tweaks to either the ui or what have you the goal is to sort of meld the tablet experience with an ultra thin pc um so you sort of get the best of both worlds nothing's really happening it's just been an announcement asus has shown off a really sexy uh machine that they're calling an ultrabook i believe the model is the ux21 so what what intel's going to do with this fund as you mentioned they're gonna invest 300 million dollars you know a third of a billion dollars uh into companies that are working on technologies that would enhance the ultrabook experience so whether it be you know some sort of battery technologies ui technologies uh basically anything even you know physical uh enhancements some sort and any sort of technology that's going to enhance the ultrabook intel has 300 million dollars to throw around to try to help those companies out now wasn't intel behind the mobile internet device craze the mid that nobody seemed to care about i mean is this something can they really control the form factor i mean microsoft tried it with the tablet pc to try to push that microsoft also tried the umpc intel they've tried mids is i mean i know that the the trend is to move to these ultra portable notebooks but does can intel actually affect change with this kind of funding do you think that's possible i think so i think a lot of see my theory is that touch interfaces aren't quite there yet especially on form factors say larger than a tablet you know or i think the phones have it pretty good so i think there's still a lot a lot of movement that's going to happen in that space and if there's these smaller companies that need you know need some funding to kind of push their technology forward and have something ready sooner rather than later i think intel can help some of these people yeah of course um you know it's it's a separate arm of the company it's intel capital it's it's really a venture capital division within intel that's gonna invest in in multiple companies so i think yeah there's lots of stuff that can happen you know people developing new materials it may not be necessarily strictly for the ultrabook market but if there's a company that is developing say a new lightweight a heat resistant material that may work well in an ultrabook that's a company intel might invest in as well it's kind of you know this broad reaching fund and you know where it goes is anybody's guess i i just think it's cool that intel's throwing that much money around in this kind of economy uh we'll see if there's any tangible goods that come around hey dave you have any like tangible things that you're working on anything in your labs like i don't know ssd or some awesome speakers anything neat no i'm just sitting around eating bon bons okay that's good so i'll i'll go raid the lab myself and see what else i can find i'm lying i'm lying i'm i'm i'm working too much actually in my possession right here is the lenovo ideapad tablet k1 try not to glare the screen there and uh yeah this is a pretty cool little device um it is a standard 10.1 inch android honeycomb based tablet uh nvidia tegra 2 dual core chip on board giga ram 16 32 or 64 gig uh of rom um you know it it does have um a micro sd card slot not a lot of ports you've got the proprietary um sync and and charge port you know docking port um you know headphone jack stuff like that so you know nothing really special about it the screen's decent has a nice um rubberized coating on the back here that's actually i like it a lot it's actually one of my favorites um and it's relatively light it's 1.65 pounds not as light as an ipad 2 and definitely not as thin about 13 millimeters thin but what i really like about this device is what lenovo did with honeycomb it's a standard 3.1 android 3.1 honeycomb installation there's some little features that uh lenovo added to add to the uh accessibility and the useful usefulness of the os it's not just oh here's another little um you know whatever music app or something like that it's it's actual ui tweaks that make this tablet interesting anything else roaming around in your labs beyond the uh the idea pad well yeah but let me let me just try and show this maybe i can get it on camera so i'm going to get this right up to the screen you see the this this is the android um taskbar or essentially the multitask pane where you see here on the bottom of the screen the left of the screen you've got a number of apps fired up there's four apps fired up now in android 3.1 and honeycomb you know those you can see the apps that are running and you can just you know tap on an app and go to that app quickly it's nice but what you see here in the lenovo this is the little stuff again that i'm talking about on the on the idea pad k1 you see the little red x's you can actually kill an app now from that view from that task uh you know app manager view and so you can just click the x and kill it which is the way it should function if you know if if google was you know put their thinking caps on you know you can pull up and switch to an app real quick but you can't just quit out of an app it's still running in the background you have to go kill it manually through the app manager and the settings control panel which is cumbersome this allows you to kill off apps real quick just by hitting that x so there's little things like that which are kind of cool with the ideapad k1 now what else am i looking at um actually looking at a really cool case from thermaltake uh the level 10 gt was the case that we built the last um hot hardware sweepstakes giveaway sweepstakes rig on the gaming rig the level 10 gt black version i'm looking at the snow edition now and it's pretty badass now on to the reader questions i believe the first one i think is from omega draco what are your favorite peripheral devices of all time not just that's a marco question what is your favorite peripheral devices or devices i'll go first but i i bet your is some interesting answers here too um favorite peripherals of all time tough question i have been using pcs since the commodore 64 days um i think some of my favorite things if i go way back i want to say it was from a company called wicco they made these awesome joysticks for the c64 loved it um i absolutely love it's in front of me right now i can't show you i love my 30 inch lcd i think investing in a huge high quality screen is one of the best things any user can do um having the kind of real estate it offers is just fantastic for productivity and just to see people's faces when they walk in front of it it's great makes those 22 inch monitors look so tiny agree um i also love i'm going to pull this into the frame oh she's so sexy you hear the music okay what is it music is a racket this keyboard is from a company called ducky it is the uh 9008 g2 tiger year edition it was a limited edition um cherry mx blue keyboard with black laser engraved keycaps um it's gonna not come across well on video they have lettering but it's kind of this is this is my transitional board before i go full otaku and and have nothing on my keycaps and have a completely blank keyboard i i really love typing on that thing right now how about you dave you have a favorite peripheral is it as cool as that laser etched keyboard a blank keyboard how are you gonna type on something with that i mean i know i don't look at the keyboard when i type now either but occasionally you need a little reference point you you can go blank keycaps uh yeah it's called skill buddy yeah oh okay um you know i i would say uh lately it has been my um it actually helps the the quality of this webcast it has been my i'm gonna pick it up now my blue usb microphone high quality mic now i'm turning it away from you now so you can't hear me so well but it's what gives us decent audio quality here for the webcast and that's not easy to come by i mean we went through a few different devices to get um you know decent audio quality to get to get something that sounds you know like you're in the same room with the person and uh i like this blue snowball mic it's kind of cool let's get that chrome finish a little red light tells me i'm on air and i play radio guy it's fun for me it's got to be something really simple i'm looking right at it it's my microsoft mouse it's like the seven dollar one it is cheap it's got a scroll wheel when that first came out that scroll wheel thing i was like that's pretty freaking cool i loved that okay it was a simple thing i was just like this is that squirrel wheel because i was like you just click and used to drag i'm like this took forever like scroll wheel and then i've seen like the logitech ones that actually have inertia i'm like that's really neat i really love that but that's like a favorite all time because it's made it very convenient for like my entire uh just using a computer in general on top of that i love scanners just in general scanners the idea that you could take paper and move it into a system and get rid of the paper it's just like that's so like it's 2008 dude it said of all time okay this is a big deal to me this was like i used to have a handheld scanner from like i think visioneer and it worked off of serial ports and you have to like move really carefully i remember that slowly and you could never get it right i just thought of something else i was so fond of can i interrupt you both yes you can oh my god my obsidian x24 the dual voodoo twos on a single board everybody oh i missed my obsidian x24 yeah those were the days sorry my last one's gotta be the wacom tablet when i learned i could draw on a computer without paper again i'm a i used to do a lot of paper stuffs and to have have the wacom tablet was very happy about that you're very artsy fartsy huh i'm a creative type go figure let's move to the second question from rr play what i would like to know is a bit of your forecasting about some of the tech advances like ssd and sheer cpu slash gpu processing power as what has previously been mentioned quote as to blowing the doors off the way things are going to be happening okay i've read that word for word so i hope that made sense our our play yeah baby um you know that that's a great question uh uh asked in a very creative way uh and and i would offer that yeah these are two areas that excite both both marco and i i mean if you think about what's the the slowest you know uh bottleneck the slowest component in your system it's it's the storage uh generally the storage subsystem and i think what's happening with ssds is is an amazing um you know you could say evolution from hard drive to solid state but really revolution the way it's accelerating in ssd i mean if you look at the hard drive guys they've gone just crazy density you know evolution but in solid state we're really talking about orders of magnitude sort of performance increases here on a regular basis and i think what's happening what's going to happen in terms of the future for ssds i think we're going to see fewer uh bridged interfaces like sata uh i think we're going to see the native interfaces um come to fruition across you know the mainstream much more so in the future so that pci express uh is a direct bolt attached on you know we've we've got pci express edge you know cards you know plug-in cards now that you know the manufacturers are coming out with and that's sort of an in-between but i think you know get rid of that that sata interface bolt flash memory right up to the pci express interface i think you're going to see more of that i think you're going to see different iterations of that um there's a new sata spec out there now uh sata express which is this melding of sata 3g or third generation say to say to 6g six gigabit per second with pci express i i think you're going to see a continual um you know migration and uh you know sort of uh intersection of the technology so that we get right down to the bare metal to the to the solid state flash and performance is just gonna hockey stick it's gonna it's gonna keep going i'm excited about that that's what's that's what really turns me on is you know some new uh ssd device hit in the lab another question from our play the basic uh gist of it is why are you guys covering gadgets so much lately i mean hardware's you know you think of processors you're thinking some serious desktop stuff and you guys are all like cell phoney now what's up with that marco you want to handle that um yeah i will handle that so we're covering lots of gadgets right now simply because gadgets are freaking hot right now that's where a ton of the activity is right now um if you look at our traditional you know if you go back 10 years when we were just covering core pc components that's still our bread and butter we still love that stuff that stuff is still super sexy um but the movement is a lot slower than it is right now in the mobile space there there's new tablets new phones uh new os releases just all this cool stuff happening in the mobile space and if we're not covering it i think we're doing a lot of you guys a disservice so to to be able to cover it all i i think is great but we will absolutely still focus on a lot of the core stuff um we're still you know hooked up with all the big oems and we're going to bring you stuff the day it launches whenever possible so um i hope you like the additional coverage and uh we'll leave it at that speaking of hooking up are any hints of any contest coming up perhaps yes yes we can hint only hint at this point um we are going to be um pulling together the components of yet another custom-built hh rig i think we're gonna we're gonna talk about that marco and i in terms of uh the resources we can pull together we're not sure what what the architecture looks like yet you know what the the base processor and graphics uh components are but stay tuned because we will be holding yet another uh sweepstakes where folks can enter and uh through participation and being involved in the site in the community and and conversation at hothaw.com you can win yet another killer gaming rig that will uh just blow the doors off off of your friends systems and uh create a lot of bragging rights uh like like lamar bowen has right now with his killer gaming rig that he won our our winner last uh contest of course you can find all that information on hotharbour.com again you can find out everything we talked about at heartharova.com or if you want to go around the web because i know you guys are like you know this site's great and everything but sometimes i want to go somewhere else but i still want to see hot hardware we got you covered there's dick.com hardware there's facebook.com hardware there's twitter.com slash guess guess what hot hardware youtube.com hot hardware vids for excellent videos all kinds of product reviews and you can see them in glorious moving pictures for creative types like me who likes to look at that kind of stuff i think that wraps up this episode another fine episode gentlemen any words of wisdom before we leave the masses don't spit in the wind any wooden nickels i don't know if that was wisdom but uh thanks for stopping by\n"