The LG Dare got its head in the market as the guys at Engadget put their hands on one of them quite recently. As far as information is offered, Verizon and LG are doing quite a good job with this mobile phone. A 3.2 mega pixel camera, built in flash, 3.5 mm headphone jack, add on memory if needed, good hardware and a lot more are presented. Now I do not know if the LG Dare can be considered better than the iPhone, only time will tell but I must say that the iPhone is not high on my list of mobile phones I would like to own. On the other hand, now we are talking about the LG Dare and it does look quite interesting.

Read the rest of the Hands on Report HERE.

DialtoSave is also linked with broadband and they do offer a great broadband comparison service that lets you choose exactly what you need with a whole list of possible providers. We thus have three main broadband deals that are tailored for mobile use, business use and home use and diversity is a key aspect here, all together with proper presentation.

Although the best part of DialtoSave is directly linked with the cheap international calls service and the unique mobile phone deals compared, on the whole we can say that this web site provides a lot more and can be considered a very important tool to have when thinking about these domains. For instance, there are quite some great mobile phones that can be ordered for free and come with great deals from mobile phone operators. You might not be aware of them but they do exist and DialtoSave presents them. The best mobile phone handsets are offered including LG, Nokia, Motorola, Samsung or Sony Ericsson. You can even get info about pay as you go offers that are sure to be cheaper than the majority of regular offers you will get from the regular shops you might want to visit. Even if you are only looking for mobile phone information you will be happy to know that DialtoSave has a lot of mobile phone reviews written. You can basically find out everything about the mobile phone you might be considering. This is where DialtoSave stands out, a service that comes with high quality and truth in mind.

The official press release stated that the three options available vary in size from 10.5 inches to 60 inches and an Element backpack is included, one that would store both the Macbook Air and the Solar Cell. It is currently marketed as perfect for college students and the image used is a student on a campus lawn never running out of Mac battery. No matter the use, there is no denial that this is a great solution although the Macbook Air is more popular among businessmen than college students.

USB-IF was founded in 1995 by Intel in collaboration with others like HP, Microsoft, NEC, NXP Semiconductors and Texs Instruments. USB-IF is now working together to bring USB 3.0 to life (it is also being called “PCI Express over cable” so you might also find it under this name). Bandwidth will be increased 10 times as compared with USB 2.0 and transfer will be at around 5 gigabits per second. A lot of the intellectual property behind this new technology was not created by Intel but nVIDIA and AMD think that the company is currently holding a lot of information to itself. They claim that Intel is working silicon so the open host controller is working but they are not giving specifications to chipset and processor makers. Withholding such info would lead to a market advantage of 5 to nine months according to the two companies.

Intel claims that it will only give the specifications once they are finished and this is not the case at the moment. If the specs would be given if they are not complete then it would be incomplete so companies would end up building different chipsets and devices would not be compatible. Intel also said that they are behind on the project and this might cause resentment.

Now the problem is that AMD and nVIDIA claim that they will develop their own open host controller for USB 3.0. Both companies say that creating different open host controllers would mean incompatibilities between products and USB 3.0 controllers, the same thing that Intel claims. A source said that AMD is actually starting development on the open host controller right now and nVIDIA says that the first meeting on the alternate version (the one different from what Intel will bring in) is scheduled next week.

We just hope that this will not have a big impact on the market and on consumers.

The new Western Digital hard drive line is sure to be highly popular although it is quite similar to the new VelociRaptor. It will share similarities in the 2.5 in drive and the 3.5 inch housing. We do not have a lot of details about the topic as everything is still in development and no time frame has been released. According to some sources the hard drive is supposed to be silent and will feature an incredible platter spinning speed of 20,000 RPM. It seems that Western Digital did not manage to get this silent part well done yet and progress aimed to be achieved through an improvement in housing.

Talking strictly about the iPhone Hayashi said: “It may sell modestly as a smart phone or as an upgraded iPod, but it’s not quite cutting it as a competitor in our mobile-based culture.” This basically means that the iPhone would need more features in order to be suitable in the Japanese smart phone market. A recent poll also showed that half of the people in the poll would want to buy an iPhone but only a fifth actually knew what it was. The only thing that is good at the moment for the iPhone in the Japanese market is the Apple brand, which is well known and might sell alone a lot of the units that will be sold. An increase in features would be good and might pull off a huge surprise in the country but still, the current line of features of the iPhone is considered not enough for the Japanese mobile market, even if the leaders have too many features. Quite strange, no?

Recent news in show that Sony is getting ready to release a small laptop (low cost of course) that is based on Via Technologies. A prototype was announced last week and shown by Quanta Computer (contract manufacturer) at WiMax Expo in Taipei. The mini laptop is based on the open source Via OpenBook reference design and will start shipping during the third quarter of this year.

Going into specs we see that the laptop will feature a 1.6 GHz C7-M processor (from Via,of course) and is listed with Sony as manufacturer. What is interesting is that Quanta is currently the largest laptop maker for laptop computers in the world although Sony was listed as manufacturer at the official showing. The truth is that Quanta is currently under contract for many big brands in the industry and they are not allowed to discuss customer facts with anyone. This might be the case with Sony as well and we do expect Sony to be officially listed as manufacturer. We must keep in mind that if Sony is in fact the listed manufacturer, Via only has to gain from this. They recently gained some ground with the C7 chips in the processor market. C7s re perfect for low cost laptops although they are definitely not as powerful as various high end chips produced by AMD and Intel. Combine this with the competition coming from Intel’s Atom processors and we do have a ground for interesting facts to appear that are currently kept secret.

The current OpenBook reference design is aimed to reduce design cycles and is based on a VX800 chipset. We see an 8.9 inch screen that comes with a resolution of 1,024 X 600 pixels. The hard disk stated at the moment can store 80 GB of data and models with more storage space can appear although it is not official. We also know of the existence of a basic wireless module that comes with Bluetooth and Wi-Fi and there are some optional modules included like Asisted GPS, support for 3G and WiMax. The OpenBook prototype that was presented by Quanta ran on Windows Vista Home Basic and showed a 60 GB hard disk, WiMax support and 1 GB of RAM memory.

Here we go towards science Fiction a little but it does seem that science fiction is quickly becoming reality from many point of views. Now we found out that a computer is capable to read our minds by simply looking at scans of their brains while thinking about some words. The scientists responsible think that this can lead to us understanding how the brain stores information and more importantly, where. According to Tom Mitchell (Machine Learning Department at Carnegie Mellon University and the same individual that helped to lead the study) this discovery can aid in the treatment of various learning disabilities and language disorders. He stated that:

“The question we are trying to get at is one people have been thinking about for centuries, which is: How does the brain organize knowledge? It is only in the last 10 or 15 years that we have this way that we can study this question.”

The team of scientists used functional magnetic resonance imaging, which is basically a brain scan but one that can see real-time brain activity. 9 volunteers were used. They though of 58 different words and the computer was calibrated by using this technology and their brain activity. Tim Mitchell added:

“We gave instructions to people where we would tell them, ‘We are going to show you words and we would like you, when you see this word, to think about its properties,’ If I show you the brain images for two words, the main thing you notice is that they look pretty much alike. If you look at them for a while you might see subtle differences. We have the program calculate the mean brain activity over all of the words that somebody has looked at. That gives us the average when somebody thinks about a word, and then we subtract that average out from all those images. After we train on the other 58 words, we can say ‘Here are two new words you have not seen, celery and airplane.’”

The computer was then asked to choose which of the brain images presented corresponded to the given word. As expected, the computer chose well and predicted when the individual was thinking about celery and when about airplane. Further research will be conducted but so far the results are positive. Who knows, maybe in the future computers will be able to read our minds completely! Isn’t that a scary thought?