Filed under: Storage

It's been quite awhile since we've seen anything substantial emerge from SmartDisk, and it looks like the last time may actually have been the last. Verbatim and its parent company, Mitsubishi Kagaku Media (MKM), have purchased "substantially all of the assets of SmartDisk's external hard drive and digital imaging business." The acquisition essentially includes everything (right down to patents and engineering expertise) in those two divisions, which should compliment Verbatim's well recognized data storage lineup nicely. Although the purchase price wasn't revealed -- nor were details about how the branding would work out in future product releases -- the two have indeed official shook hands and the exchange of assets is well underway.

[Via PCWorld]

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Filed under: Wireless

AT&T announced today that it would be making its nearly 10,000 WiFi hotspots accessible free of charge to the company's higher-end broadband customers, effective immediately. The hotspots, located in places like McDonalds and Barnes & Noble, will be made available to users of AT&T's 3.0-Mbps-and-higher services like Yahoo! High Speed Internet Pro and Elite, and FastAccess Xtreme (3.0 or 6.0 Mbps), and will give them unlimited connectivity anywhere that AT&T has service. This should be nice news for the company's users, especially those who just got a new phone with WiFi, and while this doesn't really offer anything close to T-Mobile's Hotspot @Home, it could certainly pave the telecom's way towards some WiFi-based VoIP.

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Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!

Filed under: Cellphones

What would you give for a WM6 QWERTY with a 3-inch screen touting an 800 x 480 pixel resolution? Well, reader Kim Nyberg forked over a €635/$860 premium to Expansys for the Toshiba Portege G900 and has the unboxing pics to prove it. And you thought $599 was expensive. Oh, did we mention it's tri-band HSDPA with WiFi?

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Filed under: Storage

Western Digital has bought Komag, a company that supplies its buyer with thin-film media used to create disk drives, for $1 billion. The deal is expected to close in the third quarter of the year, and has been completely approved by both boards, with just regulatory approvals needed to be cleared. The deal is overshadowed somewhat by the statement by one analyst that unusual trading in options ahead of the deal looked "suspicious," which makes it hard for us to recall an example where stock trading in the time immediately surrounding a merger deal wasn't suspicious.

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Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!

Scientists have identified the most clear genetic link yet to obesity in the general population as part of a major study of diseases. People with two copies of a particular gene variant have a 70 percent higher risk of being obese than those with no copies. Amongst white Europeans, approximately one in six people carry both copies.

Researchers have found an unsuspected link between the immune system and high lipid levels (cholesterol and triglycerides in the blood) in mice. The finding could lead to new ways to reduce the risk of heart disease by lowering elevated lipid levels.

Despite some universities refusing to act as the RIAA's henchmen in its campaign against their students, the group says the effort to bully students into paying "discounted settlements" is working to help stop file-sharing. Of course, it says that about everything it tries (even when it's not true), but you'd imagine if any of these attempts really were successful, it wouldn't need to keep coming up with new ones. Anyhow, just in case there was any doubt as to how out of touch the RIAA is with the market and its customers, its general counsel and EVP wonders why students would continue to download from file-sharing networks when they have access to discounted or free subscription services. Uh, maybe it's because students realize how lame those services are? When students choose to keep illegally downloading even though they have free legal alternatives available, it illustrates that this isn't just an issue of them wanting to not have to pay for music, as the RIAA would like you to believe. It's an issue of the RIAA and its member labels not being able to deliver an attractive product to consumers. But why bother to innovate and come up with something people would want to buy, when you can just sue all your customers instead?

Filed under: Portable Audio

Oh dear, just when we thought we'd had our fill of exploding Apple devices, along comes an Australian forum member named eeno who saw his first generation iPod nano go up in flames, and has some snuff-esque pics of the aftermath. As is usually the case with these things, eeno's iPod was charging when it happened. He says the force of the battery's explosion sent the iPod off his PC onto the floor, where it continued to smoke and spark until he unplugged the USB charging cable from the back of his computer. Since his iPod is out of warranty, the local computer repair shop didn't do him much good, but they did take a few pics to send to Apple. Hopefully this iPod was just an anomaly, and we won't be seeing a whole wave of these explosions as 1G nanos exit their warranties and head towards retirement -- but somehow we fear the worse.

[Thanks, Kip HT]

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Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!