A supercharged Chevrolet Corvette may have been all the hotness back in 1996, but times and tastes change and now people are all about the electric boogaloo. Today we get to witness one modern man’s transition into this brave new world, a Wayne Bickley from California, who has gutted his crow-black ’96 Corvette and replaced the messy internal combustion setup with a set of 18 XS Power XP1000 batteries, a DC electric motor, and his own clutchless six-speed transmission. The end result doesn’t really look much different, but its 20-mile “spirited driving” range and 85mph top speed will surely feel different and it does also sound very much like something from the the future. Read more…

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There’s just no time to make a trip to the grocery store some weeks. Tesco Home Plus is a supermarket chain in Korea that’s vying to be rated No. 1, and leave its second place spot to E-Mart, its main competitor. E-Mart has a greater number of stores than Tesco, but the company is determined to become the No. 1 grocery chain without increasing the number of stores. How does it plan to do this? Why, with the use of a smartphone, of course.

According to Tesco, Koreans are the second hardest working people in the world, and time is literally money. Taking an hour a week for grocery shopping can be a real drag, so the company devised a way to have the store come to the people. Tes

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Intel, being the worlds greatest supplier of central processing units, is always working on some new CPU or set of chips, so it is not that great a surprise to hear that a pair of them are set to launch next week.

When it comes to CPUs, their makers have to make sure they are of a great performance, size and socket support variety.

This is because there are many different computers and electronics that use such chips, with unequal performance and power requirements.

It is for this reason that there are so many series of CPUs, like Celeron, Core i3, Core i5, Core i7, the upcoming Cloverview (covered here) etc.

Turns out that the Celeron line is going to be updated soon, in about a week or so, according to most recent reports on the subject.

One of them, dubbed Celeron 787, is a single-core model that will replace the Celeron 763 on the low budget front.

As far as specifications go, it features a clock frequency of 1.3 GHz, as well as an L3 cache memory of 1 MB.

Virtualization support is also present, as is the obligatory integrated graphics core, its maximum turbo frequency being of 950 MHz (the base clock is 350 MHz).

Meanwhile, the Celeron 857 is a dual-core running at 1.2 GHz and designed with an L3 cache memory of 2 MB instead of just one.

Furthermore, though the base speed of the built-in GPU is identical to the one above, the maximum one is higher (1 GHz).

Both Celeron line members use the BGA package and are of the ULV variety, so they consume very little power, in this case 17W.

Finally, they support DDR3-1333 memory and will launch in the third quarter of 2011, meaning that their arrival could be as early as next week. Read more…

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There is a new showstopper in town. Acer has just launched a tablet that can make the most luxe of tablets stare in admiration. The Iconia’s looks are inspired by Acer’s Timeline series of notebooks—brushed aluminum back and dark grey plastic running along the sides. The front has al 0.1 -inch screen running edge to edge. On the sides are located the power, volume and screen orientation lock keys along with a couple of ports such as Micro HDMI and USB. Yes, unlike most tablets, the A500 has a USB port that eases connection to a memory drive. It can a

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We’ve already seen cameras that let you pretend you live in a radioactive apocalypse shoot HDR video, combining overexposed and underexposed images into one surreal composite. But so far, that kind of dystopian trippiness has been relegated to experiments and rigs using two lenses. But here we have AMP, a portable-enough five-pound camera that splits the light into three sensors, giving it a range of 17.5 stops to “reveal reality” in our drab, incomplete lives. The single-lens camera shoots 1080p video at 24fps or 30fps, records raw, uncompressed data to an SSD, and works with Nikon F-Mount-compatible lenses. Read more…

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Desktop CPUs are great, sure, but they only get you so far. With handheld computing on the rise, companies like Qualcomm, Texas Instruments and Freescale have plenty of reasons to celebrate. This week, the last amongst those showcased their scalable i.MX 6 quad-core ARM-based apps processor.

It’s built on ARM’s Cortex A9, and it’s targeting the tablet, eReader, automotive infotainment and other smart mobile device spaces. The i.MX 6 series is comprised of the single-core i.MX 6Solo, dual-core i.MX 6Dual and quad-core i.MX 6Quad processor families. Read more…

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