Computers-Plus

Remember Hitachi GST’s 500GB single-platter Travelstar? Well, now it spins faster and jets out data quicker, possibly having been accelerated for the Ultrabook market.

In December 2010 the Z5K500 2.5-incher rotated at 5,400 RPM and had a measly 4MB cache and 3Gbit/s SATA interface. Behold the Z7K500 marvel: 7,200 RPM, 32MB cache and a 6Gbit/SATA interface. There are encryption and enhanced availability options; the drive uses Advanced Format with 4K blocks, and volume ships start next month.

Hitachi GST is tapping into Intel’s Ultrabook specification, which combines a 7mm disk drive with a solid-state drive cache. T Read more…

T-Mobile sounds a bit bitter today.

The wireless operator has asked the Federal Communications Commission to reject a deal Verizon Wireless reached to acquire some wireless spectrum for some $3.9 billion, saying it would create excessive concentration of mobile service spectrum holdings that is contrary to the public interest.

Lest anyone forget, the price Verizon Wirelesss deal would be one-tenth the price AT&T was going to pay for T-Mobile, a deal the government rejected despite the assurances from T-Mobile and AT&T that competition wouldnt be an issue.

That deal faced plenty of industry yelling, most loudly from Sprint Nextel.

But not from Verizon.

Verizon Communications CEO Lowell MacAdam actually urged the government to let the AT&T-T-Mobile deal go through.

I have taken the position that the AT&T merger with T-Mobile was kind of like gravity, McAdam said.

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Do you ever stop to think about all those plain, unloved surfaces in the world, which go through life without ever once being used to reflect a Flickr feed or Facebook wall? It amounts to hectares of wasted potential, but there is a solution. It’s called LightBeam and it’s a ‘nomadic’ pico projector that uses a webcam to track and reorient its display to suit any ad hoc surface — the piece of paper in your hand, the cover of a book, or the picture frame on your desk. And just when you think you’ve seen it all before, the guy in the video after the break rotates a coffee mug to flip the channel. Handy, no? Read more…

Cramming a desktop environment onto a smartphone is a fun project that promises very little actual usefulness. Smartphone screens are too small for desktop OSes, and connecting a keyboard and mouse is usually out of the question. But now Canonicals Ubuntu for Android takes a different approach, surfacing the desktop OS only when it actually makes sense.

Canonical announced today that it will seamlessly integrate Android with the Linux-based Ubuntu distribution. A device running Ubuntu for Android loads Android during typical smartphone use cases, then switches to Ubuntu once its been slid into a dock that connects to a monitor, keyboard, and mouse.

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