Toshiba Responds: Blu-Ray On the Way?

Toshiba was the first to get back to me about what it is expecting to do with its HD-DVD laptops. I guess their people had the most time to think about the answer. Either way, here is Toshiba's response to our question. The answers in italics are NOT official comments of Toshiba; they are what we anticipate they really wanted to answer.

Is Toshiba planning on discontinuing HD-DVD drives in its laptops?

Yes.( We apologize to the suckers who bought our nice looking systems with HD drives. We hope you like old movies.)

When will Toshiba stop selling computers with HD drives?

No confirmed date yet. (We plan to keep them on the market until we sell out. We wasted a whole lot of money an this HD-DVD thing. Maybe we can still fool the late adopters.)

And switch to Blu-Ray?

Toshiba will explore alternative HD options for its customers. (It will take us months before we can actually say "alternative to HD-DVD" without crying. The format that starts with a B and ends with a Ray will be available sometime soon in our laptops.)

1GB iPod Shuffle Now $49, 2GB coming for $69

appletoday adjusted the pricing of its 1GB Shuffle from $79 down to $49. Is Apple finally realizing that $79 for a small mp3 player without any from of an OLED screen is a total ripoff? Not quite, Apple is releasing a 2GB model of the Shuffle later this month for $69.

The new model will also be available in the same pastel colors that will, yet again, remain in style for the whole months of April and May before looking ugly again. We recommend getting the (PRODUCT) RED version

Hands-on With The Alienware m15x: Penryn Power Quite the Light Show

We just our lucky paws on Alienware's shiny new Area-51 m 15x, arguably the most powerful 15.4-inch notebook on the planet. It's the first mobile rig with this screen size that boasts Intel's blazing 45nm Intel Core2 Extreme mobile proccessor X9000. And it's the first laptop in this class to cram in Nividia's GeFOrce 8800M GTX graphics card, complete with a whopping 512MB of dedicated video memory. (Take that, Crysis!) We'll be bringing you our first 3D and gaming benchmark results ASAP, but in the meantime we wanted to share some hands-on impressions of m15x' unique design. Namely, the rad color changing effects have us singing Karma Chameleon.

At first glance the Area-15 m15x looks a bit understated for a mobile gaming rig: It has a silver paint job and blue key backlighting-nothing too flashy and certainly more refined than the over-the-top ribbed look of previous Alienware notebooks. Do a little digging and you'll be wowed by how much you can customize this machine on the fly. The Alienware Control Center lets you seriously tweak the system's back lighting using one of the ten colors (or black and white) for each lighted area of the laptop.

Nokia N95 Smartphone

(GSM,Bluetooth,5MP,8.1GB-MPN: N958GB)

Prize Range: $649.00 - $882.00 from 6 Sellers

Description: With up to 8GB of built-in memory, the Nokia N95 8GB has key features of its predecessor, including a 5.1-megapixel camera with Carl Zeiss optics, buitl-in A-GPS, WLAN, HSDPA and innovative 2-way slide. The N95 8GB also boasts a luminous 2.8-inch (240 x 320 px) QVGA display, so watching videos, browsing the internet or viewing maps is a pleasure. With its expanded memory, the N95 8GB offers up to 20 hours of video or up to 6000 songs. The N95 8GB supports services like Nokia Music Store and N-Gage Games. Access millions of music tracks from the Nokia Music Store.