Hardware

Hamstrung by poor battery life, and burdened with an overly weighty Vista operating system that makes starting up a drag, a pair of new subnotebook computers offer a glimpse of what could be—but isn’t quite, writes Wall Street Journal tech guru Walt Mossberg. Lenovo’s IdeaPad—a junior ThinkPad—and the U2E, a quirky offering from Asus, are pricey to boot. More »

No matter how broken it is, your old cell phone is still valuable to some people. That’s because it, like most electronics, is loaded with copper, iridium, gold, and other commodities that are becoming more expensive by the day. “To some it's just a mountain of garbage, but for others it's a gold mine," one recycling-plant manager tells Reuters. More »

Scientists in England have created the world’s smallest transistor, the BBC reports. At 1 atom thick and 10 atoms wide, it could be the key to creating microchips beyond the power of silicon. The transistor is made of graphene, a single layer of graphite and an excellent conductor of electricity. And unlike with silicon, the smaller a graphene transistor is, the faster it works. More »

Global demand for computer chips helped Intel power to a 9% first-quarter revenue gain, beating analysts' estimates and sending a message that while US sales may be slumping, the world’s largest chip maker’s still got game. Intel stock rose 7.7% in after hours trading, the New York Times reports, as the news allayed worries that computer sales are slowing. More »

A recent quantum computing breakthrough is a step towards creating a quantum Internet—which would be "automatically secure," a researcher told Technology Review . A Northwestern University professor has created a fundamental element of a quantum computer, a quantum logic gate, within an optical fiber, where previous gates used laser passing through air. This “could lead to distributed networks,” said one expert. More »

A Los Angeles company has figured out a way to make a radio frequency identification (RFID) system that is cheaper and has better range, the Wall Street Journal reports. New wireless networks could expand to cover entire warehouses, keeping track of individual items with cheaper radio tags. "I think this could have significant impact," a technology analyst says. More »

An unusually large calculator is on display for the next six months at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California. The massive machine is a “difference engine,” a mechanical calculator to determine polynomial functions designed (but never built) by 19th-century inventor Charles Babbage. London’s Science Museum constructed the brand new device for tech multimillionaire Nathan Myhrvold, reports CNet. More »

IBM has found a way to squeeze five times the performance out of a supercomputer at just 40% of the power. The newest version of the Power 575 draws chilled water into the computer and runs it through copper plates above processors to cool them, before expelling the heated water, reports CNet. This method reduces the need for air conditioning. More »

Advanced Micro Devices will shed 10% of its workforce this year and predicts a 15% first-quarter revenue drop, down to $1.5 billion, the Wall Street Journal reports. Slumping desktop sales and the company's line of defective chips and have hurt AMD, which will lay off workers worldwide at "all levels within the company," a spokesman told the San Jose Mercury News today. More »

The government Thursday lifted a week-old ban that prevented IBM from competing for new federal contracts. In exchange, IBM agreed to withdraw its protest of an $84 million contract with the EPA it lost last year, and to refund any attorney fees and costs the Government Accountability Office paid to fight it. IBM has placed five employees on administrative leave in the dust-up. More »

A US Attorney in Virginia has temporarily barred IBM from pursuing new government contracts while it investigates three 2006 IBM contracts with the EPA, MarketWatch reports. "The basic issue is whether certain information concerning a contract should have been provided to IBM employees by an EPA employee," said an IBM spokesman. More »

Your cell phone might soon be able to tell you if you’ve caught the flu. Researchers with Japan’s NTT DoCoMo have developed a workable method of “molecular communications”—a system for the transport of microscopic samples from a user’s sweat into their phone for analysis, Computerworld reports. More »

New research showing that it’s possible to make stretchable, bendable complex electrical circuits could open the door to wearable computers and to health-monitoring systems that can be implanted, Technology Review reports. Previous bendable circuitry was too slow for complex computing, but the new circuits, of ultra-thin silicon on plastic or rubber, perform as well as traditional rigid ones. More »

Semiconductor company AMD has revealed updates to its Phenom line and will launch four quad-core chips that “can improve performance for gaming and multi-threaded applications,” the company says. The California firm also said it would ship triple-core processors, which CNet reports is a first for the PC market, CNet reports. More »

Thomas Edison and associates might've been first to hear recorded sound, but scientists have revealed they weren’t the first to create it, the New York Times reports. A 10-second recording of “Au Clair de la Lune” made in 1860—17 years before Edison patented the phonograph—has finally been played back by researchers who discovered it in a Paris archive. More »

Sun Microsystems is moving toward connecting computer chips using lasers instead of wires, a move that could make computers 1,000 times faster. The company snagged a $44 million Pentagon contract to continue work that could also mean smaller, more energy-efficient machines. It won’t be easy, though: A Sun researcher told the New York Times the chance of success is 50%. More »

Intel will bring a bigger—and faster—solid state drive to market in the second quarter that will heat up the competition between chipmakers and launch a new generation of laptops and PCs based on SSDs rather than hard drives, reports CNET. Intel’s 80-160GB SSDs are twice as fast as current hard drives and outpace rival Samsung’s 100mbs SSD. More »

PC makers are increasingly setting their sights on markets outside the US, which are making up an ever-larger share of the worldwide computer market, USA Today reports. PC sales are growing in the US, still the world’s largest market, but are rising much faster elsewhere. Last year, the US accounted for 26% of worldwide sales, compared to 35% 5 years ago. More »

Imagine a computer chip that could literally have wires drawn onto it and erased like an etch-a-sketch. That’s what University of Pittsburgh researchers have been able to create, Technology Review reports. To demonstrate the technology, researchers drew the tip of an atomic force microscope across the chip like a pencil, leaving nano-sized, conductive wires in its wake. More »

Hewlett Packard is reorganizing its HP Labs in an effort to move more of the projects from the famed idea generator to market—and add to the company’s bottom line—more quickly,  Therese Poletti writes at MarketWatch. But even as HP looks for more commercial results from its legendary R&D facility, HP Labs continues to conduct theoretical research—its one-time core—as well. More »