Gadgets

AMD outlines Elite Performance laptop APUs with game-ready Wireless Display -

2014 Chevy Spark EV will retail for $27,495 before incentives, hits West Coast freeways in mid-June -

HP refreshes its laptops for back-to-school season, prices start at $399 -

HP adds five new towers to its desktop lineup, Haswell offered across the board -

HP intros the Envy Rove 20, a portable all-in-one, plus two other AiOs -

AMD details Elite Mobility and mainstream APUs, we run early tests (hands-on) -

Instead of waiting until the end of the year for Google's annual Zeitgeist, you can now find out what's trending in any given month with a new Top Charts feature from Google Trends. Updated monthly and going back to 2004, Top Charts is built on the Knowledge Graph, so it's smart enough to house related keywords under one term for more accurate rankings. For example, searches for "giants baseball" and "sf giants" would go toward pushing "San Francisco Giants" up the ranks in a sports-related chart. Right now there are more than 40 top ten lists with more than 140 time periods available for your perusal. In addition to the charts, the Trends team has also rolled out a new visualization tool for "hot searches" that displays trending topics in a large colorful layout -- as seen below, you can customize it to display up to 25 searches at a time that endlessly shift and refresh, thus consuming our attention for the entire day. Filed under: Internet, Google Comments Source: Official Google Blog

At today's Thinking Digital conference, the BBC exhibited the first gadget designed through its Perceptive Media Project: the Perceptive Radio, created by Ian Forrester of the corporation's Future Media division. When the BBC announced the project last summer, the response included some head scratching, mostly due to a lack of clarity about what perceptive media entails. The BBC's R&D department defines perceptive media as distinct from personalized or pervasive media in that it intelligently adapts to specific audiences and surroundings. The Perceptive Radio accomplishes this through the use of light, sound and proximity sensors that adjust what the radio plays according to environmental factors like time, location and the listener's distance from the device. At the moment, the list of tricks ready to demo on the Perceptive Radio is short, but the BBC plans to open-source the design soon, allowing tinkerers to fiddle with it to their hearts' content. Filed under: Portable Audio/Video, Science Comments Via: The Next Web

A diagram from Bob Metcalfe's original memo explaining how Ethernet works. (Credit: Palo Alto Research Center) Most people probably associate Ethernet with a simple colored cable cinched with phone-like jacks. But, Ethernet is so much more. It is the foundation for global Internet access and undoubtedly the world's most used connectivity technology. In the annuals of techdom, Ethernet is a very big deal. "Ethernet ranks highly among those technologies that impact day-to-day life on a global basis," IEEE Standards Association writes on its Web site. "Data center networks, PCs, laptops, tablets, smartphones, and now the smart grid, smart meters, personal medical devices, the Internet of Things, connected cars, and more -- Ethernet touches them all in one way or another." And, it was 40 years ago today that inventor Bob Metcalfe passed around a memo explaining just how Ethernet would work -- connecting multiple computers to one another to exchange messages over increasingly busy networks. The Ethernet that Metcalfe, along with inventor David Boggs, came up with wasn't the first of such network protocols... [Read more]Related Links:Home networking Part 7: Power line connections explainedYear two of #Kristofize -- honoring Nicholas KristofTech CEOs say the darndest thingsTwitter needs to deal with the Twitter Accuracy ProblemXbox One vs. PlayStation 4

While single-chip SSDs are clearly known quantities, they usually run at a much more leisurely pace than their larger counterparts. Innodisk doesn't think size and speed have to be contradictory -- it just unveiled an embedded version of its nanoSSD that performs almost as well as its much bigger counterparts. The µSSD-based SATA chip has a tiny footprint (0.63 x 0.79 inches) and draws just 1W of peak power, but can still read at up to 480MB/s and write at 175MB/s. As such, it's one of the few SSDs that can theoretically stuff desktop-class storage into a smartphone or tablet. Whether or not it will is another matter. Innodisk hasn't named customers for the nanoSSD so far, which leaves us guessing just where or when we'll see the drive in a finished product. Filed under: Cellphones, Laptops, Tablets, Storage Comments Source: Innodisk