I don’t know how the Toshiba press people keep straight faces when they announce this latest news, but there you go – Most Eco-Friendly Instant-Heating Toilet Seats. Only from and for our friends in Japan.

                                             Looks aerodynamic... oops! wrong review...

 

Every year, like clockwork, the Computer Manufacturers, Distributors and Dealer’s Association of the Philippines (COMMDAP) lays out their all-out presentation of the latest and greatest locally – with every year seeing computer technologies that varies less and less from the world norm.

                                            The SMX Convention Center at night.
 

Nvidia presented to a small gathering of media and industry people their current thrust into the motherboard chipset market that has been neglected, to say the least, the past few years as Nvidia concentrated on expanding and dominating the consumer graphics arena, as well as anything graphics related.

                                             Mark Chen, APAC Channel Sales Manager

Looking like it came out of a carpenter’s refuse box and somehow got letters attached to its keys, the wooden keyboard featured on (Computer) Geeks.com, along with its bundled mouse, represents the pinnacle of woodworking design and utility. Or perhaps not.

                                             Looks neat, to be honest.
 

Battery technology has always been in pursuit of the overwhelming advancements of portable devices, thus makeshift devices and patch-up solutions to this shortcoming is always coming out of the woodwork.

                                             Cosplay? Fashion statement? Or portable power?

Nvidia is well known for pouring firepower into performance – oriented markets with their obsession for the best and the fastest. Besides the well-documented and well covered 8800 Ultra and GTX videocards by the company representing the highest end products, Nvidia is also bringing out the performance in their mainstream products, the newest of which is the 8800GT.

                                             The Zotac 8800GT: On fire!

New Q-Notes have rightly taken their place in the Philippine market as the first affordable notebooks available for purchase locally. They can be described as “white notebooks” – built up from manufacturer standard parts available to other small scale builders, but over the years Neo has made an image for itself that defines “affordable quality” – which may sound paradoxical, but is not.

                                             The "Start" button - "it all starts here."
 

There are casual gamers, but then there are also those gamers who seem to have godly skills when it comes to competitive games. I’ve always wondered what they have up their sleeves to show such skill (except for the fact that they play a lot more hours than I do) – but then that was before I knew that there were options to using a keyboard and mouse combination.

                                             Chopped up and grafted back together, the PGCU still looks cool.

Never have production types or engineers try to understand a market or a consumer group when they can be fiddling with bios configurations and board layouts instead.

                                            Did a double take? Yes, that's a Foxconn box.

Hot on the heels of the transformers brouhaha (well, not really, since the movie was released nearly four months ago), this Optimus Prime replica brings tears to this reviewer’s eyes – perhaps due to the sheer amount of chrome used in the conversion.

                                             Bling-y. Looks fit for a pin-ball machine.

Born out of equal parts ingenuity and too many Naruto episodes, a new Japanese “urban camouflage” series of disguises packed into bags and backpacks aims to deter crime by hiding from it.

                                             A portable vend machine? Or a lost ninjutsu?

Cooler Master is a name well known not only to hardware enthusiasts, but also to the average joe who has cracked open a case or two before with an AMD processor running inside, as CM supplied AMD with CPU coolers during the Athlon XP era.

                                             The Cooler Master name is no accident.
 

Many new technologies over the years have played a chicken-and-egg parody with introducing and supporting a revolutionary new product, for the inventor and the manufacturer, respectively. A good example was the BTX specification. Thankfully, this does not seem to be the case for the Wi-Fi draft committee and for manufacturers pumping out products of a new Wi-Fi specification.

Ever seen a Japanese national or an anime character doing the victory sign and then saying “V”? Well, a chinese company has taken it as inspiration to “reverse engineer” (i.e. rip off) the Japanese-made Wii console, and they call it a “Vii”.

                                             I'm pretty sure Winnie Churchill wasn't referring to the "Vii". 

Looking like something from a Star Wars spectacular, the Philips MMS430 has looks enough to set it way apart from its contemporaries. The good news is, its good looks are backed up by a fair amount of performance for gamers and casual users.

                                             It's two X-wing fighters flanking the mother ship.