fusion

Films from Miramax premiere in Facebook, Fusion Garage's Grid 10 gets a date and a $200 price cut, and Gowalla announces version 4.0 of its app that focuses on stories and guides.

Links from Tuesday's episode of Loaded:

Fusion Garage's new Grid 10 tablet is selling for a healthy $200 below its originally announced price.

Available for sale in the United States and scheduled to start shipping this past Monday, the Grid 10 is being served up in two versions--a 16GB Wi-Fi-only version for $299 and a 16GB Wi-Fi + 3G edition for $399. Those numbers compare with the previously announced prices of $499 and $599, respectively. Shipping is free.

A spokewoman for Fusion Garage told CNET that the company was able to lower the price after negotiating its supply chain costs with a manufacturing partner. Customers who … Read more

The landscape of budget laptops often looks like a police lineup of suspects: a muddy confusion of similar-looking faces and bodies. For $600 you can buy a lot of computer lately, though you're not likely to get something that's particularly sexy.

The $629 Gateway NV55S05u is one of more than a dozen 15-inch Gateway NV laptops with a galaxy of different processors. In the case of our 15.6-incher, an AMD A8-3500M APU is inside. AMD's A8 processor is part of a new line of AMD Fusion processors with graphics and CPU on one chip (called an … Read more

AMD's Fusion series of APU processors first grabbed our attention at the beginning of 2011 for their impressive showing in 11.6-inch ultraportable laptops like the HP Pavilion dm1z, offering great performance and battery life for a good price. The E and C-series APUs representing the entry-level and thin-and-light side of the laptop and desktop universe have been updated, with memory and graphics enhancements and a promised gain in resting battery life.

AMD claims 12 hours of resting battery life on a charge on the C-series APUs, and 10.5 hours on the new E-series. Of course, our battery … Read more

Just when I thought the tablet market was settling into a Honeycomb malaise, a rogue tablet has jumped into the mix. The Grid 10 from Fusion Garage (yes, that Fusion Garage) was unveiled today as a 10-inch tablet alternative to Apple's and Google's offerings, due to ship on September 15.

Sure, at $499 for a 16GB model the pricing suffers from the same delusions that afflicted HP's TouchPad and RIM's BlackBerry PlayBook, but at least Fusion Garage is in good company. Like HP and RIM, Fusion Garage is banking on a post-iOS, post-Android gag reflex to drive consumers into its arms. … Read more

Shipments of PC processors failed to gain ground during the second quarter, but revenue still inched its way higher, according to data out today from IDC.

For the quarter, worldwide chip shipments rose only 0.6 percent from a year ago and fell 2.9 percent from the first quarter. Sales reached $9.49 billion, a 5.4 percent rise from 2010's second quarter but a 4 percent drop from the first quarter.

"The first quarter of 2011 was better than most first quarters due to the extra calendar week," Shane Rau, director of Semiconductors: Personal Computing … Read more

You no longer have to buy the biggest and most expensive vehicle to get the most advanced safety features in the market. Thanks to higher-than-expected consumer interest, Ford has been introducing safety technologies on more vehicles, and plans to roll out these offerings across the product line in the future.

Typically the latest and greatest safety technologies, such as adaptive cruise control (ACC) and blind-spot-monitoring systems, are reserved for luxury brands or appear only on the biggest and most expensive vehicles a manufacturer produces. But to lower the cost for these options, Ford has been offering new safety technology on … Read more

HDR photography involves combining multiple photographs taken at different exposures into one image that contains greater detail in highlights, midtones, and shadows than any single exposure can provide. Fusion is a simple program that makes it easy to perform this task, although we were left with a few lingering questions about the program's operation.

Fusion's interface is plain and fairly easy to navigate, with a selection of buttons and menus across the top. It was easy to select the images that we wanted to work with. The program pulled up metadata for each image, allowing you to check … Read more

CAMBRIDGE, Mass.--Nuclear fusion suffers from an image of being too good to be true. But researchers here say they are already doing nuclear fusion on a small scale and it's just a matter of time--decades, realistically--before it becomes practical.

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology houses an active research lab for nuclear fusion, which many consider the answer to weaning the world from its costly dependence on fossil fuels. A tour of the Plasma Science and Fusion Center last week, organized by the TEDx Boston conference, offered a crash course on nuclear fusion, a field of research which continues … Read more