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(Credit: MobileandNotebook)

Over at the Taiwan Broadband show, Ericsson's vision for the portable computer of 2020 uses a pico-projected screen and laser-projected keyboard. And though the company's got a rough prototype (pictured above), they imagine it ultimately squeezing into this bizarre spider-leg tripod design:

(Credit: MobileandNotebook)

It'd have essentials like wireless broadband connectivity and a battery, but I'm hoping we'll have cooler stuff than a laser-projected keyboard by 2020. Their time has come and gone already, no? Less of that, more interactive holographic display technology, please. More wacky 2020 shenanigans at Ericsson via MobileandNotebook. And a video after the jump.

(Credit: Lifehacker)

OK. Don't read past this first paragraph yet. I want you to look at the pic above and try to guess what's going on. Go ahead. I'll be here when you get back.

Figure it out? I didn't. At first I thought it was some kind of "Internet-speak joke" that I'm not hip enough to get. Thankfully, it's something much cooler.

By way of Lifehacker, I bring you the Spider-Mac desktop. Not its official name (not yet at least). Basically one of Lifehacker's readers, Zack Shackleton took a Spider-man comic panel and made a useful desktop background out of it.

Using a number of diagnostic and editing tools including GeekTool and Magnifique, he pulled a bunch of info from his Mac (like the time, a to-do list, calender, and CPU info) into an impressive dynamic package that displays this data as word balloons.

This makes for a fun desktop (albeit a confusing picture if you don't know the context) for the Mac. Actually, the first thing I thought of when I saw this was the Get your War On comic and those G.I. Joe public service announcements from a few years back.

(Credit: Sony Pictures)

Love Spidey? Hate cancer? Of course you do.

Consider this: Stand Up To Cancer [link includes an auto-play video], an organization dedicated to building interdisciplinary teams of experts to focus on solving specific cancer problems, has teamed up with eBay to auction off a number of "celebrity experiences" to raise funds for cancer research.

At the top of the list: a visit to the set of Spider-Man 4 to meet the cast and enjoy a walk-on role, plus a trip to the movie's New York premiere, and designer duds to wear to the show. (At the time of writing, the bid to beat is $5,000.) Or, if you'd prefer, wait until September 5 to bid on a set visit, walk-on role, and tickets to the Los Angeles premiere of Iron Man 2.

Other goodies going on the block in the next few weeks include lunch with Judd Apatow, who will also review your comedy script; a round of golf with Sugar Ray Leonard; and a visit to the set of the CBS Evening News (which is owned by CNET's parent company CBS). Check out the Stand Up To Cancer eBay store for a list of all items in the auction.

All proceeds will go directly to Stand Up To Cancer; consult your tax adviser about tax-deductibility.

BAE Systems is developing tiny robots to help soldiers gather information in battlefield situations while maintaing their safety.

(Credit: BAE Systems)

Warfare is scary enough, but now some scientists want to throw some spiders and snakes into the action, but with the intention of making it less scary for soldiers.

BAE Systems is developing electronic spiders, insects, and snakes to help soldiers gather information without exposing them to dangerous situations on the battlefield, according an announcement the defense giant released this week. The effort is being funded by a $38 million agreement with the U.S. Army.

The Micro Autonomous Systems and Technology (MAST) Collaborative Technology Alliance aims to create miniature robots that will act as the eyes and ears of soldiers in dangerous situations, such caves and mountainous areas, potentially saving many lives.

A promotional video released by BEA depicts some of the prospective designs and how soldiers might deploy and process the information the robots gather. The video shows robot spiders scurrying around corners and mechanical dragonflies hovering in windows, with images transmitted to wrist-mounted monitors and command centers, warning them of potential threats.

"Robotic platforms extend the warfighter's senses and reach, providing operational capabilities that would otherwise be costly, impossible, or deadly to achieve," said Joseph Mait, MAST cooperative agreement manager for the Army Research Laboratory.

The Army has been working on a variety of remote-controlled devices to aid soldiers in battle situations as part of its Future Combat Systems program, the Army's largest modernization initiative.

iRobot, the company that helps clean homes with the Roomba and Scooba, announced a contract last year to supply the Army with PackBots, robots that can lift 30 pounds, climb stairs, roll over rubble, rocks, mud and snow on polymer tracks that use a patented flipper to stay right-side-up.

Alfa Romeo is set to return to the U.S. soon. While you wait, Brian Cooley thought you'd like to see the car you can't get in the U.S. right now, but probably should. Take a look at the Alfa Romeo 8C Spider, as well as a few other offerings from the Italian automaker.

Click here for our coverage of the 2008 Geneva Auto Show.

You may have seen news today that AMD announced its new Spider platform this morning, consisting of two quad core Phenom CPUs, a new 700-series of motherboard chipsets, and its already announced Radeon HD 3000-series of graphics cards. At 2.2GHz and 2.3GHz for the Phenom 9500 and 9600, respectively, AMD's new chips will need to rely on price, rather than performance, to entice buyers to choose those chips, or systems based on them, over Intel's 2.4GHz Core 2 Quad Q6600. Pricing will shake out as the various retailers get their inventories and can gauge demand, but at least at the start, the $283 Phenom 9600 is more expensive than Intel's Q6600, which we've seen for as low as $260.

AMD's new quad core Phenom chip will need to rely on price to win customers.

(Credit: AMD)

And while AMD has said it will announce faster Phenom chips in January 2008, Intel stemmed that news by seeding preview versions of a forthcoming Core 2 Extreme QX9770 chip, a high-end quad core CPU set to release in January. Several hardware sites took the bait and tested the preview hardware, with the overall message being that Intel isn't worried about it losing its performance-leader position.

So where does this leave you, the potential new desktop buyer, this holiday season? First, with only four desktop launch partners--Cyberpower, Falcon Northwest, iBuypower, and Velocity Micro--you should only expect to find these systems in expensive gaming systems. We went over to Velocity Micro's Web site and priced out a Phenom-based Raptor 64 DualX with a Phenom 9600 and two Radeon 3870's for $3,135. That doesn't sound like a bad deal on paper, and we hope to start playing with a review sample soon for a true performance look. Interestingly, no one offers a AMD-based system with three or four Radeons as enabled by CrossFireX, AMD's new multi-GPU standard, announced as a feature of the new 700-series chipset.

But if a $3,000 system of any hardware combination will give you strong price-performance, you don't have a lot of great options if you want to spend $5,000 or $6,000 on a gaming PC right now. The fastest consumer CPU right now is Intel's Core 2 Extreme QX9650. The fastest GPU is Nvidia's GeForce 8800 Ultra, preferably in dual-card SLI mode. The problem is you can't build that system today. Intel's X38 chipset, required for the QX9650, won't support two Nvidia graphics cards in SLI mode. And Nvidia's SLI-capable 680i chipset can't handle the Intel QX9650 chip. With no motherboard chipset currently able to support both Intel's new chip and Nvidia SLI cards, you're forced to compromise on either CPU or GPU power.

AMD's CrossFireX. If only we could find a vendor that sells it.

(Credit: AMD)

Numerous reports of a next-generation Nvidia Nforce 700-series chipset (about which Wikipedia has an excellent summary) suggest that this may be the platform circuitry high-end system builders need to get those $5,000 and $6,000 rigs to the appropriate performance levels. And its absence perhaps explains why HP's Blackbird and other high-end PCs don't yet offer Intel's new core 2 QX9650's. If NForce 700 doesn't come out before or shortly after the higher-end Phenom CPUs, and in the meantime AMD's CrossFireX becomes fully-realized (and remains exclusive to AMD chipsets), a possible, if remote, scenario could find Intel and Nvidia leading the individual CPU and GPU markets, but with AMD boasting the fastest overall desktop platform.

The first major fruits of Advanced Micro Devices' acquisition of ATI Technologies are ready for the public just as the market for those products is going through some profound changes.

Spider will be AMD's first "platform" product when it makes its expected debut Monday. It is designed for desktop PCs, and the entire Spider package comes with a new processor, AMD's quad-core Phenom chip, the new 7-series chipsets, and new graphics chips.

AMD's Spider platform is designed for gaming and multimedia desktops.

(Credit: AMD)

The two Phenom processors launching Monday are essentially desktop versions of AMD's Barcelona quad-core processors. They're designed for the upper half of the desktop market: gamers who don't have thousands of dollars to spend on the ultra high-end equipment and families who want a powerful home PC without breaking the bank. When combined with the Radeon HD 3850 and 3870 unveiled last Wednesday, you get a pretty decent system for around $900 to $1,200, said Leslie Sobon, director of desktop product marketing for AMD.

For years, AMD disdained a so-called platform approach for its products, preferring to say that unlike Intel's Centrino and Viiv programs, it gave its PC customers a choice of the components they could use to build a system. But PC companies like platforms because they make their lives easier, knowing they can slap components together that have already been tested and validated to work with each other.

In order to get that kind of technology in-house, AMD bought ATI Technologies last year for $5.4 billion. But Spider, which comes out of that mega-acquisition, hits the market at a tough time for desktop PCs and AMD.

The desktop market has been slowly declining in mature economies such as the U.S. and Western Europe for some time. People with that midrange PC budget--$900 to $1,200--have been spending their cash on notebooks over the last couple of years. That's not expected to change anytime soon, and most PC vendors don't terribly mind, since notebooks are more profitable.

But, there's still a lot of investment in equipment used to build desktop PCs, and there's always going to be a class of people who want something fixed and permanent in their homes. The PC industry's response to that trend was to try to find new ways to sell desktops as either gaming machines or multimedia hubs, rather than the general-purpose PC for the home.

For the most part, the multimedia hub strategy has been a spectacular failure: plenty of people have bought Windows Media Center PCs, but few are actually using those PCs in lieu of a cable or satellite receiver and DVR with their living room televisions.

And PC gaming, while still a significant market, is barely holding its own against console gaming. According to NPD, $1.5 billion worth of PC games were sold at U.S. retail stores in 2001. Last year, only $970 million worth of PC games were sold through the same channels--and there are a lot more PCs out in the wild today compared with 2001. Meanwhile, console sales have skyrocketed.

Unfortunately, AMD's greatest strength as a company has historically been PC gamers and enthusiasts. The company arrived as a corporation with the launch of the Opteron server processor, but it has long enjoyed the attention of PC fanboys who crave every last inch of performance they can get.

The hope behind that strategy has always been that PC gamers and enthusiasts are influencers, in that they are the ones whom family members call and ask what they should buy when shopping for a new PC. But I'm not convinced that's as true anymore, simply because PCs are less of a novelty these days than they were in the past.

People are more confident about buying a PC these days, and they have a wealth of options for advice. That means marketing your wares to a general audience is extremely important, and that's an area where AMD simply does not play.

Intel dominates the marketing of the PC industry. The Intel Inside program was a masterstroke, and years ahead of its time. AMD has no suitable equivalent, mainly because marketing to the general public is expensive. "We're not sitting here with billions of dollars of marketing to push one chip or another, we rely on our customers (the PC companies) to do the end user marketing," Sobon said.

AMD still does pretty well at retail without that kind of marketing effort. In October, AMD had about 45 percent of the U.S. retail market, according to CurrentAnalysisWest. That number also doesn't include Dell, which has made AMD a significant part of its product lineup. Most of that share, however, is made up of desktops, which are a shrinking market and less profitable to boot.

The initial plan for Spider is to launch it through channel partners, rather than top-tier PC companies like Hewlett-Packard and Dell. Falcon Northwest and Velocity Micro are well-known names among the PC gaming community, but they are boutique players in the market at large. And the other vendors in AMD's launch plans? iBuypower and Cyberpower, two companies that aren't exactly on the lips of most PC buyers.

This is the perennial problem for AMD. It can't reach a wider group of buyers in the more profitable segments of the market without the combination of great products and a steady marketing campaign. After Intel's product teams pulled their collective head out of the sand in 2006, the competitive comparisons were much less in AMD's favor.

This is a really tough period for AMD. It's having trouble getting faster versions of Barcelona, the chip it desperately needs to fund the rest of its operation, out the door. The Spider platform is launching into a segment that is changing rapidly, and through partners that won't produce volume. Puma, a revamped notebook processor, is still months away.

And perhaps most troubling, AMD recently canceled a meeting of industry analysts to talk about its future roadmap. CEO Hector Ruiz has done a lot of good for AMD, validating the company as a true industry player with the success of Opteron, but he'll ultimately be judged on whether the $5.4 billion gamble on ATI will pay off in the form of the Fusion products expected in 2009. Right now, that's far from certain.

Correction: This post initially misstated the brand of the two processors that launched Monday. They are Phenom processors.

The Spider-Man 3 Blu-ray will ship with the $400 PS3 on November 2nd.

(Credit: Amazon)

Way back on September 12, we reported on rumors that Sony would be releasing a $400 40GB PS3/Spider-Man 3 Blu-ray bundle for the holidays. The not-so-secret new system has now been officially announced by Sony, with a November 2nd launch date in the North America. At the same time--effective immediately--the current 80GB model will be available in North America for $500.

In Sony's press release, CEO Jack Tretton is quoted as saying, "We're pleased to offer the consumer a lower price point without sacrificing the core technology components that make PS3 the most advanced high-definition entertainment system available. Every PS3 comes with a Blu-ray drive, HDMI output, an integrated Wi-Fi connection, Cell Broadband Engine and a built-in hard-drive." As previously reported, however, the new 40GB PS3 won't offer any form of backward capability with PS2 games. (Read John Falcone's earlier post for a full report on the issue).

As I've said before, if Sony hoped to compete with the XBox 360 and Wii during the holiday season, it had to hit the $400 price point. Some readers scoffed that the inclusion of the Spider-Man 3 Blu-ray wasn't exactly a big selling point, considering the movie sucked. Also weighing heavily on Sony is the lack of a true breakout (exclusive) title that gives fence-sitters a little more sense of urgency to buy the system.

What do you think? With the XBox 360's reliability problems, is $400 the magic price point for the PS3 and its built-in Blu-ray player? Or are the games what matter in the end (i.e., Halo 3, BioShock, and the upcoming Mass Effect)?

(Credit: Uber-Review)

You young'uns out there can have your Transformers and such. We oldsters, and our creaky animated icons, are making a comeback.

Soon we'll be roaring to life in Speed Racer's "Mach 5," but first we must pay respect once again to another of our childhood favorites, Spider-Man. The latest tribute to the Webbed One comes in the form of a "Spider-Man Speaker Pillow," which Uber-Review says can play tunes from an MP3 player or anything else that can take a 3.5-millimeter headphone plug.

Actually, the real reason for posting this item was to scoop Craver Caroline McCarthy, who apparently thinks that pillows are part of her exclusive professional domain. Think again, Sparky.