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Episode 56 of the Digital City, where we discuss Apple's plans for a monthly iTunes TV subscription service; Joey wonders why everyone puts up with poor iPhone service (hint: it's the social utility of shared experiences); and Scott finds out how much laptop $350 can buy.

It's also a mixed bag for Nintendo, with Wii sales down 50-percent over last year, and a lukewarm reception to the larger screen on the DSi XL handheld -- but at the same time, New Super Mario Bros. Wii and targeted games such as Style Savvy may bring in holiday shoppers. Finally, check out a hands-on look at DJ Hero, and see Scott rock a trucker hat straight out of 2003.

Related links:
>>DJ Hero: Hands-on
>>Laptop bargain-hunting: What can you get for $350?
>>Nintendo's new big-screen DSi XL

>>Watch the Digital City live every Monday at 3pm EST on CNET Live!
>>Subscribe to Digital City on iTunes
>>Join the Digital City Facebook fan page
>>Need more? Follow Dan on Twitter!

Bonus -- Hands-on video with DJ Hero:

G-Tech's new 2TB 7200 rpm-based external storage devices.

(Credit: G-Tech)

It's not hard these days to find external storage devices that offer 2TB or even 4TB of storage. However, most of them use low-power and relatively low-performance internal hard drives, such as the My Book series from Western Digital or the FreeAgent series from Seagate. If you are looking for top speed and top capacity form external storage solutions for your Mac, G-Tech has some news for you.

The company announced Monday that it now incorporates Hitachi's 2TB, 7,200rpm, 32MB cache buffer SATA hard drives across its entire 3.5-inch product line, offering different storage solutions from single-volume external hard drive to RAID systems, with capacities ranging from 2TB to 32TB.

The company's newly refreshed products include the G-DRIVE, G-SAFE, G-RAID, G-SPEED eS, G-SPEED eS Pro, G-SPEED eS PRO XL, and the G-SPEED FC XL. With these new products, G-Tech claims that it's now the first in the world that offers a complete line of 2TB, 7,200 RPM drive-based external storage solutions, specifically designed for the Mac computer and audio- and video-editing markets.

G-Tech's new storage solutions comes with virtually all existing connections, from USB 2.0, FireWire and eSATA for desktop external drives to miniSAS and Fibre Channel for high-end RAID storage systems. The fact that now it uses the top 2TB capacity hard drives means that customers can significantly increase the amount of storage while retaining the same physical footprint.

The new G-Tech external storage devices are available now with premium prices ranging from $379 for the simple desktop 2TB G-Drive, $3,599 for the high-end 8TB G-Speed eS Pro to tens of thousands of dollars for other high-end storage systems.

The new Rocket 622 and Rocket 620 SATA 3.0 controller cards from HighPoint.

(Credit: HighPoint)

In September, Seagate made the first 6Gbps SATA hard drive available. The new Seagate Barracuda XT hard drive offers twice the throughput speed of existing popular 3Gbps SATA hard drives. Now you're about to get the chance to take advantage of the new drive's performance with your current PC.

HighPoint, which makes controllers for storage devices, announced Monday the availability of the first SATA 6Gbps (or SATA 3.0) host adapters, the Rocket 600 series, which are based on PCI-Express 2.0 technology.

SATA 3.0 is the next generation of the SATA storage standard. Currently most computers use the second generation of this standard, the 3Gbps SATA (or SATA 2.0). At its full potential, the SATA 3.0 standard could theoretically transfer entire contents of a CD (about 800MB) in just one second. According to HighPoint, its new controller cards, however, offer the sustained speed of up to 500MBps.

HighPoint's new series of controller cards comes in two versions, the Rocket 622 that offers external eSATA connections to 6Gbps hard drives and the Rocket 620 that adds the higher-speed SATA to a computer's internal storage. Both of them, however, require an available PCI-Express slot inside the computer. You need the Rocket 620 if you want to install an operating system on the new and faster SATA 3.0 hard drive.

The two add-in controller cards are fully compliant with the Advanced Host Controller Interface (or AHCI) standard. They can also be installed in PCI-Express 1.0 slots and are backward compatible with previous generations of the SATA standard (the 1.5Gbps SATA 1.0 and the 3Gbps SATA 2.0). This means you can use them with any existing SATA-based hard drives and solid-state drives, other than the new 6Gbps SATA Barracuda XT from Seagate.

The new controllers are available this month. The Rocket 620 is slated to cost $70, while the Rocket 622 costs another $10.

Acer recently outpaced Dell as the second largest PC seller in the world. Is No. 1 Hewlett-Packard next on the list?

Acer Chairman J.T. Wang reportedly intends to ship 40 million notebooks in 2010, a number that could help the Taiwanese company challenge and even overtake current champ Hewlett-Packard for the top spot in portable PC sales.

To achieve this goal, Acer is looking to kick up revenue by more than 70 percent over the next three years, said Wang in an interview with Reuters.

Credit: Acer

J.T. Wang

Much of that revenue growth is likely to come from an anticipated 50 percent gain in sales for low-cost Netbook PCs. As the economy improves, Wang expects to sell an ever greater number of low-priced, portable PCs, a segment that has been very kind to the company.

As chairman since 2008, Wang has led Acer as its sales and market share have shot up over the past year. And with revenue expected to hit $18 billion this year, he's already targeting the next milestone.

Boutique gaming PC vendor Maingear launched a brand new full tower PC Monday morning. The all-steel aluminum-wrapped, steel-skeletoned Shift takes a page from last year's limited-edition Voodoo Omen desktop by rotating the motherboard 90 degrees clockwise, facing the ports you normally find on the back panel up on the top of the system instead. The result, Maingear says, is improved heat management, as the design works with heat's natural tendency to rise.

Maingear's new Shift gaming PC

(Credit: Maingear)

Regardless of the heat benefits, (we've seen plenty of PCs work just fine with a traditional layout), the result of the rotated motherboard clearly makes an impact on the look and feel of the Shift. With monitor and peripheral cables plugged in to the top and hidden under a removable, vented cover, both the front and the back of the system cut a clean profile.

(More pics and starting price after the jump.)

(Credit: CNET)

After reading Engadget's report citing recent complaints about Flash video playback mucking up system resources on the latest 27-inch Apple iMacs, we decided to test out the claims using our own system. Users on the Apple Discussion threads noticed a bug in the Flash Player that bogs down CPU processes, resulting in choppy audio and video playback.

We visited several sites with heavy streaming video content like Hulu, YouTube, and the Break Media Network, and experienced similar issues: popping sounds and jerky video rendering the content unwatchable on several accounts. Like many of the users in the Apple thread, we called up the Activity Monitor and saw that the Flash Player demanded a surprising 114.4 percent of the iMac's CPU processes.

We were able to temporarily fix the problem by putting the computer to sleep and waking it up, but some people are speculating that a hardware malfunction could be to blame. We've also tried to contact Apple for official word, but our messages have been as yet unreturned.

If you're experiencing similar problems, we'd like to hear about it--leave a comment and let us know the issue and what you did to fix it.

Update: AMD sent along a clarification of the various issues Nvidia raised regarding AMD's drivers:

"We actually moved our DirectX 9 hardware to a "legacy driver" status back in March 2009, and we were quite open about this move" [[ed: News to us]]. We've been providing updates to this driver on a quarterly basis - ironic considering the fact that we are offering more frequent updates of our "legacy" driver than some companies do of their "current" drivers. In fact we will be posting a new legacy driver in the next few days.

Also, as you probably well know, WDDM1.1 (Windows Display Driver Model) is the driver architecture required to run Windows 7. To meet Microsoft requirements, GPU's must be DirectX10 and later level hardware. As stated on our website, Windows 7 users with DirectX 9 AMD graphics hardware can use the legacy Windows Vista WDDM 1.0 drivers (as it is not possible for DirectX 9 hardware to support the WDDM 1.1 driver requirements)."

Ever-helpful Nvidia sent us an e-mail this morning with a few updates regarding Windows 7 and AMD's older 3D cards. Some of AMD's old cards are cut-off from official Windows 7 support altogether, and others are missing out on a few of Windows 7's more-advanced features. Before we accuse AMD of abandoning its customer base, we thought we'd try to track down just how many customers will be affected by this news.

The numbers for the Windows 7 cut-off issue are difficult to track down due to the age of the cards involved. As announced in a support update on its Web site, AMD plans to move its pre-DirectX 10 graphics cards to legacy status. That means AMD will no longer update the software drivers for 3D cards from its Radeon HD 1000 series or older. You can try using the most current Vista-compatible driver for those cards in Windows 7, or try to find a user-made driver, but AMD won't be able to provide you with support.

With a burst of renewed interest in 3D technology, Acer seems to be slightly ahead of the curve with its Aspire 5738DG laptop, featuring a special combination of hardware and software to add 3D to games, photos, and videos. Thanks to projects such as James Cameron's Avatar, upcoming 3D TV monitors, and Nvidia's 3D Vision project, consumers are hearing more about 3D than any time since the 1950s.

The $779 Acer Aspire 5738DG takes a different approach than the 3D Vision product from Nvidia. While the Nvidia rig requires a desktop PC with a high-end video card, a dual-link DVI connection to a compatible 120Hz LCD monitor, a USB-connected emitter box, and a set of active, battery-powered glasses, Acer's laptop is mostly software-driven, using a special screen coating and standard polarized-lens glasses to produce the 3D effect.

Like the Nvidia 3D vision setup (previously reviewed here), movies and photos need to be rendered in a 3D format to be used, but virtually any video game will work, as long as it makes use of actual 3D data to generate its characters, settings, and in-game objects.

Acer versus Nvidia: Very different 3D setups
Before we even get to which 3D system works better, it's important to note that they are packaged and sold entirely differently. Nvidia's 3D Vision requires a bundle of specialized hardware. At a minimum, the active glasses plus the USB emitter cost $199. But since 120Hz LCD monitors are still not common (and Nvidia only lists two officially compatible models, along with some DLP TVs and projectors), it's practically a requirement to purchase a bundle including the 22-inch Samsung SyncMaster 2233RZ for $598. On top of that, a desktop (not laptop) GPU--generally GeForce 8000 series or newer--is also required. Basically, you're looking at $600, plus the cost of your desktop PC (although there's a good chance you may already own a compatible PC).

Acer's Aspire 5738DG is a much simpler complete package. For $779, the 3D-ready laptop includes a basic pair of cheap plastic polarized glasses, plus a second pair of completely ridiculous-looking clip-ons for those of us who already wear glasses (the Nividia specs fit easily over even our gigantic glasses). Acer's is a more convenient, and more portable, overall package.

But does it actually work?

We were dubious of the 3D claims made by the Aspire 5738DG, especially after a sneak peek at the technology several months ago. That demo was wholly unimpressive and led us to expect the technology not to work at all. But after taking some time to play around with different screen positions and get used to its quirks, Acer's 3D laptop exceeded our admittedly low expectations.

The system includes several built-in demo videos, and they ranged from middling to mildly effective. Putting on the glasses, you have to tilt the lid back and forth until you find the sweet spot--for us it was about 120-degrees back, and with us sitting about twice as far from the screen as we normally would. The effect works best with objects that recede into the distance, where we could get an excellent level of 3D immersion. Objects that popped out of the screen toward us just got blurry or out of focus, and didn't work at all. It's also important to keep your head still to main just the perfect angle.

The screen also has what appears to have a series of fine lines running horizontally across it, even when you're not using any 3D software. It's a distracting look, and certainly not something you want to put up with during everyday computing.

Since there isn't a 3D section on Netflix or the iTunes video store, playing games in 3D is what the Aspire 5738DG is really for. The process is slightly more involved than launching a game normally, but not by much. Launching the TriDef 3D application from the desktop opens a listing of compatible programs. You can have the system scan for them, or drag and drop the apps yourself (by dragging the desktop launch icon for a game into the TriDef window).

TriDef offers a small number of specially tuned game presets, for titles from Call of Duty 4 to Left 4 Dead, but most games will simply have to use the "generic" preset. We loaded up a few games, and compared the experience with our Nvidia 3D Vision rig, which was hooked up to a Maingear small form factor PC equipped with dual GeForce GTX275 GPUs and an Intel Core i7 CPU.

Keep in mind that by way of comparison, the hardware on the Aspire 5738DG was easily outmatched, with only an ATI Radeon HD 4750 graphics card and a 2.2GHz Intel Core 2 Duo T6600 CPU.

Testing games in 3D
In our first side-by-side test, Batman: Arkham Asylum would barely run--we had to dial the resolution down to 800x600 pixels and turn all the graphics settings to low or off. Running the TriDef 3D software in the background didn't help matters -- pressing ALT-SHIFT-MINUS turns the processing off and on, and the frame rate took a major hit in 3D mode. Unfortunately, the Aspire 5738DG wasn't able to run the game in 3D properly, even with after we downloaded a custom profile for the game from TriDef--the effect popped in and out randomly, making for a very disjointed experience.

By way of comparison, we were able to run the same game at high settings easily on our Nvidia 3D Vision desktop rig, and the 3D effects were excellent, adding context and detail without getting in the way of the game. To be fair, this is a game specifically tuned for 3D Vision, and one of Nvidia's preferred demos showcases for the technology.

Our next test was Call of Duty 4--an older game more suited to mainstream laptop components (we've even played it on an HP Mini 311 Netbook). This was a much better match for the Aspire's hardware, and the game ran reasonably well, with 3D effects that were for the most part impressive. Our only issue was with the laser sight on our gun, which sat uncomfortably in the foreground, forcing us to close one eye when aiming down the sight (which kind of defeats the purpose of 3D gaming). If you dig around the 3D options (by pressing ALT-SHIFT-F1), you can turn the laser sight off, as well as tweak the 3D depth.

With same game using the Nvidia 3D Vision system, we got a crisper, clearer 3D image (although the active shutter Nivida glasses make everything seem dark, and we had to crank up the brightness)--and we didn't have the same troublesome laser sight issue. The Nvidia 3D software's custom settings for this game made everything look right.

Just as were about to give up on the idea of a 3D laptop, a colleague suggested we try Half-Life 2. It turns out that the TriDef software works especially well with games using game developer Valve's 3D engine. Half-Life 2 looked great and ran smoothly, and the effect was a reasonable substitute for Nvidia's more complicated 3D Vision technology.

On the more casual side, Sega's Mini Ninjas worked well, but onscreen text, including the in-game menus, vanished in 3D mode. We've heard anecdotally that World of Warcraft and Left 4 Dead also produce good results.

Which 3D technology is right for me?
We could have easily gone down a list of a dozen games, noting bugs, quirks, and occasional success stories, but the point is that the 3D technology in the Acer Aspire 5738DG clearly isn't the kind of easy to use, widely supported toolset that is going to break through to the mainstream anytime soon. The entire process can be best described as "finicky."

As a mainstream laptop, the Acer Aspire 5738DG is fine 15.6-inch Core 2 Duo workhorse, with middle-of-the-road specs and Acer's typically solid construction. We especially like the wide, flat keyboard and separate number pad--but the fine horizontal lines on the display are a constant distraction.

But if you specifically want to play the handful of games that work really well, and don't mind the not being able to crank up the graphics settings, then this is worth at least a test run; but we strongly suggest an in-person demo first, and checking the TriDef Web site for custom profiles of your favorite games. The Aspire also has the benefit of being an all-in-one solution, with nothing external to buy or configure.

If you're serious about 3D gaming, however, Acer's package can't hold a candle to the Nvidia 3D Vision. Even though that system is expensive, complicated, and has an exacting set of hardware requirements, the effect worked (to varying degrees) with every 3D game we threw at it.

The results ranged from mildly interesting to completely mind-blowing. With some of the games not specifically supported by Nvidia, including the new MMO game Aion, and the racing game Fuel, the 3D effect still worked well, but some objects were out of place, and onscreen text could sit uncomfortably in the foreground.

While the effort required to put together an Nvidia 3D Vision setup is cumbersome, we've heard that some PC makers are working on compatible laptops, which is a development we'd be keenly interested in seeing.