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Beatles music may soon be strumming a new tune via air guitar video games, according to a report in the Financial Times.

Apple Corps and EMI, which respectively represent The Beatles' business interests and ownership of its master recordings, have reportedly been in discussions with video game publishers Activision and MTV Games.

Under a possible deal that could be worth several million dollars, users could put their air guitar to use while listening to The Beatles and playing Activision's Guitar Hero or MTV's Rock Band games, according to the report.

The move to push The Beatles' music onto a new stage via video games could occur within the coming weeks, the Financial Times reported. Such a move would mark a change in embracing technology for The Beatles' music, given that digital-use licenses for Beatles recordings are not yet available.

The Beatles representatives, as well as the game publishers, declined to confirm whether a deal is on the horizon.

Notice any similarities between the Hewlett-Packard Voodoo Envy and its thin rivals, the Apple MacBook Air or ThinkPad X300? Yes, they're all very thin. But look inside and you'll see more common features.

To deliver reasonable processing power at low power the Voodoo Envy opted for the same special low-power processors used in the Air: the Intel SP7700 and SP7500.

You won't find these processors listed on Intel's processor pricing page. They were designed originally for the MacBook Air and use a special 22mm x 22mm package and have a thermal envelope of only 20 watts at 1.8GHz and 1.6GHz. Typically, Intel processors running at those speeds have a TDP (Thermal Design Power) of 35 watts.

Correction: The ThinkPad X300 uses an Intel SL7100 not an SP processor. It comes in the same small package as the SP processors but runs at a lower clock speed--1.2GHz--and uses less power: 12 watts versus the SP's 20 watts.

HP Voodoo Envy

(Credit: Voodoo)

Interestingly, these processors are older 65-nanometer "Merom" processors--not the newest 45-nanometer Penryn generation. But there are updates on the way, according to Intel. "You can expect to see later this year a 45nm small form factor Montevina," an Intel representative said.

"Montevina" Centrino 2 processors coming out later this year will include low-power models such as the SL9400 and SU9400, running at 1.86GHz and 1.4GHz with a TDP of 17W and 10W respectively. One processor, the SU3300, will have a TDP of 5.5W.

New versions of the SP "small form factor" processors are also expected later this year. Future versions of the Envy and Air will likely use these Montevina processors.

This isn't where the silicon similarities end. The Envy, like the Air and X300, uses Intel X3100 integrated graphics and offers either a 64GB solid state drive or 80GB hard disk drive (4200RPM), just like the Air.

Finally, though not related to silicon, all three notebooks have a similar form factor: 13.3 inches. All in all, making for strikingly similar designs in many ways.

Adobe unveiled an online community Monday with a word processor; file storage and sharing; and deep tie-ins to a newly Flash-enabled Acrobat 9.

The online push for Acrobat is a bold move for a brand perhaps best associated with the free and nearly ubiquitous Acrobat Reader, which opens print-ready Portable Document Format, or PDF, files. Now, PDFs will play movies.

The announcement comes in advance of the release of Acrobat 9 document-creation software, which adds dynamic features such as integration of animation, dynamic maps, 256-bit encryption, and improved forms.

The free Acrobat.com beta includes the Buzzword word processor. Its ConnectNow Web conferencing and desktop sharing tool enables chatting via text, video, and voice. The hosted services invite file storage and sharing with the capability to convert up to five documents to PDF.

Buzzword and companion tools would provide interactivity lacking in leading online word processors such as Google Docs.

The free Acrobat.com launched in beta mode on Monday.

(Credit: Adobe Systems)

Users can store files on Acrobat.com and join each other in virtual meeting rooms to share identical document views in real time. The site also can host data from forms created in Acrobat software.

Acrobat 9 document-creation software will arrive with a slew of support for creating interactive, secure documents and integration with Acrobat.com.

Acrobat users can convert MOV and WMV files to Flash content that can be embedded within PDFs alongside audio content and even 3D models. The free Acrobat Reader 9 will play the movies, eliminating the need to open other media players.

The new PDF Portfolios feature in Acrobat 9 lets users drag and drop content into a portfolio, then choose from myriad layout and presentation options.

Mapping features only in Acrobat Pro Extended 9 preserve geospatial coordinates and enable users to mark locations and measure distances.

The next Acrobat will take snapshots of Web pages and convert entire pages or chunks of them to a PDF that preserves links and animation.

Developers can tweak layouts with Flex Builder 3 or Flash CS3.

The new Acrobat.com will enable users to stash their work, edit documents, and collaborate with each other.

(Credit: Adobe Systems)

Adobe also tried to make it easier to for companies to make pages match visually with themes and custom logos, and it improved tools for comparing documents.

For creating online forms, Acrobat 9 adds intelligence to recognize content for conversion to fillable fields. And a forms tracking dashboard will show, for instance, the status of responses to a mass party invitation e-mail and let a user send reminders to guests. Responses can be sorted, filtered, and exported to spreadsheets.

Acrobat 9's security enhancements enable users to add 256-bit encryption, used by banks online, to PDFs.

Redaction tools, a key selling point of Acrobat 8, will offer searches for numeric patterns in addition to multiple words and phrases. A company could, for example, find every accidental mention of a social security number or top-secret product being developed and black out the potential leaks from a PDF with one blow.

Business users could opt to access documents at Acrobat online or via SharePoint workspaces, network folders or WebDAV.

Acrobat Pro Extended 9 will enable maps to be marked up, preserving latitude and longitude.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

Acrobat 9 comes in three flavors, set for stores in the coming weeks: Standard at $299 or $99 to upgrade, Pro for $449 or $159 to upgrade, and Pro Extended for $699 or $229 to upgrade. Pro Extended also comes with Adobe Presenter, which plugs into Microsoft PowerPoint 2007 for adding interactivity to presentations.

We'll have a review of Acrobat 9 software once we receive final code, and we'll share our experiences soon with Acrobat.com beta.

I still groan when I have to open a PDF file from the Web (my PCs make loud grinding noises), so I'm curious to see how the new tools might make PDFs faster to open as well as more dynamic to explore.

PDF Portfolios in Acrobat 9 will package FLV and SWF content with the usual word processing files and more.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

Future versions of the MacBook Air will pack larger-capacity but lower-cost solid-state drives, emblematic of the next generation of flash storage that will make a quick descent from current stratospheric pricing.

STEC solid-state drive

(Credit: STEC)

Today, a consumer pays dearly for a solid-state drive (SSD). For example, for only 64GB of SSD storage on the MacBook Air, a consumer must pay a premium of about $1,000 over the 80GB hard disk drive model.

But the cost per gigabyte of solid-state drive storage will drop as notebook PC makers like Apple switch to solid-state drives with capacities above 100GB based on multilevel cell (MLC) technology. Adoption by notebook PC makers is expected to start in the third quarter, according to industry sources.

Virtually all SSD manufacturers have moved from single-level cell (SLC)--which is used in products like the MacBook Air, the ThinkPad X300 and HP 2510p--to MLC technology.

"Compared to the price you're paying today for a 64GB drive. You'll get a 128GB of storage for less than half the price (of the 64GB drive)," said Patrick Wilkison, vice president of marketing and business development at STEC, a supplier of MLC-based solid-state drives.

STEC offers solid-state drives with capacities up to 256GB in a 1.8-inch form factor, the same physical size as those drives used in ultra-light, ultra-slim notebooks today. These drives are based on MLC technology and offer better performance than hard disk drives.

Wilkison said that his company's drives offer read speeds in excess of 100 megabytes-per-second (MBps) and write speeds better than 65MBps. This compares favorably with standard 2.5-inch hard disk drives. The STEC products page lists enterprise SSDs with read/write performance of 200MBps and 100MBps, respectively.

Intel is set to move into the high-capacity SSD market on the back of its multilevel cell technology and current SSD manufacturers such as Samsung and Toshiba have also moved from single-level cell to multilevel cell.

MLC is a more sophisticated technology than current SLC. Its advantages are not only lower cost but higher capacity. Instead of the relatively small-capacity 64GB SLC-based drives being offered today in notebook PCs, manufacturers are targeting MLC-based drives ranging up to 256GB by the end of this year or early next year.

The disadvantage is more complexity, which can result in lower performance. "Inherently, MLC is slower and inherently (has) less write cycling endurance," Intel has stated in the past.

Avi Cohen, managing partner of Avian Securities, sees it that way too. "You lose some speed and you lose some reliability when you move to MLC," he said. "Errors per cell with MLC is an order of magnitude worse than SLC, which isn't that great to begin with," Cohen said.

But manufacturers like Intel and STEC say they mitigate the reliability problem and boost performance with proprietary controller chips. "We spend 85 percent of our time grappling with this reliability issue" when talking to customers, said Wilkison. "NAND (flash memory) will forever have limitations...It will be subject to a finite number of program and erase (record and delete) cycles," he said.

"There's a lot of background operations happening to manage the media. Moving the data around to make sure you're evenly wearing down the drive. You're not necessarily pounding on one specific spot and then killing a (memory) cell prematurely," Wilkison said. "This is all controller intelligence."

The kind of technology to optimize the longevity of the drive is generally referred to as wear leveling. Error detection and error correction technologies are also used, Wilkison said.

Wilkison said he believes these techniques result in solid-state drives that are just as reliable as hard disk drives. And he expects a surge in adoption of solid-state drives in notebooks. Whereas today there is only one notebook model per company that comes with a solid-state drive, the number of models offered with such drives will increase exponentially in the second half of the year, he said.

"Today it's a very boutiquey option. Volumes are very trivial," according to Wilkison. "It's one thing I do have visibility into" (because STEC is in talks with a number of computer makers). "It's an exponential number of platforms that are moving forward with SSD," he said. "What was one platform (model) per company in the first half of the year is going to be six in the second half of the year."

There will still be a "price delta" between hard disk drives and solid-state drives but that will continue to come down with MLC technology, he said. Reports have cited Intel pricing as approaching $1 per gigabyte.

Solid-state drives have no moving parts. Hard disk drives, in contrast, use read-write heads that hover over spinning platters to access and record data. With no moving parts, solid-state drives avoid both the risk of mechanical failure and the mechanical delays of hard drives. Therefore, solid-state drives are generally faster and in some respects more reliable.

Adobe Systems is offering two-day trials of three beta applications from its next Creative Suite package.

The previews of Dreamweaver for Web design, Fireworks for image editing, and Soundbooth for audio editing became available Monday.

Trials expire after 48 hours for most people, but registered CS3 users get to keep using the CS4 betas until the final applications replace them.

Adobe hasn't publicly confirmed its planned shipping date or the name for the next Creative Suite, which we're nicknaming CS4. Adobe Creative Suite 3 was released in March 2007.

We took a quick test drive of the Dreamweaver trial and liked some of the changes. Among the touted enhancements are a Related Files Toolbar and Code Navigator. The Properties panel integrates HTML and CSS coding, which could save time for those who edit dynamic sites. A new Live View Mode, driven by Webkit open-source rendering, previews pages within Dreamweaver, eliminating the need to open a browser. Adobe intends for this feature to make it easier to debug JavaScript as well as to work with Flash animation.

The interface of Fireworks, originally from Macromedia, finally resembles those of other applications in the Creative Suite. Fireworks features compatibility with Adobe's AIR, Flash, and Flex Builder as well as HTML. And users can export design mockups as high fidelity, interactive, and secure Adobe PDF files.

Soundbooth adds support for multiple track editing as well as volume matching across audio files. Users can preview the compression settings before saving MP3s. Speech recognition is supposed to enable quick, searchable transcripts of dialog content.

There's no word yet on whether the next rough draft of Photoshop will be available for a free trial. However, Photoshop's next iteration may become available in widgets, enabling users to mix and mash up some features with third-party content, according to a blog post last week by Photoshop product manager John Nash. We suspect that there will be more opportunities to blur the lines between the desktop, the Web, and mobile platforms within the next Creative Suite.

System requirements for the Windows trials demand a machine running XP or Vista with at least 512MB of RAM, 1 gigabyte of disk space, and a Pentium 4 processor. Mac users must have OS X version 10.4.11 or later on a PowerPC G5 or Intel-based system. Soundbooth, however, won't run on a PowerPC Mac.

The MacBook Air, IdeaPad U110, and ThinkPad X300 are the three hottest ultraportables out there. They all sport unique styling outside. And Intel blue inside.

The IdeaPad U110, like other ultraportables, uses an Intel low-voltage processor

(Credit: Lenovo)

Styling and design are now so crucial in notebooks that when a model arrives in pink the color change alone is news.

Ditto for the styling imperative for some of the sveltest, lightest, and most impressive of notebooks: the Air, X300, and just-released U110.

Scratch the surface (or lift up the keyboard in this case), however, and you'll find that their unique exteriors house similar Intel core electronics.

Does this have anything to do with nefarious strong-arm tactics on Intel's part? Or just that AMD and Nvidia don't have competitive offerings in this space? The evidence points pretty convincingly to the latter.

Graphics--an increasingly important differentiator in any computer--is the same across all three notebooks: Intel X3100 integrated graphics. No Nvidia option here. No AMD-ATI. Intel across the board. The reason for this is strictly practical. For heat and power consumption purposes, these ultrasmall designs cannot accommodate an extra graphics processor. (It should be noted also that Nvidia and AMD-ATI integrated graphics are typically not used in ultra-low-power designs.)

The processors are all Intel too with some differences. Again, a practical consideration since AMD doesn't offer ultra-low-power x86 processors with relatively high performance.

The newest 11-inch U110 IdeaPad has gone with the Intel Core 2 Duo L7500 processor. It runs at 1.60GHz and integrates 4MB of cache. The low-voltage L7500 has a thermal envelope (referred to as Thermal Design Power or TDP) of only 17 watts. Much lower than the typical 35-watt Intel mobile processor. AMD mobile processors have similar above-30-watt thermal envelopes.

The 13.3-inch ThinkPad X300 uses the Core 2 Duo SL7100 LV chip running at 1.2GHz. This is a 60 percent package "shrink" of Intel's original Core 2 Duo design and draws a mere 12 watts. Why the shrink? These variants consume less power compared to larger counterparts, giving laptops longer battery life.

The Mermon package shrink featured in the X300 debuted with great fanfare in the MacBook Air. The Air uses 1.6- and 1.8-GHz versions of this Intel chip with a 20-watt TDP.

Similarities between ultraportables extend beyond Intel to storage options too. The Air, X300, and U110 all offer either 4200RPM hard disk drive options or 64GB solid state drives. The 4200RPM drives in the U110 and Air can be real performance bottlenecks if a user pushes the usage envelope. The X300 only comes with a solid state drive.

The solid state drives, while expensive, have proved to be able performers, even bettering high-end hard disk drives in some benchmarks.

(Credit: Sandia)

It took 20 years, but here it is--again: the new and improved flash-bang grenade.

Sandia National Laboratories, which created the original Mk 141 flash-bang two decades ago, is having a second go at marketing a "fuel air" version of an old SWAT standby that it says is far safer for law enforcement and the military.

Traditional flash-bangs are basically big fire crackers--the "flash powder," a mixture of aluminum and potassium perchlorate dust, explodes quickly when ignited and produces an intensely bright light along with its huge bang. The body or canister is generally a steel tube with holes positioned to allow the blast and flash to be emitted without producing shrapnel (PDF).

Traditional stun grenade

The new device, which works differently, is basically a fuel-air bomb. A gas generator spews out a cloud of aluminum powder that, when ignited, causes a small-scale dust explosion. Think: exploding grain silo. All of this occurs outside the canister, making it safer for all concerned, according to Sandia. Apparently, it also resolves the flammability factor; flash-bangs have been known to ignite flammable materials, as was the case in the Iranian Embassy Siege in London.

But the flake aluminum used here, while creating a flash comparable to looking directly into the sun for 60 milliseconds, causes no permanent damage to vision. In addition, the flake aluminum poses no appreciable burning hazard because it cools to the ambient temperature quickly.

Stun grenades or flash-bangs--the official nomenclature is "Noise and Flash Diversionary Devices" are non-lethal weapons generally tossed through a window or door by law enforcement to temporarily distract or disorient crooks or crazies in hostage rescue, forced-entry, or crowd-control situations.

Sandia has licensed the device to Defense Technology Corporation of America, of Casper, Wyo., the second company to try to bring the product to market (PDF). It may be that discerning agencies are holding out for the "Multisensory Grenade," which promises pepper irritant, indelible paint to mark-up the miscreants, and a stink bomb or teargas feature.

Adobe Media Player (AMP) is like an RSS reader for video. Some videos can only be seen after advertising.

(Credit: Adobe)

Clarification: Adobe TV is one of many channels available from the Adobe catalog.

Adobe Systems on Wednesday plans to release Adobe Media Player (AMP), a free download for playing Flash-based Web videos on Macs or PCs. (Get it from Download.com for Windows or Mac.)

Written with Adobe's AIR, AMP is a hybrid online/offline application that lets people subscribe to different video Webcasts. Adobe has signed on some initial partners including CBS, PBS, MTV Networks, Universal Music Group, CondeNet, and Scripps Networks. (See my colleague Rafe Needleman's review of AMP on Webware.)

The videos are either streamed from the content producer's Web site or they can be downloaded. Adobe will host a catalog on its site where people can find videos, including one on Adobe-related content called Adobe TV. Because it's written with AIR, people can be offline or online when they watch.

Initially, many of the videos available will have advertising attached to them. Using Adobe's digital rights management server, content producers are able to put controls on their media.

Later, Adobe intends to enhance the client software so that different business models can be used, such as paying to download a video or renting videos, said Ashley Still, a senior product manager at Adobe.

There are already a number of existing media players, like iTunes. But Adobe thinks that having its own player will be strategic for a number of reasons, Still said.

PBS is one of the content partners to use the Adobe Media Player.

(Credit: Adobe)

Adobe is trying to garner more revenue from online services; the company will be sharing revenue from advertising with content producers.

The player complements Adobe's multimedia content-creation multimedia products and Adobe wants to make sure there is a high-quality way to deliver that video to consumers, Still said.

"This is the first time Adobe is participating directly in the playback of Internet video content," she said.

With the 1.0 version, the player will only display Flash content, but Adobe could add support for other formats, Still said.

During a keynote speech at the Intel Developer Forum in Shanghai, an Intel executive brandished a Netbook that looked Air-thin. Will inexpensive Linux Netbooks be a poor man's MacBook Air?

Ultrathin Intel Atom-based Netbook shown at IDF.

(Credit: Intel)

Most of the photos to date of upcoming Netbooks are ho-hum designs, engineered to be inexpensive yet practical for users such as young schoolchildren. But some upcoming designs look intriguing--and extremely thin. (See close-up photo here--PC Watch.)

"This Netbook is running Linux...As you see, this doesn't mean an ugly design. It's a really nice-looking, stylish design," said Dadi Perlmutter, executive vice president and general manager of Intel's Mobility Group, when waving a very-thin-looking Netbook (photo) at the audience during his keynote at IDF.

Consider the typical specifications for a Netbook (best exemplified by the tiny Eee PC) and it's not a stretch to design an ultraportable, ultrathin Netbook:

Power-sipping Atom processor: This chip will draw as little as 0.65 watt, much less than the Air's Core 2 Duo chip which has a TDP (Thermal Design Power, or thermal envelope) of 20 watts. This means less heat dissipation.

Solid-state drive: Netbooks (Eee PC, Intel Classmate) will typically use SSDs, not hard-disk drives--another power- and space-saving feature. (There will be exceptions such as the 2go, which packs a hard drive.)

No optical drive:: Typically, Netbooks won't come with optical drives--meaning power and cost savings.

Smaller display: Netbooks will have small, less-power-hungry displays, ranging from seven to nine inches.

Though not as well-endowed as full-fledged notebooks like the MacBook Air, Netbooks won't set you back $3,000 either. It's likely that the price will be much closer to $300--but that's a big unknown at this point.

Intel sees two distinct market opportunities for the Netbook. In the developing world, Netbooks will attract first-time buyers. In more mature markets, they will become supplemental PCs.

Click here for more stories on IDF Shanghai.