Netbooks may be all the rage these days, but one thing is for sure: if you need an optical drive, you’re hosed. Of course, that’s why companies like Lite-On exist–to solve quandaries you never knew you’d end up in. For on-the-go computer users that love the low price and small design of netbooks, but wish they had an optical drive on certain occasions, there’s the all new eTAU208.The drive is completely USB powered, meaning that travelers won’t even need to hunt down an AC outlet to use it. The entire unit

There’s cheerful news from Sunnyvale today; AMD is claiming to now lead the discrete mobile GPU market with a 36.5 percent market share gain and a whopping 87.2 percent more units sold in the first six months of 2009 compared to the first six months of 2008. At this point, AMD claims to hold 53 percent of the discrete mobile market, and credits the jump in sales to the strong positioning of the ATI Mobility HD 4000 series. AMD points to design wins with HP (the dv6T), Acer, Samsung, Asus, and MSI, but the HD

iBUYPOWER has announced its proprietary USB Internal Expansion System (IES Controller). The new system will enhance control and boost power to front panel USB ports and add-ons like card readers. The iBUYPOWER USB Internal Expansion System is available with any new iBUYPOWER tower PC for $14 or $24 with Bluetooth capabilities.

The IES Controller accomplishes this by connecting front panel ports, which often struggle to power USB devices, directly to the computers power supply. The system also adds an internal USB port that can be used for storage expansion with a flash drive or for adding USB wireless router. Wireless device users can also add a Bluetooth module to the IES Controller to free up a front panel USB port. The Bluetooth module simply plugs into the added internal USB port on the IES allowing peripherals to remain constantly connected to the PC. The transmitter can sync with a mouse, keyboard, printer, speakers, headset, or mobile phone.

Eyeing the T-Mobile HTC Touch Pro2, but not exactly ecstatic about the $350 price tag?  Join the mob club.

Fortunately, our go-to wireless store has the new Windows Mobile smartphone for $150 less than the T-Mobile web store; LetsTalk.com is offering the T-Mobile Touch Pro2 for $199 at checkout (with free shipping and without any mail-in rebate).

Internet Explorer 8 is the safest web browser on the market, according to a pair of studies sponsored by, um, Microsoft.One study focused on socially engineered malware and the other on phishing.In the first study, NSS Labs found that IE8 caught 81 percent of live threats, while Firefox 3 caught 27 percent, Safari 4 caught 21 percent, Chrome 2 caught 7 percent and Opera 10 Beta caught 1 percent. NSS attributed this to “concerted efforts Microsoft is making in the SmartScreen technology.” But one might wonder

Get ready to storm the battlefield! DICE, an Electronic Arts Inc. studio, today announced that Battlefield: Bad Company 2 will be available March 2, 2010 in North America and March 5, 2010 in Europe. Battlefield: Bad Company 2 will deliver a level of destruction, vehicular warfare, squad play and open world environments never before experienced in a modern warfare action game. By pushing destruction to new heights and delivering a host of land, sea and air vehicles, players will soon witness the best-in-class online warfare experience.

The variety of weapons, choice of vehicles and scale of destruction in the Battlefield: Bad Company 2 sandbox environment generates countless unscripted and unforgettable moments, said Karl Magnus Troedsson, Executive Producer Battlefield Franchise, DICE. When Battlefield: Bad Company 2 ships in March, it will deliver the best online multiplayer experience ever.

iBuyPower is a company generally associated with custom gaming PCs and notebooks. If you need a high-octane machine to handle the latest games, they’re the company to turn to. What they aren’t known for, however, are things such as this. Of course, you won’t find us griping about a company spreading its wings and trying new things, particularly when it delivers something as unique and useful as the Internal USB Expansion System. The all new IES Controller system is a proprietary development designed to add all

Activision and id Software announced today that the highly-anticipated Wolfenstein is now available nationwide for the Xbox 360 video game and entertainment system from Microsoft, the PLAYSTATION 3 computer entertainment system and PC. Developed by Raven Software, Wolfenstein is rated “M” for Mature by the ESRB. The game can be ordered online for $45.49 with free shipping right now.

Following in the footsteps of its predecessors, the Wolfenstein multi-player experience features the Axis and Resistance squaring off against each other in Team Deathmatch, Stopwatch or Objective based games. With three classes from which to choose, players can fight on the frontline as a soldier, heal their compatriots as a medic, or help gather objectives as an engineer all while using the Veil powers in special ways. Additionally, the persistent gold found within the multiplayer maps allows players to purchase upgrades for weapons and Veil powers on the fly, ensuring a deep and continuous variety of action along with tremendous replay value.

In an effort to test the awesome power of their new super computer, a team of scientists at University of Tsukuba, Japan, have calculated Pi out to 2.5 trillion decimal places, more than doubling the previous record. The computer, the T2K Tsukuba System, used 640 Quad-core AMD Opteron processors, speeding along at 95 teraflops, to perform the calculation. With that huge amount of processing power, the computer finished the calculation in only 73 hours. By comparison, the previous record holder took around 600 hours to calculate half as many digits. And just to make sure that they didn't make any mistakes, the scientists ran the calculation twice.

Calculating pi to that precise of a measurement doesn't have any practical applications (other than proving how bad ass the T2K computer is), but fulfills an ongoing mathematical project of exploring the nuance of this endless, but important, geometric constant. Additionally, if you're into Piphilology, the art of memorizing the numbers in pi, this gives you a new goal to shoot for.

NVIDIA has been touting its low-power Tegra System-On-A-Chip (SoC) for mobile devices since early last year, and now – for the first time – we’re beginning to see this system show up in handheld spec listings.  The upcoming Zune HD is powered by the Tegra APX 2600, which gives the player its 720p HD video capabilities.

But this SoC won’t be limited to dedicated multimedia devices; NVIDIA’s Tegra APX series of SoCs will also power future Windows Mobile handhelds, and will provide not only for HD video output, but for a more visually appealing UI as well.

In a press release regarding the Zune HD, NVIDIA states that the company has at least “50 active Tegra processor-based design projects currently in the works.”  At least some of these devices are sure to be Windows Phones, smartphones powered by Windows Mobile 6.5, or (more likely) Windows Mobile 7 which is due out next year.

What will Tegra mean for future Windows Mobile smartphones?  Perhaps most importantly, Tegra will provide the processing power for a new User Interface, which Microsoft has indicated is a main focus of Windows Mobile 7.  Other benefits include superior video playback, faster rendering of web pages in a mobile browser, support for OLED screens, up to 12MP of image processing from a digital camera, HDMI output to TVs and other video devices, device screen resolutions up to 1280×1050, and OpenGL & Direct3D Mobile support.