Microsoft unveiled a number of significant upgrades to its Xbox 360 platform with the latest Xbox LIVE Update. While the update is available today, a few of the new features won’t be available until tomorrow, August 13th. Here’s a quick look at what you can look forward to with the update. Games on Demand Starting tomorrow, you’ll be able to browse and purchase games through the Xbox LIVE Marketplace. New game titles will be added every Tuesday, and your game licenses will be linked to your Xbox LIVE account,

Just what the world has been waiting for: A Hello Kitty designer flash drive. Mimoco has been creating character-based USB flash drives in its Mimobot line. Favorites from Star Wars, Halo and other characters in the geek pantheon are staples of the line. Starting next month, Hello Kitty and her friends will join Darth Maul, Han Solo and Master Chief. For Hot Hardware readers who are unaware of the popular cartoon cat from Japan, she turns 35 this year. The Mimobot line with Sanrio, HK’s creator, will start with

Text messaged every single person on earth already? An Australian website is offering you the chance to send a text message into space. You have until 07:00 GMT Monday, Aug. 24th, 2009 to sign up. The site, HelloFromEarth.net, is accepted SMS style messages (meaning 160 characters or less) which will eventually be sent into space, directed at Gliese 581d, “a planet outside our Solar System which may support life.” Expected delivery date is December 2029 give or take a few months, the website says. Let’s be honest,

For many, it’s not difficult to remember back when USB flash drives topped out at around 8GB and demanded a near fortune. Today, these minuscule drives are near ubiquitous, and with flash prices in free fall, a rather sizable one (capacity wise, not size wise) can be had for not too much dough.But, even big corporations like Intel and Micron know that 128GB in your pocket just isn’t enough for some (or even 256GB), so we’re not surprised to hear that the two have joined together in order to spearhead development

What might be the tiniest flash drive yet comes in emerald green or royal purple. Verbatim announced two new USB drives in the new “Tuff ‘n’ Tiny” family: an inch long, half an inch wide and as thick as a penny. The drives have support for Windows, Mac and Linux. The 8GB drive – that’s the purple one – can store nearly eight hours of MPEG-1 video or 2,000 hours of MP3 music or about 4,000 300dpi color photos. The 4 GB drive comes in green. The drives are solid state – i.e., no moving parts – and Verbatim says

Judge Leonard Davis, of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas, ruled Tuesday that Microsoft can no longer sell Microsoft Word in the United States due to patent infringement. One can imagine Bill Gates having to pick himself off the floor after reading that ruling. Indeed, the ubiquitous software that you probably use every day infringes a patent, according to Davis. To be perfectly honest, Davis’ ruling simply upheld a $200M verdict issued in May of this year, when jurors found that Microsoft

If you’re looking to score a rugged notebook, there’s hardly a better place to look than in Panasonic’s Toughbook line. For years now, the iconic series has led the way in durable computing, with its briefcase-styled rigs able to withstand an intense amount of abuse in the field, on the road and in the wild.Today, Panasonic is taking things one step further by announcing that its fully-rugged line and Toughbook U1 are he first to be certified by an independent third party test lab to meet the newer and more

Anyone paying even the slightest attention to the evolution of Dell designs would know that the company has come a long way since the beige box days in the late 90s, but even for the newer, fresher, hipper Dell, this one’s pretty radical. Just as the company decided to dump its Inspiron Mini 12 in favor of keeping just the Mini 10 around, it has decided to tag-team with what’s likely the most popular network for kids on television today: Nickelodeon. In a cute, almost slimy joint announcement today, the two

Kingston's HyperX Fan was designed specifically to keep memory modules nice and cool. The dual 60mm fans optimize airflow around the modules helping memory run at peak performance for longer periods of time. We test it out on a water cooled Intel Core i7 system with 12GB of memory running at 1600MHz.

OCZ Technology is at it again, this time pushing out a new range of solid state drives for the laypeople in the crowd. The Indilinx-based devices, which proudly boast a Solid 2 Series label, are designed to slot neatly into notebooks that can hold 2.5″ form factor drives. The MLC based solution was designed with mainstream consumers (as opposed to hardcore tech enthusiasts) in mind, utilizing an Indilinx controller and offering decent performance that’ll definitely crush traditional hard drives.OCZ Solid 2 SATA