We have relatives who won’t trust the cloud, fearing that a company will either go out of business or end a service. After all, if a company as large as Yahoo! can shut down a service like Yahoo! Briefcase (admittedly, a laggard among cloud storage services anyway), what else can happen. This is a perfect example, with URL shortener tr.im announcing Sunday it was shutting down service, effective immediately. URL shorteners are in vogue now, what with the popularity of Twitter and its 140-character limit. Much

Video:Samsung SyncMaster 2233SW 16:9 Widescreen LCD Monitor Review @ TweaknewsVisionTek HD 4890 OC Review @ NeoseekerSapphire Radeon HD 4890 2GB Vapor-X Graphics Card @ TweaktownATI Stream vs. NVIDIA CUDA – GPGPU computing battle royale @ PC PerspectiveMotherboards and Chipsets:ASRock X58 Extreme Core i7 Motherboard @ TweaktownMemory and Storage:ioSafe Solo 500GB Rugged USB External Hard Drive @ TestFreaksIn Win Na Hard Drive Enclosure at Modders-IncPatriot Corza Network Storage Server @ BMRSeagate Momentus

Apple may have found a new way to force you to tell the truth about how well you’ve taken care of your iPhone or iPod. A recent patent filed by the company describes a customer abuse detection system that will allow technicians to tell if you’ve been too hard on Apple devices. Instances of abuse could include things such as immersing the device in liquid, exposing it to extreme temperatures, dropping it, or tampering with the device’s internal circuitry. This detection system could store a digital recording

Heard of Gaiser high-end PCs? Yeah, neither had we, until we came across the glorious machine shown here. This ultra-luxurious PC is way, way more than just your next small form factor PC. It’s an icon, a status symbol and a perfect way to spend upwards of $30,000. Yeah, 30 grand!  Compensating?The German company produces machines that, internally, aren’t all that spectacular. You’ll find the traditional array of internal specs (Core 2 Duo, a few gigabytes of RAM, a decent hard drive, etc.), but it’s obviously

In the never-ending race to produce a flash memory device that’ll become lost the moment you unwrap it from its packaging, Buffalo has developed this: the 16GB microSD USB card reader.Put simply, this nub of a flash memory device–which looks about as large as Logitech’s latest USB receivers–holds 16GB of information on its own. But, knowing that that’ll never be enough for you, Buffalo also included a microSD/microSDHC slot, so you can toss another 16GB in through that. All told, you’re looking at having at

Wall Street Journal is reporting something we’ve noticed recently, locally, at one location. However, they’re reporting it’s happening in New York City in a big way: coffee shops offering free wi-fi are starting to boot out the free (wi-fi) loaders. We noticed this locally at a Panera Bread store, which offers free wi-fi. But during lunch hours, they restrict the amount of time you can be connected to the service. What the WSJ is reporting is similar, with some coffee shops even going so far as to cover —

Astak launched a new 5-inch Pocket PRO eBook reader that should provide Amazon’s Kindle with some good competition. This new reader supports over 20 open file formats and also features Adobe firmware that adds support for Digital Rights Management PDF files. Thanks to the Adobe firmware, users can read both public-domain titles as well as copy-protected PDF documents on the Pocket PRO. At the end of July, Astak announced they had acquired permission from Adobe Systems to install the Adobe Digital Editions firmware

Last we heard from Stealth Computer, it was gettin’ down with its very own Core 2 Duo-equipped mini PC. Now, the company is back to doing what it does best: rugged. The all new Stealth NW-2000 Rugged PC isn’t for the faint of heart nor those without a degree in weightlifting, but if you’re looking for a new machine to withstand scenarios only found in the Rambo series, this probably fits the bill.The dual-mode machine can easily convert from a traditional notebook to a tablet PC (and back again), with the display

HTC’s upcoming Touch Pro2 Windows Mobile Smartphone (Windows Phone) is already confirmed for T-Mobile and Verizon Wireless, and we’ve always assumed it would show up on AT&T and Sprint as well. 

We still don’t have any hard info on the AT&T release, but PhoneArena has crossed Sprint off the will-the-or-won’t-they list with not only a small photo of a Sprint-branded Touch Pro2, but with a possible release date: September 3.

The Sprint Touch Pro2 would replace the current Touch Pro.

Ever since TDK issued a promising new line of solid state drives back in May, the drive and optical media manufacturer has remained eerily quiet on further plans. According to a new report, however, the company may be aiming to compete with the likes of Seagate, Western Digital and Hitachi in the “big boy” desktop HDD space.If all goes well, we could see hard drives as large as 2TB in the desktop 3.5″ arena and 620GB in the notebook-friendly 2.5″ format by January of 2010. The information is being gleaned from