Early adopters get to sample new products and technologies long before everybody else. But the price they pay for the opportunity and the bragging rights is often spending a lot more money than if they had only waited longer, potentially problematic hardware that hasn’t had all the bugs worked out yet, and (in a worst-case-scenario) sometimes investing in a technology that has a very short shelf life. With the possible exception of buggy hardware, this is exactly what happened to those who jumped onto the high-definition

The Bluetooth SIG has been hard at work on the next generation of its short-range wireless technology for years, and yesterday the group unveiled the result: Bluetooth 3.0.

Bluetooth 3.0 + HS features a blend of Bluetooth and Wi-Fi technologies to deliver transfer rates of up to 24Mbps – that’s about eight times the speed of today’s Bluetooth 2.0 +EDR.  Basically, when Bluetooth 3.0 needs to send or receive data fast, it enlists 802.11 tech (Wi-Fi) to make it happen.  When no data-heavy transfers are needed, the 802.11 part of the team goes to sleep to save power.  Using the high-speed transfer will require more power while in operation.

With that speed, Bluetooth will have the ability to transfer live video from one device to the other, or to make quick work of any media or data syncing with a PC.  This ability also opens up Bluetooth to more media-centric devices like camcorders, digital cameras and TVs. 

There wasn’t much talk about what improvements – if any – Bluetooth 3.0 will offer for more typical uses, like wireless headsets.  We hope there is at least some quality-boosting goodness when it comes to wireless audio devices like stereo headphones and cell phone headsets.

According to Engadget, while some Bluetooth 2.0 hardware could be upgraded to 3.0 if a Wi-Fi adapter is also onboard the device, upgradability isn’t going to be an option for mobile devices like Windows Mobile Smartphones or the Apple iPhone.  The earliest we can expect to see Bluetooth 3.0 products is the beginning of 2010 with inclusion in mobile devices likely to follow months later.

Just a day after TiVo and Amazon announced HD video downloads, Western Digital is adding a 1TB storage option to its My DVR Expander so you can store all of those movies and TV shows you’ll be downloading. By attaching a My DVR Expander to your TiVo, you can instantly and seamlessly expand your TiVo’s recording capacity. TiVo has verified the My DVR Expander to be compatible with TiVo Series3 and TiVo HD DVRs. With the new 1TB drive option, the My DVR Expander can store up to 140 hours of high-definition television

Active Media Products today launched a new USB flash drive that commemorates President Barack Obama, and comes pre-loaded with President Obamas Inaugural Address. The Obama USB drive is a folding-style drive that measures only 1.6 x 0.6 inches when closed. The drive is also waterproof. Packaged in a patriotic retail bubble pack, the 2GB drive retails on Amazon for $8.95.

The new Obama drive is a standard USB 2.0 flash drive that works in any computer. The drive features a custom Obama hologram on the front, making it a unique presidential collectors item. The drive is immediately available only in 2GB capacity. Other capacities will become available soon. The Obama drive comes preloaded with over 30MB of bonus material including Barrack Obamas Inaugural Address and his landmark Race Speech in MP3 format a total of nearly one hour of audio, text of several other significant speeches in PDF format, and an official White House Obama photo. The bonus material occupies less than 2% of the drives capacity, and can be deleted by the customer if not wanted.

Rushing in a new era of power efficiency, AMD today introduced the 45nm Quad-Core AMD Opteron EE processor with AMDs lowest x86 quad-core server power band. The new 40W ACP processor is designed for very dense data center environments such as those built for cloud computing, web serving, or other highly dense environments. It offers a full suite of virtualization and power management capabilities so customers do not have to compromise on feature sets in order to deploy very low power servers.

Adding the 40 watt EE power band to the Quad-Core AMD Opteron line-up helps our customers achieve maximum value for their unique data center needs across the board, said Patrick Patla, vice president and general manager, Server Workstation Business, AMD. The EE processor is ideal for cloud computing environments, which demand both extreme energy efficiency and a balanced system that can handle high transactional demands.

Samsung recently introduced their new 500-Gigabyte (GB) 2.5-inch hard disk drive with a shock operation tolerance of 400G/2ms. The Spinpoint M7 500GB 2.5-inch hard drive with 250GB per platter features a rugged base and cover design, offering better data protection for road warriors and other mobile laptop users. Global shipments in the United States and Europe began in April with shipments to other regions to follow accordingly.

The Spinpoint M7 is available in 250-, 320-, 400-, 500-GB capacities. A new controller has been adopted to reduce power consumption in seek mode to up to 25 percent over conventional 2.5 drives. In particular, internal test results on PC Mark show an 18 percent improvement in overall performance over 2.5 hard drives. The Spinpoint M7 500GB hard drive is lightweight and durable, featuring a 5400rpm spindle speed, 8MB cache, native command queuing and a 3.0Gbps SATA interface. The perpendicular magnetic recording technology enables the 500GB drive to store 160,000 digital images, 125 hours of DVD movies, or 60 hours of high definition video images.

Expanding consumers TV recording capabilities by hundreds of hours, WD today announced in the U.S. that its My DVR Expander is now available with 1 TB capacity. Consumers can instantly and seamlessly expand their TiVo DVR recording capacity by simply attaching the My DVR Expander to their TiVo DVR. The new TiVo Verified My DVR Expander with 1 TB capacity is available now at select retailers and in the U.S. through WDs online store. Pricing for the WD My DVR Expander with 1 TB is $199.99 USD.

TiVo Verified compatible with TiVo Series3 and TiVo HD DVRs, the new My DVR Expander is capable of storing up to 140 hours of high-definition (HD) television programming based on 1 TB of hard drive storage. The My DVR Expander, which utilizes an eSATA connection, is perfect for consumers who need more room to store the ever-expanding HD entertainment options offered by their service providers.

HP’s HP Pavilion dv3t is officially available. This lightweight Intel-based pavilion notebook boasts of a 13.3-inch LED-backlit display, Core 2 Duo processor (2.0GHz T6400), and up to seven hours of runtime on the optional 9-cell battery. The Pavilion dv3t is about 1.25-inches thick and weighs just under 5 lbs. The base model comes with 2GB of RAM, but HP is currently offering a free upgrade to 3GB. For connectivity, the Pavilion dv3t offers Wi-Fi (b/g or optional Wi-Fi n and Bluetooth), optional integrated

Mozilla released Firefox 3.0.9 yesterday, fixing more than nine security flaws – some of which were termed critical, causing crashes in Firefox 3 and, occasionally, in Firefox 2. Some of the crashes corrupted memory.One of the issues dealt with JavaScript running in mail programs on Firefox and Thunderbird (which shares the Firefox browser engine). According to the company’s website: Mozilla developers identified and fixed several stability bugs in the browser engine used in Firefox and other Mozilla-based products.

Just a day after Netgear announced that its Digital Entertainer Elite media streamer was shipping worldwide, the company has issued a similar announcement for its MoCA Coax-Ethernet Adapter Kit. Said kit, which was launched to much fanfare earlier this year at the 2009 Consumer Electronics Show, enables high performance home networking (up to 270Mbps under ideal circumstances) using the coaxial cabling that is already installed within the walls of most newer homes.Officially known as the MCAB1001, the box was