SanDisk today announced that it is now shipping an upgraded family of SanDisk Extreme IV CompactFlash (CF) memory cards to better meet the needs of professional digital photographers. The entire series of SanDisk Extreme IV high-performance memory cards has received a 12.5-percent speed boost up to 45 megabytes per second (MB/s)1 and the newly-released 16-gigabyte (GB)2 card is twice as large as previous capacities. A 16GB SanDisk Extreme IV CompactFlash will set you back $399.

SanDisk Extreme IV CompactFlash 45MB/s (300X) memory cards offer advanced technologies that are fully compatible with all CompactFlash cameras including the latest UDMA-enabled cameras. SanDisk Extreme IV CF cards have undergone internal testing with many leading manufacturers cameras and DSLRs, such as Canons EOS series, Nikons D300 and D3 cameras, the Sony Alpha A700, and the Olympus E500 and E3 cameras. Depending on the camera used, the increased performance of the SanDisk Extreme IV memory card line may help reduce the delay between shots, enabling photographers to take more photos overall.

Graphics is more than just fast frame rates. And with the adoption of NVIDIA CUDA technology, developers can use the power of NVIDIA GeForce GPUs in ways never before possible. Only NVIDIA GeForce GPUs offer the ability to deliver fast frame rates and more realistic, immersive experiences, which would explain why more than a million downloads of the first ever GeForce Power Pack occurred in less than two weeks.

GeForce Power Packs are freely available content that allow consumers to experience first-hand new NVIDIA technologies that are fundamentally changing the way applications are designed, played, and experienced. For total immersion, the gaming environment has to feel as real as possible, and characters must be able to move and interact with the objects in the environment that have a compelling, dramatic impact on game play. PhysX technology provides developers the ability to include effects such as trees that bend in the wind and water that ebbs and flows naturally, and additional objects in the environment that dramatically impact the gaming experience.

Results from a survey recently fielded by Entertainment for All Expo indicate some surprising trends relating to women and video games. Front and center: many women would rather play video games than catch up on sleep, according to the new survey which polled more than 120 PoshMama members on their video game habits. Responses were gleaned from the high percentage of female respondents (71%) who said that they play video games.

According to the E for All / PoshMama survey, more than one-third of those surveyed say that they play video games when they should be sleeping. Women in the survey also say they play video games in other unusual circumstances, including: while on the phone (32%); while at work/in a meeting (20%); and, while preparing for work (12%). When it comes to spare time, nearly twice as many women say that, if given an extra hour of free time at home, they would rather play video games than catch up on sleep.

Microsoft has released a beta of Phone Data Manager, a utility designed to backup select data on your Windows Mobile phone (or other SyncML/OBEX standard compliant handset) so you can restore it with ease.  The beta works both with Windows Live Contacts and a Windows PC to backup contacts, music, video and photos.

While Phone Data Manager isn’t exactly an all-in-one backup solution, it does offer some unique benefits.  Contacts are stored in the Cloud on Windows Live, while media files are stored in a folder on your Windows XP or Vista PC.  Aside from backing up contacts, Phone Data Manager is also a contacts sync solution to mirror contacts between Windows Mobile and Windows Live Contacts. 

This type of synchronization is the future of mobile and we hope to see more of it.  Unfortunately, this first beta only supports backup/sync via Bluetooth or USB cable, and Windows Mobile devices must use USB, at least for now.

If true, this is a disappointing development in the world of Windows Mobile. According to a blog at CNet, Microsoft is quietly telling some of its partners not to expect the final version of Windows Mobile 7 until the second half of 2009. 

This schedule isn’t exactly a delay, as Microsoft has never provided a firm date for delivery of WinMo7, but many analysts expected the new OS to ship in early 2009.

Windows Mobile 7 is expected to be a major update to Microsoft’s mobile OS, with gesture recognition, more touch-friendly interaction, and sweeping improvements to the the UI.  These changes are very much needed in light of increasing competition from RIM, Apple and Google’s Android.

The first Android-powered smartphone is now a reality.  The long-awaited T-Mobile G1 was made official this morning, giving us our up close look at an Android handset.

The T-Mobile G1 is built by HTC (it’s the HTC Dream) and features a HVGA touchscreen display, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth (without A2DP stereo support), UMTS/HSDPA wireless broadband, a 3MP camera, GPS and microSD expansion.

Read all about the T-Mobile G1 Android Smartphone here…

Philips, the innovator of CD and DVD technologies offers one of the most complete ranges of CD & DVD recordable media. They are available in more than 20 added-value packaging variations. These high capacity recording DVD+R’s almost doubles the capacity of a single layer DVD+R disc and are the best quality for preserving your valuable data on DVD. This deal ends Wednesday at 12:00pm ET.

Philips, the innovator of CD and DVD technologies offers one of the most complete ranges of CD & DVD recordable media. They are available in more than 20 added-value packaging variations. These high capacity recording DVD+R’s almost doubles the capacity of a single layer DVD+R disc and are the best quality for preserving your valuable data on DVD. This deal ends Wednesday at 12:00pm ET.

TweakTown posted their article, “GIGABYTE shows us final design X58 Extreme mobo.” Find this and other reviews from around the web by visiting our forums!

Today we got a close up look at the final design that will ship to customers, besides the heatsink cooling setup, which GIGABYTE is still keeping under wraps for the moment – and this one is an actual working live sample. Besides the physical changes to the board layout, on this board and others, GIGABYTE will be introducing Ultra Durable 3. GIGABYTE has already tweaked their boards to what we thought was the max and we really thought there wasnt much more left to improve, but we were wrong.

UD3 adds two 2 ounce copper layers to the 12-layer PCB motherboard one is a ground layer and the other is a power layer. We got a chance to see the actual copper layers that slot into the regular PCB compared to normal one ounce copper layers, but we are not allowed to show you until the actual launch tomorrow. These thicker copper layers create less resistance (impedance) by up to two times, creating better electrical current flow according to GIGABYTE. In their labs, engineers measured a 50 degree Celsius drop in temperature in the hottest parts of the motherboard (mosfets around the CPU).”

Over the past few months, we have seen previews of some GPU-accelerated Adobe effects at events being held by both NVIDIA and AMD / ATI. Today, however, NVIDIA launched a website showcasing many more of the GPU-accelerated aspects of Adobe’s upcoming Creative Suite 4, due out some time in October.According to NVIDIA, “Adobe is the latest in a trend of visual computing companies grabbing on to the massively parallel processing power of NVIDIA GPUs for more than just rendering pixels to the screen. Adobe Creative