It's amazing, really, that this meme has lasted this long. When we first noticed Brando's SATA HDD Dock, we figured it was destined to become a cute, one-off gift that only the hardest of hardcore storage freaks would bother with. Over a year later, we're having trouble counting the iterations available. Now, we've got storage mainstay NewerTech diving in with one of its own, as it has just revealed the quad-interface Voyager SATA hard drive docking station. As you'd expect, the unit turns any 2.5- or 3.5-inch SATA I / II hard drive (up to 2TB) into an external drive, and with FireWire 400 / 800, USB 2.0 and eSATA sockets, you shouldn't have any issue hooking it up. It's available now for stocking stuffing at $99.95.

Apparently the fear of snapping up another job after ditching the green fields of Tesla Motors isn't on Darryl Siry's mind, as the SVP of Marketing and Sales has publicly admitted to leaving the company over "disagreements in strategy." The news comes but 1.5 months after Elon Musk made himself CEO and told a few others to stay happy elsewhere, and while Darryl's replacement wasn't directly named, Siry does outrightly state that he has only remained on this long to recruit "a very strong successor." The best part of his farewell? This gem: "So what now? I have no immediate plans but look forward to exploring various opportunities that I find out there." Translation? I'm so loaded after my stint in this place, it doesn't even matter, holmes.

[Via Autoblog]

It was HP who made the PC "personal again," but don't think Dell isn't doing its darnedest to make it ultra-personal... again. After seeing a number of Dell laptops get unorthodox paint jobs and hearing that it would make Art House machines CTO in 2009, we've now learned that Dell has swung open the doors to its all new Design Studio. Naturally, said studio was built to customize the outfit's Studio 15 and Studio 17 lappies, and it features an interactive gallery of original artwork commissioned exclusively for this initiative. Available for browsing right now, each unique image costs $75 to have "permanently tattooed into the laptop lid," meaning that you better heart that design a whole lot before pulling the final trigger.

We're hard pressed to think of a display-related story that has lingered on longer than SED (well over four years at last count), and believe it or not, this still isn't apt to be the last you hear of it. If you'll recall, Canon recently declared victory after winning a lawsuit against Applied Nanotech that was previously holding it back from making progress, and now Applied Nanotech has waved the final white flag by giving up its right to appeal. Comically enough, it may actually be too late for Canon to even salvage the win, with president Tsuneji Uchida noting that "at times like this, new display products are not introduced much because people would laugh at them." Shh... nobody tell him the world's been laughing at SED for years.

[Via OLED-Display]

Now this -- this is an interesting character. Part nettop, part HTPC, the Sotec-branded HDC-1L series is a unique mixture of components that are traditionally found in either a diminutive desktop or a media center PC (but rarely both). First and foremost, this little bugger relies on a 1.6GHz Intel Atom 230 CPU, and it only packs 1GB of RAM, a 160GB hard drive, Windows XP, Ethernet, audio in / out, VGA, slot-loading DVD drive, a few USB ports and a remote input. Sadly, there's no integrated TV tuner to speak of, but with a starting price of just ¥59,800 ($640), we suppose you could add one and still come in well under the cost of most pre-fab HTPCs. The box should be available in Japan as early as tomorrow, and it'll purportedly be sold with a number of upgrades and extras for those fond of the bundled approach.

[Via Impress]

Since hearing about Nokia's foray into the world of home automation, our curiosity has been seriously piqued. Thankfully, our girl-on-the-scene Drita has captured video of the new software / hardware combo in action on the Nokia World show floor. It looks like a fully decked out system is going to run you a hefty fee (given all the components required), but can you put a price on the extreme laziness it will enable? We didn't think so. Check out the thrilling video out after the break!


[Via Engadget Spanish]

Can you believe it? It's been over two years since we first got wind of what would become Meizu's high-end iPhone clone, the M8. Okay, we admit to being somewhat dubious at first, and won't be entirely won over until we get one to play with, but just a few days away from its Chinese release the handset seems to live up to its promises according to IT168's full review. Other than a few faults, including an "ear-piercing" integrated speaker and issues running third-party Windows CE applications, things sound surprisingly good. The 480 x 720 3.4-inch screen received high marks, performance was rated as very speedy, and the integrated 3 megapixel camera looks to be able to take great looking pics -- assuming you turn a few lights on. It does sound like a solid device, but is it a proper iPhone competitor? In China, where the iPhone still isn't officially available, we wonder if it isn't the iPhone that's the underdog now (cue raised eyebrow).

When we asked how you'd change Nikon's 720p-recording D90 DSLR, many of you globe-trotting photogs let out wistful sighs, gazed at the brightest star, and wished with all your might for automatic geotagging of photos. Like some trickster genie, Nikon is granting your wishes, but we're not sure the GP-1 GPS add-on is exactly what you had in mind. It slots into the hot-shoe on most cameras (clipping onto the strap for a few) and uses an unwieldy looking cable to connect to the body of your D200, D3, D700, D90, D300, or D3X. We can't say that we're particularly fond of the device's means of indicating status, either: red blinky light = no satellites; green blinky = three satellites; green solid = four satellites or more. C'mon Nikon, for $240 you couldn't integrate that cable into a hand strap and put more than two LEDs up in there?

[Via Gadget Lab]

Not that AMD's being overly secretive about its forthcoming Phenom II processor, but it hasn't exactly been forthcoming with model names / estimated ship dates, either. And that folks, is why we look to leaks. A recent writeup over on Chinese site HKEPC details the impending chip family by listing over a dozen new CPUs (including two Phenom II X3s and seven Phenom II X4s) that are destined to be announced between CES and June 2009. Not surprisingly, some of the model names aren't -- shall we way, completely original -- with the 3GHz Phenom II X4 940 and 2.8GHz Phenom II X4 920 sharing eerily similar naming schemes with Intel's fresh Core i7. Of course, we're not sticklers for silly things like that -- we just want to see a few slabs of silicon get out the door on time. Is that really too much to ask, AMD?

[Via CNET]