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Gold and silver USB drives celebrate the Year of the Pig
While most of you may think we're just rolling along in 2007, you're probably just paying too close attention to that Gregorian calendar, as there's still a ways to go before the Year of the Pig is rung in. In a collaborative effort between the Beijing Zhongshi Boda Company and Lenovo, a limited run (9,999 to be exact) of gold and silver USB flash drives are being released with celebratory engravings on the sides. Each drive is made from "30 grams of its respective metals," and reportedly sports a purity level of 99.9-percent. Looking to woo folks who just can't get enough of that Chinese culture in the side of their computer, the devices feature a pig pattern and "2007" to commemorate the upcoming new year, and moreover, the Chinese characters "Jin Zhu Tian Fu" are inscribed, which translates to "may the gold pig bring you good fortune." We've no idea if silver users won't be nearly as lucky for typographical reasons, nor how much capacity these things actually have, but the sets should start selling soon for a whopping 9,999 CNY ($1,281) over in China.[Via Spluch & Engadget China]
Mass market SED HDTVs by 2008?
Yeah, we know that Toshiba and Canon promised us a complete line-up of SED TVs by March of this year, and we don't quite buy their "drop in LCD / Plasma prices caused the delay" excuse, but we'll let them off the hook just this once. According to the slacking partner companies, we should expect to see mass-market availability of SED HDTVs by 2008, just in time for the next major sports event / HDTV-push: the Beijing Olympics. The make or break factor for SED is how much it's going to cost consumers, so it's not encouraging to hear Canon chairman Fujio Mitarai say "we have not yet established the manufacturing technology for mass-producing SEDs at low cost." With the price of Plasmas and LCDs dropping all the time, they better figure out how to make SED TVs cheap, otherwise they run the risk of the benefits of SED -- CRT performance in an LCD sized package -- becoming irrelevant to the average consumer.[Via HDBeat]
Teclast TL-T29 media player is slender, stylish
Damn, those kids in Asia get all the cool gear first. Our friends in China just got a new Teclast portable video player, those lucky dogs. This time it's the TL-T29 -- this superslim player measures 2.8 x 1.6 x 0.3 inches, sports a flash drive (1, 2 or 4GB) with a 220 x 176 display and has a whopping 24 hours of audio playback time. No word on price or if you can get it anywhere outside the Zhongguancun district in Beijing, where CNET Asia found it. Maybe if these things were to cross the Pacific, then we'd have some real competition in this sector, hrm?[Via CNET Asia]
