ASUS DR-570 e-reader to sport 6-inch OLED color screen, 122 hours of battery life

Well, isn’t this a doozy. ASUS was a bit of a no-show in the e-reader arena at CES, but has dropped some knowledge on the Times Online’s InGear: it’s building a 6-inch color OLED e-reader, which flies in the face of previous rumors about an ASUS e-reader entry. The device, currently dubbed the DR-570 and pictured to the left, will play back Flash video, includes WiFi and 3G, and supposedly can last for 122 hours on one charge under “real world conditions.” It’s supposed to be released by the end of the year, and while from anybody else we’d assume this would cost an arm and a leg, the ASUS brand gives us some hope that we might actually be able to afford one when it hits.

Cowon W2 spec’d, priced, and dated for Korean consumers

That lovable little Windows 7-powered Cowon W2 MID has gotten two steps closer to reality this week with a price tag and release date. In order, 599,000 to 739,000KRW (equivalent to $533 and $658 in US, respectively) and Monday, January 25th. Unfortunately, those only apply to Korea only, but if you are thinking of importing, how about we take a look at the full specs list: 4.8-inc WSVGA screen, 1.3GHz Intel Atom Z520, 1GB RAM, 60GB or 80GB HDD, Bluetooth 2.0, 802.11b/g WiFi, two USB one miniUSB ports, and a battery promising 10 hours idle / 7 hours video playback. Yeah, we’re not sure about that netbook-caliber processor either, but surely that MID form factor makes up for something… right?

Self-assembling solar cells built using ancient wisdom, modern technology

Alright, so self-assembling electronics are hardly new in and of themselves, and nanoscale tech tends to always come with bombastic promises, but you don’t wanna miss how this latest innovation is built. Two professors from the University of Minnesota have successfully demonstrated a self-assembly technique that arranges microscopic electronic elements in their proper order thanks to the absolute enmity that exists between water and oil. By coating elements with a hydrophilic layer on one side and some hypdrophobic goo on the other, they’ve achieved the proper element orientation, and the final step in their work was the insertion of a pre-drilled, pre-soldered sheet, which picks up each element while being slowly drawn out of the liquid non-mixture. The achievement here is in finding the perfect densities of water and oil to make the magic happen, and a working device of 64,000 elements has been shown off — taking only three minutes to put together. If the method’s future proves successful, we’ll all be using electronics built on flexible, plastic, metal, or otherwise unconventional substrates sometime soon.

LG Display’s 19-inch E Ink display plays loose with the truth

Well doesn’t that look impressive? A big ‘ol 19-inch electronic ink display that appears to emulate your father’s newspaper. No doubt, this massive Metal-Foil e-paper prototype from LG Display is impressive at this size (just 0.3-mm thin and 250×400mm — about the same size as a 297×420-mm sheet of A3) and weight (130 grams). Hell, we were already impressed with the flexible 11.5-inch panel from LG Display found in the Skiff Reader. However, like the rigid Skiff Reader, a flexible panel doesn’t mean that we’ll be seeing a flexible e-reader. In fact, chances are we won’t after the manufacturer gets through adding a touchscreen overlay, application processor, and radio chipset. Let’s hope for a surprise though, whenever these panels do make it out for mass production… assuming anyone still cares about monochrome E Ink displays by then.

Intel profits recover to $2.3 billion in Q4 2009, company describes it as 875 percent jump

Yo Intel, when your 2008 fourth quarter was one of the worst you ever recorded, it’s slightly, just slightly, facetious to go trumpeting an 875 percent improvement in your 2009 fortunes. The self-appointed chipmaking rock star has clocked up $10.6 billion in revenues for the last quarter, which filters down to $2.3 billion in pure, unadulterated, mother-loving profit. That’s good and indeed technically nearly nine times what the company achieved in the same period the previous year — we’d just appreciate this to be represented as the recovery it is, rather than some major leap forward in the face of a global financial meltdown. Either way, the Santa Clara checkbook is now well and truly balanced, even if it would’ve looked fatter still but for the small matter of a $1.25 billion settlement reflected in last quarter’s results.

DigitalRise X9 tablet has Atom, multitouch, $780 price tag

ASUS EeeTop ET2010PNT hints that NVIDIA Ion 2 is GeForce G310

We were a little disheartened last week when we didn’t hear a peep out of NVIDIA about Ion 2, but Pierre of Blogee has dug up some dirt on the next-generation graphics. The ASUS Eee PC ET2010PNT’s got a pretty nice looking 20-inch HD multitouch display, but it’s also powered by the new Intel Pine Trail D510 processor and NVIDIA GeForce G310 graphics — which according to the document is being dubbed as Ion 2. Sure, we already knew that the next version of Ion would be compatible with Intel new Atom platform, but we didn’t know that they’d be tossing aside the GeForce 9400M for its G310 graphics card (which is apparently just a rebranded G210). As we thought, it looks like this will be a discrete solution, and it appears (if the benchmarks are accurate) that the G310 will be considerably faster than the current Ion platform. We’re just hoping the 589MHz 16-core CUDA chip has been tweaked for better power efficiency when it comes to cramming it into netbooks. No word on when the ET2010PNT will be available, but given the initial hold up we saw with Ion 1 we aren’t overly optimistic that it will be any time soon.

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