Verbatim has announced its plans to release a new 500 GB portable hard drive for later this year. Aside from carrying some of the more standard features of the SmartDisk line, this new drive will also carry a reasonable price tag. Details are available in the full article.

OWC has added a 500 GB model to their Mercury On-The-Go series of portable hard drives. This new hard drive sports quite a number of features that any PC user on the go will definitely appreciate. To find out what this product has to offer you, head on over to the full article for more information.

Toshiba recently unveiled two new additions to the ever-growing Portage R500 sub-notebook family, the R500-12P and the R500-12Q. The latest laptops boast of packing 128 GB of solid-state storage. Find out more on these in the full article.

We're letting the Apple fans know that the company has released updates for its Aperture and GarageBand applications. The updates will cover mostly stability and compatibility issues that were found in each application's previous build. Details are in the full article.

News and images of Intel's newest "gaming platform" for extreme hardware enthusiasts just hit the web recently, and dozens of hardware discussions have been revolving around them. The Skulltrail motherboard seems to be picking up more than just hype, as the newest details to arise from images show Intel's been making steady adjustments to the server-turned-extreme gaming motherboard. That and a little more at the full story.

Be it the AQUOS BD-AV1 or the BD-AV10, you'll get 1 Terrabyte of hard drive storage to boot. These new Blu-ray player-recorders from Sharp pushes the envelope for capacity in-house, though the AV10 will be your choice for premium capacity on recording - it supports dual-layer Blu-ray burning.

Otherwise, both units will come with a single digital TV tuner, one HDMI port, a single FireWire (IEEE 1394) port, and an assortment of connectors for the usual composite connections to standard players and television sets.

The AV10 comes in at a hefty US$ 1,040 price tag (JPY 120,000) and US$ 865 (JPY 100,000) for the AV1. Prices get slashed by approximately 50% if the versions without the hard drive are picked up. We're not sure where the new units will hit first, but these babies will most likely appear in Japanese electronic entertainment stores before anywhere else.

  

The Apple Summer Mac product conference is already rolling hot with Steve Jobs manning the show. As expected, his keynote address is filled with surprising unveiling of new Apple projects and the "everybody saw this coming" types. Tab this one under the second category - as predicted and whispered around various boards the past few weeks, Apple is giving us brand new iMacs.

Sporting a retroish look, the sleek new iMacs are made of aluminum and glass. It comes in 20- and 24-inched versions, each equipped with the usual but impressive specs such as up to  2.4GHz Core 2 Extreme processor, up to 4GB of memory, ATI Radeon HD graphics card, up to 1TB of hard drive storage. 802.11n and Bluetooth 2.0 built-in. There's also the usual compliment of ports like USB 2.0, Firewire 400/800, a slot loading SuperDrive, iSight camera etc.

What's also worth noting is that the oft-rumored new keyboard for the iMacs turns out to be true, with Steve Jobs himself confirming it. Boasting of large spacing and flat keys, Apple seems to be aiming to give the iMac users the laptop feel while typing. iMac purists seem to be a bit skeptic with the move, but let's all wait and see what happens. The 20-inch iMac goes for US$ 1,199 each (add three hundred bucks more for a processor and graphics enhancements), while the 24-inch monster demands US$ 1,799 per unit.

As most Apple fans know, the Apple WWDC is going pretty strong. A lot of people have their own thoughts about the iPhone and Mac OS X Leopard, but no amount of speculating beat first hand information.

Mac Rumors was lucky enough to get some details from those who attended the WWDC and were able to get some details about the Leopard. In addition, they also gave some of their impressions on the product which were quite insightful. Consistently, the people who saw it have been raving about the new mail system that Apple implemented.

Another thing that was pointed out by one of the attendees is the fact that Spotlight has been tweaked so that it has become "much more responsive." Another thing that was pointed out was that "Safari seems faster and now has that styled text editor as in Firefox." For those who are worried about the requirements of the said OS, don't fret, the readme on the copies handed out clarified everything (it's no Vista in terms of memory requirements).

System Requirements:

• an Intel processor or a PowerPC G4 or G5 processor
• a DVD drive
• built-in FireWire
• at least 256 MB of RAM for a Power-PC based Mac and 512 MB for an Intel-based Mac (additional RAM is recommended for development purposes)
• a built-in display or a display connected to an Apple-supplied video card supported by your computer
• at least 6 GB of disk space available, or 8 GB if you install the developer tools

That said, it looks like the Mac OS X Leopard is primed and ready to hit the ground running. Hopefully it will be everything and more Mac users wish it to be. Keep checking back here for more updates on the WWDC and the products featured there.

In the spirit of bringing you more Apple TV-related modifications, we're now gonna show you how to run the full Mac OS X on the Apple TV. semthex from Hackint0sh.org hacked out a replacement to the Mac OS X kernel, side-stepping over certain hardware restrictions that previously made running the Mac OS X on an Apple TV improbable.

Here are the steps to install the full Mac OS X on the Apple TV. Install at your own risk.

1) Remove the drive from the Apple TV
2) Back up your drive! Make an image of it (see the harddrive upgrade tutorial for this)
3) Connect the drive to a regular Mac (use a Firewire or USB drive dock)
4) Install OS X (Intel version) to the drive (we suggest a slim install - no printer drivers etc.)
5) Boot from this drive, and set it up as you would like it. Make sure you do updates so it is at least 10.4.8.
6) Reboot to your normal OS X install.
7) Remove mach_kernel from root of the drive containg the ATV install.
8) Replace it with the customised mach_kernel that you’ll find on Hackint0sh.org.
9) Replace /System/Libary/Coreservices/boot.efiwith the same file from your backup of the Apple TV OS drive (OSBoot partition).
10) Run bless:

bless --folder=/Volumes/OSBoot/System/Library/CoreServices --file=/Volumes/OSBoot/System/Library/CoreServices/boot.efi --setBoot

11) Delete all the Nvidia kexts (all beginning with NVD, there should be 5) from the target drive (in /System/Library/Extensions).
12) Transfer the drive back to the Apple TV
13) Turn the Apple TV on and cross your fingers...

And you should boot up into Mac OS X. The Apple TV running Mac OS X can use the mouse and the keyboard normally. Use either Front Row or Back Row to watch content.

For a more detailed how-to, check the installation video by clicking on the full article link below.

 

Something new - and cheap - just came out from Mini-box, the VoomPC-2 car pc. It does what a normal PC would and it uses less than your parking lights. We're not sure whether the design was meant to look like a car amplifier though.

Features include an anti-battery drain system that automatically shuts the PC off whenever battery power dips below 11.2 volts. The VoomPC-2 has also been tested in harsh temperatures (-40 to 55 degrees celsius) so you don't have to worry about the circuits frying in summer or freezing in winter.

Additional specs:

• Mini-ITX motherboard
• Jetway 1.5GhZ X86 VIA C7 processor
• I/O for VGA, S-Video, USB2.0, Firewire, Ethernet
• PCMCIA type I and type II CardBus interface for GPRS/WIFI/ and smart 5+1 channels audio
• Slim Cd-ROM to 2.5" IDE Adapter
• M1-ATX car PC PSU
  

The VoomPC-2 is now available from Mini-box and the car PC barebones version will cost you US$ 395.