Liam 'Lamsey' McBrien - Cool Gear Guide

Cool Bits of Hardware

Every so often, you come across a piece of hardware that just makes you think "wow... wish I could afford one of those". On this page I'll be linking those up as I come across them, in the vain hope that someone will buy me one someday.

Surround sound without the surround
If this thing works as advertised then it's clearly an example of pure unadulterated wootness. Surround sound is great until it comes to actually placing the bloody speakers, which is invariably a royal pain in the arse.
R2D2 Projector
I want this so badly. Who wouldn't want a digital projector in the shape of R2D2? It even moves and makes the right noises! Best of all, it doesn't come with a C3PO...
Apple iPhone
These things have been rumoured for so long it seems wierd that Apple have finally announced them. They'll be in the UK before the end of 2007, apparently. They look decidedly cool, with the impressive UI innovation you would expect from Apple. Only problem is the price tag - sure, it's a phone/mp3 player/web browser/email client all-in-one thing, but it looks like it'll be something like Ł400 over here :-/
nVidia's 8000-series GPUs
Wow. These things utterly blow the competition away. In Half Life 2, for instance, just one of these babies matches up nicely to a dual-GPU Crossfire config with ATi's finest. Dual 8800s blow everything away. ATi will need to come up with a damn good answer to these cards because it's a revolutionary step rather than an evolutionary one in terms of architecture.
High-density perpendicular storage HDs
After so long in the 'three-to-five-years-away' stage, it's great to finally see perpendicular recording being used in retail products. This technology allows for greater data density on hard discs, greatly improving the amount of data which can fit into a given area. 500 gigs in a laptop drive sounds pretty good to me, as does the idea of 2.5TB in a desktop drive!
DigitalTigers Zenview monitors
Seeing the Radius 320 reminded me of what must be one of the coolest sites for looking at uber-cool monitor setups. I say "looking at" because you'd have to lay down some serious coin to be able to afford one of these babies....
Radius 320 monitor
I love my dual-monitor display, but this is just utter coolness. A 50-inch wide display capable of 4800x1200 display means some serious wootness. Only problem is you need "enough video cards for three DVI ports capable of 1600x1200"... then again to run Doom 3 at that resolution you'll need a few cards ;-)
nVidia Quad-SLI cards
>100 fps in Doom 3 at 2560x1600 with 4xAA and 8xAF. For those who don't understand such jargon, that is some WHOPPING graphics performance. I won't be able to afford these any time soon, though, as it'd be four figures just for the cards - never mind the supporting motherboard and monstrous PSU to go with it!
Segway Project Centaur
OK, technically it's not a conventional bit of hardware as such but it's still really cool technology. It would be a nice urban vehicle if they could speed it up a little - it'd be a damned sight cheaper than a new car, and a damned sight cooler too.
Raytracing Processing Units
First soundcards, then 3d GPUs, then the PPU, and now we're going to have RPUs? How many damned cards are we going to need to play games in future?
Holographic storage discs
Screw Blu-ray or HD-DVD, these things sound much cooler and aren't too much further around the corner given the current kerfuffle over AACS and so on. The only problem is, burning with these things using IDE would be painful :-/
MRAM enters production
MRAM sounds pretty cool, bridging the gap between Flash and DRAM nicely. We should hopefully start seeing this stuff within a couple of years and it should fit in nicely with hard-disk caching tech (currently the idea is to use Flash with this).
Optimus Keyboard
This keyboard has a minature OLED on every key, allowing it to show different keyboard layouts at the touch of a button. One of the examples shows a Quake layout with graphics showing the controls. Words can not express how cool an idea this is. My wallet cannot express how bad an idea this is.

More to come as I find them...