So far the only uses for the Cell Chip technology has been for research, and the PS3. However, at CES 08. Toshiba demoed the laptop on a modified Qosmio G45 laptop with a standard Intel Core 2 Duo, in addition to the cell chip with four 1.5GHz synergistic processing elements (SPE). They had four demos running, all were multi-tasking beasts. One was scanning movie files and using face recognition to detect all the faces within the movie file. It then created a thumbnails of each of them. You could then click on the faces, and watch all the clips that included that face.

We’re barely getting the 45nm Quad Core  generation into full swing and they’re already using the cellchip in consumer computers.

As of now, the police haven’t disclosed the console used, but an 18 year old boy has been hauled off to jail for attempting, and nearly succeeding,  to strangle his father over a dispute with managing play time. According to the police report the teenager was warned multiple times by his Dad to turn the game off. Eventually the man walked into his sons room and after being ignored, pulled the plug on the console ending his game and erasing his progress. The teen became so angry that he lept off his couch and managed to nearly kill his Dad over the video game.

Luckily, the wife heard the dispute and managed to help her husband out of the struggle and saved his life. Soon after EMT’s arrived and rushed the father off to the hospital. The police located and cuffed the teen a few blocks away from home and hauled his hiney off to jail. He’ll be tried in front of a judge for attempted homicide and possibly faces prison time.

Sony recently made the decision to no longer sell the 20GB and 60GB model Playstation 3’s in Japan due to unsuccessful sales. Instead, they will be focusing on the 40GB model and try to boost sales with new marketing strategies.

Sony also said that the 40GB will not ultimately be the only model available, but instead they’re releasing newer models that will better suit the end user demands and needs in the console. Currently, the 40GB model (launched in November) sells for  ~$364 USD (39,980 Yen), which is less than the 20GB model.

A new revision to the already fast USB interface was announced this year at CES. With blazing speeds of 4.8Gb/s, you’ll be able to transfer full length movies from your desktop to a USB Thumb Drive or other device in just over 1 second. (4.8Gb/s = 600MB/s Avg. movie size ~750MB). It will also feature a smart power management utility that will regulate the amount of energy a device consumes, based on it’s current usage status. Unfortunately this technology will not be made available until 2010.

The 2008 Consumer Electronics Show (CES) was pretty fun this year, although most of the hype was around different displays from short throw projectors to the 150-Inch Plasma T.V., and even Alienware’s huge Curved Monitor. There was a lot of other stuff that we enjoyed quite a bit that sometimes got buried by the hype, so here’s our list of the top 5 favorite things and their pictures from C.E.S. 2008.

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We all knew when the console/format wars began that only one format would make it to the top. Paramount is poised to jump on the wagon and ditch HD-DVD, closely following Warner Brothers’ decision to do the same. All this crazy love and war brought about single-console and format topics, such as the “Adam vs. Adam” spot on G4 that basically rants to the public about having all developers and console makers to band together and create one ultimate console, eliminating the need for exclusive games and exclusive format rights. Of course, that leaves us vulnerable to a costly monopolistic situation, not so good.

More and more companies are backing Blu-ray which will ultimately end in a bias on the two head to head console, the Xbox 360 and the Sony PS3. Examining the moment now, with the X360’s red ring problem, and the death of HD-DVD, the PS3 seems to be looking more and more attractive to a lot of consumers.

The classic “Darwin Awards” comes to mind when looking at this picture.

If you can’t see what’s happening, these lovely bunch of braniacs are using their electric griddle in the middle of a pool. How do they plug it in? A surge protector floating on two flip-flops. We rate you guys 5 out of 5 lightning bolts to the face.

(Found image via Google, no context or credit found)

SanDisk’s latest MicroSDHC card has a 12GB capacity. If you’ve ever held one of these cards, you’ll appreciate the true beauty of this article. If you haven’t, we’re talking small. MicroSD is a very small form factor, about the size of a small pinky nail. (The actual memory bank on the whole chip takes up about half the space.)

Currently you can buy the 8GB MicroSDHC cards for around $130. That’s about $16 per gig, and factor in the +$2 per gig on the next model up, we’re talking about $18 per gig on the 12GB model, totaling $216.00 USD is our guess at the price (SanDisk hasn’t released pricing info yet).

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1200FPS is high enough quality to watch something drop in a pool of water and watch every single droplet’s path, and effect on other objects not normally visible to the naked eye. This enables the average user to record super slow-mo clips (Like Myth Buster’s High-Speed camera, just not quite that fast) and play them back at 30-60FPS which can slow it down quite a lot (by a factor of 40 (1200/30=40)).

It can shoot in full resolution at 60FPS for stills, and 300, 600, or 1200 FPS for video. This is an amazing accomplishment for this price range, especially when you factor in the lens quality needed to support the exposure time, and the processing capabilities needed to handle 1,200 images every second.

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