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Scart issue: transforming the Apple TV
The week's hottest personal technology stories
Register Hardware Register Hardware - it's just like The Register, only harder - brings you the hottest personal technology news and reviews every day. The gadgets that grabbed the headlines this week:
Brits to get year-old Sony Blu-ray Disc player
The consumer electronics giant released its BDP-S1 Blu-ray Disc player in the US last autumn, having originally promised to ship it in the summer. Earlier this year it promised a new, slimline model. But what do the Brits get? Not the new unit but the old one...
This after a Sony executive claimed we're paying more for the PS3 than the Americans because they're "cheap people". More wonderful Sony quotations here.
Polishing the Apple TV
It's been a busy week for Apple TV hackers. Some have been taking the set-top box apart to replace its underwhelming 40GB hard drive with a much more capacious unit, while others have worked out how to run its version of Mac OS X on other machines.
And there was good news for folk keen to connect an Apple TV to a widescreen CRT or a display without HDMI or component-video ports: J S Technology's component-to-Scart converter had its price cut by 40 per cent.
De-scratch your DVDs
US-based VenMill appealed to anyone with kids and a hefty CD and DVD collection with a gadget that will, it claimed, render badly scratched discs playable. All it takes is a little heat and pressure...
Intel strums 'Van Nehalem' riff
The chip giant focused on its upcoming 45nm processor architecture, 'Penryn' this week, confirming bigger caches, better power savings and clock speeds nudging past 3GHz.
But the real shock was the return of Hyper-threading, due with Penryn's successor, 'Nehalem', in 2008. The AMD-esque architecture will feature an integrated memory controller, an on-board graphics core, a HyperTransport-like point-to-point serial bus and the ability to scale to eight cores. Might as well jump...
iRiver revival
iRiver's sleek Flash-based media player, the X20 appeared in the UK in a bid to win hearts and minds away from the iPod. Its weapons: a cute rotating user interface and a features list as long as your arm.
iPod users needn't feel left out - accessory maker Griffin Technology rolled out its promised iTrip FM transmitter once again, this time for the second-gen Nano.
The iRiver's UK supplier even put a DAP inside that seaonal treat, the Easter Egg... Eggsemplary.
Best of the rest
Nvidia launches nForce 680i LT SLI chipset
Samsung shows self-adjusting phone display
AMD launches laptop-friendly 690 chipset
Palm to bring HSDPA to 3G Treo 750
Ricoh extends SLR-wannabe compact camera line
Samsung doubles solid-state drive capacity
DLO flips for dual-cover iPod case
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