Best Buy today announced the availability of its new digital video service CinemaNow which will provide customers same-day instant access to new release movies and TV shows. 

The service will initially be accessible through select connected Blu-ray Disc players and HDTVs, and on most PCs via the web at www.cinemanow.com. Beginning this month, the service will be available on all new connected Blu-ray Disc players and home theater systems from LG Electronics. CinemaNow is also expected to launch on an array of other devices from various manufacturers, including Insignia, later this year.  

CinemaNow, the result of the previously announced strategic relationship between Sonic Solutions® and Best Buy, will be powered by the RoxioNow™ technology platform. Best Buy owns the legal rights to the CinemaNow trademark, and will use it going forward to market the service to consumers who will have the ability to buy or rent from an extensive library of premium content, including new release movies and TV shows, with no subscription required.

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Mach Xtreme Technology Inc., a worldwide leader in top performance, high reliability and user-friendly designed PC components, today unveiled MX-NANO Series 1.8” PATA SSD with 256MB cache memory which makes MLC (multi-level cell) NAND-based storage an affordable offering for notebook users demanding performance and energy efficiency at an attractive price point.

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The new MX-NANO Series of 1.8” PATA SSDs that are ideal for upgrading popular notebooks based on 50-pin, 44-pin or ZIF PATA interface. Combined with industry’s leading 256MB cache memory and ultra-fast access times, these new SSDs deliver double or even triple the performance of the default hard drives in most current notebooks, resulting in substantially faster boot-up, application load and shutdown speeds. It is one of the fastest and easiest ways to upgrade dozens of different notebooks and UMPCs to higher performance and more local storage (up to 240GB).

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Panasonic announced today exclusive agreements with two of Hollywood's premiere film studios, Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment and Universal Studios Home Entertainment, to offer the Blu-ray 3D versions of Fox's Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs and Universal's Coraline, two of the industry's most successful theatrical 3D titles, with its critically-acclaimed and award winning VIERA Full HD 3D TVs.

Consumers who purchase a Panasonic VIERA VT25 Full HD 3D Plasma TV between May 16 and July 10, 2010 will be able to receive the two Blu-ray 3D titles via mail-in coupon. Complete details on the offer are available on the Panasonic web site at www.panasonic.com/promos/3d-blu-ray-movie-offer.asp.

Both the Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs Blu-ray 3D version and the Coraline Blu-ray 3D version were authored by the Compression and Authoring Center of Panasonic Hollywood Laboratory.   To assure the highest possible image and color quality, both Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment and Universal Studios Home Entertainment involved the film-makers in the process of encoding the titles for 3D.  Thanks to this close collaboration, both Blu-ray 3D titles deliver dazzling color and image that is true to the original theatrical release.

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sans digital mobilenas mn4lab.jpgSans Digital, a leading provider of high performance storage subsystems is announcing MobileNAS MN4LA+B, a 4-bay iSCSI and NAS unified storage tower utilizing the latest Intel ATOM based Dual Core D510 CPU with dual Gigabit Ethernet ports. Based on the existing popular EliteNAS and MobileNAS series that range from 1U 4-bay to 8U 50-bay rackmounts, the MN4LA+B provides the same capability of supporting both NAS and iSCSI simultaneously while increasing the performance with double amount of bandwidth when compared to the MN4L+B.

Small business and enterprise both face the same challenges with today’s information technology: the needs to have continuous expansion of their shared data storage, with minimum maintenance overhead and maximum return on investment. Supporting Windows, Apple and Linux based network, with a total of 8TB of storage space, the MobileNAS MN4LA+B is an excellent choice for SMB (Small Medium Business) who demands great performance on a budget for its network storage expansion.

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Synology today launched DiskStation DS110+ and DS210+, high-performance and secure 1-bay and 2-bay NAS servers for SMB users to share and backup data efficiently and increase productivity with rich business-oriental features.

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The Synology DS110+ and DS210+ are ideal for users who require a reliable data storage solution and demand high-performance speed for file sharing. The performance test conducted by Synology's lab showed that in a Windows® environment, the Synology DS110+ serves an average of 108+ MB/sec reading speed and 68+ MB/sec writing speed while the Synology DS210+ delivers 108+ MB/sec reading and 58+ MB/sec writing. The web server responsiveness is impressive, too. The Synology DS110+ and DS210+ take 85.08 and 78.14 seconds respectively to handle 1,000 simultaneous requests.

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Panasonic Corporation has achieved the cumulative sales quantity for its dual-wavelength high-power laser for DVD recorders to 300 million units in April, 2010. The production of dual-wavelength high-power laser started the first time in the industry in June 2006. Now, under the favorable demand of the personal computers, Panasonic will increase monthly production to 25 million units (300 million annually) for the latter half of this fiscal year.

The dual-wavelength high-power laser has been highly reputed for its quality and stable supply. The device offers several advantages in comparison to the use of single wavelength lasers as it combines two laser wavelengths, an infrared beam (with a wavelength of 780 nm, for CD use) and a red beam (with a wavelength of 650 nm, for DVD use), in a single chip. As result, light source point adjustment is unnecessary, the optical pickup system can be simplified, and the number of peripheral parts can be halved. These benefits helped dual-wavelength lasers capture a high share of the total market for DVD recorder pickups and achieve the sales of 300 million units in the four years since production started.

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Transcend Information, Inc. today introduced a USB 3.0 Expansion Card that comes with two high-speed USB 3.0 ports. This easy-to-install add-on card enables speed enthusiasts to connect USB 3.0-compatible peripherals to their desktop PC and experience data transfer rates up to ten times faster than USB 2.0 with optimized power efficiency.

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For users who are not prepared to upgrade their entire computer system for the sole purpose of adding USB 3.0 functionality, Transcend`s USB 3.0 Expansion Card is a perfect solution that allows them to join the SuperSpeed USB 3.0 revolution. The card`s PCI Express 2.0 single lane connection interface is compatible with virtually all current motherboards, and guarantees unrestricted two-way communication between the computer and any USB devices plugged into the card.

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Cooler Master CM 690 II Advanced Mid Tower Case @ TweakTown
Cooler Master HAF 932 AMD Edition Case @ Tweaknews
Crucial Ballistix PC3-12800 (1600MHz) 6GB Kit @ TweakTown
Dell P2210H DisplayPort Monitor @ Phoronix
G.Skill Phoenix 100GB SSD @ TweakPC
Lenovo ThinkPad Edge 15-inch Notebook @ ThinkComputers.org
NETGEAR Powerline AV 200 XAVB2001 Adapter Kit @ TweakTown
ROCCAT Kova Gaming Mouse @ Madshrimps
Sapphire HD5850 Toxic Video Card @ Metku.net
SilverStone Strider Plus 750w Power Supply @ OCIA.net
Zotac GeForce GTX-470 Fermi Video Card @ Benchmark Reviews

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Patriot Memory today announced the immediate availability of the Inferno series to its family of solid-state-drives (SSDs). The Inferno series of SSD offer blazing fast transfer speeds, improved system responsiveness, quicker boot times, and shorter application loading times over traditional hard disk drive storage solutions.

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Patriot’s Inferno series, available in 100GB and 200GB capacities, is designed around the highly acclaimed SF-1200 processor series. Paired with specially screened MLC NAND Flash the Inferno drives deliver class leading performance with sequential read and write speeds of 285MB/s and 275MB/s respectively. SandForce DuraClass™ technology provides enhanced endurance and reliability by an average of 20x over traditional SSD controllers through innovative write technology and Wear Leveling.

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MXI Security, the leader in encrypted USB and biometric USB drive markets, today introduced the new Stealth HD Series of encrypted USB hard drives.

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Replacing the well-known Outbacker MXP Series, the Stealth HD Series is powered by MXI Security’s Bluefly Portable Security Processor. Bluefly recently received FIPS 140-2 Level 3 validation (Certificate number 1269), making the Stealth HD Series the first and only USB hard drives to offer this level of security.

The Bluefly Portable Security Processor offers unmatched security in any environment, foreign or familiar. Bluefly’s anti-malware features, including its read-only mode of operation, protect the Stealth HD® Series from all attackers. With the optional ACCESS Antivirus Scanner, user data and host systems are shielded from all forms of malware.

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