The Combined Exhibition of Advanced Technologies, or CEATEC, got underway yesterday in Japan. While I can't claim to be on the show floor or, truth be told, anywhere near the land of the rising sun, Akihabara News has correspondents onsite. Blu-ray announcements are dominating the coverage, with solid-state storage garnering headlines, as well.

In next-gen optical storage news, Blu-ray looks to be outpacing rival HD-DVD at the show. Hitachi is showing off a number of camcorders, including a model that uses mini Blu-ray discs. Sony announced its VAIO L series all-in-one PC, which will feature a Blu-ray burner, while NEC showed off a sub-$1,000 ValueStar PC with a Blu-ray drive (BD-ROM means reading but, sadly, no writing). Sony also had a pair of stand-alone Blu-ray recorders on display, as did Pioneer, while Toshiba countered with a prototype of an external (USB 2.0) HD-DVD player.

Tired of hard drives that have the gall to spin in order to find your data? Then take a peek at the flash-based drives that TDK and Taiwanese company iNNODISK have on hand. It'll be interesting to see what new laptop designs these small, fast, and durable drives will afford. Perhaps such mobile devices will dominate next year's show.

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Prints from HP's lasers promise to be sharper than this photo
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When shopping for a new printer, odds are two names are at the top of your list: Canon and HP. We've covered a bunch of Canon printers and all-in-ones recently, and we will soon be able to even out our printer coverage with reviews from HP's new laser lineup, which the company unveiled yesterday. It includes seven new all-in-ones and two printers.

In addition to five monochrome-only LaserJet all-in-ones that target large enterprises with prices that range from $1,499 to $3,999 and print speeds that range from 27ppm to 35ppm, there are two all-in-ones that are slower and cheaper and give you the option for color prints:

HP Color LaserJet CM1015 MFP
$499; 8ppm for both color and monochrome
HP Color LaserJet CM1017 MFP
$699; same speed as above, but it's networkable and can hold additional memory

The two printers announced yesterday boast impressive print speeds for businesses with high-volume printing needs:

HP LaserJet P3005
$549; 35ppm monochrome only
HP Color LaserJet CP4005n
$1,299; 25ppm for color and 30ppm for monochrome

HP says the P3005 is available now and the CP4005n will start shipping on November 1. The others will ship in either late November or December.

Looking forward to next year, HP announced that some of its high-end business printers will begin using the company's Egdeline printing technology, which it introduced in in-store retail photo-printing kiosks last spring. With Edgeline, a printer is constructed so that the printheads stretch across a whole page so that they don't need to move. The paper moves, but the printheads remain stationary, and prints can be completed in just one or two passes. According to an HP VP, it's four times faster than any HP printer on the market today, and because the printheads are motionless, you'll get more accurate ink placement and better image quality.

Source: PC Magazine

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R.I.P. P4
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With Core 2 Duo out in full force, Intel is expected to relegate its Pentium 4 chips to the bargain bin. Using Intel's suddenly outdated Netburst architecture, Pentium 4 CPUs will see their prices slashed by up to 58 percent at the start of 2007 as Intel looks to clear out inventory of its old chips. The price of the 3.0GHz Pentium 4 631, for example, is expected to drop nearly $100, from $163 to $69.

Intel will reportedly stop manufacturing Pentium 4 processors by Q3 of next year; production of the Netburst-based budget Celeron chip will cease in early '08. A budget line of CPUs based on Intel's new Core architecture is expected to be released in Q2 of next year. On the high end, of course, Intel's quad-core desktop CPU (Kentfield) is expected to be one of the major headliners of next year's CES.

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Now with Core 2 Duo
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Sooner than expected, Apple has brought Intel's mobile Core 2 Duo (a.k.a. Merom) chips to its iMac line and introduced a larger size. Joining the 17-inch and 20-inch models is a new 24-inch iMac that features a 1,920x1,200 resolution. Priced at $1,999, the 24-inch iMac features a 2.16GHz Core 2 Duo chip (you can also upgrade to a 2.33GHz chip) and Nvidia GeForce graphics, with either the 128MB 7300 GT or the 256MB 7600 GT card. The 17-inch model now starts at $999 with a 1.83GHz Core 2 Duo processor. In the middle sits the 20-inch model at $1,499, which features the same two processor options as its larger cousin and ATI Radeon graphics.

Apple claims that the 24-inch model, when equipped with the 2.33GHz Core 2 Duo processor, delivers up to 50 percent more performance than the previous 20-inch iMac. Apple also states that the 24-incher's screen is 40 percent brighter than the suddenly puny-looking 20-inch model. We will bring you a full review of the new 24-inch iMac as soon as we are able to lay our hands on one.

The $1,999 24-inch iMac includes:

• 2.16GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor (with 4MB shared L2 cache)
  
• 1GB of 667MHz DDR2 memory
  
• 250GB SATA hard drive (7,200rpm)
  
• 128MB Nvidia GeForce 7300 GT graphics card
  
• 8X double-layer SuperDrive
  
• Built-in iSight video camera
  
• Built-in AirPort Extreme and Bluetooth 2.0
  
• Apple Remote, Mighty Mouse, and Apple Keyboard
  

The full Core 2 Duo iMac line can be seen on Apple's product page. Pricing and spec info can also be found for all four models on our Apple iMac Core 2 Duo series page.

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Steve Jobs will take the stage one week from today
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Core 2 Duo iMacs? New Nano? Feature films in iTunes? Apple hardware for the living room? We'll know one week from today. Until then, enjoy the rumors and speculation.

Steve Jobs is set to take the stage for a press event next Tuesday, September 12. Though that date marks the opening of Apple's Expo in Paris, Jobs will pontificate closer to home--from the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Theater in San Francisco. AppleInsider posted a good roundup yesterday, leading with the rumor that at least one Hollywood studio will make its movies available for download via iTunes for $9.99 a pop. With no rumors of a touch-screen, wide-screen video iPod circulating, the thinking is that you'll watch the films you download from the comfort of your living room with a new Airport Express that will be able to smoothly stream video. Either that or you'll go out and grab the rumored 23-inch iMac, which may be able to do HD. The iMac is also expected to lead the transition to Intel's new mobile Core 2 Duo chips. We anticipate MacBooks and the Mac Mini to follow suit, sooner rather than later.

Last and certainly least (in size), the iPod Nano is expected to hold more songs and less scratches.

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The UX280P adds more memory and a larger hard drive
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Only a few months after its release, Sony's UMPC has received an update. The new UX280P doesn't appear to solve any of the problems we found with the UX180P, namely its high price, poor battery life, and less-than-ideal typing experience. The new model is even pricier at $2,000, and it features the same design and same 1.2GHz Core Solo processor as its predecessor. What has changed, you ask? Only the memory (doubled to 1GB) and the hard drive (up from 30GB to 40GB).

To be fair, the UX180P already packed an impressive amount of features--Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, a full version of XP, not one but two Webcams, a QWERTY keyboard, a fingerprint reader, and a 4.5-inch wide-screen display--into a small package. Despite this impressive list, we're not sold on the UMPC concept. What are your thoughts? Would you buy one? Would you use one if your company purchased one for you? Or does this convergence product solve a problem you don't have?

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50GB for $40
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Now, the bad news: a Sony product manager stated last week at an event in Sydney, Australia, that the company's first Blu-ray drive for the PC, the BWU-100A, won't play commercial Blu-ray titles. You're stuck playing just your own recorded content for the time being, thanks to the lack of updated hardware and software. HDCP-compliant graphics cards aren't out yet, and there aren't any retail playback apps for Blu-ray drives that can decrypt HDCP. (An OEM version of WinDVD supposedly can handle HDCP, but it's currently available only as part of the bundle with a Sony laptop.) Add this fact to the list of reasons of why you should hold off buying a next-gen optical drive.

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Boom goes the lithium ion.
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Market-leading Dell begins a market-leading battery recall today. The U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission says it's not only the largest battery recall, but the largest recall of any type of electronic product. Teaming with Dell, it plans to recall 4.1 million batteries. Sony, which manufactures the batteries in question, has pledged to assist Dell in the recall. Unfortunately, many Dell laptops use these Sony batteries, including models from the Latitude, Inspiron, and XPS laptop lines as well as Precision mobile workstations. Six incidents have been reported since June of a Dell laptop's battery exploding and catching fire. Here's the list of affected models:

Latitude: D410, D500, D505, D510, D520, D600, D610, D620, D800, D810

Inspiron: 6000, 8500, 8600, 9100, 9200, 9300, 500m, 510m, 600m, 6400, E1505, 700m, 710m, 9400, E1705

XPS: XPS, XPS Gen2, XPS M170, XPS M1710

Precision: M20, M60, M70, M90

If you purchased any of these models between April 2004 and July 18, 2006, you are urged to visit Dell's Web site on the matter or call 866/342-0011 (good luck getting through). Dell asks that you run your laptop on AC power until your replacement battery arrives. No word yet if other laptop vendors using Sony lithium-ion batteries will add to this already huge recall.

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Asustek and Gigabyte: boardroom board partners
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Help me, Hitachi Maxell; you're my only hope.
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Hitachi Maxell stated this week that we'll see holographic storage products by Christmas. At prices that make $1,000 Blu-ray burners and $500 HD-DVD players look downright cheap, holographic storage will be the plaything of the enterprise market and not this year's Tickle Me Elmo hot holiday gift. The first holographic storage discs will hold 300GB of data and cost $120 to $180. Sitting down? Good, because here comes the part where we tell you that you'll need a $15,000 drive to read or write the discs when they're released in November or December. Capacity is expected to increase; Maxell's director of technical marketing expects we'll see 800GB discs in 2008 and 1.6TB discs by 2010. Pricing will obviously come down by then, too. Media is expected to range from regular CD-size cartridges to smaller formats the size of credit cards and postage stamps.

Want to know how holographic storage works? Check out this illustrated explainer.

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