REMEMBER WHEN INTEL talked about opening Atom CPUs to other companies? I'll bet you didn't think one of the first customers would be Nokia.

PROTEX 3.0, available in triple pack or singles. Oh, sorry. We were thinking about something quite different. Asus is apparently touting its latest mainboards under the Protex 3.0 banner, although we cannot help but think about condoms rather than motherboards, given a name like that.

GOOGLE JUST CAN’T stop dreaming up now products, good ones too, but its latest stroke of genius might one day be something that no traveller will leave home without. If you’ve read the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy then you might be familiar with the Babel Fish, although Google hasn’t gone quite that far in its efforts to come up what it said is a universal translator.

DON’T EXPECT ANYTHING new from Intel this year in terms of desktop chipsets, at least not the way Intel’s current roadmap is planned. We’re going to have to make do with what’s on offer for the rest of 2010, despite some “missing features” in all three of Intel’s latest chipsets. What’s worse is that there’s not much to look forward to next year either, if our sources are correct.

IF INTEL'S NEXT generation chip does indeed slip into 2011 as some rumors suggest, there is a very good reason for it. Intel works in strange and mysterious ways, and uses more Feng Shui than anyone would expect.

IT SEEMS LIKE Biostar jumped the press release gun as the company posted details of its upcoming TA890GXE motherboard based on the AMD 890GX chipset on its website. The press release has since been taken down, but it has already spread all over the web. However, what makes it interesting is the fact that it includes the retail name for AMD’s upcoming hexa-core CPUs.

HERE WE GO again, Intel has come up with yet another nifty marketing name, Core vPro. These are not only Intel’s 'new' processors for businesses of all sizes that add a host of features, but they're also said to gain cost savings.

The Symbian platform, which has been developed over more than 10 years and has shipped in more than 330 million devices around the world, is now completely open and the source code is available for free. According to the Symbian Foundation, an industry group; the transition from proprietary code to open source has been the largest such project in software history.

IT DOESN'T APPEAR as if ARM is getting ready to slow down its product development. Quite the contrary could be said as the company is readying 2GHz ARMv7 Cortex cores for 2011. It looks like Intel and its Atom processors might get a lot more competition.

A LOT OF people were disappointed by Apple’s last product announcement, as only a single product was unveiled. However, it seems like those that were waiting for new desktop machines from Apple might not have to wait that much longer, because the rumour mill is suggesting mid-March for some new Mac Pro action.

BY NOW P55 based motherboards are a dime a dozen. Well, maybe not quite, but all the big motherboard makers have pretty much put their entire product line-ups out the door already. However, it seems like Gigabyte wasn’t happy with its GA-P55A-UD6 as its top of the range model and as such, the company has launched the GA-P55A-UD7 as of today.

IT’S ALWAYS GREAT having a choice when it comes to colours, as how boring would it be if everything we owned was the same colour? Sony seems to have taken this to the extreme with its Intel Core i3 and Core i5 based Vaio E series of notebooks, since not only can you have them in a selection of six colours but they’re also available with optional coloured keyboard skins.

NVIDIA JUST BROKE its traditional naming scheme as the Fermi cards won’t be the bearing the GTX 380 and GTX 360 model names that have been floating around for some time. Actually, they won’t even have the number three anywhere in the model names. Isn’t that something.

THERE HAS BEEN a lot of talk recently about ATI's 'Grey Screen of Death' and almost all of it is hysterically overblown. Let's take a look at the problem in a bit more detail.

OK, SO WE might be a little bit sarcastic here, but we can’t quite figure this one out. Asus has announced no less than six new motherboards, based on very basic chipsets, that are not only meant to have the lowest electromagnetic emissions in the industry, but they also feature “advanced protective shields”, “anti-surge features” and reduced “system-wide power consumption by up to 80.23 [percent]”.

WHEN DDR3 MEMORY was launched it was hailed not only as offering much better performance than DDR2, but also as a much more power efficient type of memory. However, Samsung latest 30nm DDR3 offering has managed to improve upon the original specification to bring us even lower power requirements.

HERE'S SOMETHING you don't generally hear when it comes to Apple hardware. The iPad is deemed as being too inexpensive by Taiwanese hardware manufacturers. Considering that Apple has a reputation for selling reassuringly expensive products, it now seems like the company has come up with a product that is too cheap for the competition.

IT SEEMS LIKE there has been some confusion as to AMD’s naming convention of its chipsets and what we thought was the 890G is actually the 890GX. There will also be an 880G model, but that is expected to launch a month or two after the 890GX, which is set to arrive the first week in March.

ARCTIC COOLING’S CLAIM to fame was its at the time fantastic Freezer 7 series of CPU coolers and the company also had some good success with its graphics cards coolers that most low noise graphics cards still rely on. However, now the company has decided to expand its product line, although we’re not sure we quite follow the logic here.

DESPITE THE EXCITEMENT ahead of the launch of the iPad, it seems like Apple has failed to impress not only the media, but even a large share of its otherwise loyal community. It’s not just the name that has been ridiculed, but the device itself just isn’t what most hoped it would be and this could possibly be Apple’s first failure in many years.

APPLE HAS JUST announced its latest addition, the iPad. We’re not sold on the name, but one of the big news items here is that Apple might be forced to change the name, as iPad was a registered trademark of Fujitsu Japan and there’s also a company called Magtek that sells a product called the IPAD. But that’s for another day; let’s take a closer look at what’s on offer.

THERE HAS BEEN a lot of discussion about EVGA’s dual CPU board that was displayed during CES earlier this month. The main topic of discussion was what CPUs it would work with and most people presumed it was limited to Xeon processors.

AMD SPENT SOME time talking to the press in Singapore today and unveiled some details of its upcoming platform plans for 2011. What we’re looking at are more cores, fusion and improved notebook battery life.

THERE’S NO NEED to send us the answer to this question, but how many different file formats is your digital music library made up of? Unless you own an iPod or an older Sony player, the answer is most likely one, MP3. Now the creators behind the MP3 file format is getting ready to launch a fourth iteration that goes under the name of MusicDNA.

IT'S NOT ALWAYS journalists or bloggers that get their hands on new gear first, as is evident in this case. A forum member at Bit-tech who goes under the handle of windwithme has run a good selection of benchmarks on the upcoming Gulftown CPU, which is expected to be the next Extreme Edition processor from Intel.

AMD HAS LAUNCHED five new processors, of which three are priced at $99 or less. Okay, so this might not be such a big deal, as AMD already has a number of CPUs selling for under $100, but it seems like AMD is set on owning the sub $100 CPU market.

TAPE DRIVES HAVE sort of faded into the dark over the past few years as a backup medium, although many enterprise backup solutions still rely on them on a daily basis. The storage capacities of the various backup tape technologies haven’t really kept up with the development in the hard drive storage market and as such the largest backup tapes only hold about half as much data as today’s largest hard drives.

YESTERDAY NVIDIA RELEASED the 196.21 WHQL drivers for its graphics cards that add SLI support to several recent games - as well as some old ones - and bring a new version of the PhysX drivers along for the ride. However, it also killed most overclocking utilities at the same time.

VOIP TELEPHONY TOOK off with the help of Skype, but the biggest hit in the US and Canada at the moment is the oddly named "magicJack" service, which we'll call Magicjack. Rather than just being a software solution the Magicjack is a small USB dongle to which a normal phone is attached and it allows you use the phone as you normally would when connected to the POTS line.

TSMC HAS REPORTEDLY fixed its yield issues with its 40nm manufacturing process, you know the one that all the new GPUs from AMD and Nvidia rely on. This should hopefully mean that there won’t be any more shortages of GPUs, at least for the ones that are already in production.

ONE THING YOU hopefully learn very quickly in the IT business is that you shouldn’t believe everything you see on TV, or read on the Interweb these days. With Apple’s announcement that it’ll be announcing something on January 27th, the rumours about what Apple is up to haven’t stopped. The latest is that Apple is ready to unveil its own CPU, but the question you have to ask is if this makes any sense at all.

COMPUTERS HAVE BEEN getting smaller and smaller over the years, although the x86 architecture hasn’t really changed much. However, VIA has been something of a pioneer when it comes to making it smaller and smaller and the company has just announced its first Mobile-ITX module which measures a mere 6  by 6 centimetres.

LOCKHEED MARTIN MIGHT not be a company that most of us associate with computers, but as the company is heavily involved with the US military, it has come up with a secure computing solution called the IronClad in co-operation with IronKey. At first glance it might just look like any other USB key, although in a fancy brushed aluminium casing, but one shouldn’t judge a book by its cover.

WE’VE BEEN GIVEN a sneak peak at Gigabyte’s upcoming AMD 890G board, the GA-890GPA-UD3H and although it’s not that different from the Asus board that Charlie spotted at CES, it does have a few extra features that makes it standout from the so far very small crowd.

WE’VE HAD SOME criticism on our original story about the rusty chokes on certain Asus motherboards that got pointed out to us, so we decided to do a follow up. This time around we’ve done what many of the comments around the web have asked for, we cracked one of the chokes open to see what it looks like on the inside.

NVIDIA'S GF100 ARCHITECTURE is falling into the same trap that G200 did, shooting for the moon at the cost of the parts that pay the bills. Let's take a look at the architecture and how it stacks up in the market once again.

IT LOOKS LIKE it's time for dueling product videos once again, with ATI and Nvidia both releasing their own 'viral' videos. ATI's is about upgrading to a DX11 card and Nvidia's is about the birth of Fermi GF10.

SOME OF YOU might not be old enough to remember the farce about a decade ago about blown capacitors on motherboards. It was a huge issue and came down to the matter of poor choice of components as the motherboard makers tried to save some cost. Although we’re not the first to unearth this, it now appears that a certain manufacturer has ended up with at least some board models that come with pre-rusted chokes.

Update: Asrock responds

Update2: More information in part 2

IF YOU'RE LOOKING for a tiny, power efficient server motherboard, then the new range of Pine View based mini-ITX server boards from Supermicro might just be what you’re looking for. The company has launched three boards going under the X7SPA moniker that offer slight variations in the feature set from each other.

TRADITIONALLY APPLE HAS been pretty good at keeping a tight lid on things when it comes to leaks about upcoming products, with the odd slip here and there. That doesn’t stop its fans from coming up with some wild speculations as to what Apple is going to launch next as soon as Apple announces that it is about to host an event. The next such event is on January 27th and the interweb has been full of speculations about what Apple is going to announce.

ONE OF THE worst kept secrets of the year, all 14 days of it, is that the ATI 56xx Redwood parts are coming out today. They are more than half of a Juniper 57xx series and have all the goodies that those chips do.

THERE'S NO SECRET that Zotac has become something of a favourite among the HTPC crowd, but the new range of tiny PCs that the company was showing off at CES should have an even broader appeal. What’s interesting here is that unlike everyone else, Zotac has decided that not all of us want Atom based tiny computers and as such is readying AMD and Intel CULV models.

AMD SEEMS TO BE EXCITED about its potential in the notebook market this year, as the company is expecting to steal away some market share from Intel. AMD is expecting to hit in excess of 10 percent market share by the middle of this year and to reach 15 percent by the end of the year. It might not sound like much, but considering how tiny AMD’s share of the notebook market is, this would be a huge improvement.

SHUTTLE SHOWED OFF a range of notebook products at CES, but you can’t have one. Well, at least not directly from Shuttle for the time being as the company is looking for smaller notebook vendors to join the Shuttle Notebook Ecosystem and they will then in turn offer the notebooks for sale to end users.

EVERY COUPLE OF years the death of the desktop PC is announced and we’re told that notebooks are set to replace the humble desktop as not only are they getting faster but they look so much better, use less power and of course they’re much more desirable than a desktop PC. However, the New York Times Bits blog talked to a few technology companies at CES about the desktop PC and according to them, it’ll still be around, for now.

ALTHOUGH ASUS ALREADY has an Atom Ion mini-ITX board on the market it looks like the company is getting ready for round two with its upcoming AT3IONT-I and AT3IONT-I Deluxe boards. We don’t have a lot of details on these boards, but from what we can tell from the single picture that has surfaced so far, it looks like Asus is getting ready to take on Zotac.

VESA HAS ANNOUNCED the latest iteration of the DisplayPort standard called 1.2 and the new version adds a couple of handy features and some that are more marketing spiel than actual features at the moment. However, with the announcement coinciding with CES, no one seems to have taken any notice of it.

EVGA TEASED US about a dual Intel Core i7 board a few weeks ago, and now it is showing that off. It is big, has lots of slots, and does indeed support two Intel Core i7 chips.