On the up side, the 280 is the single fastest GPU on the market. On the down side people don't buy GPUs, they buy graphics cards, and the 280 is not the single fastest graphics card on the market. That honour goes to the ATI 4870X2 by a large margin. With the new-gen GT200 parts, Nvidia loses on all fronts, performance, performance per dollar, and performance per watt, they simply aren't competitive.

That brings us to the new parts, the 270 and 290. They popped up on a PNY price list a few weeks ago, and then were pulled off immediately. This part is what we were calling the GT200b in May, but the public code name is GT206. It is simply an optically shrunk GT200, so clock for clock, you won't get any speed boost out of it. It is meant to fatten up the margins by reducing cost. If the GT200 is a 576mm^2 die, and the 206 is around 460mm^2 (~21mm*21mm die), even with the more expensive 55nm process, NV should save some money.

I have been fiddling around in the LittleBigPlanet beta for about a week now and have not even come close to creating anything this unbelievably impressive. PSN user Upsilandre has created a level in LittleBigPlanet featuring an actual working calculator.

Now, at first this seems kind of boring and almost shrug-worthy. But before you dismiss it, keep in mind that there is nothing in LittleBigPlanet that allows you to just easily create something that adds and subtracts numbers. Upsilandre constructed this ingenious gizmo using more than 1600 parts, including 610 magnetic switches, 500 wires, and 430 pistons.

Finally! Details! On a Bungie Halo title! Courtesy of Microsoft's TGS address, the Halo 3 singleplayer expansion - first revealed in a trailer a few weeks back - now has a name (Halo 3: Recon), a setting and a rough release date. The expansion will serve as a prequel to the events of Halo 3, with the player taking the role of a UNSC recon soldier, who is our "new hero" for a "new campaign".

Engadget received an invitation for a town-hall event in San Francisco about new Apple notebooks, featuring an image of what could be hinting at possible new aluminum enclosures for 13-inch MacBooks.

tw.apple.pro purports to have images of new aluminum cases for the MacBooks. Judging from the height of the ports (and if the photos are authentic) the new MacBooks could be significantly thinner than their predecessors.

The first products to come out of the Blue Label process are laptops, one each from HP and Toshiba. Best Buy talked to its customers about their "ideal laptop" and learned that consumers wished for longer battery life, a thin and lightweight design, an illuminated keyboard, more optimal screen size and superior warranty support.

In response, Best Buy worked with HP and Toshiba to create exclusive laptops that are less than 1.5 inches thick, weigh less than 5 pounds, feature an exclusive exterior design, a backlit keyboard and come with a two-year warranty at no extra charge. In addition, the laptops feature 30 days of support from Geek Squad, Best Buy's team of Agents and Installers who assist with set-up and troubleshooting of Best Buy-purchased products.

When they're not hand-wringing over the recent drop in Apple's share price, Mac enthusiasts have been transfixed lately by the mystery product, code-named "brick," that's due for release later this month.

Some bloggers and pundits have suggested it might be a new iteration of Apple TV or an updated Mac Mini. But according to a report on 9to5Mac.com, "brick" refers not to what it is, but how it's made. The Web site, which cites an anonymous source, says the code name has to do with a manufacturing process for Apple's MacBook and MacBook Pro lines of laptops. Apple (AAPL) will build the notebook out of a single piece of carved-out aluminum—a brick.

Well, after changing the name without changing the specs, Nvidia may now change the specs without changing the name. Expreview reports that an updated GeForce 9600 GSO based on the G94 graphics processor will come out at the end of this month.

The current 9600 GSO features a G92 graphics processor with 96 stream processors, a 550MHz core speed, a 1375MHz shader speed, and 384MB of 800MHz GDDR3 RAM tied to a 192-bit memory interface. Expreview says the "updated" GeForce 9600 GSO will feature a G94 GPU (the one that powers the GeForce 9600 GT) with 48 stream processors, a 256-bit memory interface, and either 256MB or 512MB of RAM.

Picture the scene. A small country pub in Canterbury, a warm, autumn evening, surrounded by friends drinking and smoking in the beer garden; relaxing after a difficult, hard day at work. The birds are singing, the breeze is light and feathering our very souls. This is heaven.

And then the nerds arrived and I was already preparing my 8 feet of rope and looking out for a ceiling fixture. Within minutes, they’d taken no regard to the peace and quiet, solidarity and gentle nirvana we had around us; they’d started to talk about Vista as if it was serial sex-offender, part-time puppy and kitten contract killer, who deals crystal meth to teenagers.

The very first time you touch the BlackBerry Storm–RIM's first all-touchscreen keyboard-free smartphone, just announced for Verizon Wireless–you will be startled. No matter how many times your fingers dance on the screen like you've been trained on every other touchscreen, nothing will happen. At least, not until you push the screen all the way down and you feel a click. Yes, the screen is a giant button, one you have to punch for basically every action, even every letter you type, completely breaking the touchscreen paradigm. Surprisingly, it works.

MSI has announced that people wishing to get their hands on an MSI Wind U100 Netbook can stroll into their nearest Best Buy starting today and pick up the 10" 3-cell version with a 1.6GHz Intel Atom processor and Windows XP for $399. Before your rush out to get one though, keep in mind that the updated U120 version with HDSPA could hit before Christmas.

The UK will be the first place to get the Vision, and there are apparently a few prototypes to be won in London arcades. The video detailing the console has been pulled from YouTube already, but a few details survive. It will play "Java mini games", which suggests a similar experience to the "games" you can play on your cable-TV box at home.

Still, a pocket TV, despite being the ultimate 1980s throwback, could be worth buying if there are some classic Sonic games on there (ie. the first two, and no more). The Register's comments are chock-a-block with references to the Gamegear, Sega's last and fateful foray into the handheld market. It's failure was a real shame, as it was a great little device (despite poor battery life). There was even a TV-Tuner add-on.

Thanks to ISO50 for posting this amazing recording of Delia Derbyshire's utterly haunting 1964 sound collage, "Dreams," in which Derbyshire set "a collection of spliced/reassembled interviews" of people relating details about their recurring dreams (or nightmares) against her own "dissonant, often terrifying musique concrete soundbeds..." Listen alone/in the dark for the full effect.

It's rare that anyone wants to play bass in Rock Band; it's the instrument you trade off on between rounds on the guitar, or you give it to the least-talented member of the band if you're breaking in a new player. The Mad Catz Fender Bass looks to change that, however, by making playing the bass fun.

This is the main event right here. Peak has designed a full-sized Rock Band and Guitar Hero controller made out of real wood. It's wireless, although you can use a wire to hook it into your PS2 system. There are also two dongles for the PS2 and PS3. Sony fans have a lot to be happy about as this works on both its systems and is wireless.

The most interesting development, however, arrived only today: a free software upgrade that permits the Vudu box to play movies in a new movie-quality level, called HDX. It’s a reaction to all the Web sites, cable companies and satellite services whose “hi-def” movies don’t look nearly as good as they should because they are so heavily compressed.

The HDX versions of Vudu movies are insanely sharp; they make standard films look blurry and washed out by comparison. It’s like seeing a movie on VHS videotape and DVD side by side.

During their Fall Press Conference today, Nintendo have - as expected - announced a new version of the Nintendo DS. Called the Nintendo DSi, it eschews the GBA slot (boo!) in favour of a slight downsizing (it's a little thinner) and a range of improvements. The handheld's screens have been enlarged, and will now be 17% bigger (at 3.25 inches) than those found on the DS Lite. As for the rumoured additions, both have proven to be correct, with "audio enhancements" made to the handheld, while it will also now include a .3 megapixel (640x480) camera. And that's just the start of it.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Apple will not publish a Flash player for the iPhone unless and until there exists some other mobile phone that (a) does run Flash, and (b) starts taking sales away from the iPhone. Which, my guess is, means never. Apple has no motivation to allow it.

If Adobe really wants to get Flash on the iPhone, they should shut up about the iPhone and start talking about and coding for Android. An excellent implementation of Flash for Android would give Adobe some amount of actual leverage. Until then, Adobe’s just embarrassing themselves every time they mention it.

I made a short video about how to trick people into thinking you're halfway decent at Mega Man 9.

This is that video.

We want to see how today's new generation of video cards stack up in terms of gaming value. There exists a wide range of video cards you can purchase; from the $150 Radeon HD 4850 to the $1100 Radeon HD 4870 X2 CrossFireX. How do figure out what will suit our needs? Also, is there such a thing as "GPU overkill" right now? We are here to answer these questions and find out what kind of gameplay experience and performance is delivered between $150 and $1100 using the newest generation GPUs from AMD and NVIDIA in single and multi-card configurations.

$150-$300 Price Range: Radeon HD 4850 - $150, GeForce GTX 260 - $215, Radeon HD 4870 - $250, Radeon HD 4850 CrossFire - $300

$390-$550 Price Range: GeForce GTX 280 - $390, GeForce GTX 260 SLI - $430, Radeon HD 4870 CrossFire - $500, Radeon HD 4870 X2 - $550

$780 - $1100 Price Range: GeForce GTX 280 SLI - $780, Radeon HD 4870 X2 CrossFireX - $1100

But there is often an untold aspect involved in setting an embargo date: Some embargoes are in place for no other reason than to give another site an exclusive on that review. Let's call bullshit on this process right now. Did that site do any extra work to get the exclusive coverage -- and I mean, real legwork or investigative work, not just putting together the best "deal" for the publisher? No. The only work involved may have been making the review sound effusive enough to justify the high score that allows the site to keep the exclusive, thanks to certain restrictions occasionally requested by a publisher's marketing department. Embargoes designed to protect the publisher from a bad score, or a competitor's deal with a publisher, fly in the face of why embargoes were originally created, to protect the public interest -- not the publisher interest.

Yes, in the past, pre-Crispy, I was in the business of negotiating for exclusive reviews. First review always means the best traffic, right? The numbers bear that out. I came to realize exclusives were not worth the risk for games with extensive multiplayer components, because they couldn't properly be tested pre-release. How do you review a multiplayer game when you can't test it in real-world conditions against people who aren't developers and on servers not belonging to the developers or publishers?