UnitedKeys OLED is a newcomer on the scene and already wants to jump right in the OLED keyboard market with Art Lebedev. Unfortunately, while they have managed to reduce the price significantly, it does seem to have the same WHOA factor in my opinion.



The 103-key full keyboard version features a 3x3 array of OLED keys on the left of a standard keyboard. This keyboard is 20.5-inches long, 7.25-inches wide and fully functional under both Windows XP or Windows Vista. The OLED keys are actually monochromatic unlike the Art Lebedev keyboard where the entire keyboard is FULL color OLED keys. Although, Artie's keyboard cost more than most HDTVs this holiday season at a whopping $1600 USD. The UnitedKeys keyboard can be pre-ordered for only about $259.99.



But wait THERE'S MORE! UnitedKeys is also offering a smaller 3x3 keypad with 9 customizable monochromatic keys. The keypad has a MSRP of $199.99 and is also available for pre-order now. Check it out here!

I am at the most amazing loss for words. I haven't been this dumbfounded for awhile. Imagine a device that was sculpted for one handed use. A keyboard with just the keys you needs, extra buttons, shift keys, joysticks and ergonomically fucked... I give you the last 800 devices just like this one that have come out in the last decade.
It doesn't matter how many TERRIBLE reviews these get from us, or how many "meh" reviews it gets from our industry colleagues, nor does it matter how many "eh" reactions are freely given by the gaming community at large... No matter what, every gaming peripheral company comes around to thought that if they can hook just a few d

opes into buying these things, then its worth coming up with their own version at the price of their reputation.

Do yourselves a favor and let's pretend you didn't issue this press release...

THE ONLY GOOD NEWS to emerge from this is that a new G18 is in production and will be released within the year. The only thing we have to go off for the new keyboard is this picture of a prototype snapped by Engadget China. All we know for sure is gathered from this pic, including what appears to be a full color LCD screen! ooooo



You can find the press release to the G13 Gameboard below...ew.

Press Release as follows:

FREMONT, Calif. — Dec. 10, 2008 — Whether you’re rescuing hostages, on a quest with your guild or saving humanity, you don’t want to worry about hand fatigue or hitting the wrong key. Today, Logitech (SIX: LOGN) (NASDAQ: LOGI) introduced the Logitech® G13 advanced gameboard – a hybrid gaming keyboard designed to complement your Logitech keyboard and mouse – giving you game-changing comfort and control on a Mac® computer or a PC.

“If you’re into serious gaming, there’s no better feeling than playing with the G13 gameboard by your side,” said Ruben Mookerjee, Logitech’s director of product marketing for gaming. “Unlike other gameboards that focus only on programmability, the G13 advanced gameboard incorporates the principles of our award-winning Comfort Wave design. So whether you’re getting into World of Warcraft® or walking into your next LAN party, the G13 gameboard gives you a powerful advantage over those forced to work with less.”

With its sculpted, ergonomically inspired shape and pushing-the-envelope functionality, the Logitech G13 advanced gameboard completes your search for gear, augmenting a Logitech® G15 keyboard for gaming and a Logitech® G9 Laser Mouse.

Delivering increased comfort, the iconic contoured design complements the natural shape of your hand and fingers, while the smooth, concave home-row keys make it easy to locate buttons by touch. With three game modes, 25 programmable keys and a programmable analog stick, the G13 gameboard offers up to 87 ways for you to control your game (software installation required). And you can set up custom button-profiles for each one of your favorite titles. You can even create macros on the fly without having to pause your game.

And for another tactical advantage, the 160-by-43-pixel GamePanel LCD shows live game stats, system info and even messages from other players.

With the G13 gameboard, you’ll also get backlit keys that help you easily locate the right key in low-light conditions or lights-out play. And you can select from hundreds of available backlight colors, so your gameboard looks just the way you want it.

A handy solution for the laptop gamer, the G13 gameboard includes onboard memory, letting you program up to five ready-to-play profiles and take them with you to your next LAN party. The G13 gameboard also offers pre-configured settings for many popular games, including World of Warcraft: Burning Crusade, Lord of the Rings Online™: Shadows of Angmar™, Call of Duty® 4: Modern Warfare™ and many others.

With its sturdy weight and strategically placed feet, the G13 gameboard won’t move during gameplay, giving you rock-solid support all the way to victory.

Pricing and Availability
The Logitech G13 advanced gameboard is expected to be available in the U.S. and Europe in December for a suggested retail price of $79.99 (U.S.).

About Logitech
Logitech is a world leader in personal peripherals, driving innovation in PC navigation, Internet communications, digital music, home-entertainment control, gaming and wireless devices. Founded in 1981, Logitech International is a Swiss public company listed on the SIX Swiss Exchange (LOGN) and on the Nasdaq Global Select Market (LOGI).

For the entirety of 2008 and a good portion of 2007, OCZ has seemingly been a company on a mission to prove that they are leading the pack in terms of innovation. Looking at some of their new products would make it blatantly clear that they have indeed earned that position. Currently, OCZ has no less than 4 active series of solid state hard drives. The most well-known of these, the Core series, has been updated and is seeing much better performance than what was observed when they first launched. The Core series is aimed at the mainstream market. The Solid series is a higher-capacity offering that is meant for the value market and offers great performance and includes a mini-USB jack for easy firmware upgrades. The Vertex series is the latest product that has onboard cache and will be the high-performance entry. Read/write speeds are reportedly around 200/160MB/s which is pretty impressive.

Of course the best part of OCZ's SSD offerings is their pricing. During black friday you could pick up an SSD for around $30, and you can still get the 30GB Solid series drive for about $70. Aggressive pricing had driven down the cost of SSD's tremendously and most of it is thanks to OCZ. Although there are arguments about the performance of some of their SSD's, there is one thing everyone can agree on: OCZ is good for the SSD business.

The company also recently launched the first eSATA/USB compatible flash drive. The Throttle series flash drive fits both form factors and offers tremendous transfer rates of up to 90MB/s. It comes in various flavors up to 32GB and seems to be a great option for a backup hard drive at this capacity. Also in the NAND flash market, the OCZ Slate Series ExpressCard is basically a removable hard drive. It is designed to fit in an ExpressCard slot of a notebook and allow for easy transfer of data from one machine to another. There is also a mini-USB port on it so it can potentially be used as an external hard drive as well. There is a limited consumer base for this, since it requires that you have an ExpressCard slot on your notebook, but certainly no other products exist like this.

Lastly in the DRAM space, OCZ is currently offering the best prices on the fastest available triple-channel DDR3 memory kits for Intel's new Bloomfield/X58 platform. OCZ's CAS latencies are significantly lower (7 vs 9) than their competitors, and a quick trip to Newegg will reveal pricing is also superior. Polling system integrators in the area reveals that OCZ is having a very hard time keeping these parts in stock because the demand is so high.

It is great to see a company like OCZ being successful despite of the abysmal worldwide market. It just goes to show that innovation and diversification are the best ways to stay alive when the times get tough.

If for some reason further proof was necessary that AMD's purchase of ATI was a good decision, the company has confirmed today that XFX, long-time board partner of NVIDIA, will now be batting for the home team. XFX has been a strong brand in the enthusiast market for their overclocked cards and support of competitive gaming including their contributions to the Fatal1ty line of gaming products. XFX's CEO, Michael Chiu, said that superior performance was not the only thing that provoked the change of sides - multimedia functionality including video transcoding, HD playback and audio capabilities also played a part in the decision.

Not only is this good news for AMD as they will be getting a strong new board partner, it seems like pretty bad news for NVIDIA as well. Apart from ASUS and MSI, who have been selling video cards for both teams for a long time, the last major NVIDIA board partner is EVGA. It has been reported already that EVGA might be thinking of cuddling up to Intel's Larrabee when it launches in the next decade, as they have recently put an end to their exclusivity to NVIDIA products with the launch of their X58 motherboard.

Of course with the pending launch of NVIDIA's new graphics cards, the GeForce GTX 285 and GTX 295, we might see a swing by existing partners to take over XFX's former tier 1 position. All signs seem to be indicating that the upcoming graphics cards are pretty special, so this is a good chance for NVIDIA to promote other board partners and take advantage of the temporary success that will follow the launch.

Source: Fudzilla

Written by Thomas Gribble | Original posted here

When AGEIA introduced PhysX technology to the world in 2006, the reception was not exactly warm. At a time when prices of processors and graphics cards soared to ridiculous levels, the thought of spending an extra chunk of change on a card that didn't appear to do very much was a difficult one to swallow. There was a marked lack of notable games that supported the technology, competing physics APIs that were showing a lot of promise, and an overall unwillingness of the industry to accept that in-game physics was indeed going to be the next big thing. Of course, there were champions of the technology; in fact, it is very likely that there was no bigger advocate of AGEIA's PhysX than yours truly.

I raced through my review of the sample that was sent to me with shear excitement and, in light of the less-than-favorable results that I obtained in my first round of testing, remained optimistic. My second round of testing turned out to be everything I had hoped it would be. Running the demo of a new game called CellFactor on PhysX technology was absolute bliss. Not only was this groundbreaking technology at my fingertips, but the game play I experienced could only be described as revolutionary. Indeed, the future of in-game physics and this relatively inexpensive piece of hardware from AGEIA seemed almost unimaginably bright. Granted, a huge amount of my optimism for the technology was based on the promises I had received from various AGEIA personnel stating that adoption into mainstream games was right around the corner. There was an impressive list of developers who were on board with the technology, and the games they were sure to create would almost certainly propel this company and the product it produced into the stratosphere.

So after being probably the strongest supporter of PhysX technology, why am I writing this article? How did my opinion of PhysX change so dramatically? Well, the answer to these questions requires compound response. My love for PhysX reached its absolute peak when Immersion Games released CellFactor: Revolution in May of 2007. The game provided everything that I could possibly want: Stunning graphics, unprecedented environmental interaction, revolutionary game play, and an absolutely visceral fragging experience. It was certainly not the best game I had ever played. Nor did I pull any punches when criticizing its flaws. But the game was free. The game demonstrated the power of in-game physics and PhysX technology itself. If nothing else, CellFactor: Revolution would be a beacon to which all developers could look to when producing their own physics-enabled games. Or so I thought.

Since May of 2007, there have been several major games released that utilized PhysX technology. By far the most notable of these games was Unreal Tournament 3. UT3 was one of the most anticipated titles to launch in 2007. I was particularly anxious for the release not only because I was a fan of the franchise and wanted it to be a good game, but I also sincerely hoped that this would be the savior of AGEIA's PhysX technology. Unfortunately it was neither. The game turned out to be pretty damn good, but it was not adopted into competitive play with nearly the fervor its predecessors were - a testament to its longevity (or lack thereof). It was, however, a terrific implementation of PhysX technology. In PhysX levels, you could go through areas and blast the hell out of floors, ceilings, and walls in order to create shortcuts from place to place. You could use the shock rifle's secondary attack to pummel an enemy with upended debris as well. This was reminiscent to CellFactor and I was pleased to see it done so well (see images and clips @ PC Perspective). Unfortunately, this experience could only be enjoyed in two levels of the game. Additionally, these two levels of the game did not actually come with the game itself; you had to apply a patch that basically downloaded them as extra content. Moreover, you could only play these levels if you had the actual PhysX hardware. So, although the PhysX implementation in the game was pretty cool, it was only being exposed to people who A) had a PhysX card and B) had the wherewithal to download the additional content. Limited exposure plus limited implementation do not a savior make.

Other games have had PhysX as well. These games, however, do not really use the technology in way that affects the actual game play experience rather than just add to the visual effects. Effects augmented by physics processing include things like particle systems, volumetric fog, cloth behavior, debris manipulation, and extended environmental interaction. So called Effects Physics is the most frequented application of PhysX technology.

NVIDIA, who bought AGEIA in early 2008 in what even I hailed as a brilliant move, has completely eliminated the necessity of a dedicated physics processing unit. NVIDIA has converted PhysX into a GPU-based technology that runs with the aid of CUDA, NVIDIA's GPGPU language. While getting rid of the hardware requirements was probably a step in the right direction, the real hope that came out of the acquisition was that NVIDIA would be able to use its presence in the gaming world to persuade more and more developers to implement PhysX into its upcoming titles.

Perhaps the first significant to title to incorporate PhysX technology since NVIDIA took over is a game called Mirror's Edge. The free-running game takes place mostly on rooftops and involves ninja-like manipulation of the landscape. It is a fascinating game that I had the opportunity to play on the Playstation 3 when it first came out. It's adaption on the PC bumps up the graphics and brings PhysX into the mix. The problem, of course, is that it is all effects physics. There is a slight impact on game play, insofar as lines of sight can be impaired, but other than that… Well, just take a look for yourself:



In order for PhysX, or hardware accelerated physics in general, to be successful there is going to need to be a movement by game developers to incorporate the technology into games in a way that actually affects game play. Having effects physics in games as optional eye candy is not going to promote a large scale adoption by consumers, especially when they see videos like the one shown above that make it very clear that the impact is insignificant. Yes, the effects physics being produced now can increase the graphical splendor of a game. And yes, there is definitely something to be said about the overall appeal of more realistic games. However, in the long term there will be limited success for API’s like PhysX that necessitate hardware acceleration when competing standards can replicate the same sort of effects through software. Note to NVIDIA and conspiring game developers: unleash the real power of PhysX if you want it to be successful.

Developing games that really take advantage of PhysX is surely not an easy task. The added difficulty here will likely increase production time, which will probably put a damper on NVIDIA’s plans for PhysX. In light of the company’s recent announcement that major game developers EA and Take Two will be integrating PhysX into upcoming titles, it is definitely possible that the technology will become more widespread over time. While it is nice to see the GPGPU industry moving forward, the argument for buying NVIDIA video cards over superior offerings from AMD solely for their PhysX capability will remain weak until we start seeing some really strong titles emerging that make use of the technology. AMD’s commitment to Intel’s Havok and its software accelerated physics could prove more beneficial in the short term and provide some serious competition to PhysX when newer titles materialize. Until then, I have one question for NVIDIA about PhysX: Where’s the beef?

Believe it or not, I have loved Destructoid for a very long time. A frequent troll on this site since launch, I have never felt the need to come and comment or blog on what has quickly become on of my favorite sites.

The name is Stu. I along with a team of 3 other awesome guys run FPSLabs.com. We are a hardware site for gamers. What does that mean? Well, instead of running a shitload of useless benchmarking software at ridiculous resolutions, we run those benchmarks at a shitload of different resolutions alongside a healthy helping of real world tests. That's right. We actually play games with the hardware before dishing our opinions/reviews.

We are newly independent and enjoying the status and freedom that comes with that. In short, we are broke and proud of it. We all just wanted to have an awesome community and that is what we have accomplished.

So what am I doing here?

Spreading [s]herpes[/s] the love. We have so much great info for gamers and I was going to share a bit of it with all of you. I hope you don't mind!

Cheers,
Stu
Executive Editor, FPSLabs.com