Todays & Tomorrows Technology

A whole new day is dawning for the never-ever-a-netbook Sony VAIO P -- those new processor and drive upgrades apparently have the little PC churning through benchmarks at twice the pace of the original. Most of the benchmark help comes from the SSD drive, but the Atom Z550 doesn't hurt. Meanwhile, Japan is getting a WiMAX version to churn through stereotypically Japanese websites in record time. We'd be jealous if only we lived under 1,000 miles from the nearest WiMAX signal.

There's nothing particularly offensive about this DAP, but we can't imagine it changing anyone's life -- and really, is that too much to ask out of a portable audio player? After catching wind of this upcoming YP-R1 from Samsung, the fine folks at DAP Review did a bit of sleuthing to pair up the specs with a photo, and it's all pretty traditional: 8GB of flash storage, a 2.7-inch 400 x 240 touchscreen display, a good amount of video and audio codecs, TV-out, Bluetooth, FM, e-book reader and even some games. Supposedly it'll be out in the UK on July 30th for £109.99 (about $181 US). Like we said, pretty standard stuff, but who knows, maybe Samsung will surprise us all with a new UI theme or something.

We've already seen a bit of guitar in DJ Hero, but apparently it might not just be a one way street: Neversoft (developer of the Guitar Hero franchise for Activision) hinted to Eurogamer at E3 that they're interested in bringing the DJ Hero turntable to future versions of Guitar Hero. They also aren't ruling out the possibility of bringing drums to DJ Hero -- which seems to us an even more exciting prospect -- and we're sure in a few years time you'll be able to direct wire Activision to your bank account and fill you living room to the brim with more-or-less interoperable pretend instruments.