Touchscreen controls are nice for some applications but, until someone invents transparent fingers, they’re a real bother for gaming. Many, including Apple, have toyed with the idea of putting the touch sensitive sections on the back of the device, and we have strong rumors coming out of Gamescom this week that this is the path Sony is taking for its next-generation PSP. Now, we’ve been hearing various rumors about this thing for just about as long as we’ve known about the first-gen PSP, but Sony is said to be quietly showing off a prototype unit about the size of a PSP-3000. While everyone agrees about the touch-sensitive portion ’round the back, it’s unknown what (if any) physical controls will go along with it. A release date for the thing is also unclear, with some saying next year and others saying it’ll be later than that. Whenever it ships we hope it’ll do the right thing and finally put the UMD format out of its misery.

After wrapping up his magnum opus and bringing Solid Snake’s legacy to a graceful conclusion in 2008’s Guns of the Patriots, you’d expect Hideo Kojima would finally be ready to move onto new pastures now his legacy and stealthy hero have been given the farewell salute

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The dazzling electric violinist Linzi Stoppard has mixed together an intoxicating form of electric violin with the glitz of Swarovski crystals to bring out the world’s most expensive electric violins. With a price tag of £1million, each bespoke Bridge electric violin is encrusted with 50,000 Swarovski crystals. These functional pieces of art will be on display at Harrods until June 2 at the top of the fourth floor Egyptian Escalators.

We’ve seen more than our fair share of USB displays as of late, and on the whole they’re usually tiny — say, around 7-inches. Sure, they’re well-suited for someone who wants to get that Tweetdeck or their IRC window off of their main desktop, but that’s about it. It looks like Samsung’s poised to take the whole affair to the next level with its new 18.5-inch LCD display. By “improving the transmittance of the panel and the luminance efficiency of the backlight,” Tech-on! notes, the company was able to keep power consumption down to 6.3W — low enough that a forked USB 2.0 cable is sufficient to power the thing as well as supply data. The only drawback? Apparently the device uses an edge-lit backlight that limits the device’s lifetime to 30,000 hours compared to 50,000 for existing LCD monitors). According to the company, you can look forward to seeing these things hit store shelves sometime in 2011.

Typical, right? As the 3D craze flows from the cinema to the television and onto the PC, it was just a matter of time before one of MSI’s Wind Top all-in-ones shipped with support for the third dimension. By most accounts, the new Wind Top AE2420 3D looks like a mildly larger version of the AE2220 we peeked late last year, touting a 24-inch 1080p multitouch panel, support for shutter glasses (a single pair is included), Core i5 or i7 CPU options and an ATI Mobility Radeon HD5730 pushing the pixels. There’s also a pair of 5-watt speakers built-in, not to mention an Ethernet jack, VGA output and a handful of USB 2.0 sockets. Mum’s the word on pricing, but MSI Read the rest of this entry »

Gainward has added a new factory overclocked graphics card to its range in the form of the GeForce GTX 470 GS. The card integrates 448 Stream Processors, a 320-bit memory interface, a 1,280MB of GDDR5 memory, a dual-slot ‘hybrid’ heatpipes cooler with 2GR8 fans and boasts several factory overclocked frequencies – 650MHz for the GPU, 1,301MHz for the shader and 1,700MHz for the memory. It also comes with a number of connectivity ports including dual DVI, HDMI Read the rest of this entry »