In the battle for video card domination, dark horse Matrox never seemed to even come close to keeping up with Nvidia and ATI’s crazy GPU arms race. But after fading almost completely from the gadgetsphere, the company has suddenly returned with the launch of five new graphics cards under its “M-Series” line. The M-Series targets the multi-display market and consists of two low-profile PCIe cards and three standard formate ATX PCIe cards.
The cards range from $259 for the M9120 PCIe x16, which has a single DVI-I output that uses a breakout cable to run two independent displays, to the $599 M9140 LP PCIe x16, which can power up to four 1920 x 1200 screens.
Judging from the pricing and features no regular person would need, it seems that Matrox has bypassed the home consumer market in favor of “professional” applications. That’s probably a smart move, considering how even Intel is having trouble wrestling control of the market away from our two graphics chip overlords now. [The Inquirer via Crunch Gear]
The Boy Genius Report has a first look at Motorola’s answer to the “Touch Screen Wars,” called the Blaze. From the looks of the branding, this touchy-feely handset is coming to Verizon, complete with a special Verizon-only operating system. BGR says the touch screen is decent, and the mobile browser is “OK,” but nothing to write home about. Email and texting functionality are also lambasted by BGR, as is the crush-the-screen-to-make-it-work haptic touchscreen feedback. Specs include a 2 megapixel camera, EV-DO Rev. A support, GPS, and Bluetooth. They didn’t sound too keen on the Blaze, but they didn’t write it off completely. Thoughts? [
Dudes in the Institute of Multidisciplinary Research for Advanced Materials in Tohoku University just developed a 42GB DVD that’s backwards compatible with nothing. The new tech uses a V shape in the pits—current pits are just pits—which allows nine times more information to be held on the same sized disc. The downside is that current CD and DVD drives cant’ read it, so you’ll have to purchase all new tech in order to use this. It’s also not capable of being adapted to Blu-ray drives, so there’s little to no incentive for the industry to add this in to this generation either. But nice work (in theory), Japanese researchers! [
If chugging through the BlackBerry OS to load up ringtones is too much hassle, 
The fashionable thing these days is to take the tremendous processing power of graphics cards and put them to use when you’re not utilizing them to render games. CyberLink, for one, has come up with a pretty ingenous method to take an ATI or NVIDIA card (in their case, the demo was on an ATI Radeon 4850 512MB card) and convert four 1080p MPEG-2 movies into MPEG-4. Simultaneously. As long as you’ve got a pretty fast video card, all you need is a copy of CyberLink PowerDirector 7 and you can be doing this too. We hope this is the kind of thing Apple’s going to be putting into Snow Leopard. [
Mio’s new Moov 380 GPS just passed through the FCC, complete with the ability to make/take phone calls and send/recieve SMS texts. The GPS unit comes with a SIM card slot, allowing for said cellular functions as well as an SD card slot for storage. In addition, the Moov 380 comes with a SIRFStarIII GPS chip and cellular data speeds would range between 2.75G and 3G.
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