Been desiring a solid-state drive for your computer, but can’t afford it? Salvation may be on the way.

According to DailyTech, JMicron has developed a new controller chip that will significantly reduce the number of controllers required to operate an SSD, and will result in the price being cut by as much as half.  The new chip will be introduced at Computex 2009 in June, and will go into mass production in July.  This could mean that the new, cheaper drives will hit the marketplace in time for the holiday shopping season.

This is an interesting convergence of events as Windows 7 is scheduled to hit in the fall, and people will be looking to buuy new systems, so the dream of an SSD as your hard drive may not be as unattainable as you once thought.  This is especially attractive for laptop buyers as these dries next to no heat compared to the current hard drives.  Laps across the world rejoice at the idea of a cooler laptop.

Got electrical power cord spaghetti behind your TV? There’s finally a solution to figuring out what goes with what.

As we add more and more gadgets to our lives, there has been a problem that has plagued humanity: cord spaghetti.  Up until now you could just put some sort of sticker on the cord that you could barely read, or it might fall off, to figure out what each cord is.  Luckily there is a new product called Dotz that aims to solve this nightmare.

The idea is a simple one.  You have a little colored clamshell piece of plastic that you stick a provided image label inside of, and then you snap it on to your power cord and… done.  They make sets for home essentials, entertainment and computer/office, so pretty much all of your standard electronics are covered.  Each set costs $9.99 and comes with 10 Dotz and several sheets of labels so you can label pretty much anything a standard home has.

They also have cord straps if you wish to wrap up a cable or bundle multiple together, as well as cord winders if you wish to keep infrequently used cables spooled up.

It may seem a bit nuts to pay $9.99 for something to simply label your cables, but as someone who has had more home made labels fall off over the years than I can count, this sounds like a great idea to me.  I plan on ordering the entertianment pack ASAP!

Google may be changing the Internet as we know it again with their new product, Google Wave.

While it won’t be released widely until the end of the year, Google Wave still made an enormous splash when it was introduced to the world yesterday at a conference.  Wave is taking aim to create a whole new communication experience that brings together email, chat, file transfer and a lot more.

First up, let’s take a look at how it will appear (click the image for a larger view):

As you can see it feels a lot like Gmail, but there is a lot more going on in it without making it feeling overwhelming.  As you converse in email with your contact, your reply is added to any section you choose so that your comments always stay in context.  Original sender replies again?  Then their section is also put in context, so you are truly getting threaded conversations with this tool.  If the conversation gets really long and you aren’t sure who added something and when, you click the playback button and the history will replay for you in the order people worked on it.

File transfer just got worlds easier also with drag-and-drop interface so you will no longer have to send an attachment and annoy people.  You will drag the file in to the Wave folder and the file will begin transferring automatically.

Wave will be perfect for friends, families, work projects and just about anything you can think of.  And the scariest part?  It’s open source.  This means that people will be able to change Wave any way they please to make it fit their own needs more specifically.

It’s hard to wrap your head around a product that barely any one has ever touched it yet, but my mind is already racing with the possibilities of what this tool will do for people.  I can’t wait to get my hands on it.

Now, if you want to learn loads about it, you can watch the hour and 20 minute presentation below.

In an unexpected move, Hulu has launched a desktop application for accessing their large video collection.

We say “unexpected” because it really only improves the viewing experience of the service for a very small percentage of users.  If you have a Windows Media Center PC or a Mac, you can hook them up to your TV and then use the remote control from your computer to control the browsing of the service from anywhere else in the room that you want.  While this is a nice idea, it still requires your computer to be hooked up to your TV, which means it has to be in phycial proximity to your television set.  If you already have that arrangement, you can already hook the computer to the TV with some cables and just stream the web site to your television screen.

This seems like an odd use of their resources as other video sites such as Joost have abandoned their desktop applications.  If they want to spend some time working on something, they should see about launching applications for devices such as the Xbox 360, TiVo or Apple TV.  These are devices already attached to the TV, in most cases people have routed Internet connections and it takes the computer totally out of the equation.  I am sure this is what we will see eventually from the company, but it just doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to bother with the desktop app at this time.

You can decide for yourself by watching the introductory video below.

The Skyfire mobile web browser has finally left Beta testing, and is available as an official 1.0 for you to download.

While most mobile phones come with a built-in web browser, the majority of them are not very friendly to your normal web browsing experience.  This browser gives you the ability to use Flash animation and Ajax tools, something that has been lacking for a long time on cell phones.  Not even the iPhone has yet to be able to use Flash. (and no, Apple does not allow other browsers to be added to their devices, so you’re stuck with mobile Safari for the time being.)

For now the new browser is only available for Windows Mobile 5 & 6 devices and Symbian Nokia N and E Series phones.  BlackBerry devices are said to be getting their own version “shortly”, but no definite release date has been mentioned.

Google Earth is continuing to make the world that much smaller of a place.

While Google’s amazing satellite project, Google Earth, is already bringing us amazing photos of just about everywhere on the planet, one of the most fascinating side projectsis the buildings being rendered in 3D.  While anyone is able to do build a rendering for them, it’s interesting to see corporations such as Disney doing it also.

The first of the world class theme parks to get the treatment was Walt Dinsey World in Florida, but now you can also tour Disneyland Paris.  By turning on the 3D renderings, you are able to go as low as street level in the French theme park and tour the sights down to the umbrellas over the tables at outdoor cafes.

I am self professed Disney fanatic, but have only ever been to the two parks in the United States, so this is a wonderful treat for me as I doubt I will ever get to the Paris version of the park.  Especially seeing as my favorite ride is the Haunted Mansion, and their version, Phantom Manor, is completely different, I can’t wait to see what the facade looks like in 3D!

If the rumors are true, you will soon be able to download TV shows and movies directly to your iPhone and iPod Touch.

While nothing is set in stone yet, rumors are swirling all around the Internet of what we can expect from the next iteration of the iPhone and its accompanying software.  The majority of the rumors have focused on the hardware aspects of the new iPhone, but not much has been learned of what the actual software powering the device may deliver in the ways of tweaks.

Open Salon thinks they may have stumbled across something, and they have numerous pictures to back up their claims.  It is a tad odd that they are said to have been found by following an advertisement in an application, but the images do appear legitimate to everyone that has commented on them, and they even appear to be a work in progress.

This seems like a natural extension for Apple, and a bit surprising that it hasn’t been available before now.  It will be interesting to see if these downloads will be allowed over carriers cellular networks, although my personal guess would be a big “no” to that.  While it would still be somewhat useful over Wi-Fi (say while travelling and you want to add a movie during an airport layover), it would still be somewhat slow compared to doing it on your computer when you are near it.  A reenue stream is a revenue stream, though, and it would be silly for Apple not to offer this to their customers at some point.

The next iPhone is expected to be announced on June 8th at Apple’s WWDC event, so that will probably be the day we find out if this new software feature is legitimate or not also.

The new Samsung SPF-87H digital photo frame does a lot more than just show you pictures of Uncle Joe.

Those of us around the StarterTech office have a bit of an obsession with digital photo frames.  The ability to display multiple photos, make them into slideshows and so on is just fascinating to us, but Samsung has really outdone themselves with the new SPF-87H model.  Thanks to a USB cable, you can place it just about anywhere near your computer and it turns in to a handy second monitor for your work.

Now, the screen isn’t huge by any means (800×480 Resolution), but it’s more than enough to move something like a Twitter application or the such over to it, and keep it off of your main desktop.  It will. of  course, also display photos on its 1 GB of internal memory, with room for more on SD cards thanks to its SD Card reader.  Power consumption also low if you choose to supplement it with USB power.

The frame is priced at $129, and is quickly shooting up my personal “Oh, I want this!” list for the monitor ability alone.

Chrome, the web browser by search engine giant Google, has finally left the Beta stage with its latest release.

Google Chrome has already found a small, but very loyal, following of fans for its stability and general rendering speed.  Now it has come out of its Beta stage, and the new version 2.0 feels even faster with its page loading speeds.

If you are surprised to learn that version 2 is out, that is the one place we at StarterTech feel that Chrome falls a little short: No notifications of updates.  To learn if there is a new version of the browser, you need to click on the wrench in the top right corner, and then click on “About Google Chrome” to see if there is a ner version for you to download.  It’s a bit counter intuitive as opposed to Firefox giving you a pop-up notice everytime there is a new version.  The Chrome system isn’t quite as user friendly, but it does work.

This is apparently one of the steps in Google moving all of their products out of Beta at long last so they can be accepted by corporate clients, and it’s about time.

It seems that Sir Paul McCartney is not a fan of Google.

According to the Sun, When Sir McCartney discovered his multi-million pound house was visible on Google Street View, he consulted with his security people, and they decided it was a security risk.  They then contacted Google and asked that the house be removed from the images in the service.

Google is now saying that anyone can have their home remoed from the service by simply clicking a button, but I honestly don’t get the excitement over this.  So long as Google did not go down a private lane, and stayed only on public roads, then they aren’t showing anything that an average person can see from the street.  By removing your house, as Sir McCartney did, he actually draws more attention to himself and his property.

To each their own, but the amount of trauma having one’s home on Google Street View seems to cause some people amazes me.