A bayonet is a weapon with a worker at each end
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X-25 SSD in a PS3
THE CHAPS AT Extremetech have come up with a nice, albeit expensive, mod for your PS3. It seems Jason was hanging on to an Intel X-25 SSD and stuck it in their Playstation 3 just for fun. The results? Well, apart from install times remaining pretty much the same, once installed games start and load levels anywhere between 25 and 40 per cent faster than the default 60GB HD unit. A tad expensive as an upgrade, but maybe worthwhile for those of you insane enough to do it. Get it here.
Cameron at Tweak Town is looking long and hard at Gigabyte’s EP45-UD3P motherboard. It uses the P45 chipset, but sports “Ultra Durable 3” marchitecture. This introduces some (even) more advanced power management that brings down the heat on the chipset considerably, and we all know how warm the chipset has become over the last year. Overclocking went pretty well too… read about it, here.
Hardware Zone has a nice little review of the even nicer Lenovo Ideapad S10 netbook. You can imagine what the specs are. Aesthetics are what makes these distinguish themselves, and the Lenovo S10 looks very, uhm, toy-like. The battery life (on a three-cell unit) doesn’t do it any favours, but Lenovo has a six-cell battery up their sleeve sometime in the future. Look it up, here.
By the way, if you want to focus on the S10’s visuals, you can check Hot Hardware’s video feature on the very same netbook, right here.
The Holy Order of the Associated Press has managed to scribble a review, of sorts, on the HTC Dream/G1. It’s mostly a hands-on with no benchmarketing, but a lot of details that come from handling the phone intensively. It’s a problematic music phone, in Rachel’s opinion, as it uses a USB connector for the earbuds, instead of a regular jack… anyhow, read the hands-on for yourself.
Absolute Vista usually posts some good material on HP, and that’s precisely what the xw8600 Personal Workstation review is. This is a machine targeted at what HP calls the mega-tasker, one step above the power-user, one step below God. AV ran a whole bunch of virtualisation machines on the Workstation and was blown away by the performance. FYI, this is a dual Xeon 5492 purring along at 3.4GHz, with 16GB of DDR2-800 FB-DIMMs and dual Nvidia Quadro 5600 graphics *cough*, don’t even ask what the price is… Read about it here.
SweClockers reviewed Jetway’s NC81-LF mini-ITX motherboard a couple of days ago. Our Swedish skills are zero, so we resorted to Google to provide us the necessary translation. Forgive us if we misread something... So what do we have here? A 780G mobo with an SB700 southbridge and 128MB sideport memory. It has two SO-DIMMs (one on the front, another on the back, and you can stick 4GB of DDR2-800 on this one… HDMI, DVI-D and VGA for video. Very complete mobo, it is. Read it here in Swedish, or here in English. µ
Tags: Intel
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I do not think companies use propriety headphone connectors because they save space. A mini 3.5mm jack is tiny. 
Heck my Sony Ericsson mobile phone's fast system port connector is huge, intrusive, badly fastened and falls out. 

The reason I presume is they can charge you profit for extra headsfree sets which would require a special connector to route mic data. They don't include them because they want to rip you off. Sony walkman phone I have did provide a handsfree with media controls (being a walkman phone) but they break too easily.
W is just making a mountain out of a mole hill. As a HTC customer (I have a HTC Touch), I know that there are adapters for my phone (and the T-mobile G1/HTC Dream) that convert the ext port to a mini-usb + headphone jack for around 11quid from expansys.
He also forgets that Nokia, Sony-Erricsson and Motorola have been doing the same thing for years.
W., they do include a dongle. The HTC touch and Diamond both use this USB-to-mini jack 3-in-1 contraption, and may also include another 2-in-1 jack. This is likely overseen as this is a view based on a New York showing and not a package sent for use or review.

The included buds are USB, but standard headphones can in fact be used via an adapter reviewers seem to not be getting.

HTC has THE largest assortment of "stuff" in their packaging I've seen in a phone.
If companies want to use propriety or non-standard headphone connections for space reasons why don't they throw a converter cable/plug in the package, it would cost them very little but at least would show some understanding and respect towards the customer.
It all seems so simple, for cases where companies don't use propriety connections as a way to force people to use their branded stuff that is.