BenQ has unveiled the upcoming 27-inch LCD monitor dubbed the M2700HDS in Japan. This latest widescreen monitor from the company boasts a resolution of 1920 x 1080 pixels, a 5ms response time, 1000:1 contrast ratio, 300 cd/m2 brightness and four 2.5W built-in speakers.

As far as ports, it features USB, D-Sub, DVI and two HDMI ports. The M2700HDS will be available later in the year. Unfortunately, we don’t have a price yet, but it should fall in line with other monitors with comparable specs.

The future of beer is in a box thanks to some inside-of-the-box thinking. The $20, 1.5-gallon boxes of beer are designed for beer drinkers who prefer their beer from the tap but also don’t mind if that tap is a box. Currently they are testing boxes of Miller Lite and Coors Lite in select cities and they plan to expand it nationwide this football season.

In case you were wondering, 1.5 gallons equals 16 bottles. So you’ll be paying $1.25 per bottle, which is more expensive than buying a 12-pack of bottles. Hey, you have to pay for innovation.

Everyone texts today, even my mother in law uses texts and she didn’t get a cell phone until last year. With text messaging being so popular, even the most basic handsets are now being designed for friendly texting.

Sprint has announced a new mobile phone that is aimed at entry-level users and has a QWERTY keyboard for texting. The handset is the Sanyo SCP-2700 and it sells for only $29.95 after instant and mail-in rebates and a new 2-year contract.

There are several important factors to consider when shopping for a new notebook. One of the factors is performance, often as important if not more important than performance is the battery life of the notebook. A great notebook with poor battery life is hard for many users to enjoy.

Acer has announced that its new Timeline notebooks are now available in America. The Timeline series averages over 8 hours of battery life and prices start at $598. The TimelineAS3810T has battery life of 9 hours and 7 minutes. The machine features and Intel Core 2 Duo SU9400 CPU, 13.1-inch LED backlit LCD display, 4GB of RAM, and 500GB HDD among other features. It sells for $899.99.

It’s no surprise that Intel unveiled a bunch of new processors at Computex. The T9900, P9700, P8800, SU2700 processors and GS40 chipset. The T9900 Core 2 Duo stands out from the crowd, clocked at a fast 3.06 GHz, which makes it the first Penryn-based Core 2 Duo chip to accomplish that. The P9700 and P8800 are “performance kickers” that pack a whole lot of super-fast cache memory.

The SU2700 is aimed at ultra-thin laptops, which is where Intel predicts a “boom” this year. Decent performance and low-power is the key here.

Android is the hottest netbook OS around. All the cool kids are doing it. And today it looks like we can add another cool kid to that list. Averatec CEO Tae-Hyun Cho says that the company will ship a new netbook with a “surprise” OS.

One that combines “cell phone and PC technology”, which we should see in August or September. That’s all we know, but it looks like it will be cheap since Averatec is positioning itself to take advantage of thrifty consumers.

Nothing fancy here. Just the typical design with a relatively low price and enough power to handle everyday tasks easily. Averatec’s latest is a 12-inch ultraportable thats powered by a 2GHz Core 2 Duo T6400 processor, a WXGA panel, 4GB of DDR2-800 RAM, a 250GB SATA hard drive, 8x SuperMulti dual-layer DVD writer, WiFi, gigabit Ethernet, a trio of USB 2.0 ports, FireWire and audio in / out.

There’s also a VGA output, 4-in-1 card reader, GMA X4500HD graphics set, 1.3 megapixel camera and Windows Vista Home Premium 64-bit. It’s four pound and will cost you $699.

There’s a lot to be paranoid about these days. UFOs are abducting humans and cows at an alarming rate. The near collapse of our nation’s banking system. Bigfoot. Shadow governments. The Illuminati. E-coli. North Korea. Bird flu. Grocery store muzak. Falling satellites. Nuclear weapons. Just to name a few.

I don’t have to tell you what it all means. It means that it’s time to start shoving stuff under your mattress. Money. Guns. Medicine. Powdered food rations. Maybe a back-up gaming console. Everyone knows that under the mattress is the most secure place for all your stuff. You sleep there don’t you? You’ll be safe as long as you have your stash of important stuff.

I was among the many who was hoping that the rumor that Walmart would be selling a $99 iPhone 3G was accurate. As it turned out Walmart did in fact get the iPhone 3G, but the price was only slightly less than other iPhone retailers.

However, your hopes of a $99 iPhone 3G aren’t completely dashed, at least not for a few more days. AT&T is currently offering refurbished iPhones while supplies last. The 8GB refurb handset will sell for the magic $99 number.

I like netbooks, I happen to think that the tradeoff of screen size and some power for portability is well worth it for the way I use a notebook. That said I think going below an 8-inch or 9-inch screen size is too much of a compromise, but some folks want even more portability in their web access device.

The MID walks the line between a netbook and smartphones like the iPhone and Gigabyte has an interesting new MID called the M528. The M528 was seen back in June, but Gigabyte has updated the specs. Running on Linux the device has a 4.8-inch LCD screen with a resolution of 800×480 that is touch sensitive.

Google has officially announced the availability of Google Earth to use straight from your iPhone or iPod Touch, and so far reports are that it’s not too shabby. When a good data connection is available the geographical software streams to the device relatively quickly and not only makes use of the phones full display but also it’s functionality.

Multi-touch enables users to zoom in or out of a map with ease and even rotate the map on the screen. A compass in the corner helps keep your bearings. Tilting the iPhone will change the angle of the view to better see the topology of the current terrain, and “My Location” feature will bring the map right to your current location on Earth. Google also of course incorporated their search engine to find information on local businesses and the surrounding area, and built in Panoramio and Wikipedia to get articles and pictures from near your current locale.

Until recently Lenovo was an exclusively business oriented notebook maker. Lenovo has sold consumer oriented notebooks and desktop computers in its native China for a long time. Recently, Lenovo has moved into the consumer market in the United States and other countries as well, but it is still better known for its ThinkPad line of business-oriented notebooks.

Today, Lenovo announced its newest ThinkPad notebook computer aimed at the mobile workstation market called the ThinkPad W700. The new ThinkPad features a 17-inch widescreen LCD and brings the industry’s first built-in digitizer and color calibrator to the mobile workstation market. The notebook also uses other new technology including the upcoming Intel mobile quad-core processors and optional dual hard drives with RAID Configurations.

Judging by the images, I feel fairly confident that if I buy the SofaBox, good looking women will gladly carry it anywhere, then open it up and sit while I watch. Seems like a pretty strange life being a SofaBox owner. But I might just take the plunge. My $2700 isn’t doing much good in my pocket anyway.

Regular sofas are so stuck-up, just sitting there all smug and arrogant, with their backs always up like you are expected to sit in them at all times. Well, I ain’t having that. I’m gonna sit where I want and when I want. And I’m gonna put it away in a box when I’m done. I’ve done it their way long enough. Also, sofas don’t get dirty in a box, but these gals carrying it just might.

NextoDi brought a couple of new products to the PMA show in Las Vegas this year with one of them being an upgraded media storage device with support for eSATA drives and just about every media card you can think of. Until you get your hands on a few 32GB media cards the Nexto Extreme ND2700 works well for transferring and storing data from the smaller media in your digital camera and camcorder while on the go.

The ND2700 also uses NextoDI’s X-Copy technology delivering backup speeds as fast as 40 seconds for 1GB. The USB connection makes transferring data even easier by connecting to your camera directly without having to remove the media card. A sampling of those media cards supported by the Nexto Extreme include CF, SD, SDHC, MMC and a whole array of Memory Sticks. NextoDI didn’t have any information quite yet on pricing or availability.

In case you have been in a cave the last few days, Sony released it’s next generation game console to United States customers yesterday at stores across the country, and like the PS3 sales in Japan only a week ago, the consoles were reportedly gone in a matter of minutes. Sony geared up to be able to offer 400,000 PS3 consoles to the US market for the launch date, and Sony wants to have 1 million available to US customers by the end of the year.

Sony has two versions of …