Lenovo Launches ThinkPad With AMD Zacate APU

A new generation of netbook?

Lenovo this morning took the wraps off of a few new ThinkPads. One such model is the new entry ultraportable ThinkPad X120e laptop, the first commercial laptop to feature an AMD Fusion "Zacate" E-Series Accelerated Processing Unit (APU).

"Multimedia elements like audio and video have become important parts of our world, and businesses are embracing this trend in digital content," said Dilip Bhatia, vice president, ThinkPad Marketing and Product Operations, Lenovo. "We've optimized the ThinkPad X120e to not only give businesses an excellent experience creating and consuming multimedia content, but we've also made key improvements to an area that has plagued laptops: battery life."

Thanks to the AMD Zacate, Lenovo boasts that the APU gives 65 percent faster graphics performance, while also extending battery life by up to 30 percent over the previous models. The X120e is now rated for more than six hours of use.

The X120 sports an 11.6-inch screen and a full-size keyboard and weighs under three pounds.  The ThinkPad X120e laptop will be available beginning in February starting at under $400.

The 3DS Virtual Girlfriend Who Stays Faithful

Dating sims are nothing new, especially in Japan. Originally they were mostly PC games, but now they're in the mainstream – and one is being made for the Nintendo 3DS.

Project LovePlus is one such new title, and it will use the front facing camera of the 3DS to identify the player through facial recognition software. The feature is called the "Boyfriend Lock" which will keep the game's character faithful to the owner.

Intel Intros New Ultra-Compact 310 SSD Series

Intel's new line of SSDs offers X25 performance at one-eighth the size.

Wednesday Intel announced the release of its ultra-compact 310 Series of SSDs. The new line promises X25-performance at just one-eighth the size, measuring a mere 51-mm by 30-mm and only 5-mm thick. The drives also weigh just 10 grams, making them ideal for dual-drive notebooks and AIO desktops, single-drive tablets and low-power, rugged embedded industrial or military applications.

Skype iOS App Gets Video Calling... on 3G Too!

FaceTime just got nuked by Skype.

Skype released a surprise for iOS users on the iTunes App Store yesterday with its release of its Skype client version 3.0, which brought with it the ability to make and receive video calls.

SMS Messages Can Kill Mobile Phones

You may not think much of SMS messages hitting your phone every day, but two researchers revealed earlier today at a hacking conference in Berlin, Germany, that SMS could be used to attack and shut down individual cell phones or an entire carrier network.

The attack discussed at the 27C3 conference resemble the nature of a denial of service attack with a huge number of messages being sent of cell phones. In this specific case, Collin Mulliner and Nico Golde of the Technical University of Berlin tested cell phones in an isolated environment and shot 120,000 messages at them. The phones tested were simple feature phones (as opposed to smartphones such as the iPhone or Android devices) with just one processors as their operating systems usually shut down when just one application crashes. It is estimated that there are currently more than 4.6 billion feature phones in use today.