Paul Lilly
Paul is a seasoned geek who was first seduced into the world of computers and technology by the Commodore 64, and through the years he’s courted a number of OSes and platforms from DOS on up to the latest version of Windows. Having joined the HotHardware team in 2011, Paul is now a mainstay of the site covering the news beat and reviews, and resident wiseguy who keeps the mood light. He’s also an experienced freelance technology writer whose work has appeared in a number of online and print publications.
Opinions and content posted by HotHardware contributors are their own.
Recent posts
Well, well, well, it looks as though a Verizon employee "dropped" a carrier document containing the company's latest MAP (minimum advertised price) list for several make and model smartphones, including Motorola's upcoming Droid 4. Lucky for you, the MAP list was picked up and posted online -- strange how that always...
Read more...
Remember when Plextor ruled the optical drive market with premium ODDs that typically performed better than the competition? That was long before the price of CD/DVD burners fell to around the cost of a case of water, and these days Plextor appears fully focused on solid state drives (SSDs). Announced at CES 2012 is Plextor's new M3 Pro Series,...
Read more...
Microsoft made a surprise announcement a couple of weeks ago when it informed the tech world that the 2012 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas would be the last one in which the Redmond software giant gives a keynote or rents floor space. The company is pulling out after this year, at least as far as major presence...
Read more...
The folks at Turtle Beach know a thing or three about ear candy and so it's no surprise that the gurus of gaming audio used the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas to unveil a couple of new headsets, the Ear Force XP300 and Ear Force XP400. Both are fully wireless operating on dual-band 2.4GHz and 5GHz frequencies...
Read more...
Fancy yourself too cool for regular RAM that any ordinary Joe can get their hands on? Then what you're looking for is a kit made out of Northern White Rhinoceros hide or some other critically endangered species. Of course if you find one, it'll cost a king's ransom and you'll be letting the world know your moral...
Read more...
Corsair today announced on the second day of CES a couple of additions to its PC case lineup, including the builder-friendly Obsidian Series 550D ultra-quiet premium case, and the compact Carbide Series 300R gaming chassis, both of which sport an all-black interior and exterior theme. So other than size, what sets...
Read more...
Razer always seems to have something up its sleeve every time the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas rolls around, and this year one of the things wiggling around at Razer is a new rodent designed for RPG and Multiplayer Online Battle Arena (MOBA) fans. It's the Naga Hex Gaming Mouse and it sports six large thumb buttons to bind...
Read more...
Asus is pumping out a fair number of product announcements at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, and one of them relates to an upgraded version of its Eee Pad Transformer Prime tablet. The new tablet -- model TF700T -- will sport the same body style and slip into the same docking station as the original Prime...
Read more...
Acer's been in the Ultrabook game since the day it started (which wasn't very long ago) and rolled out the first model back in September. Apparently pleased with the reception and feeling encouraged about the form factor's future, Acer bounces into the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) with new Ultrabook models in tow...
Read more...
Marvell is doing some magnificent things in the storage space lately. Hot on the heels of co-developing the "Kilimanjaro" native PCIe to NAND flash controller platform with OCZ (demonstrated via OCZ's new Z-Drive R5, which we covered the announcement here), Marvell on Monday unveiled its 88SE9230 6Gbps SATA controller...
Read more...
I'm fully aware of the oxymoron in the title, because after all, how can a single stream be concurrent? It can't, and that's exactly my point. Netflix got itself in a bit of hot water a few months ago when subscribers reported the streaming service was tightening the reigns on the number of concurrent streams...
Read more...
Diablo fans were equally disappointed and miffed when Blizzard announced back in September 2011 that it was delaying the release of the franchise's third major installment, Diablo III, into "early 2012." Blizzard was apologetic about the delay, though said in a statement that despite hoping to launch the game in 2011, the publisher "never...
Read more...
You've probably never driven your car off a cliff or walked aimlessly into a 30-foot hole in the middle of a construction site, but perhaps your travels have taken you "through an unsafe neighborhood" or "in an open area that is subject to harsh temperatures." One of Microsoft's latest patents -- No. 8,090,532 -- aims...
Read more...
If you walk into any Walmart and head over to the HDTV section, one of the brands that will jump out at you is Vizio, which has built a reputation for building and selling comparatively affordable TV sets. In a way, Vizio is to TVs what Rosewill is to PC parts -- value oriented. Perhaps bored with focusing almost entirely on HDTVs (Vizio also...
Read more...
The ambitious folks at Vuzix announced plans to develop what they consider the Holy Grail of the wearable display industry, otherwise known as "Smart Glasses." It's all a fancy pants way of describing a pair of see-through HD glasses in a designer sunglasses form factor, but with Web capabilities baked in. "Now after...
Read more...
Samsung is a company best known for its Android smartphones, high definition television sets, and storage devices, but audio products? Apparently Samsung dabbles in audio gear as well, and to prove it, the company sent us a note announcing its new family of "Your Sound" wired headsets. Samsung EHS-60 "Serious Sound"...
Read more...
You shouldn't take the latest iPad rumors with a grain of salt, you should take them with seven seas full of salt, and then some. The idea that Apple will release an iPad 3 and a supercharged iPad 4 both in the same year is beyond ludicrous -- either that, or this editor will eat a giant sized crow in nine months --...
Read more...
Users over on Crucial's support forum have been complaining about a strange error that manifests on certain M4 solid state drives (SSDs) after precisely 5,200 hours of use. It appears to only affect the 64GB models, with affected drives kicking Windows systems into a BSoD with an error code that reads 0x00000f4...
Read more...
Is your DSLR camera suddenly strutting around with a goofy grin on its LCD face? If so, it must have heard about Sony's new high-speed XQD memory cards that support the recently adopted XQD specification for high-speed, high performance digital image capture. Of course, in order to take advantage of the new cards...
Read more...
Lost in the shuffle of Ultrabooks, tablet PCs, and everything else that dominated the headlines in 2011 is the all-in-one (AIO) PC market. We've seen several new AIO models emerge over the past 12 months or so, and who knows, maybe in another year or two these things will replace traditional desktop towers in the mainstream market. That would...
Read more...
It's out with the old and in with the new over at Intel. According to reports, the Santa Clara chip maker is letting its hardware partners know of a revised schedule to halt production and/or stop the supply of more than 25 existing desktop processor models so that it can focus on and make room for its upcoming 22nm Ivy Bridge launch. Speaking...
Read more...
Listen closely, do you hear anything? Any fanfare, ballyhooing, or trumpets? Neither do we, and that's because AMD opted for none of those things when releasing its Radeon HD 7670 graphics card in complete silence. There is, however, a product page on AMD's website that lists this as an OEM-only videocard. Let's take a peek at the specs. The...
Read more...
