$300

Yesterday Asus launched its third tablet in a year with the name "Transformer" in it: the Asus Transformer Pad TF300. In April 2011, the Transformer TF101 was released and was followed by the much more powerful Transformer Prime TF201 last December.

With three tablets with the Transformer name out there in the wild, this is a great opportunity to illustrate their differences in a concise manner. Tables help with that, but if you're not a table person and prefer wordy prose, I've got that too.

According to Asus, the new $380 (for 16GB) Transformer Pad TF300 now replaces the TF101 as Asus' "low-end" full-size tablet. The TF101 will officially be available through the second quarter of 2012, and Asus claims it will continue to offer software updates and tech support.… Read more

The Asus Transformer Prime was the great silver hope for Android fans -- and by "silver" I mean "champagne gold" or "amethyst gray" or whatever awkward-sounding color combo Asus assigns to its tablet.

Arguably, the Prime marked the first time Android fans could hold up a tablet to their iPad-owning frenemies and say, "Now I own the most powerful -- on paper at least -- tablet in the universe!" Or something like that.

Aside from some GPS and Wi-Fi issues, the Prime was a robust and powerful tablet, but was probably too expensive for most wallets. Enter: the Transformer Pad TF300.… Read more

Intel today announced the availability of a series of solid-state drives with a 60GB version selling for $89, the least expensive dollars-per-gigabyte drive to date from Intel.

The 330 Series use a SATA 6 gigabit-per-second (Gb/s), giving "consumers a more affordable entry into the accelerated storage performance of SSDs," Intel said in a statement. The SATA 6Gb/s interface doubles the bandwidth of its current SATA 3Gb/s Intel SSD 320 Series. … Read more

It looks as though we'll have another new big-name tablet hitting stores in a little more than a week as a new Asus Transformer Pad 300 has started popping up for preorder at some online retailers.

The Taiwan-based tablet maker has apparently dropped the "Eee" from the name, and the new Transformer will join the Galaxy Tab 2 to make its debut on April 22, according to a report from PC World.

Like its predecessor, the Transformer Prime, the new tablet features a quad-core processor and snaps into a keyboard dock (sold separately) to become a full-fledged Android laptop, but at a lower starting price than the Prime. … Read more

In celebration of the Year of the Dragon, Chrysler Group just announced its return to the China market at the 2012 Beijing International Automotive Exhibition on April 23, with two new concepts.

According to a press release, Chrysler will unveil a Chrysler 300C design concept and a Jeep Wrangler design concept. Both are designed to appeal to the Chinese consumer.

Although Chrysler did not reveal any details, dark and vaguely revealing photos of the Jeep Wrangler concept show embossed leather seats, large black wheels, and a mesh grille. The Chrysler 300C offers a light, luxurious interior and a dark mysterious … Read more

I have to admit I never really bought into noise-canceling headphones.

The name was a turnoff, they don't really cancel or eliminate noise, they reduce noise--and that's great--but so do most in-ear headphones. Better yet, those headphones don't need batteries and don't run the music signals through the noise-canceling electronics. My favorite isolating headphones sound better than noise-canceling headphones, but I haven't tested a noise-canceling headphone for a long time.

So I borrowed a pair of Bose QuietComfort 15 Acoustic Noise Cancelling headphones ($299) from CNET editor David Carnoy. I headed down into the New … Read more

BMW says touch me, Ford takes mirrors high tech for quiet, the Chevy Volt is off the hook with the Feds, and how much would you pay for Obama's Chrysler 300? And we drive the Chrysler 300 SRT8.

Want a piece of U.S. presidential history?

Well, a cool $1 million will get you this 2005 Chrysler 300C, once owned by President Barack Obama. The vehicle has been put up for auction by an anonymous owner, who has chosen to sell it through a respected eBay broker, referred to in the eBay description merely as "Lisa."

The 5.7-liter V8-powered luxury sedan was owned by the president when he was a senator. The 300C only has 20,800 miles on its odometer.

According to eBay, a deposit of U.S. $2,000 is due within 24 … Read more

The market for quality headphones is still growing by leaps and bounds, so there are lots of new brands getting into the game.

When Hifiman introduced the HE-5 headphone in 2009, I was so impressed I compared it with $1,000+ models from Audio Technica, Denon, Grado, Sennheiser, and Ultrasone, and the upstart company's headphone model more than held its own.

More recently I looked at the Hifiman HE-500 headphones ($699), and compared them with one of the best headphones in the world, the Audeze LCD-2 ($945). That one's low bass felt more solid and had superior impact, but the HE-500's midrange and treble were more detailed and present.

The HE-300 ($249) shares the HE-500's styling, but uses more conventional driver technology. It's lighter in weight (270 grams), has a leather headband and soft velvet earpads, and comes with a user-replaceable 9-foot-long cable terminated with a 3.5mm plug (and there's a 6.3mm adaptor). The long cable is bulky and a little stiff, but since it's user-replaceable, HE-300 owners may find shorter, more flexible alternatives. The headphone comes with a sturdy padded storage case. Comfort over long listening sessions was good, but not up to full-size Sennheiser headphone standards. That company has a real knack for making comfy headphones. … Read more