3D

With Valentines day just a couple of days away, why not get in to the spirit? We put together a collection of screensavers and Valentine's Day themed downloads to get you in the mood for the most romantic of holidays. Hopefully, it will also act as a reminder to those who might forget. Ahem.

Some of these downloads are paid and others are free, but any one you choose will certainly put you in the spirit of Valentine's Day.

Cool EasyCard lets you create Valentine's cards (or any type of greeting) with your own photos and the … Read more

Getting an early start on the competition, LG Electronics announced Sunday that its new Arena KM900 smartphone will debut at the upcoming Mobile World Congress.

LG is touting the touch screen's user interface as featuring a 3D cube-based layout with four customizable screens for accessing the phone's features.

"The direct, intuitive, and dynamic S-Class UI will be unlike anything that has appeared on a mobile phone before," Skott Ahn, president of LG Mobile, said in a statement.

The Arena features a 3-inch WVGA touch screen with 800?400 resolution and a 5-megapixel camera that promises "… Read more

Google Earth 5's big new features include the other final frontier, the 20th century, and the Red Planet.

For Windows and Mac, Google Earth 5 maps the ocean, explores the past with historical maps, and shows you there's more to Mars than red dust. Check it all out in this First Look video.

Burning Tires 3D Lite is a free, two-level preview of Burning Tires 3D, a behind-the-car, third-person-view racing game with energetic graphics and sound effects. You compete with three other cars as you complete laps around the track and try to cross the finish line first. Steering with the accelerometer can be difficult to master at first (turning your iPhone or iPod Touch left or right like a steering wheel), but, thankfully, the game offers adjustable accelerometer sensitivity and--even better--touch-screen steering, which allows you to touch buttons on the left and right side of the screen to turn your car. You … Read more

NBC's Chuck aired in 3D Monday, and it left many viewers wanting to do exactly that with the paper 3D glasses: chuck them.

The overriding opinion of many people interviewed who tuned in to the 3D television event was disappointment.

"I thought it was a gimmick and did not add anything to the show," said Jamie Knapp of Columbus, Ohio. "The red/blue (glasses) did not look good and gave me a headache."

The 3D promotion was intended to raise awareness of 3D movies, specifically ones coming to theaters soon, like Monsters vs. Aliens from … Read more

Google Earth upped the cartographic ante again today with Google Earth 5 for Windows and Mac. As CNET News reported back in April 2008, the latest version incorporates even more data from NASA, the BBC, National Geographic, and other proprietary sources to create one of the most unique map offerings ever, meshing comprehensive real-time data on Earth's surface with information on the oceans, the stars that we see, historical maps, and topographical information on Mars.

Conceptually, the oceanic maps are great. It is beyond cool to be able to see ocean-related points of interest like shipwrecks, and have cross-referenced … Read more

The latest version of Google Earth continues to set the mapping paradigm. Accessible enough for casual users, Google has added features that make it a necessity for those whose topographic desires are more serious. Although Google Ocean is the big newsmaker in version 5, you can also check out the surface of our nearest neighbor, Mars, as well as incorporating historical Earth maps.

If you'll forgive the pun, the oceanic maps are pretty cool. They provide the capability to plunge to the floor of the sea, view exclusive content from the BBC and National Geographic, and explore shipwrecks like … Read more

Correction: This post initially misstated the company providing the tracking technology being used to provide security and safety for NFL personnel. The company is US Fleet Tracking.

At its core, football represents the polar opposite of technology: A bunch of large men run around a field, battling for position and the control of a small pigskin ball.

Of course, the production of an actual NFL game requires lots of technology--from the headsets coaches use to communicate, to the computers used to calculate statistics to the HD cameras that record the contest for the viewing audience.

When it comes to the … Read more

On Wednesday, we wrote that we'd published reviews of two high-end PC graphics cards: Nvidia's GeForce GTX 295, and what we thought at the time was the Asus EAHD4870X2 TOP, an overclocked card using ATI's Radeon HD 4870X2 dual-chip design. We learned Thursday morning that the Asus card we thought we had is actually something else.

As found on the Asus Web site, here is a picture of the standard clocked edition of its $479 EAHD4870X2 graphics card:

Also on that same site, a picture of the $550 overclocked version:

Finally, here's what showed up in our lab:

Turns out, despite all outward appearances, the card we received was not, in fact, overclocked. Instead, it's the standard edition, at 750MHz clock speed per core. AMD says it sent us the Asus-branded, ready-for-retail packaged version, but we're unclear as to why the fan and heatsink assembly is so different than what Asus has on display. If you've purchased the standard clocked edition yourself, we'd be interested to know what came in your box.

The reviews (Asus now here, competing GeForce GTX 295 here) have since been corrected, although our assessment stays the same. We still recommend the Nvidia GeForce GTX 295 card over the Asus card, or any other with ATI's Radeon HD4870 X2 design. The standard version may be $479, down from the $550 overclocked model, but it's still slower and more power-hungry than the GTX 295, which costs just $20 more. You can also bet we'll be running GPU-Z on all 3D cards from here on to confirm their clock speeds. … Read more