Windows Live Hotmail Wave 3 will be launched shortly. Whats new !?
Faster than ever. It’ll be up to 70 percent faster to sign in and see your e-mail. Of course, along with more speed, you’ll get powerful technology that deflects spam and helps protect you against viruses and scams.
Simpler, cleaner design. We’re combining the classic and full versions of Hotmail, so you get access to everything Hotmail has to offer. The reading pane will let you check out your e-mail without having to open it up.
Put more you in your e-mail. New themes and colors will let you design the look of your inbox, so your personality can really shine through.
Closer to your contacts. Just start typing in the "To" line and you’ll get a choice of e-mail contacts that most closely match what you’ve typed. Plus, it’ll be even easier to e-mail groups of people.

Panasonic will soon begin selling Blu-ray Disc-based video recorders in Europe, it said Thursday at the IFA electronics show in Berlin. The company put its first Blu-ray Disc burners on sale several years ago in Japan but the planned launch of the products in France later this year marks the first time they will be available in Europe.
Using the recorders, consumers will be able to record high-definition TV programs to Blu-ray Disc without losing quality. The only other options available are to record at standard definition to DVD or VHS tape or in high-definition to hard-disk drive, although the latter makes saving favorite programs difficult because of the limited amount of disc space available.

Full story @ PCWorld

Advanced Micro Devices plans to announce its first desktop microprocessors produced using 45nm process technology on the 8th of January, 2009, the first day of Consumer Electronics Show. The code-named Deneb chips will not get truly high clock-speed boost, but will be able to offer substantially higher performance thanks to larger cache and architectural improvements.
The first desktop processors from AMD made using 45nm process technology will be AMD Phenom X4 chips clocked at 2.80GHz and 3.00GHz, sources familiar with AMD’s plans said. The new processors will support both DDR2 and DDR3 memory, but since the initial chips will be available in socket AM2+ form-factor, the chips will have to rely on dual-channel DDR2 PC2-8500 (1066MHz DDR2) memory.

Full story @ Xbit-Labs

With every intention of evening up the score with Firefox 3, Microsoft opened up its public beta process for the first edition of IE8 to contain a full list of new features. Beta 1 (which was launched back in March) concentrated on making the engine work and rendering pages properly; now it’s Beta 2’s turn to dazzle the public.

"We looked very hard at how people really browse the Web. We looked at a lot of data about how people browse and tried a lot of different designs in front of many kinds of people, not just technologists," reads a blog post from IE General Manager Dean Hatchamovitch this afternoon.

To that end, IE8 will work to "one-up" Firefox in a number of regards, including a completely revised, color-coded tab bar that resembles something that’s only in the "laboratory" stage at Mozilla. "IE8…takes into account that there are often relationships between new tabs that users open, and the browser can make it a lot easier to figure out which tabs go with which," Hatchamovitch wrote.

Full story @ betanews.com

Download links: http://www.microsoft.com/windows/internet-explorer/beta/worldwide-sites.aspx