Measuring about an inch thick and weighing a mere three pounds, Toshiba claims its Portégé R700 is the world's lightest 13.3-inch full-performance ultraportable equipped with an integrated DVD drive.

"Portégé ultraportable laptops are not only a demonstration of Toshiba's superior engineering and craftsmanship, but our ability to innovate to meet the demands of businesses," said Carl Pinto, vice president of product development, Toshiba America Information Systems, Inc., Digital Products Division. "The Portégé R700 delivers the ultimate mobile experience at breakthrough prices that businesses have been waiting for, providing both performance and battery life within an extremely thin and light, yet durable form factor without compromising key features such as an integrated DVD drive."

Aimed at the business user, pricing starts out at $890 and includes a Core i3 350M processor, 4GB of DDR3 memory, DVD burner, two dedicated USB 2.0 ports, an eSATA/USB combo port, memory card reader, Intel HD graphics, and Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit.

Several upgrade options abound, including Core i5 and Core i7 processors, and solid state drive options.

During a recent press meeting, the Tokyo Institute of Technology talked up details of its Tsubame 2.0 project, a next-gen supercomputer slated to start crunching numbers in the fall of 2010.

"It will be the first petaflops computer in Japan," said Satoshi Matsuoka, professor at the Global Scientific Information and Computer Center (GSIC) of the University. "And it will be the world-class supercomputer system for our university."

At full bore, Tsubame 2.0 will be capable of computing 2.39 PFLOPS, making it the second most powerful supercomputer in the world. It will also be one of the greenest supercomputers on the planet, helped in large part by 173.9TB of SSD storage.

"By using them to input and output local data (that are not shared by other nodes), the performance of the entire system can be enhanced," Matsuoka added.

More details here.

We don't know if robots will one day rise up and defeat man for dominion over Earth, but one thing's for sure, we're giving up too much ground already. That's because IBM has gone and created a supercomputer capable of beating humans at Jeopardy, a game show that has been dominated by humans ever since it was created nearly 50 years ago.

As The New York Times reports it, IBM's supercomputer, called Watson, appeared in a mock version of the popular game show back in December, followed by live matches after that. During those live matches, Watson won four of six games, answering a variety of questions from cultural media to science and even wordplay.

IBM so far has stuffed the contents of tens of millions of documents into Watson, and come fall, the supercomputer will have its shot at beating humans in the real life Jeopardy game show on national TV, NYT reports. Which side will you be rooting for?

YouTube Demonstration

Things aren't looking so hot over at Nokia, which is still the world's largest maker of mobile phones. According to the company's recently updated full year 2010 outlook, Devices & Services sales aren't going to meet expectations.

"Nokia now expects Devices & Services net sales to be at the lower end of, or slightly below, its previously expected range of EUR 6.7 billion to EUR 7.2 billion for the second quarter 2010," Nokia said. "This update is primarily due to lower than previously expected average selling prices and mobile device volumes."

According to Nokia, industry mobile device volumes will shoot up by about 10 percent in 2010 compared to 2009. Unfortunately for Nokia, the handset maker doesn't expect to make the most out of it, saying that its market share will likely remain flat for the rest of 2010.

Get the full scoop here.