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Sylvania, best know for their TV’s that are sold mainly at Wal-Mart has decided to enter into the already overcrowded netbook market. Sadly the MESO seems to be just another netbook, and overall nothing really special.

The MESO will feature an 8.9-inch display, 1.6GHZ Intel Atom processor, 80GB hard drive and a built-in card reader and webcam. The Sylvania will be running either Windows XP Home or Ubuntu Netbook Remix. Again similar to other netbooks, the MESO will be available in a variety of colors which include onyx, snow, solar and blossom, which are better known as black, white, yellow and pink.

Although it has not officially been announced, the MESO is expected to be available through Wal-Mart and retail for $299 and up.

[Out of the Box]

Anyone looking to become a new T-Mobile customer may just be in luck. Wal-Mart of all places currently has a sweet deal in place on a variety of models. Some of the items include the Wing, which comes with a free Kingston 1GB memory card and USB card reader and will (after rebate) give you $50.

The titanium BlackBerry Curve, Pearl and Dash are all in the same category, giving you $50 cash back, however these last three do not offer the free memory card and USB card reader. Still a nice deal though.

The Samsung Blast, Katalyst and the SGH-T639 will all get you $75 back after rebates. They also have some good deals on the Nokia 5310 XpressMusic phone, MOTORIZR as well as some MOTORAZR models.

Of course most of these deals require a mail-in-rebate so be sure to fill out all your paperwork. Click the product link below to check out the full list of deals.

Product [Wal-Mart] Via [Gizmodo]

Here comes yet another effort to push Blu-ray into more households. Wal-Mart is currently offering a $100 gift card along with the purchase of any Blu-ray player. The promotion will run from June 8-14 and to kick off, Wal-Mart is even adding more Blu-ray brands to its inventory with units from Magnavox, Samsung and Panasonic. In addition, Wal-Mart will also offer Blu-ray movie titles at a reduced price of $15 per regular title. Some of these movies will include titles such as “3:10 to Yuman”, “Shooter” and “300.”

Wal-Mart’s promotion may yet be the biggest campaign thus far in the drive to promote the Blu-ray format since it won the drawn out format war. It was only a couple of months ago that Blu-ray beat its rival format, HD DVD and it looks like that it has not yet reached maximum sales.

Wal-Mart seems to have good intentions with this promotion, but will it be enough to convince customers to replace their standard DVD players and movies?

Read [Eweek]

Two new colors for the Creative ZEN have recently begun to show up online. Wal-Mart currently has a new pink color, while Buy.com is listing a red colored model, and while they are still not listed on the official Creative site the pink model is listed as in-stock at Wal-Mart, the red model from Buy.com is temporarily sold out.

The newly colored pink ZEN is listed as a Wal-Mart exclusive and is the 2GB model which retails for $69.98. The Buy.com red model is the 4GB model and is retailing for $98.24. Aside from the new coloring they will retain the same features which include a 2.5-inch display with a 320 x 240 resolution, FM radio, microSD card slot for additional storage and they offer support for a wide variety of audio and video formats. Looks like a good time to drop the pink and red, after all Mothers Day is just around the corner now.

Via [SlashGear]

Vizio, who is currently the “fastest growing brand of flat panel HDTVs in North America” has found a great partnership with big-box retailer Wal-Mart. Even with the Vizio lineup in the stores for less than a full year, that was still enough to have Wal-Mart give them some well deserved recognition as the Electronics Supplier of the Year for 2007. The award comes in part because according to Wal-Mart most of the Vizio models were among the top selling flat panel HDTV’s.

I guess with a combination of “Every Day Low Prices” from Wal-Mart and “Where Vision Meets Value” from Vizio it almost seems like a match-up that was waiting to happen.

Read [Yahoo! Finance]

The Cloudbook showed up as available early Friday morning at Wal-Mart and we wasted no time in placing an order. It arrived on Monday evening as expected and here is a nice unboxing set to show you the Cloudbook in a little more detail. With some very positive first impressions we are thinking we have a winner when compared to the Eee PC. Stay tuned for a more in depth review comparing the Asus Eee PC and Everex Cloudbook in the not too distant future.

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PC Mag has reviewed and ripped apart the Everex gPC. The low-cost desktop computer had been announced back in October and was quickly found as being sold-out in most locations, which would have either meant it was very popular or initially available in limited quantities. The gPC has sort of become know as the Google PC due to the amount of integration with Google Apps however the g actually stands for Green, it retails for $199 without a monitor and is available only at Wal-Mart.

The PC Mag editors gave the gPC a 1.5 out-of 5 rating, while the readers gave it a 1 out-of 5 rating. As if the rating was not bad enough, the bottom line comments from PC Mag would most likely keep me from running out to grab one even at that price.

“The gPC is not the alternative to Windows or Mac OS X it’s cracked up to be; it’s very frustrating to use.”

It seemed to only get worse from there, with pro’s such as “it’s cheap” and its “available at over 600 Wal-Mart stores and online,” it almost seems like they were just looking for something nice to say. The gPC seems like it would be a great low-cost computer option for the non-computer person in the family who just wants or needs some basic web browsing but there are a few reasons that this would make it not so nice of an option. According to PC Mag the internet connection is required, the modem is non-functional, the resolution is only available at 1280 x 800 and Flash support needs to be installed, which is not always the easiest process for a computer novice. Of course to be fair, some of these bad points would most likely fall with just about any low-cost or budget computer.

There is also a “live-cd” available with the gPC operating system, for anyone who still wants to test it out and not waste their $199.

Read [PC Mag]

It seems the movie download business was just not for Wal-Mart. They have closed the service effective December 21, 2007, having it up and running for less than one year. According to a Wal-Mart spokesperson the movie download service was shut down because Hewlett Packard had discontinued the technology that was behind it. Wal-Mart does not currently have any plans to find another partner to power the service, due in part to the service not performing as well “as expected.”

Wal-Mart has not offered any refunds for movies that were currently downloaded. The movies are able to be played on Windows Media Player or the Wal-Mart Video Download Manager, but are not able to be transfered to another computer. Wal-Mart had support of all the major Hollywood movie studios and TV networks however I think they were lacking one important item; flexibility.

Read [Yahoo! News]

In an effort to drive their movie sales and maintain a hold on the market, Wal-Mart has partnered up with the “Big Six” film studios for their new “Video Downloads Store.” If you’re not familiar with the Big Six, it includes Walt Disney, Warner Brothers, Paramount, Sony, 20th Century Fox and Universal - the power-houses of the industry.  By launching this service, Wal-Mart has not only beat iTunes to the punch, but services like Netflix as well (in that they’re launching 3,000 titles compared to Netflix’s 1,000).  The main issue here is that *for now*, the movies are only being distributed in WMV, so it can be locked down with DRM.  The videos will only be viewable on up to 3 PCs running Windows XP and IE6 or greater.

According to Gizmodo, the videos will be downloadable in both a PC format and portable format.  The PC format is “near DVD quality” - with a bit rate of around 1.3-1.6 Mbps, and the portable quality hasn’t been specified.  Wal-Mart also mentioned that the Video Downloads Store is not meant to cannibalize in-store purchases.  This is very evident through their pricing scheme.

Movies will run you from $12.88 to $19.88 at the time a DVD is released, and older movies will start at $7.50.  Also, the downloadable versions will be offered as a supplement to in-store purchases similar to what they did with Superman Returns back at launch.  When you buy a DVD in a Wal-Mart store, it will come with a code to download the portable version for a discounted price of $1.97, PC version for $2.97, and both for $3.97.

Since its glorious appearance earlier today, it rid itself of a stylesheet and is all jacked up.  Hopefully when you take a look it will be back up for good.

Update: The service works in IE, silly me for using Firefox.  Apparently they want Firefox users to be completely confused when a page of jumble comes up instead of giving a message that says “IE Only.”

Wal-Mart Video Downloads Store

Read, Read [Gizmodo]

Available at Walmart, the Everex Stepnote VA4101M is the first sub $500 Windows Vista laptop we have come across. The machine features a 15.4” screen, 1.46Ghz Celeron M processor, 512MB RAM and a 60G HD. It weights in at 5.9lbs, but the battery life is currently unknown.

Overall, a very capable notebook for the price. That’s if you are running Windows XP...don’t expect this machine to run Vista too well due to the steep system requirements for it’s user interface (Vista highly recommends 1 GB of RAM, a Core Duo processor, and a 128MB graphics card).

Product [Walmart] via [Laptoping]