3DConnexion has always had a place in our heart for their reasonably priced and smartly designed three dimensional controllers. Now the company is back on the scene with the SpacePilot Pro, which ups the ante — and the price point — considerably. This bad boy sports an LCD screen and lots (and lots) of buttons, including controls for various isometric views and navigation settings (pan and zoom, rotation, speed). If that weren’t enough, there are function keys for various apps and an applet for checking your MS Outlook mail. Ships with drivers for Windows XP and Vista, Solaris 8 and 10, and Linux — as always seems to be the case with this company, Mac users are stuck without for the time being. Retails for $499, available now.

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Are you bored with keeping tabs of your carbon emissions? NEC and BIGLOBE have developed a system that not only performs this odious task, but makes it “fun” to do so — if you’re generous as to what constitutes “fun.” A WiFi-enabled device is attached to your circuit breaker, where it keeps track of your power consumption and later transmits it to your home computer via ZigBee. The data is then sent to a website, where you can use it to play games against other green households in such thrilling arenas as Carbon Diet (users score “eco-points” with which they can purchase virtual soil, water, flowers and grass) and Carbon Ball, in which Dung Beetles compete to see who can travel the farthest, with distance being determined by — you guessed it — how well the user reduces power consumption. But that ain’t all — the system also keeps tabs on daily and hourly energy consumption, your rank in comparison with other households, and more. A three-month trial service is underway in the homes of 100 NEC employees, after which the companies will analyze the data and develop a business model for unloading this bad boy on local governmentand the private sector. One more pic after the break.
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Not down with MSI’s GT725? Just an AMD purist? Either way, you’ll be thrilled to feast your retinas on the company’s latest gaming behemoth, the GT733. This 17-inch beast gets powered by a AMD Turion X2 Ultra dual-core mobile CPU, 2GB of DDR2 RAM, a WUXGA display, ATI’s Mobility Radeon HD 4670 (512MB GDDR3), up to 500GB of SATA hard drive space, an optional Blu-ray optical drive, 2.0 megapixel webcam, and a 4-in-1 multicard reader. There’s also gigabit Ethernet, Bluetooth 2.0+EDR, three USB 2.0 sockets, HDMI / VGA outputs and your choice of a six- or nine-cell battery. Per usual, MSI’s keeping quiet on the pricing / availability front, but we reckon it’ll be filtering out here soon.

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Intel’s announced this week its latest batch of Nehalem-based Xeon processors, the single-socket 3500 and dual-socket 5500 series for servers and workstations. Both models boast speeds up to 3.2 GHz and feature Intel’s turbo boost, hyper-threading, and virtualization technologies, as well as integrated power gates. If you’ve got the newest Mac Pro, however, then you’re already using the new quad-core CPUs,, but for everyone else, they’re now being sold en masse to manufacturers at a price ranging from $188 to $1,600 for the Xeon 5500 and $284 to $999 for the 3500. We’ve already heard about 5500 / 3500-equipped Lenovo and Dell workstations, but if that doesn’t suit you, Intel promises over 230 systems are in the pipeline from companies such as Cisco, Fujitsu, HP, IBM, among others.

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It’s finally here, and even a few minutes early. Skype for iPhone is now available in the US iTunes store, free of charge. We’ve heard great thing from the folks in Japan who’ve been fiddling with it for the last twelve hours, and so far it’s sounding pretty good for us, too, with only minor hiccups. Not sure if it’s a glitch, but despite what we heard earlier, we seem to be able to dial out while on 3G and not over WiFi (at least running OS 3.0 beta). Hit up the read link for quickest route to the app store page, and let us know what you think. Betcha wish you could ditch that AT&T voice plan now, huh?

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