On Wednesday, Samsung revealed its new line of CF and SDHC cards boasting waterproof, shockproof, and magnetproof functionality. Now I'm sure we've all had the experience of dropping memory cards and cringing at potential gigabytes of lost data, but these new cards are practically begging you for torture.

The Motorola Droid has been rooted, according to Hack a Day, paving the way for wireless tethering, customized UIs, multitouch support, and other features not specifically endorsed by Verizon on the Android 2.0 platform. The hack was posted by Zinx Verituse on the AllDroid forums, adding the Droid to the ranks of other rooted smartphones.

Discussions about licensing agreements aside, what does it mean for you, the Verizon customer with a Droid? You can now get cute custom themes, the ability to have gesture support like pinch-to-zoom run locally without installing an app, and access to other features locked down by Verizon. Root access also means you could get tethering working before it is released next year--and without having to pay $30 a month.

Various sources hinted this Thursday that Dell could be gearing up to reveal a new tablet device at January's Consumer Electronics Show (CES). If the rumors are true, it could really make 2010 the year of the tablet.

Looking to become a one-person mobile broadcasting outfit? The interactive video site Ustream has released Ustream Live Broadcaster (iTunes link), an iPhone app that allows live video-streaming from your iPhone over a Wi-Fi or 3G connection.

As users eagerly await tablets from companies like Apple and Microsoft, Fusion Garage jumped ahead with the demonstration of JooJoo, a handheld Internet and entertainment gadget with a 12.1-inch touch screen. Tablets are a new category of handheld devices with large screens for users to surf the Web and watch videos. The JooJoo is due for release in a few months but could be held if a lawsuit is filed by TechCrunch, which originally partnered with Fusion Garage to develop the device under the name Crunchpad.

Dell's Vostro line has traditionally been geared towards small businesses, doling out drab, low-powered notebooks and desktops for organizations that need PCs on a tight budget. But the V13, the latest notebook in the Vostro lineup, hopes to shake things up a bit. Weighing in at 3.5 pounds and a svelte 0.65 inches thick, this brushed-metal bijou promises to turn heads, without emptying your corporate warchest. We recently had a chance to sneak a peek at one, and came away fairly impressed.

Although the wireless 802.11n standard has just recently been made official, IEEE has begun work on the next iteration of WiFi. The coming upgrade may deliver speeds of up to 1 gigabit per second by improving on the effeciency of existing technology, according to Electronista.

The Wireless Home Digital Interface (WHDI) Consortium announced on Tuesday that their wireless technology specification has finally reached a completed state. The new standard will give consumers the ability to transmit high definition (HD) content around their homes wirelessly.

The WHDI, which is a formed alliance between Amimon, Hitachi, Motorola, Sharp, Samsung and Sony, was first revealed in the summer of 2008. This Tuesday, just a mere year and a half later, the group revealed that the impressive video technology, which promises to wirelessly deliver uncompressed HD content with ease, had reached version 1.0.

Last week was a busy one for acquisitions: Apple bought Lala, a streaming music service, and Google acquired AppJet, makers of realtime collaborative text editing software EtherPad. Google announced that the AppJet developers (many of whom previously worked for Google) would be joining the Google Wave team, improving the services offered by the new Wave product.

When Google acquires a company, it tends to immediately suspend new account creation for the acquired company's products. Users of EtherPad faced a similar situation, and rather than rejoice at the news that their favorite collaborative text editor had been bought by Google and would no longer allow users to creation new pads, EtherPad's users revolted.

Starting January 11th, you'll be able to get faster, beefier netbooks, with the arrival of next-gen Atom chips, according to Gizmodo.

Search for netbooks on Amazon.com and you'll notice that for all the different models you can buy, the specs are mostly standard: 10.1-inch screen, 160GB hard drive, 1GB DDR2 of memory, and a 1.6GHz Atom N270 processor. If you're willing to spend the money, you can upgrade to 2GB ram and a 1.66GHz Atom N280, but that's about it.

A functional transistor recently discovered by researchers from Finland and Australia has an active region composed of a single atom. Although this transistor would be difficult to incorporate into your DIY project, its discovery means that a new generation of atom-scale processors could be close at hand, leading eventually to nano-scale computers and devices.

Intel is delaying the commercial release of its Larrabee graphics processor, which had been due out next year, and is not providing a new launch date.

The company originally planned to start selling the many-core chip sometime in 2010, but has fallen behind where it hoped to be in Larrabee's development, an Intel spokesman said Friday. He did not provide a more detailed reason for the delay.