The economic crisis never was so nice and hard at the same time. [iTunes Store]

It goes up to 35MPH and gets somewhere around 200MPG. Those numbers fluctuate depending on the lardassity of the passengers.

What's interesting isn't the way it rolls around only only two wheels—even though it has four other wheels in front and behind just in case the balancing mechanism doesn't work—it's that weird adjustment mechanism that's shown at about a minute deep in the above clip.

We could really see people riding this in cities. But that's exactly what we said eight years ago with the Segway. [Jalopnik]

Intel
Like it or not, Intel's the biggest player in the game, so they've got essentially two major entries for mobile. First up is Montevina, soon to be known to your mother as Centrino 2. It was supposed to launch this month, but was delayed until August for a full rollout. It's a "platform" for notebooks, so it's got a few different components, like a Penryn Core 2 Duo processor and a wireless module (two options, one flavor has WiMax). It's basically nimbler all around than the preceding Santa Rosa platform—speedier front-side bus, faster RAM, better integrated graphics—but solid emphasis on battery life too. It'll basically be in any of the full-sized notebooks worth buying after this summer, and probably in the next MacBook/MacBook Pro release.

The ballyhooed Atom chips actually cover two classes of devices: so called "mobile internet devices"' (a vague category between a smartphone and a tiny laptop) and budget, smaller notebooks ("netbooks," "mini-notebooks," whatever you like), including the Eee PC 901 and MSI's Wind, with chips running from 800MHz to 1.86GHz, and an average power use of 160 to 220mW. As Jon at Ars sums up in his nitty gritty coverage, it's not quite "there" yet, but it's just a foot in the door for Intel.

AMD
I've been feeling so bad for AMD lately. Hopefully, its just-launched mobile platform, Puma, will help start turning things around. Its CPU soul is a Turion X2 Ultra, which has the nifty feature of adjusting power levels on the fly for each core. Another winning aspect is the integrated Radeon 3000 graphics, which AMD believes totally pwns Intel's, with three times the 3D performance and five times the HD quality (maybe something useful came out of the AMD/ATI merger after all?) Also, it can flip between using integrated and discrete graphics to save juice or ramp up performance. Tom's Hardware isn't too hot on it, though.

Nvidia
Nvidia is a relative noob in the mobile platform space, with Tegra being its first real charge. It's a system on a chip, with memory, a graphics processor, a CPU (from ARM) and more on a single chip. While they reference Intel's Atom a whole bunch, it's not really a competitor—these are just for more of those mobile internet devices. No hard products use it yet, either, but here are some videos depicting what Nvidia's got in mind. Neat, but I'm not sure who's gonna buy 'em. Also, new 9M notebook graphics cards—faster than the 8M series that's in decent notebooks now, we mayyyy see 'em in new MacBook Pros in August (crosses fingers).

Via
Via's Nano processor follows up the C7 used in stuff like the OQO UMPC and Cloudbook. It's mo' powerful, but it also uses more juice than the C7 or Intel's Atom. So, as Ars points out, it doesn't quite compete with Atom, just cause of the power differential. That's cool though, since Via's planning on using the Nano to break into powering bigger, badder notebooks that'll do HD video, and the C7 isn't going anywhere. You might see it replace the C7 in some stuff though, like HP's Mini-note, since physically it'll fit anywhere the C7 did.

That should bring ya up to speed.

Something we missed, or you still wanna know? Send any questions about chips, Pringles or anything else to tips@gizmodo.com, with "Giz Explains" in the subject line. [Giz Explains]

[Digibarn via MAKE]

• The Puma mobile chipset, due out in Q2 of this year, is able to play the Transformers HD DVD (intense MPEG-4 AVC) and still have 40% to 60% of the processor left over. Normal laptops today use almost 100% of their processors on Transformers, and still drop tons of frames.

• Hybrid Crossfire will enable a cheap-o PC with integrated graphics to deliver a 1.7x speed bump when combined with a cheap-o discrete graphics card.

• A beta plug-in for Adobe Premiere is coming soon which will allow you to offload video encoding to the GPU, delivering a massive speed increase of 6x to 10x. Basically, you'll be able to encode in half the time it takes to play back, without paying a ton for the processor. [AMD]

But there were past times, darker times, in the history of OS X—we didn't always have widgets, Expose, or that rock-solid stability Apple pimps so hard as it blasts that card castle, Windows. Let's take a trip in the OS X Time Machine (not that one) and reminisce over former feline days of yore.

OS 10.0 "Cheetah" Released March 24, 2001, the first consumer version of OS X left the Classic Mac OS in the dust—though much like Rosetta eased the transition to Intel processors, the Classic environment allowed you to still run older Mac apps. Cheetah introduced the Aqua interface, the Dock, and Mail. But it was also unstable, sluggish (blasphemy in the current Apple canon), and hardware didn't "just work." Put another way: It was bad enough 10.1 was released as a free upgrade less than 8 months later.

OS 10.1 "Puma" Puma was essentially a glorified service pack designed to fix Cheetah's problems, so most of the improvements were under the hood—better performance and hardware compatibility, but not much in the way of actual new features.

OS 10.2 "Jaguar" Performance was boosted still further, but there remained some noticeable interface lag on occasion. Features-wise, the slickly designed iChat client made its entrance and Finder snuck into every window. The cat system of code names also became part of the official OS marketing.

OS 10.3 "Panther" Launched Oct. 24, 2003, the OS X Mac users know and love today really took shape with Panther—Expose exposed itself for the first time and Finder was juiced up with real time searching and the now-familiar brushed metal interface. Panther also marked the shift to Safari as the OS's default browser.

OS 10.4 "Tiger" The state of the union. Intel processor support, Rosetta for PowerPC apps, Dashboard, Spotlight, and a more unified UI among a plethora of other updates—both to apps and under the hood—make up the Tiger package. Let's not forget Boot Camp, either. While not part of the initial OS release, it's definitely worthy of a nod.

And that more or less brings us up to speed—will Apple rewrite the OS X history books? Evolution or revolution? Stay tuned. – Matt Buchanan

WWDC 07 [Gizmodo]

AMD is charging against Intel's current Santa Rosa dominance and future Montevina platforms with their Puma chipset. They said it has been designed for mobile computing from the ground up. I say it was about bloody time already.

At the core of Puma there is their new Griffin 65nm mobile processor, with cores in separate power planes (so they can be managed separately and save energy), a new DRAM pre-fetcher (to increase efficiency on memory operations) and HyperTransport 3.0 (so you can travel through interdimensional portals and do the Kessel Run in less than 12 parsecs).

On paper the Griffin is not that different from the Intel Core 2 Duos. However, the big news are in the chipset itself, which has features that are not present in Santa Rosa and even Montevina. You can read about them after the jump.

The AMD 780G can deliver DirectX 10 graphics acceleration, full high definition H.264 decoding with both HDMI and Display Port outputs and 5GHz PCI Express ports. As you know, Santa Rosa doesn't have any of these features. Montevina won't have 5GHz PCI Express support until 2010. AMD will also add the option for HyperFlash, which is a technology similar to Intel Turbo Memory.

Keep in mind that Puma is not here yet and these are only "platform details" announced by AMD. They have even pointed to a new platform called Fusion, which will feature CPU-GPU integration for laptops in 2009. Intel has said that they are also investigating that path but for the time being, my bet is that they are thinking "fusion-schmusion" as Santa Rosa takes over the world today. – Jesus Diaz

AMD "Puma" Mobile Platform Details Unveiled [Daily Tech]

Far be it from Puma to list how much the pouch costs, but then again, I've never seen such an unnavigable, Flash-heavy Web site in all my years. – Nicholas Deleon

Puma Home Page [Puma via Chip Chick]

TrainAway [ Puma via Get Outdoor Blog]