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Apple today announced a handful of minor updates to its iPod line: the iPod Nano and iPod Touch have received modest upgrades and price cuts. The iPod Classic, however, is MIA.

The Nano (9 for 8GB and 9 for 16GB) will retain the same basic form factor of last year's model, but is given bigger icons to improve navigation, improves Nike+ support, and is given some new clock faces for people who want to use it as a watch. It seems like a firmware update could do all of this for the old Nano, but no such update was introduced.

The iPod Touch (8GB for 9, 32GB for 9, 64GB for 9) remains the same on the inside, but gets new capabilities courtesy of iOS 5 (reinforcing the software-centric nature of these updates). It now also comes in white. Apple’s decision not to use the A5 in the iPod Touch reflects both the fact that the A4 is still Good Enough for most tasks, and the fact that Apple needs all the A5s it can get for its phones and tablets.

I expect the iPod Classic will be discontinued, but cannot confirm or deny this at this time – the product was absent from Apple's slides, for what that's worth. The iPod shuffle remains the same – last year's 2GB player for .

BESIDES BEING an obvious fashion fad, a tablet, or ‘pad’, has some useful functions. It’s not exactly a great content creation device due to the lack of a proper keyboard, but it is nevertheless great for reviewing content as well as web surfing or browsing electronic books.

However, how great it is depends upon, among other factors, its display resolution. Even though tablets are somewhat smaller in size than notebooks, users will usually hold them closer to themselves when operating, therefore the resolution, and aspect ratio, have quite an impact. And, with the likelihood of using new-generation tablets to watch full HD or even glasses-free 3D movies on the go, the screen resolution gains even more importance.

Now, both the first and second generation Apple Ipads stick with the 1024×768 display, the trusty old XGA resolution. While not terribly great – and barely better than the Iphone 4′s 960×640 resolution on a fivefold smaller screen – the choice, together with the natural 4:3 display format, is good enough for both document viewing and web browsing without constant scrolling, whether in landscape or portrait mode.

On the other hand, many other tablets, while more powerful or flexible than the Ipad in general hardware features, stick with the currently prevalent ‘el cheapo’ 16:9 format displays with netbook-class 1024×600 resolution on both 7-inch and 10-inch models.

Now, that number of pixels is just fine for a 7-inch miniature tablet, as even sharp-eyed people can’t see that much more. The issue is the format, just like on bigger machines. The cost savings due to tagging along with the flat panel makers’ movie screen-proportioned glass results in either non-stop scrolling up and down to see the content in landscape mode, or scrolling left to right in portrait mode, as with the narrow 600 pixels height or width you can’t see any web page or a document properly without moving. Moving to the ‘HD ready’ 1366×768 screen helps only a little to resolve this problem.

However, why not go further? Since tablets are becoming so popular, with or without real justification, there is the volume purchasing power and economies of scale to demand a proper screen resolution and format for a general tablet. The 4:3 or, at least, 3:2 aspect ratio – like that of the Iphone 4, for instance – seems to work best, as it is closest to the paper format.

The last time we checked in with iBUYPOWER we reviewed the behemoth that is the iBUYPOWER Paladin XLC, a massive hunk of machine that was generally a solid value but suffered from the same kind of shaky overclocking that afflicted so many boutique builds during the era. This time iBUYPOWER is packing a K-series Sandy Bridge processor (complete with easy overclocking) and one of the most powerful graphics cards on the planet: the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 590. The 590 may ultimately not have had the performance to beat AMD's Radeon HD 6990, but it's also a much quieter card. iBUYPOWER managed to fit it into a MicroATX case (along with a 92mm water-cooling rig for the processor). Does the beefy LAN Warrior II work, and does it work well, and just how much will this bad boy set you back?