Sunday, April 19, 2009
It's now officially been "confirmed" by "people close to the situation"... two of them in fact. Apple will release a touchscreen netbook by Fall 2009. Doing so would go against everything they've stated publicly to date, but I think I've figured out how they'll get around that.Digitimes got this party started on Monday by reporting that the Commercial Times said "Wintek will supply touch panels for Apple's new netbook, and shipments will start in the third quarter this year". Dow Jones got in on the party soon after, confirming the story with anonymous sources who they assure us are quite friendly with the "situation". The "monitor screens" will be "between 9.7-inches and 10-inches" and Quanta will be making the computers.
Of course, there are a few problems with this. First of all the second "close source" is either contradicting the first one or just being useless, having yielded up the telling quotation "specifications and functions are still under evaluation." Also, although this doesn't necessarily mean the story isn't accurate, Dow Jones is not where I go to get my reliable Apple news. But the biggest reason this doesn't make sense is Steve Job's famous line, "we don't know how to make a $500 computer that's not a piece of junk." Those are pretty strong words and Apple hasn't really backed off them since day one.
My conclusion? Netbooks are hot and Apple knows it. Just like Sony caved, so too will Apple in their own fashion. Now Jobs is right about that price point but I think I've guessed their workaround, and I'm putting my $799 off to the side now so I don't spend it before September.
The much hyped thin-and-light 13.4 inch Adamo laptop is now available for preorder from Dell, and it's officially a lot less exciting than we'd hoped for.
The starting price for the Adamo is $1,999 and for that you get an Intel Core 2 Duo ULV at 1.2GHz, 2GB of 800MHz DDR3 memory, a 128GB solid state drive, and a genuine copy of Windows Vista Home Premium 64-bit. Oh joy. And graphics are delivered by the mediocre Intel GM45 chip.
Sure, this is a luxury laptop and it’s arguably good looking, but put it next to its rival – the MacBook Air, also a luxury model – and it immediately pales in comparison. It also weighs 4 pounds, a pound more than the Air, which is a lot when comparing ultraportables.
Even in the best of economic climates it would be hard to sell this laptop, but right now it should prove damn near impossible. To continue the MBA comparison, the Apple ultraportable is also available with an SSD and uses more powerful 1.6GHz and 1.8GHz Core 2 Duo’s from Intel, and also has the much more capable Nvidia chipset.
Will be 24" in time for holidays? The first Acer Aspire One had a 9-inch screen and was extremely popular. It will however be phased out and replaced with a 10-inch variant, and an 11.6" version is in the making already. At this rate of growth, we have calculated that the Aspire One will be a luggable by late July.
The line between netbooks and laptops – if there ever was one – is getting more and more blurred, and soon all that remains will be a mainstream laptop with very poor performance. Dell was the first manufacturer to remove ‘small’ from the netbook formula with its 12-inch Inspiron Mini 12. Even the ‘cheap’ part of the recipe is being phased out as new netbooks are getting bigger and more full-featured.
Now Acer is doing the same with an 11.6-inch version of its Aspire One netbook lineup. The new model comes with an Atom Z530 CPU on the Intel “Poulsbo” chipset with GMA500 graphics, which should be capable of HD video playback (720p and 1080i) according to Intel. The screen resolution is 1366x768.
Gaming laptops are often on par with mainstream desktops in gaming performance, but have the drawbacks of being large and heavy. AMD wants to change this with the XGP, which is literally an external graphics card in a box. Unfortunately, this solution also has its drawbacks.Fujitsu Siemens was the first manufacturer to release an XGP box that can be used in conjunction with its 13-inch Sa3650 laptop. On its own, the 3650 is a fairly standard AMD-based laptop with a Turion X2 Ultra processor running at 2.1GHz and integrated Radeon 3200 graphics, which makes it sufficient for most tasks except gaming. When you add the GraphicsBooster, however, graphics performance get a a 470% boost according to Fujitsu. This isn’t particularly surprising, considering that the box contains a Radeon HD 3870 GPU.
One of the obvious drawbacks is that you need an external screen to use the GraphicsBooster, so basically it’s not really a mobile solution. We tried it with Far Cry 2 on an external 22” monitor, and regretfully it wasn’t running very well either, at least not in high resolutions.
Having your 13-inch laptop double as a gaming rig definitely sounds like an interesting idea, but clearly the 3870 isn’t fast enough to satisfy hardcore gamers. It will be interesting to see how future versions of the XPG perform, but for now it’s neither a mobile or cost-effective solution.
Logitech has introduced two new ways to improve your general laptop using experience. If you've ever experienced overheating or had back issues from constantly staring at the screen at a bad height, these could be helpful accessories.Logitech has introduced two new items - the Cooling Pad N100 and the Notebook Riser N110.
Many laptops both current and old are prone to overheating, especially during heavier use when the fans are forced to kick in. The Cooling Pad N100 is a USB-powered fan which distributes air evenly and quietly underneath the notebook. The fan is ultra low-powered to have minimal impact on battery life. The design features comfortable waves so that it will feel good on your lap too.
If you spend hours of every day peering into a laptop screen, you have probably wished at some point that you had an external monitor so you could raise it up and actually look straight into your display rather than looking down into it. A less costly solution is just to get a notebook riser like the N110. It has three tilt angles (20, 30, 40 degrees) so that you can raise your notebook's display to an ideal viewing level. Sit with your head up, shoulders set back and eyes looking straight ahead. To use it for more than watching movies you will need an external mouse and keyboard though, since the angle is better for viewing than typing.
Both of these accessories are suitable for PCs or Macs up to 15.4" in size, and will cost you $29.99.
We already knew the U115, with its hybrid SSD/HDD magic, would manage to have excellent battery life. But what happens when you match up this battery-stretching beast with a mammoth 9-cell laptop battery? You break records, that's what.Not all that long ago, the U115 was reported as capable of achieving 12 hours of battery life on a 6-cell battery. This is due to the fact that the netbook has an HDD for mass storage but runs most basic tasks on a power-sipping SSD. But recent reports from Johannes of the German site Eee-PC.de have put the U115 at a mind boggling 25 hours and 4 minutes on a single charge.
Johannes used a batteryeater test on the lowest possible settings to get his results. Conversely, LaptopMag put the U115 under a more rigorous test of constant websurfing - and it still squeezed out 10 hours and 32 minutes. Your real life usage will probably be somewhere in between.
Frankly, if a laptop gets 5-6 hours of charge I'm fairly happy with it, especially if it doesn't require an oversized battery that juts out awkwardly. But I'm not going to complain about a little jutting when it's getting me 20 odd hours of juice. Finally, a single device on which I can continuously watch 10 hours of movies, listen to 10 hours of music, and all the while work on my various business reports while flying nonstop to Australia. Or perhaps even more importantly, I can finally forget to bring my power cord to work for 3 consecutive days without it mattering anymore.
And Now For Something Completely Different People Helping Robots
0 comments Posted by Hori at 11:15 AM
Miniature smiling robots made out of cardboard are cute, we know this. But cute enough to encourage random New Yorkers to help it make a random journey across Washington Square Park? Read on to find out.
MSI has let the cat out of the bag, and it's only 14" across. For a full list of specs, read on.
The resolution is hardly groundbreaking at 1280x800, but that should be fine for most games. There is also an optional Blu-ray player for watching movies, though again, you won't get close to full HD.
Other specs include an integrated webcam, 802.11b/g/n, HDMI, VGA, eSATA/USB to go along with 2 regular USBs, a card reader, and an ExpressCard. It weighs in fairly light at 4.8lbs with a 6-cell battery and has a special "Color Film Print" finish for "more texture and brightness".
MSI has packaged it's own "Turbo Drive Engine" tech for overclocking when the laptop is plugged in, which should help with gaming. The machine will run Vista Home Premium, and there's no word yet on pricing or availability.
Nokia has unveiled the latest in its Eseries of smartphones targeted at push-email business users in the UK.
The Nokia E75 is being touted as offering the benefits of full desktop email functionality in a mobile handset, and is the first device to offer the latest Nokia Messaging email user interface.
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Nokia said that the complete integration of its email and messaging services would allow for an efficient three-step email setup. The E75 has also been configured to offer access to both corporate and consumer email accounts, including Yahoo Mail, Gmail, Hotmail, Mail for Exchange and Lotus Notes Traveller.
The SIM-free model is available now from Nokia retail outlets and online stores in the UK for £379.
Unlike other E-series handsets, the E75 features a slide-out Qwerty keyboard and two customisable home screen views offering business and personal user interfaces.
The handset also offers integration with Nokia's web-based Ovi services, including Ovi Files for storing and accessing files and documents on a PC even when it is offline.
Nokia Maps, which works with the onboard Assisted-GPS, is preloaded for enhanced startup performance, and Nokia is supporting the N-Gage games service on an Eseries device for the first time.
The E75 goes on sale from Nokia direct today, and from Carphone Warehouse on a £35 pay-month tariff from 28 April, and from Orange Business on a £40 pay-month tariff from 4 May.
Asus is well-known for the Eee PC line of their notebook because they are small, cheap, and a cool design. However, the Eee PCs quickly turned into the so-called netbooks because they are smaller than a notebook and mostly because they are very portable and are used to access Internet anywhere you can find a Wi-Fi spot.
The Asus Eee PC 900 Netbook features a 8.9-inch display which supports a maximum resolution of 1024 x 600, an Intel Mobile 900 MHz processor, and a memory of 512MB of DDR2. The Eee PC 900 comes in Galaxy Black or Pearl White, but personally I prefer black because white gets dirty and all of that.
As a graphics card (which probably doesn’t matter at all), Asus has chosen an Intel UMA card. The Eee PC 900 Netbook comes packed with a 4GB SSD, HD audio and built-in speakers, SD/MMC (SDHC) memory cards support, and (of course) built-in 802.11b/g. The wireless features is indispensable, however, I appreciate the fact that I can rely on HD audio, and memory card support, while the 4GB SSD is more than enough for me, and I think for everyone as you don’t need games and other software to shorten your storage.
You probably guessed that the Asus Eee PC 900 features Linux as the OS which runs pretty well meaning that the netbook is not slow, and you won’t get any errors.
On the netbook’s sides you will find 3 x USB ports, an earphone jack, a microphone jack, a slot for Ethernet RJ45 10/100 Mbps, and a 15pin VGA-out slot. The Asus Eee PC 900 Netbook measures 22.5 x 17 x 3.38 centimeters, and it weighs only .99 kilograms.
This netbook is perfect when it comes to Internet - it automatically detects & connects to Wi-Fi hotspots, it helps you to easily manage IMs like Yahoo, MSN, Gtalk, and Skype, but also emails, photos, videos, and other documents. This means that you can surf the web while chatting with your friends, and uploading them photos on Flickr, and videos on YouTube.
The Asus Eee PC 900 Netbook is available now in stores for a price ranging between $300 and $400 depending on your location. Please note that the price may be higher or lower depending on how you choose to pay, or discounts respectively.
The Garmin-Asus alliance caught some of us off-guard, but if a merger is what’s needed to get a quality product out in the market then we’re certainly not against it. That seems to be the case with the Nuviphone. Now known as the nuvifone G60, it was first announced in early 2008, but it is only now that we’re getting an approximate release date for their GPS-enabled mobile phone. June is when it is expected to be released, and barring anymore delays, I’d say it’s high time this baby is made available. However, one small caveat possibly standing in its way to success is its Linux Mobile OS. With Mac OS X Mobile and Android making great strides in the mobile scene, does LinMo have what it takes to lure consumers to their side? That’s what we’ll have to wait and see.
