Soft Cell Netbook
There’s no denying netbooks have become hugely popular and they are an essential travelling companion, but like all laptops, large and small, they have one big drawback. Somehow they always run out of power at the most inconvenient moment. That won’t be a problem with this new one from Norhtec? The Geko Edubook looks like just another 8.9-inch cheapie, and the starting price is competitive, the baseline model will be a touch under £170, but the big bonus feature is that it doesn’t use a proprietary rechargeable battery pack. Instead it uses a set of 8 standard AA cells. It will run for up to 4 hours on NiMh rechargeables, and if you get caught short all you have to do is pop into the nearest shop and drop in some Duracells and it’s good to go for another 6 hours, thanks to the very low power consumption (there’s no fan and it uses an LED backlight). It even has it’s own built-in charger so there’s no need to lug a mains adaptor around with you either. The rest of the spec is fairly routine. It has a 1Ghz processor, it comes with 256, 512 or 1Gb of RAM and there’s a choice of standard hard drive or SD flash storage. Needless to say it supports Windows XP or stick with the pre-installed Ubuntu Linux operating system. They’re taking orders now for US delivery, unfortunately there’s no word on the European release just yet.
Super Slim Backpacks for Cool Laptop Owners
We know what a drag carrying your laptop around can become if you don’t have the right bag for it. Regular one-side bags are kind of old-fashioned and give you a geeky look most of the time. Plus, they don’t come anything close to doctors’ recommendation, because they can really hurt your back and even cause scoliosis.
So, a better alternative would be a backpack. They are so popular nowadays that they can be found in every shape or size imaginable. Even Yoda-shaped ones are available, if you are a Star Wars fan. However, each good thing has its downfalls. When carrying an oversized backpack, besides hurting your back, you can really knock people over when turning. Actually, I heard it was voted as one of the ten most annoying things that people usually do in public, next to talking too loud on your cell phone or forgetting to take a shower. Read more
WiFi to Replace Ancient Radio Waves Technology
Although these things have been around for quite some time now, I’ve only recently decided to give some more though and attention to the WiFi Radio concept, and I was pretty impressed to find out that’s it’s actually a lot more popular and widespread than I previously thought. I have never been a classic radio fan, since most radio hosts annoy me to the point that I just want to smash the radio with a baseball bat. But over the years I have tested some Internet radio stations and I can’t say I was disappointed. After Yahoo launched their new Messenger 9, I also had a brief “stint” at listening to some Yahoo music stations. Read more
Asus Smellbook
You’ve got to admire Asus for pushing back the frontiers of laptop design. From the genuinely revolutionary Eee PC, which launched the whole Netbook craze, to the slightly odd bamboo-cased laptop there’s seems to be no end to its creativity, at least that was until we heard about the F6Ve series notebooks. This is a range of ‘fragranced’ laptops, that’s right, they smell, you can choose from a pink coloured ‘Floral Blossom model costing around £649, or a glossy ‘Musky Black machine, which starts at £799. Basic specs are a 13.3-inch screen Intel Centrino Core 2 processor, wi-fi, choice of 120, 160, 250 or 320Gb drives, up to 4Gb RAM, web cam and Vista pre-installed. Incidentally, someone at Asus has obviously been doing some research into smells and national characteristics and in the US you can get models entitled Aqua Ocean and Morning Dew – make of that what you will. Read more
Unforgettable USB Drive
If the media is to be believed Government employees are a forgetful lot, losing laptops and leaving CDs and USB drives containing sensitive data all over the place. It’s easily done; though and short of chaining a USB drive to your wrist sooner or later you are going to inadvertently leave one plugged into a PC. Here’s a simple little freeware program that might help jog your memory. It’s called Flash Drive Reminder and all you have to do is download the zip, extract it and copy a couple of small files to your drive. In fact there are two versions, Standard displays a reminder message when you plug the drive into a PC, and another when you log off or shut down the PC; the Quiet version just displays the logoff and shutdown messages.
40-Hour Laptop in Pipeline
Remember the One Laptop per Child (OLPC) project? As you may recall the idea was to develop a laptop, costing less than $100, which would be given away to children in undeveloped countries. One unexpected spin-offs was the creation of a consumer market for compact low-cost mini laptops, or ‘netbooks’ typified by the Asus Eee PC and Acer Aspire One.
One of the brains behind OLPC was Mary Lou Jepsen (pictured right) who is the former head of display technologies at Intel, and she was responsible for the OLPC’s super low power, sunlight readable display. Now she has a new startup company, called Pixel Qi, with plans to start shipping a highly efficient screen, similar to the one in the OLPC, but for more conventional laptops. Read more
NVIDIA GPUs in Toshiba Laptop
Now, wait a minute, and say that again, please. Could it be that three NVIDIA graphics processors are powering one of Toshiba’s portable computer systems? If so, this is happening at a time when most desktop computer systems are basically powered by a single graphics processor, while the majority of portable PCs are featured with integrated graphics. This should be interesting, at least if you are one of those late-night LAN party gamers looking for the very best in terms of computing experience.
Toshiba is known for offering some of the most interesting portable computer systems on the market but, this time, the company appears to have really outdone itself, with a bit of help from the Santa Clara, California-based green team. Read more
90 Percent Charge in 10 minutes
That’s what Toshiba reckons its latest Super Charge Ion Battery (SCIB) is capable of, and the icing on the cake is that it should be able to withstand between 5000 and 6000 charge/discharge cycles, or up to ten times the number of charge cycles for a standard Lithium Ion battery pack. There’s even more good news, they won’t explode when crushed, which is probably not something most people need to worry about, but it could happen. However, there’s no word on what SCIB’s do when they are short-circuited, which is one of the possible reasons for the recent spate of well-publicised laptop battery fires. So what’s the catch? Well, Toshiba hasn’t announced a launch date yet, which usually means there are some manufacturing or cost difficulties, or both, still to be ironed out, but the idea of being able to get a dead laptop battery up and running in just a few minutes is going to appeal to a lot of power-users, so we probably won’t have to wait too long for it.
Mobile Broadband’s Big Spend
Nowadays it seems you can’t buy a laptop without a built-in Wi-Fi adaptor, and it has happened really quickly, in the space of 2 or 3 years. If the GSM Association gets its way, in another couple of years, most new laptops will have a Mobile Broadband adaptor as well. It has already started to happen, though currently most Mobile Broadband adaptors are in the form of plug-in USB ‘dongles’. They’re basically compact 3G (or 2.5G) mobile phones that hook your laptop up to the mobile phone network and provide fast data transfer rates, as good as and in some cases better than wired broadband. The only trouble is coverage is still a bit patchy, and there are several different standards around the world, but they’re working on that and multi-mode adaptors are not a problem to build. Read more
Wi-Fi On Radar
Here’s a wireless utility with a difference. The Xirrus Wi-Fi Monitor generates a radar-like display to show all of the wireless networks in range of your laptop. By translating relative signal strength into range it shows, in a rather eye-catching way, which ones are likely to give you the best connection. For obvious reasons – unless you have a rotating and highly directional Wi-Fi antenna on your PC the display cannot tell you which direction the access point actually is, but it looks great. Versions of Wi-Fi monitor are available for Windows Mac and Linux, and the only catch is the XP version requires that you install Yahoo Widget Framework, which adds another 15Mb to the download, (the Vista version installs as a sidebar Gadget)
