Gadgets

Apple has refreshed its 13.3-inch polycarbonate white MacBook with unibody enclosure and LED-backlit display. New Apple MacBook inherits features and technologies mostly from the MacBook Pro lineup. Updated Apple MacBook now looks like an Ice-cool version of 13.3-inch MacBook Pro that was introduced back in July. This new unibody polycarbonate MacBook would be offered for Rs. 56,900 in India and would be made available in the first week of November.
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Korean giant Samsung has launched an ultra-sleek Netbook N140 powered by newly launched Windows 7 OS in the Indian market.

Targetting both home and enterprise users, Samsung N140 netbook comes with a 10.1-inch LED Backlit display and a spillproof keyboard. The Netbook supports 11 hours with a 6 cell battery and has 250GB hard disc drive.
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Nokia had entered the mobile PC market few months ago with the Nokia Booklet 3G and it has now introduced the mini laptop in the US. The device is launched in association with AT&T, Best Buy and Microsoft.

The Nokia device brings together mobility and personal computer experience in a sleek form-factor. The Nokia Booklet 3G runs on Windows 7 and is powered by Intel Atom. The robust device offers around 12 hours of battery life and weighs less than 2.76 pounds.
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LG’s theme for its TVs at IFA 2009 is ‘Live Borderless’. This consumer electronic version of the Schengen Agreement is based on panels without visible borders.

Two ‘Borderless’ Full HD LCD panels, the SL8000 and SL9000, use a new injection compression moulding technique that creates a sleek, uninterrupted glasslike surface.

A special sheet of laminate film covers the televisions’ front surfaces, eliminating the line between the screen and the bezel while also reducing glare. The result is a uniform, seamless surface from edge-to-edge, with no visible frame.

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After a sound investment (arf!)? The Sennheiser PXC-450s are some of the best noise-cancelling over-ear headphones you’ll ever clap eyes (or should that be ears) on.

Granted, the Sennheiser PXC-450s aren’t much to look at – a more German-looking pair of cans we couldn’t imagine – but you’re not buying these for their looks. These babies will cut out all manner of noise pollution, whether its the mindless chatter of your mates or the high-roar of a jet engine. Apparently pilots use NoiseGard-equipped headsets to kill external noise. Well, guess what… the Sennheiser PXC-450s have NoiseGard 2.0 tech built-in!

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eBook readers like the Sony E-Reader PRS-505 have been stealing headlines of late, but not all reactions have been positive. iPhone-toting folk will tell you they’ve got an app that handles eBooks just fine, while those that linger in libraries, sniffing spines, can’t even stand the idea of an electronic book.

At just 7.6mm thick, and a just handful more with the bundled faux-leather case, the Sony PRS-505 lets you carry hundreds of books around with you without resulting in back pain – or being stung by Easyjet’s extra luggage charges. Plus, the PRS-505 won’t give you eyestrain like the iPhone does.

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Now this is quite something! A US based company, Gscreen Computers, is readying a dual screen laptop that might go on sale sometime later this year. The laptop will consist of a main display and a slide out expandable display, which will give the laptop huge screen real estate.

Each of the screens will have a 1280×800 pixel resolution (which might be too low by today’s standards) and will measure 15.4 cm. However, the widescreen effect should more than make up for this. Dual screens apart, the laptop is as “normal” as a laptop could be - save for the specifications, which is not bad at all. The base version will ship with the following configuration Intel Core 2 Duo P8400 @2.26GHz, 4GB RAM, a 320GB hard disk. As for the graphics, it might either pack in a Nvidia GeForce 9800M GT or a Nvidia Quadro FX 1700M - both with 512MB memory.

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Apple’s latest set of quarterly financial results saw the company top $10bn in sales for the first time ever. As well as selling zillions of iPhones and iPods, it also increased Mac sales by almost ten per cent. That growth was largely down to the success of its MacBook range of laptops, which were completely redesigned and upgraded in October 2008.

That redesign no doubt helped boost sales, but the remarkable fact about the new MacBooks is that their gleaming new aluminium design actually resulted in a hefty price rise, with prices now starting at £929 for a model with 13in, 1280 x 800 screen and 2GHz processor.

The fact that Apple can increase its prices and still rack up significant sales increases during the worst recession in the entire history of the universe says something about the sheer eye-catching quality of its designs. Even so, £929 is a lot of money for what is meant to be the low end of Apple’s product range. And, in particular, it’s a lot of money for the cash-strapped students and the bulk-buying US schools and colleges that make up such an important part of Apple’s market.

So, when it introduced the new aluminium MacBooks, Apple also decided to keep one of the older MacBooks on sale in order to appease its key educational customers. Priced at £719, the old model retained the somewhat cheap and cheerful white plastic casing that it had used for several years, emphasizing the fact that it was very much the cheapo alternative to its shiny aluminium siblings.

Then, in January, with virtually no fanfare at all, Apple went and upgraded the white MacBook as well, and while it may lack the gleaming good looks of the aluminium models the new white MacBook actually works out as rather good value for money.

The new white MacBook costs £719, as before, and includes a 13.3in screen, 2GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor, 2GB of DDR 2memory, 120GB 5400rpm SATA hard drive and – the key improvement – an Nvidia GeForce 9400M integrated graphics chip. On paper, those specs look almost identical to those of the 2GHz aluminium MacBook model that costs £929. However, you need to look a little more closely at the spec sheet to spot the differences.

With typical Apple perversity, this upgrade actually starts out with a small downgrade. The previous white MacBook ran at 2.1GHz, so Apple has actually lowered the speed slightly for this model. It’s a tiny decrease, though, and probably more than made up for by an increase in the front-side bus speed from 800MHz to 1026MHz.

The memory has been increased from 1GB, which is perfectly adequate for running Mac OS X 10.5 and most mainstream Mac software, although the additional gigabyte was probably necessitated by the fact that the new integrated graphics processor grabs a 256MB chunk of system memory for its own use. It’s a shame, though, that the DDR 2 memory still runs at 667MHz, rather than the 1067MHz DDR 3 memory used in the aluminium models, as that would have put a little more spring in its step.

The 120GB hard disk is a bit miserly, but not something we’d lose any sleep over. The most important feature is the inclusion of the GeForce 9400M to boost graphics performance. This is the same integrated graphics processor used in the new aluminium MacBooks and, as our Xbench test results show, it produces a huge increase in 3D graphics performance compared to previous white MacBook models.

Our own trusty white MacBook - 1.83GHz with Intel GMA950 integrated graphics - can only manage a feeble nine frames per second when running Doom 3, whereas this new model romps ahead with a very respectable 47f/s.

Of course, nobody buys an Apple Mac to do nothing but play games – in fact, the never-exactly-healthy Mac games market seems to have declined even further recently as all the big games developers have been concentrating on the iPhone instead. However, there’s a lot of eye-candy in the Mac operating system – such as the Cover Flow and Quick Look options that allow you to quickly preview files without opening them – that requires a reasonable amount of graphics power to function efficiently, so the new graphics processor will have practical benefits even for routine tasks when working with the MacBook.

Programs such as the bundled iPhoto and iMovie are also awash in graphical bells and whistles that will benefit from the enhanced graphics performance.
Source:[reghardware.co.uk]

Dell’s cheap and cheerful Mini 10v is a firm favourite here at Vulture Central but some potential customers are doubtless more interested in capability and functionality rather than absolute economy. So, with that in mind, we thought it wise to take a quick gander at the top end of Dell’s netbook offering, the Mini 10 complete with all the trimmings, almost.

Externally, the only difference between the 10 and the 10v is the flush fitting screen cover. Aesthetically it makes little difference but it does mean that wiping the screen clean is easier so for that reason alone we will count it as an improvement. Everything else – the size, the weight, the keyboard, the daft sticky-out SD card slot, the rather bulbous 6-cell battery housing, the one piece track pad and click bar, the lack of easy access to the memory slot – is identical to the 10v so we won’t bother repeating ourselves, just take a shufti at the 10v write up.

It’s only inside that things start to differ. The Mini 10 is available with Intel’s low power Z series Atom processor rather than the N series used in the 10v. To be precise, you can have your Mini 10 with either a 1.33GHz Z520 or a 1.6GHz Z530 chip. Both come with a 533MHz FSB, 512KB L2 cache and 1GB of DDR 2 memory and the only operating system on offer is Windows XP. As you would expect, the graphics are handled by the integrated Intel GMA 500.

Wireless connectivity supports 802.11b/g Wi-Fi. As with the 10v, to upgrade to 802.11n you’ll need to cough up an extra tenner. On the plus side the 10 ships with Bluetooth 2.1+EDR, as standard. The only hard drive on offer is a 160GB 5,400RPM SATA HDD – even though the technical spec on the Dell web site lists a 250GB unit as an option, this doesn’t appear when you come to ‘build’ your machine.

The first and obvious difference between the 10 and the 10v – and just about any other netbook for that matter – is the screen resolution. Take one look at the Mini 10’s 10.1in screen and its pretty obvious you are not in Kansas any more, because at 1366 x 768 the Mini 10’s screen has the same glorious resolution and perfect 16:9 ratio as Dell’s current grown up Inspiron 15 range and is equally bright, crisp and colourful.

Not only does the higher than the netbook norm resolution mean you get to see web pages in their entirety – which, as a benefit, speaks for itself – but it also renders video with a clarity you just don’t get on 1024×600 – or 1024×576 in Dell’s case – machines.

Having such a high resolution on such a small screen is not all beer and skittles though, and if your eyesight is less than perfect you could develop a bit of a squint when using the Mini 10. The text in application menus, tool bars and address bars is often rather too small for comfort, especially when using the machine on the lap rather than on a desk. The same is true for the desktop text size, but at least you can increase the size of that.

If you do find yourself going boss-eyed the screen can be set to 1024×768 or lower but that gives everything the look of having been squashed up so it’s not something we would recommend. Before we leave matters screen related we should mention that when we ran Ubuntu 9.04 from a live disc on the Mini 10. However, the system wouldn’t recognise the monitor type and would only operate the screen at 1024×768. Customers in the US can buy the Mini 10 with Ubuntu 8.04 pre-installed and still opt for the HD screen, so a fix may well appear down the line.

Beyond the standard Dell Mini array of three USB ports and a VGA output the Mini 10 also comes with an HDMI port. This makes hooking up the 10 to a suitable TV a cinch – just connect it up with an HDMI cable, select the relevant video output settings and bingo, sound and video through your telly and home cinema system.

Indeed, this turns the 10 into quite a handy little part time lounge PC for watching video or browsing the web on the TV, especially if you invest in a wireless keyboard. You will need to make sure you have a spare HDMI cable though, as Dell don’t supply one.

Another less than common feature of the Mini 10 is the built in digital TV tuner. Unfortunately our review machine didn’t have it fitted, but we have seen it in operation at a Dell presentation. From what we saw, it did a decent job of turning the 10 into a small telly – at least in an area with decent Freeview reception.

Dell ship the TV-tuner equipped Mini 10 with an MCX antenna array that has two telescopic aerials. The MCX cable plugs into a slot next to the SD card slot on the right hand side of the machine – plus an MCX-to-coaxial adaptor and a couple of clips to hold the antenna in place. Judging by comments on the web, early customers didn’t actually get any of the external TV kit. Dell has informed us that has now been rectified, but if you still don’t get your TV antenna just give Dell a call and it will be posted to you.
Source:[reghardware.co.uk]