Proof That Macs Can Crash Too

This image, from Gizmodo, shows the very simple fact that yes, Macs can lock up, crash, s#%t-the-bed, etc.

According to the Gix post, this is an iPhone display at an AT&T store. The system is a Mac computer running whatever Mac OS. The displays used to run XP.

The gray box in the center of the display is called a "panic" message. Something about the system halting. Interesting...

Windows 7 Microsoft Pages

Upon some snooping around today, I came upon the official Microsoft Windows 7 page(s). The pages are not that much, except they offer some low level information about the upcoming OS. 

The site also gives links to specific information for developers, enterprises and the "press." I also found the "Windows 7 Team Blog." This blog has some interesting tid bits about Windows 7 including differences between it and Vista / XP, new features and product development phase updates.

The blog does talk about the unveiling of Windows 7 at this years PDC in LA. Some quotes from people who were given pre-Beta loaded machines for demos are available there as well, if you wanna get some inside opinions on it as it is so far.

Windows 7 Taskbar Improvements

Gizmodo has a video of the new Windows 7 Task bar in action. It looks to be impressive and neat. 

I am still a a little confused as to how this is really different from XP or Vista's task bar. I mean, the icons are larger, but you still can drag and drop to it. It doesn't seem to be that different to me.

Maybe I am missing something here. I must say that I love the wallpaper on the PC. It gives one the underwater feeling.

Uber Cheap Netbooks? There Will Be a Catch!

Ever since the birth of the Netbook, or rather the classification of sub notebooks as Netbooks, many including myself have asked the question: Why are they still so damn expensive?!?

As far as overall pricing some Netbooks range from $300, for the older model Asus Eee, to $600 for a HP Netbook that is the same as a Celeron laptop.

While there is speculation that these costs will be coming down with newer and cheaper chip sets and the falling price of RAM, to believe that any of these Netbooks will ever really be below $200, to me is folly. 

LCD's simply can't come down that low and there is still a lot of electronics in the machines. So when I hear, or see someone offering or talking about an $99 Netbook, I am skeptical at best.

It seems that to get the cost low enough that the average person would look twice at a Netbook, they have to come with a "data plan." This is like your typical cell phone cellular minutes and data plan where you sign up for 1 - 2 years and get deep discounts on the hardware. I can't imagine who, aside from the heavy traveler, would ever need this kind of deal.

It is of my own personal opinion that the best way to get Netbook costs down is to stop trying to make laptop spec'd Netbooks, and make less powerful devices.

Google Chat Now Comes With SMS

The all powerful and knowing what gadgets you really need / want company Google, has added the ability to send SMS messages through GTalk (Google Chat.)

This is an excellent idea, in and of itself. But I have 2 questions:

• Can you SMS someone who is offline?
• Does this work with GMal Chat?

Google Cuts Back On Perks, Still Better Than Your Job

According to an article posted on the New York Post, online edition, it seems that the company known for it's incredible employee perks, is reigning in the slack a little.

According to the article, Google had released a inter company memo stating that they were trying to "to find areas where efficiency can be improved." That means, in this case, cutting back on some freebies like lunch items and some food items in general.

This downgrade in corporate splurging may be the result of Google's stock. It has seen a free fall over the last few months, losing up to 48% [NYP]. The stock is still very valuable, closing yesterday at $358 a share. The stock has been as high as $593.08 a share in early May.

Although the employees at Google will feel the corporate pinch of greed, they will survive, and live to fight another day.

Why You Should Be Excited About Windows 7 (Unless You Use A Mac)

Gizmodo has an excellent article on some of the improvements for Windows 7 over Vista. Personally, I never had much of a problem with Vista. I know few people who did, actually. I do admit that there has to be some truth to the pummeling it has taken over the past few years, or Microsoft would have absolutely denounced them long ago. From the looks of this article, they won't have to when 7  is released.

The article goes into some of the major improvements, which I will outline generally (I didn't do the research, I can't take the credit!)

• Applications running on Vista should run on Windows 7.
• Systems running Vista will see an improvement in speed.
• Notebooks should get better battery life.
• Windows 7 will be more reliable from the gate.

Having said all that, one must take into consideration how these things will be accomplished. Some of the new features and improvements outlined in the article are:

• Windows 7 window memory manager
• Application Crash Resiliency
• Problems Step Recorder
• "Sandboxed" device drivers
• All hardware updates via Windows Update
• Better background management
• battery efficiency reporting.

It sounds like Windows 7 will be what Microsoft wanted Vista to be. Hopefully, it will be and more. My big question is...will Microsoft make the upgrade cheap to get people away from Vista?

Microsoft Office Live

We all believed it was only a matter of time before Microsoft joined the online (and free) office bandwagon. The question is how good is their version?

As the image above states, the version of Office Live is limited in scope and capability. You can only use 3 of the MS Office tools, and they will have limitations. 

The initial look and feel of the site is similar to Googles online Office. It has a bit more asthetics, but is essentially the same layout.

You can create workspaces that can be shared and viewed by others as well as upload existing files for sharing.

The "Word" portion is what I believe to be called "Note." It has version control and looks like a watered down version of MS Word. The "List" document is essesntially a smaller version of excel. It starts out with one cell and more can be added.

So far, that is all I have had the time to play with. I will post more as I get to it. So far, so good. It is a bit slower than Googles, but it has some more functionality too (Task list, calendar events, etc.)

Also, just FYI, the site doesn't work with Chrome  from Google.

New HP Netbook

While I find the insanely flooded Netbook market intriguing and possibly the future of mobile computing, it is easy to get tired by the same old, same old.

HP's new Netbook, the Mini 1000, is not the biggest jump from the typical netbook, containing "10.2-inch netbook that comes in at under 2.5 pounds and packs a 1.6 Ghz Atom processor, 16 GB SSD and up to 2 GB RAM " [Gizmodo]

What will make this netbook different in the future is the custom OS developed by HP. Currently the Mini 1000 runs a version of XP, which is common in the Netbook realm. 

The OS is said to be based on a version of Ubuntu, a Linux distro.

While this is new to the current market, it is not new all together. Hopefully this time around the new OS will be more user friendly and less of a software engineers toy.

Windows 7 on a Eee?

According to an article on Gizmodo, it seems that in the future, Asus Eee's will be running Windows 7.

That is awesome news, if Windows 7 is as good as it is being made out to be. I still think Vista Basic would be a good fit for netbooks, but that is just my humble opinion.

New Dell Mini-Inspiron

The new Dell Netbook is as beautiful as it is large. There is a great review of it at Gizmodo.

The specs look decent, but I feel they still don't fill in the price tag ($599). Intel Atom Processor, maybe 1 GB RAM, small hard drive (40 - 80GB), nothing special. The only thing truly interesting about this Netbook is the size. It very nicely runs on a 12 inch screen.

Wait for the XP or Linux model to come out.

Experimental Firefox 3.1 Build Gets Awesome Multitouch Gestures on Macs

While I am not a huge fan of multi-touch (yet) and really don't see a lot of use for it (yet), it is interesting that it will be an imminent feature of computers in the not to distant future.

According to an article on Gizmodo, Firefox 3.1 may have some secret Beta for implementing multi-touch on new Macs. While this is very cool news, I still ask the question, why?

I know the new Macbooks will have some multitouch support but there seem to be several other machines that have the same capabilities. 

Untr-Portables: Pomera Digital Memo

Another ultra-portable semi-useful device has made it's way into the spotlight recently.

The Pomera Digital Memo DM10 is not much to look at, or use, but it is well, fairly new. Currently only available in Japan, it is simply a bad ass notepad wanna be that'll run about $250 - $300. 

It has but one purpose, to take notes. This would be very useful, but not cheap enough, for college students or research scientists. Maybe one day this little note taker will have more gusto than keys, but not today.

Original article here

Touchscreen Eee PC Due Early 2009, Will Run Windows 7 Later Says Asus CEO

Since the Asus Eee has been known to run several OS's ranging from Linux distro to full blown Windows XP, it may not come as a surprise that one day they will run Windows 7.

Asus does have a good feel for the market of netbooks and disconnected devices, such as gaming and multimedia consoles, and they are the market leader with sub-notebooks.

But why Windows 7? Why not Mac OSX or Windows Vista Basic?

Windows 7 will simply be a better version of Vista, with some new features. Why start there? Isn't there some form of happy medium where an OS can be an OS? I find it hard to believe that any version of Windows post XP will be smaller than 4 GB of physical hard disk space.

So why use it? Why can't the Linux distro be tweaked and made very "Windows like?" Just one Eee fanboys opinion.

iKit Mini-Mini PC

I am a sucker for small for factors and low end specs, if the cost is low too. The Imovio iKit is 2 out of 3 in that department.

The iKit is basically a compact, yet powerful PDA. Although it does run a Linux OS, is fairly upgradable and does have some options, it is still a few clicks away from full fledged Netbook, and almost as expensive.

The specs are:

Processorr Marvell PXA270 312MHz

Operating System Linux 2.4.19

User Interface GUI : Proprietary plus Trolltech QT/E 2.3.8

Display Icons / Indicators
- Battery signal strength
- WiFi active/inactive/level
- Bluetooth® active/inactive
- Date & time

Home screen: 8 icons
- Email, launches Email application
- IM launches Instant Messaging application
- Web browser, launches browser application
- Contacts, launches A-Z listing contacts
- Multimedia, open 2nd level icon screen with
- icons for, Video player, Music Player, File manager
- Wireless, open 2nd level icon screen with icons for
- BT, WiFi
- iKIT, open 2nd level icon screen for Display settings,
- Date & Time, Sound settings
- Utilities, Open 2nd level icon screen with icons
- for PC Sync

Keypad
- QWERTY/AZERTY + numeric keys, other
- languages optional
- 2 soft keys, 5 quick access keys, multi directional 
- key, power on/off key, volume up/down key
- Backlight: White

Speaker
- 16 mm built-in, monophonic

Memory Internal
- ROM : 128 MB, RAM : 64 MB SDRAM
- User  data : 12MB, User media files : 23MB

Memory External
- Micro SD (up to 8GB)

Display
- 2.8 inch QVGA, TFT, 260 000 colors, landscape

Camera
- 0.3 MP fixed focus camera (Option)
- Viewfinder: 15 fps, 16-bit color depth
- Image format: JPEG, fine and standard 
- compression, user selectable
- Digital zoom: Up to 3X smooth digital zoom with 
- 7 steps
- Effects: Color, black & white, negative, sepia
- Capture time: less than 2 seconds to return to 
- viewfinder mode after shuttered


Vibrator
- Built-in for use as an alert

Dimensions
- 95 mm (L) x 65 mm (W) x 15.5 mm (H)

Weight
- 113 g (with battery)

Form factor
- Clamshell

Connectivity                        
- Bluetooth® 2.0 with EDR, supports wireless 
- stereo headset
- (A2DP) & DUN profile
- WIFI® IEEE 802.11 b/g

Connector
- Mini-USB 1.1 used for charging, PC data exchange 
- and wired stereo headset.

Browser
- Web browser Opera Mini 4.1

Java                                    
- JTWI / JSR75 compliant

Email Protocols
- POP3 / IMAP / SMTP

Instant Messaging            
- Support MSN

Audio Formats
- MIDI, WAV and MP3

Image Formats
- JPG, BMP, GIF and PNG

Video Formats
- 3GP, MP4 and AVI format, Maximum size 
- QVGA
- 25 fps video playback for QVGA size video 
- clips
- Support full-screen display

Contact List
- Maximum 2 000 records

Calendar                        
- Maximum 1 000 events

PC Sync                        
- With Outlook 2000/2003 & Outlook Express v6 
- (emails, contacts, calendar)

Personal Features            
- Calculator
- Media folder
- Notepad
- World clock
- Alarm clock
- Stop Watch
- Countdown Timer


Battery                                    
- 1050 mAh, Li-ion
- Standby Time; up to 250h
- Power-up Time; up to 3h (25% data download 
- per hour)
- Gaming Time; up to 4h (java game)
- Charging time: 2.5-3.5 hr to full charge from flat 
- with device power off


Colors                                    
- Velvet Black, Satin White – other colours available 
- to order

Box Contents           
- iKIT
- Battery
- Mini USB / USB cable
- USB stereo earpiece
- Charger
- User guide and CD

Personally I love this device. The problem is the cost. If you are someone who is in the market for a modifiable PDA that has some sweet perks, then this may be a good place to start.

Otherwise, this is almost a netbook in price and specs. Why not just get a netbook? If I could find one for around $100, I would highly consider buying one.