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Fancy a BMW designed keyboard?
BenQ’s X730 Wireless Desktop Companion Pro owes its stylish silver and black design to BMW’s DesignUSA design studios. Standing out from the crowd the X730 has a concave design, with the keypad held in a plastic cradle which allows it to be slid to one of four angle settings.
On the left hand side of the keyboard is a scroll wheel, but unlike other keyboards with a similar mouse, the X730 has two buttons which toggle between vertical and horizontal scrolling functions, so you don’t get those annoying scrolling movements in more than one direction.
The top edge of the keyboard is dominated by a host of media control keys, including a neat volume knob, which is so much easier to use than the usual pair of control buttons.
The cordless optical mouse is a clean design with all the controls on the top of the body and fits comfortably in the hand.
£59.63 (inc VAT)
www.qed-uk.com
Broadband capping - good or bad?
We want to find out what you think of broadband capping. Is it understandable that heavy users should pay more, or have ISPs just found another revenue stream? With Tiscali recently expelling around 500 customers for using their broadband connection excessively, what’s the future for unlimited broadband?
Has your ISP suddenly thrust a usage cap on you? Have you been confronted by your ISP for using your connection too much? Whatever your thoughts, leave a comment - if you make a good point, you might just find it appearing in the next issue of PCW.
Waste Electrical & Electronic Equipment WEEE
When will it all happen, well it all seems to be on shaky ground, although the EU directives legal deadline is August this year, it looks like that the wrangling between the government and manufacturers means the UK will look to implement in Jan 06. But a major a problem is the Landfill Regulations Waste Acceptance Criteria which comes into force July this year. So where’s it all going to go and will local authorities cope? - Anyway we will soon start to see equipment marked to comply with part of the WEEE Directive.
AMD announces virtualisation platform
Hot on the heels of Intel's announcement of its 'Vanderpool' virtualisation technology, AMD has just revealed details of its Pacifica virtualisation platform for servers, desktops and mobiles.
Virtualisation allows a single PC to run multiple independent operating systems on virtual PCs, but at the moment software-only platforms incur a large processing overhead. With hardware assistance the technology becomes attractive to a wider audience. It's expected that the next version of Windows will incorporate virtualisation features out of the box.
The full AMD Pacifica specification will be available in April.
Intel launch new Xeon platfom
Intel has announced details of its latest Xeon platform. Codenamed Truland, the platform includes support for 64-bit Xeon MP (multiprocessor) processors and the new E8500 chipset.
The new platform brings together Intel Extended Memory 64 Technology, PCI Express, DDR2-400 Memory and Demand Based Switching with Enhanced Intel SpeedStep Technology. The new Xeon’s are available in two ranges; Performance and Value with up to 8 MB of Level 3 (L3) cache, while the E8500 chipset has a 667 MHz dual, independent front side bus and is designed with 10.6 GBs of system bandwidth, more than three times the bandwidth of the previous generation.
Performance Processors
64-bit Intel Xeon processor MP 3.33 GHz 8MB L3 cache
64-bit Intel Xeon processor MP 3.00 GHz 8MB L3 cache
64-bit Intel Xeon processor MP 2.83 GHz 4MB L3 cache
Value Processors
64-bit Intel Xeon processor MP 3.66 GHz 1MB L2 cache
64-bit Intel Xeon processor MP 3.16 GHz 1MB L2 cache
FireFox not without its problems
A new critical patch has been released to update a GIF buffer overflow exploit - allowing an attacker to run arbitrary code on the user's machine, within FireFox.
You can keep track of these updates as FireFox does have an automatic updater of sorts, the updater is in options, under advanced, under software update.
As FireFox continues to grow we should expect to see more and more problems or exploits arising, after all it is a work in progress- so will FireFox continue to be the alternative choice to IE?
Stubborn Showcenter Embarrasses Pinnacle
Product launches that go horribly wrong are never easy to sit through, and we had to feel for the poor PR guys from Pinnacle when they came in to show off the latest Showcenter streaming media device. Wireless kit such as this is never easy to set up and, sure enough, the Showcenter 200 had no intention of playing ball. Pinnacle assured us it was very much a pre-production unit, but a late April release date doesn’t leave much time to iron out the bugs.
Despite the unfortunate demo, the compact 802.11g Showcenter 200 does have some interesting features. A front access USB socket lets you attach devices such as digital cameras and external hard drives, while premium video and audio content capabilities are available along with Divx and HD support. It will have an RRP of £199 and we’ve been promised a review unit as soon as they’re available.
Pinnacle is also launching an external USB digital TV tuner. It's totally USB powered and sports a built-in high-performance aerial. Again, this will appear late April with a price tag of around £80.
Future for 802.11n wireless standard still unclear
Pre-N wireless Lan products continue to be on shaky ground after an inconclusive vote on the new 802.11n standard. The TGn Sync proposal marginally won the initial round of voting against WWiSE proposal with 53%.
The WWiSE group have suggested a merger of the two proposals - as the TGn Sync failed to ascertain the necessary 75% vote at the first round of confirmation voting. The second confirmation vote will be held in July.
This means it’s still not certain which standard will be successful and it’s still unclear how the current proposals will affect existing Pre-N product compatibility once the new standard is finalised.
The price is right
Notebook Results
Choosing your notebook is a balancing act between performance, graphics speeds and weight. The compiled data should help you make an informed decision on what’s best considering your needs. Notebook results
New Entry Tops the charts
Its all change at the top of the graphics card chart, the latest results show Asus Extreme N6800 Ultra (SLI) with an impressive 9451 3DM05 score.
Bird Flu for Browsers
Things have got a little more complicated, it looks like the use of other web browsers can still led to IE being infected, through the use of Java applet, even if your IE security settings are set to maximum. - This was recently reported by vitalsecurity, although there appears to be a great deal of controversy over the wording of the article and who’s to blame.
New logos for Smithfield multicore Pentiums
Here are the new logos for the upcoming dual-core 'Smithfield' Pentium D and Pentium Extreme Edition. Notice that as we reported here, the 4 has been dropped. Single core Pentium 4s will continue for a couple of years, mainly aimed at business users.
To our mind the Pentium D logo is blandness personified, but the Extreme Edition's a bit more enticing. How long before it gets renamed Pentium X?
The difference between the two is that the Pentium D has two cores but no Hyper Threading, while the Extreme Edition has two cores with Hyper Threading, giving a total of 4 threads.
Expected launch date according to Intel is the second quarter of this year.
Road Warrior
This handy group of retractable cables from Zip-Linq should help keep your notebook carry case a little less cluttered. Its certainly useful if your on the road for a while as I recently found out. It includes a flexible Notebook Light, Mouse, CAT5, Telephone and USB cables.
Notebook Road Warrior Kit (49.98 inc VAT)
Fingers and thumbs
SanDisk recently announced doubling of its xD-Picture Cards too one gigabyte. They hope to have products avialable in April although pricing in Europe has yet to be rubber stamped. Whilst also introducing a new secure USB flash storage drive with biometeric fingerprint identification - we hope to get one in soon for testing.
Ad-hoc wireless connections limited to 11mbps
Reader Ian Longdon has drawn our attention to a little-known limitation of ad-hoc (peer-to-peer) wireless networks, typically used between two or more notebooks with Wi-Fi adapters. The IEEE 802.11 standard specifies that performance in ad-hoc mode must achieve 11Mbits/sec, but no more, regardless of whether the adapter is 802.11b or 802.11g. There's no requirement for manufacturers to exceed the 11Mbits/sec specification, and as Ian found with his D-Link cards, some don't.
We asked D-Link and the Wi-Fi Alliance about this problem. D-Link replied:
"Unfortunately we only meet the standard and don't exceed it. D-Link wireless products follow the IEEE 802.11 standards. The 802.11b and 802.11g standards specify that Ad-Hoc mode only needs to support up to 11Mbps. For best results, use an access point or wireless router and set your adapters to Infrastructure (station) mode."
The Wi-Fi Alliance told us that as the standard only specifies a maximum of 11Mbits/sec performance in ad-hoc mode, testing above this speed is not performed as part of the Wi-Fi certification procedure.
While it's arguably unfair to criticise vendors for not exceeding a standard, they certainly don't go out of their way to let users know about this. Some products do appear to connect at higher rates in ad-hoc mode, but it's certainly not advertised and it's very much a 'suck it and see' process to find out. Netgear is one of the few companies with a public statement on the issue.
We'll certainly be keeping an eye out in future when products come through the labs. Thanks again to Ian for informing us about this.
Buffalo FireStix Flash Drive
A new compact range of USB 2.0 Flash Drives (RUF-GP256m/U2) have been announced by Buffalo. A quick test confirmed read speeds at a little over 19MB/Sec and write speeds at 16.5MB/sec.
Avialable in 256, 512 and 1GB (76.50 ex.VAT) models
Product Information
110 Free Microsoft Tools
In our May 2005 issue, we've reviewed 110 of the best free tools available from Microsoft. Click on the link below to download a Zip file containing spreadsheets with clickable hotlinks to all the utilities. These files are also included on the cover CD/DVD.
Download 110_microsoft_tools.zip
Another first from ECS
Hot on the heals of their dual graphic engines range of motherboards, ECS have just announced the ECS PF88, a converter card that enables AMD and Intel technologies to be used on the same platform.
The first ECS motherboard designed to be compatible with the new PF88 is based around the Intel P4 LGA775 socket and includes 4 slots of DDR2 667 memory, a 1066FSB, SATA2, GigaLAN, 1394a Firewire, and makes use of the SiS656 Northbridge and a SiS965 Southbridge.
The SiS965 Southbridge is shared with the converter card, which is based around the AMD socket 939, and has its own dedicated SiS756 Northbridge, 2 slots of DDR400, power management circuits and a FSB2000T, which are required to run AMD K8 technology. PF88 and the motherboard support the latest dual core technology from Intel and AMD.
Look out for a review as soon as we lay our hands on the board.
Cebit daze part 3
Samsung had an impressive line-up, including this elegant but otherwise normal looking Sonoma notebook that seems to me to be one of the most interesting products at the show. Not because the Q30 weighs just a smidgen over 1Kg but because it packs Digital Multimedia Broadcasting – the multimedia version of the Dab broadcasts used for Britain digital radio stations. Regular readers of PCW know that I believe that this, and its close cousin DVB-H, which uses the digital TV signal to a similar end, could evolve into what is in effect a new communications medium.
Handhelds are not ideal platforms for pure TV but they have an advantage over normal TV sets: they are viewed close up, which means they are suitable to displaying text – a far faster way to convey information than audio. My belief is that these broadcasts will evolve into something containing visuals, audio and text – a cross between TV, radio and the internet.
There are DVB-H and DMB pilots in Britain and multimedia broadcasting is big in Samsung’s home in Korea.
But processing that digital signal takes power, as anyone who has a battery-driven Dab radio knows. So a notebook would seem to be a good test bed because it is not quite as power-sensitive as a handheld computer – though Samsung has developed a DVB-H enabled mobile phone. And on its stand was this DMB-enabled Nexio handheld with a 5in screen.
Samsung seemed to be playing a game of ‘mine is bigger than yours’. It showed a biggest-yet 106in plasma screen and an 82in TFT LCD television – both HD ready. 
And it showed a this 7megapixel phone camera – the reverse side has a keypad – with a 3x optical zoom and the ability to add a telephoto or wide-angle lense. It is small, but Casio was showing smaller cameras with similar facilities. The Samsung design is equivalent to one of these with a phone stuck on the back. The company also showed a phone supporting Bluetooth stereo, of which more in the magazine, and the one on the 
left, the SGH-i300, which packs a 3GB hard disk - astonishing because it is no bigger than a normal phone. You couldn't do much with the disk in the show model, however, because the Windows Mobile operating system does not yet support it. Samsung says it will be the time the phone launches in the second half of this year.
Saw my first Sonoma-based Tablet PC today, of all places on the LG stand. Can’t tell you anything about it because (see below) I can’t read the CD. There’ll be more in the mag next month.
I'll also be writing more about this little device, which uses a nanoprobe to etch data on to a polymer surface. IBM reckons it can store a terabyte in a square inch, which means you could have your entire movie collection on an SD card. It reads and writes as fast as a flash drive put sadly it is still a prototype.
Sorry about the blurred photos but I was having to grab some of these pictures through glass with confusing lights. Most companies have thoughtfully provided pictures and press releases on CD, to save us lugging screeds of paper around, and the press office here has equally thoughtfully removed all the CD drives from its machine so we can’t read them. That’ll teach me to ring a notebook without one.
I have always been impressed by the accuracy of national stereotypes. The Germans have traditionally been viewed by the English as rather too organised for their own good. They are certainly very efficient but sometimes they seem deliberately to try to break out of the mould. How else can you explain the numbering system of rooms at the convention centre, which obeys no pattern known to man? Rooms 1 and 2 are at opposite end of the building, with other numbers distributed randomly between them, so that to find where you want to go is rather like undergoing an entrance exam for Mensa.
Everything is placed at different levels, providing interesting spaces, but you cannot cross from one room to another without negotiating several flights of stairs. I reckon I have climbed the equivalent of a mountain in the past few days, weighed down my notebook and press releases. It may be a subtle plot to keep people fit, but after three days of Cebit I fear it may have the opposite effect.
No prizes for guessing what is happening in this picture, because you won't, not unless you have been to the Sony Ericsson stand at Cebit. The ball on the podium is a robot camera that can trundle about under Bluetooth control beaming what it sees back to the phone. The man on the stand said: 'it's just a bit of fun. You can send the robot up to 50 metres away to take pictures.' Sounds like the kind of fun that could get you arrested.
Buffalo goes High Def
Buffalo has recently announced the Linktheatre - its first foray into the world of wireless media streaming. Much like Pinnacle's popular Showcenter device, it allows you to wirelessly stream video or audio from your PC to a television or Hifi.
Where the Linktheatre stands out from the crowd, however, is with its support for high definition video. Both WMV HD and Divx HD formats are supported in 720p 1080i, as are MP3, WMA and Jpeg photos. It also includes an integrated DVD player, and its front-facing USB port allows you to connect a memory key, digital camera or external hard drive.
The Linktheatre couldn't be included in the streaming media devices group test in the current issue of PCW, as it was in development at the time. We’ve just managed to get our hands on one and are planning to conduct a review for the June 2005 issue – since this also gives us an excuse to sit around watching movies all day. Roll on the weekend.
The mains attraction
Further to my story about the 200Mbit/sec mains links (see elsewhere on this site) here is a picture of one in action. It uses modules from the Spanish company DS2 and is delivering two HD video streams at around 25Mbits/sec each, and four standard TV streams. You may just be able to make out the plug-in DS2 modems that do the trick – they look like mains power adapters. Panasonic claims its techology is unique in offering quality of service – that is guaranteed timely delivery of packets. But developers of both rival techologies say they too support QoS, and there certainly seemed to be no dropped frames in the demonstration I saw. You won’t be able to buy those DS2 modems – the company sells its technology for others to use in products. But booth neighbour Corinex, which uses DS2 technology, says it will be selling a 90-euro modem into the UK in a couple of months.
More on that other argy-bargy, the one between the Blu-ray and HD-TV camps about which technology will be used to store high-defiition video. I’ll be writing about this – in the mag if not online - after I hear the HD-TV side tomorrow (Friday). But in case you are still under the impression that HD-TV is the only one of the two to be backwards compatible, take a look at this picture. It shows a Philips drive that reads and writes Blu-ray, DVD and CD formats. It has three lasers - blue, red and infra red, respectively for Blu-ray, DVD and CD – and a single optical system. Sony has produced a similar drive. Philips says its one will be available by Christmas.
Incidentally the Blu-ray people say they are on track for four-layer technology storing 100Mbytes per disk, and Sony has successfully tested an eight-layer one that will store 200Mbytes.
That’s enough for now – I have to leave something to put in the mag. Meanwhile take a look at this door at the rear of the Sony stand. Has Sony got something to hide? Or maybe its one of those padded cells where company employees can scream out their frustrations. Get the picture: one too many smart-arsed kids asking awkward questions on the stand, and Sony's finest can rush to the back room and bang their heads against the wall. Maybe it will catch on.
Cebit ... the first daze
Cebit, the world's biggest computer show, is set in what looks like an industrial estate of 26 warehouse-like halls surrounding this confection of steel and glass, which is where most of the press conferences are held. It was lightly dusted with snow at the start of today's preview events, at which the tone was much more upbeat than last year despite rumours that many big names have pulled out or have a reduced presence.
Patricia Russo, chief executive of Lucent, gleefully reported revenues up 7percent with profits of $2 billion compared with a loss of $770m last year. Part of that profit was a tax refund. Lucent, which was hit badly by the Dotcom crash, traditionally kicks off Cebit and last year Russo painted a picture of unremitting gloom. She said today, with some understatement: '2004 was a pivotal year for us.'
So far the buzz at the show seems to be High Definition – see our news story about Sony.
Sony showed off its latest DCR-DVD403E camera, which shoots natively in 16:9 format and packs multichannel recorders so that you can capture not only those charming pictures of Baby's First Moments but also, in full Dolby 5.1 surround sound, the screaming that kept you awake at nights for months on end. Sony also launched a 4GB Memory Stick Pro supporting read and write speeds of up to 80Mbits/sec.
Sharp was also plugging High Definition. Like Sony it is in the Blu-ray camp and showed this next generation recorder and remote control. It is also showing a lot of solar-power products, which I hope to see more of later this week if I can squeeze time between meetings. The company is flourishing its green credentials and pledges to have a 'zero global warming' balance by 2010. I took this to mean that the global warming produced by its activities will be offset by its pollution-saving products. Call it hype if you like, but at least it is hype on the side of the angels.
Two faces of Germany. At a supermarket checkout last night a skinhead sporting heavy gold earrings stood with his wife (or girlfriend) paying for groceries. It would have been a scene of mildly amusing incongruity were it not for the fact that he had already drunk two of the beers he was paying for and emblazoned across back of his jacket was the brand Lonsdale, flanked by two lions. These jackets are apparently favoured by neo-Nazis because the letters NSD in the middle are the initials of the National Socialist Party of Germany - the Nazis, whose swastika symbol is banned in Germany. Somehow the mixture of German and British icons (the lions, and the name faintly redolent of London) made the image even more sinister. Could the far-right in both countries be finding a common cause?
More typical of today's Germany is the fact that when I left my expensive digital camera behind in the press room, the charming lady attendant had kept it for me and gave it back with a smile when I returned in a panic an hour later.
Bigger, faster storage from Kingston
Kingston Technology has added two larger capacity cards to their lineup of Secure Digital media. The 512MB SD/512-S joins the high speed Elite Pro family with up to 7.7MB/sec write rates and up to 8.2 MB/sec read rates while the SD/1GB is a normal speed card, but is Kingston’s largest capacity SD card to date at 1GB.
Both are available from ebuyer.com
SD/512-S £31.06 (£26.43 ex VAT)
SD/1GB £51.69 (43.99 ex VAT)
Where's the customer service, Wanadoo?
Well it's now five days and still no sign of the recovery CD from Wanadoo, which is needed to get our wireless router working again after an unexpected firmware update stopped it from working.
We don't think this sort of wait is acceptable and have been pretty unimpressed with the level of service we've had from Wanadoo since signing up for this account. It took about three weeks for the account to go live after it was set up, with PCW having to do the chasing to find out why the delay. It seems we not the only ones having some issues with the Livebox either, the forums are full of discussions on it - see Broadbandbuyer and our sister title IT Week.
Once it was working, the Livebox wireless router and 1Mb/s connection worked without a problem for Internet access (but not the home network) until last Wednesday evening, and now we are back to the frustration of Wanadoo's poor service.
So right now, we like the ADSL service itself - and the Livebox was an easy wireless router to set up and get going - but we don't like Wanadoo's customer service.
See also: Wanadoo's manual makes Livebox network setup a mystery
Brit takes the helm at Sony
According to Reuters, struggling giant Sony is about to get its first non-Japanese CEO. Howard Stringer, Welsh-born head of the US Sony operation will take over officially later this year, it reports.
Rumours that Sony's Vaio PC range might be rebranded as 'Boyo' can only be described as scurrilous.
Eau, water good idea
We’ve just received one of the first review samples of Pentax’s latest digicams – the OptioWP. With a 5megapixel CCD, 3x optical zoom and 2in LCD monitor, the OptioWP’s biggest asset is that it’s totally waterproof. Despite conventional looks, it can be plunged in to water up to 1.5m deep without the aid of a separate waterproof case.
We’ve only had it for a short while now, and you’ll find a full in-depth review in the June issue of PCW (on sale 21st April), but so far we’re impressed. As you can see we’ve tested the waterproof claim for ourselves and haven’t come across any problems... yet.
The Optio WP will be available in April with a guide price of £229.99.
Latest Results - update
CE- ATA 1.0 Spec
It looks like a we have a new spec for handhelds and portable consumer electronic devices, finalised at break neck speeds- under six months. But whats the fuss, well CE-ATA-based products may offer compatibility and interoperability with other CE-ATA devices enabling mobility and "plug and play". Based on the MMC electrical interface, also using an optimised subset of the ATA command, it is designed to improve performance for multimedia applications in handheld and consumer electronic devices. - We may even have commercial products within 6 months.
The Spec & more info
Wanadoo foul up kills customers' broadband
Any Wanadoo Livebox customers that suddenly found they had no broadband on Wednesday night - which the company admitted was quite a few people including us, as we're testing the service at the moment - will be happy to know it was caused by a server cock-up.
A firmware update, due to go out on Monday coming, was accidentally released on Wednesday evening, before customers had been warned. Anyone unable to get online at that point that performed a hard reboot screwed their Livebox and lost broadband access. There's nothing wrong with the firmware update, Wanadoo said, just the timing of its release.
We've been broadbandless for 36 hours now, and we await a recovery CD to fix the problem. We'll let you know if the problem continues, but next time Wanadoo wanadoo a firmware update, let customers know first.
Latest Arrivals
The latest arrival on the Labs bench is ATI's Theater 550 PRO TV Tuner card. Its the first hardware accelerated video processor to support both PCI-Express and PCI.
Look out for a review in PCW soon.
IDF in pictures
The venue - San Francisco's Moscone Centre near the junction of 4th Street and Mission Street. Most of the activity was here, including keynotes, tech briefings and breakout sessions plus the Technical Showcase. Good breakfasts as well..
Craig Barrett examining a pimped-up Chrysler 300C during his keynote speech. Mad Mike Martin and Mike Megdal of West Coast Customs (from the MTV 'Pimp my Ride' series) are on the left. Apart from installing acres of grey suede and losing the roof, the boys had installed a few Centrino laptops in the car. Not too sure why - battery life is hardly a problem when you've a 5.7-litre V8 and 340bhp helping turn the alternator. Craig was definitely in a travelling mood - later in the keynote he told Bert Rutan, privateer astronaut extraordinaire, that he'd always fancied going into space.
GUI nightmare - a spherical 3D user interface looking suspiciously like something out of Windows Longhorn (Windows eXperience?) formed part of Barrett's presentation. If you look closely you'll see Pat Gelsinger hiding in one of the frames.
Media Centers were everywhere, including one from our very own Evesham Technology (the silver box at the bottom left of the photo).
Watch out Mac Mini - this is the tiny concept PC based on the mobile dual-core Yonah processor. Not for sale, unfortunately - for now it's in the safe hands of Don MacDonald, VP of Intel's Digital Home group.
Don't drop it, Don..
Finally, a rather funky-looking Portable Media Center concept, with a detachable DVD drive on the back and a touch sensitive screen that's also doubles up as the speaker by means of a sound transducer attached to the glass. Needless to say, it's based on a dual-core mobile processor as well.
Philips' Mini Attack
The list of challengers to the Ipod Mini continues to grow in earnest, with the latest contender emerging courtesy of Philips. The HDD084 has a 3GB hard drive, capable of storing up to 1,500 WMA tracks, or 750 MP3s at 128kbps.
The device is roughly the size and width of a credit card, and has a very attractive design. Refreshingly, Philips has refrained from 'borrowing' the touchpad-style navigation pioneered by Apple, and has instead opted for scroll keys with two-levels of sensitivy.
The rest of its functionality is fairly standard. It acts as a USB2 mass storage device, has a range of EQ settings and a large backlit LCD display clearly relays information back to the user. Watch out for more information when we get our hands on one.
Power for SLI setups
Enermax have updated both their 600W and 660W power supplies to run in nVidia SLI setups.
Both the EG701 and EG851 now come with two PCI-Express 6-pin power connectors.
Both available from Overclock.co.uk
EG701 £99.77 (£84.91 ex VAT)
EG851 £140.84 (£119.86 ex VAT
Skype hots up
It looks like we'll soon be able to make free calls via Hotspots - without having to pay for net access. BroadreachNetworks announced today a partnership with Skype to offer free Voice over Wi-Fi . Broadreach will open its network of 350 ReadytoSurf™ fixed and Wi-Fi wireless Internet.
The revolution continues ....
Batterylife Comes onto Your Notebook
Battery life company Batterylife is set to release a new version of its Activator product, which extends the battery life of notebook PCs. Batterylife claims the ACT150100 Notebook Activator can protect new batteries from deterioration, and regenerate used batteries so they start to regain their normal capacity.
The Activator is said to provide longer operation and stand-by time, shorter charging times and a longer battery lifetime.
The ‘device’ resembles a small piece of cloth and measures just 150mm x 100mm. It can be cut and adjusted to fit any size of battery, and is effective as long as it covers at least 80% of its outer surface.
We're a rather sceptical bunch at PCW, so we were more than ready to denounce its effectiveness. Surprisingly it worked rather well during preliminary tests, so you can look forward to a full review in a forthcoming issue.
IDF - Pot noodle laser meets Mr. T
A distinctly un-exciting start to the IDF press preview day on Monday here in San Francisco, although we were all given a cool sample of Intel's latest technology breakthrough - the first continuous-wave Raman silicon laser (pictured), which Intel announced in Nature recently.
We also had some interesting tech stuff on nanoscale integration in the future of chip fabrications, although the following slide isn't really indicative of the technical level of the presentation:
We also found out what 'the family of *Ts' we mentioned on Sunday are all about, but disappointingly it wasn't the first showing of the Roswell aliens who have been helping Intel's R&D all these years. T just stands for technology, and * is a wildcard. Gosh.
To compensate for the lack of excitement, have a look at the rather bizarre screensaver they were showing in the conference room instead, it might help cheer you up.
Tomorrow we get down to the nitty gritty, apparently, with keynotes and technical sessions piled up from dawn till dusk. Rumours that a game of Moore's Law bingo is being planned for the first keynote could not be substantiated at the time of writing.
