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Asus offers Eee battery upgrade for a tenner
For UK consumers to get a worse deal than the rest of the world on electrical goods' pricing is a given - we are a difficult to access island after all - but for us to receive inferior products isn't common at all.
So it surprised us to here that UK buyers of the Eee PC 900 received a 4,400mAh battery while American's got a 5,800mAh battery pack.
Now, however, Asus has now decided it will swap out your 4,400mAh battery and send you the larger 5,800mAh battery for £10 (P&P included).
Asus has also released a new Bios (version 0601) that, it says, will add around 30 minutes extra battery life on the Eee PC 900. UK Eee PC 900 owners should go to Asus' support site to grab the bigger battery and download the new Bios.
Traxdata media player
Traxdata has announced a product that sounds rather similar too Iomega's Screenplay, which we described a few days back.The £149 MultiMediaDrive packs a 500Gbyte disk and a multimedia player than can play movies, songs or photos directly to you television using an HDMI, Scart or composite video link. You can load content via a USB2 port.
High Definition support goes up to 1080i. Supported formats include Mpeg1, Mpeg2, DivX (with subtitles), Xvid, MP3, WAV and JPEG. The Traxdata MultiMediaDrive has a recommended retail price of £149. For more details visit
Traxdata has also announced prices on its new range of fast Class 6 (rated at 6Byte/secs) SD variant cards: 16GByte SDHC £45; 8Gbyte miniSDHC £24-25; 4Gbyte miniSDHC £12-14; 4GByte microSDHC £14.50-£16.
Hands on with the MSI Wind
We got some precious hands-on time with the MSI Wind yesterday, competitor to the Asus Eee PC 900.
It has an exceptional feature list, starting with a 10in screen, 1.6GHz Intel processor (that's all we're allowed to say... for now), 1GB Ram, an 80GB 5,400rpm hard drive, a 1.3megapixel webcam, and a much bigger keyboard than the Eee PC.
The processor is overclockable to 1.9GHz, which MSI's UK marketing manager, Richard Stewart, says is a unique feature for such a small-form factor notebook.
It weighs 1kg with a 3cell battery, packs all the usual goodies like Wifi, Blutooth, XP Home, a card reader and three USB ports and its price is something special: £329 inc. Vat.
The screen is LED backlit and has a 1,024x600 resolution. That's a small step behind the HP Mininote 2133, which has a superior 1,280x768 resolution, but it's still an impressive display for the £329 price point.
Richard Stewart's comment: "demand will undoubtedly outstrip supply", is a bit of an understatement in my opinion.
Asus has already had problems building enough Eee PC 900s (my uncle ordered two a few weeks ago and they still haven't arrived) and rumours suggest that Intel is struggling to keep up with demand for its current and upcoming ultra-mobile CPUs.
But while supply will be a problem, demand is equally a factor, since the Wind breezes past the competition in terms of feature list, value for money and possibly even performance too.
Stewart also confirmed an 8.9in version of the Wind, due for launch at a later date with Linux instead of Windows, and a desktop version of the MSI Wind is also in the works. The desktop version will have a similar price and similar components (the same processor), but lose the battery and display in place of an optical drive.
Dell's mini laptop, Acer's Aspire One MiniNote, Medion's 10in wonder which PCW saw at Cebit08, HP's Mininote 2133, Via's Openbook (possibly to be sold through Belinea and Packard Bell), Acer's new Eee PC 901 (based on the Atom rather than the 900 based on the Celeron 353), Acer's 10in Eee PC and even Elonex's £99 notebook make this a crowded and, happily, a competitive market.
Via shows off Nanobook successor
Via has released the details of its successor to the Nanobook, called the Openbook.
It's a reference design that will be re-badged and tweaked by manufacturers just like the Nanobook was (Belinea's S.book 1 and Packard Bell's Easynote XS used Via's older design).
It is perhaps named Openbook because, Via says in its launch video, that it will put the CAD design files for the notebook freely on its website so manufacturers can easily modify the original design to suit their brands.
The Openbook design has been modernised to include a bigger and higher resolution 8.9in display with two webcams (one pointing out, one pointing in) and a sleeker chassis compared with the Nanobook.
OLPC laptop has split screen
Nicholas Negroponte has unveiled a good-looking design for the next-generation cheapo notebook from the One Laptop Per Child project, which aims to bring IT to poorer people. The OLPC project has been riven with squabbles and the first-generation XO design has had a less-than-enthusiastic reception in some of the countries to which it has been aimed.
The XO2 has two hinged screens that open up like a book, which has been done before, but Negroponte gives the idea a novel twist by allowing one of the screens to double as a soft keyboard, so that the machine could be used as a standard notebook.
He plans a selling prince of just $75 but as the first XO never hit its target price of $100, the figure should be taken with a large pinch of salt.
The machine will run XP, Microsoft presumably having taken note of the fact that the emerging generation of low-cost mobiles could push Linux into the mainstream. Negroponte bases his price on the fact that LCD screen price have dropped since their use in DVD players.
The screens will be made by a company called Pixel QI and there will be no motherboard; instead the circuitry will be integrated into the screen in much the same way as the active-matrix backplane is today. The Pixel QI site says it is working on touch capability that will cost $5 to $10 per screen.
Negroponte gets a lot of flak but these devices do have the potential to deliver text books and other learning materials in countries where they are very thin on the ground. He foresees the X02 being used initially as an eBook reader.
Er. before you start to get too smug about open-source security...
Open-source security is improving rapidly, according to our colleagues on vnunet.com, but a rather different picture emerges from a report in MIT Technology Review. It says a cock-up two years ago by some coders at Linux house Debian has compromised millions of machines, not to mention some of the web's most important software.
A fix has been produced but the problems caused cannot simply be patched away. New keys have to be generated, certified and distributed, which takes time.
The coders were using a tool called Valgrind that, ironically, identifies possible vulnerabilities. It spotted what appeared to be a problem in the OpenSSL Library used by software including the Apache web server, the IPsec Virtual Private Network, and SSH remote access software.
Valgrind flagged that the OpenSSL Libray used a block of memory without initialising it to a known state, which is normally considered to be a mistake. But in this case the unknown memory values were used by the library as one of several sources of randomness when generating encryption keys.
The Debian programmers simply commented out the lines implementing the 'mistake'. The effect was to narrow considerably the number of possible keys, rendering the encryption open to attack.
Astonishingly, so-called secure systems have been running with this vulnerability for two years. No-one knows how many machines are affected;, not least because some may not even have been using the compromised code.
At least it brings a new meaning to the term OpenSSL.
Iomega upscales Screenplay
Iomega has released a new version of its Screenplay product that doubles as an external USB2 hard drive and standalone media player.
The Screenplay HD Multimedia Drive has a capacity of 500GB includes HDMI, component and composite video, and Scart (RGB)video ports as well as composite RCA and coaxial S/PDIF audio outputs.
It measures 19.6 x 5.8 x 12.7cm, about the size of a paperback book, and can upscale to 720p and1080i resolutions. Supported media formats include MP3, AC3, WAV, WMA, MPEG-1, MPEG-2 (AVI/VOB), MPEG-4 (AVI/DiVX 3.11, 4.x, 5.x/XViD) and JPEG.
Win a motherboard
Yoyotech is offering a 5 percent discount to PCW readers who purchase a motherboard at an event it is holding this Saturday (May 24) at its store at 30 Windmill Street, just round the corner from Piccadilly Circus and five minutes walk from the computer shops of Tottenham Court Road.
Central attraction will be Foxconn’s Black Ops motherboard, designed for overclockers, that can be cooled by liquid nitrogen. Visitors also get a chance to win one.
Samsung’s crane-arm screens
Samsung has launched a dual-monitor display with a twist: one of the monitors is a digital picture frame.
The package, called the 2263DX, bundles a 22in monitor and a 7in 800x480 LED backlit digital picture frame for £269.99. A crane arm keeps the monitors attached to each other physically, with two rotating pivots so the 7in monitor can be placed above or to the side of the bigger display in a landscape or portrait orientation.
A stripped down version of Displaylink provides the video stream to the 7in monitor. Displaylink uses USB for the video stream, rather than VGA or DVI, which ensures all buyers can install the dual-screen setup regardless of graphics card setup (see our Samsung UX940 review for more Displaylink info).
The digital picture frame is supposed to be used for instant messaging clients like AIM and MSN, leaving the full main-monitor area for everything else.
PCW’s Editor summed up one school of thought when this concept was originally announced a few weeks ago: manufacturers are struggling to sell bigger monitors because 22in at your desk is usually more than enough. And a 7in mini-screen gimmick is a way of pushing up sales - and the price.
It should be on sale in Currys’ stores soon.
Freesat warns of set-top box shortage
After launching just over a week ago, Freesat appears to have hit something of a stumbling block with its website warning of a shortage of Freesat HD boxes, citing 'very high demand'.
It's an embarrassing start for the joint BBC and ITV venture, and there's no indication of when more stock is expected.
Developed as an alternative to the terrestrial digital TV service Freeview, it provides a wide variety of free-to-air channels, including the high-definition BBC HD, via satellite. Standard installation of a satellite dish costs £80, but if you have a Sky dish you can hook a receiver straight up to that instead.
A quick web search showed both Comet and Currys out of stock of HD Freesat receivers, however at the time of writing Argos still had some Humax Foxsat HD boxes for sale.
Space Shuttle disk used DOS
A curious detail emerged from reports that data had been recovered from a hard disk wrecked in the 2003 Columbia space shuttle disaster that killed 11 astronauts…it was running the pre-Windows DOS operating system. No version was cited the AP report, posted on the MIT Technology Review site, so we don't know whether it was a Microsoft product or from a rival.
The drive could hold 340Mbytes, and so was relatively modern, but there is no reason why an old operating system would not have functioned well.
Curiously the data may not have been recoverable if a more modern operating system had been used because it might had been scattered across the disk, according to Kroll Ontrack, the company that did the work. The drive casing had melted and the platters were damaged – but not where the data was.
It is surprising how low-tech space technology can be. Mission Control at Cape Canaveral, which conducted the first landing on the moon, looks impressive with its ranks of screens at a time when computers were a rarity. It is open to visitors now and looks much smaller than it seems on TV and many of the screens are visual-display units for video rather than computers.
Sorry for Canon misfire
On page 17 of our July edition we name Canon's latest portable printer as the Pixma iP90v. In fact it is the iP100, which supersedes the iP90v. Other details are correct, as is the link to the specifications
Scroll on a roll as ePaper goes mainstream in ebook reader
E-paper screens are finally hitting the mainstream, judging for today's announcement that Borders is to stock an ebook reader. The Iliad (pictured left) uses E-ink technology from the US company married to technology from Philips and spin-off company iRex.
Potentially more exciting is the Readius mobile phone from Polymer Vision, another Philips spin-off company. It uses organic (ie carbon) polymer semiconductor transistors for the driving matrix; and flexible polymers elsewhere in the screen.
The result on the Readius is a 5in diagonal screen that can scroll into a device the size of a standard mobile phone (left). It supports 3G and HSDPA and is expected to be on sale around late summer.
Its long-term significance is that it could lead to pocketable devices with screens you do not need to take a magnifying glass to. Another design often mooted is that of a folding screen, examples of which have shown up at trade shows.
Microsoft research has indicated that a screen somewhere between 5in and 7in is about the minimum for comfortable working use. I'd say 7in is minimum for stylus input – smaller screens like that on the oQo and the Sony's UMPC are virtually unusable for handwriting.
The important point is that a comfortably-sized screen is too big to put in today's pockets. Ultra-mobiles and slightly smaller Mobile Internet Devices (Mids) are getting thinner and lightER, so that it is not inconceivable that pockets will be made larger to accommodate them.
But some crafty design around a scrolling screen could make that change unnecessary.
Wifi hype and crowded airwaves
The latest Ofcom report, Tomorrow's Wireless World, provides a nice counterbalance to the hype put out by the Wifi industry, which likes to pretend that there is no such thing as contention and that radio links are simple replacements for wires.
The report points out the obvious fact that the more devices that use the crowded unlicensed bands, particularly the 2.4GHz bands used by Bluetooth and Wi-fi, the more likely there will the contention and service degradation.
It is to launch a study of congestion to facilitate spectrum management, and it says much more needs to be known about how wireless propagates in and around buildings.
Perhaps this will be borne in mind by those people blithely promoting Wifi as a replacement for wired networks, rather than as an edge link to complement them.
The report also outline some possible future uses for wireless networks, some of them familiar to those of us who do the round of conferences.
So-called body-area networks could be used to monitor the vital organs of peope with ill health; home hubs could dispense pills and alert a doctor or carer if they are not taken; a smart inhaler could alert asthmatics of poor atmospheric conditions.
It suggests that RFID tags in stores could alert allergics to dangers in foods, cars could automatically alert the authorities when they crash, and also flash radio alerts of braking to a void cars running into each other.
Apple's hot Air and the advantages of a copyright dongle
A stroke of luck last week made me the owner of one of the latest MacBook Air notebooks. We are broad minded here at PCW and have always covered Mac news; some of our friends even use Macs. Time was when I used a Mac (for Quark Xpress) side by side with a PC and was well acquainted with the pros and cons of both designs, but it has been some time since I used one in earnest.
Three-in-one speaker system 'gives true stereo wherever you are'
Your reporter has to look at a lot of products and it seems that around 98 percent of those at events like last night's Digital Summer showcase (see Belkin story below) are iPod docks. This is unfair, because the real figure is around 50 percent but sometimes I feel that if I look at another one I shall scream.
Some of them are beautifully designed, though, and I particularly liked one called the T6 from an English company Orbitsound. For one thing it has a preamp that uses valves instead of transistors. The valves stick out of the top and you can imagine the electrons streaming across them, though of course the light comes from the heaters.
Like many of these devices it has a standard audio jack so that it can be used by those many people who use audio devices other than iPods.
The £199 (inc Vat) device comes with a single speaker cabinet, which is also interesting because Orbitsound says it reproduces true stereo wherever you are in a room. It does this by beaming three audio streams using a central speaker and two more at right angles.
The central one beams the result of adding the right and left audio channels. The left speaker beams the left channel minus the right channel, and the right speaker beams the right minus the left.
The sound of these side speakers contain the spatial information the ear uses to give a sense of direction, says . Heard separately they are unintelligible.
If you doubt that this will give true stereo, consider that Orbitsound does not regard the sound you get in headsets as such. It reasons that each ear is receiving a mono streams: if you were listening to the same audio stream on speakers your ears would receiving sound from both.
Orbitsound offers a smaller £79.99 (inc Vat) version of the T6 speakers called the T3, which is designed to hang around your neck, and a £349 (inc Vat) Soundbar designed for the living room.
Dell's business notebooks that get your fingers in a twist
Dell's new Vostro 1310 laptop appears to have a rather large flaw, according to new pics appearing on Flickr.
The bottom row of keys, starting with zxcv, are all one key to the right, so if you touch-type you're bang out of luck on this model.
US models don't have this flaw, which appears to be caused by an abnormally large left shift on UK keyboards. We're waiting for comment from Dell on this issue, but it might be worth spending a bit more doe on a dearer notebook for now.
Update 13:09, Dell's response:
A limited number of Dell Vostro 1310 and 1510 laptops in Europe have been sent out with the wrong keyboard layout. We are working diligently to offer a solution to impacted customers and correct the error before any additional units are shipped. We will be contacting impacted customers directly to both apologise and instruct them on next steps. This issue is under investigation, and we will come back with more detailed information as soon as possible. We will be acting as quickly as possible to find a satisfactory solution for our customers.
Belkin good kit for bootlegging
Vendors suddenly seem to have sensed a market for high-quality recording on the move. My review of the new Olympus LS-10 should be posted in the next couple of days. The company calls it a studio in the pocket, which is perhaps going a little over the top, but it is a very convenient (though not cheap) way to make very good stereo recording with a pocketable device. I liked the sample I reviewed so much that I bought it (reviewing can be an expensive business: I bought an Eee PC too).
Belkin is targeting a similar market with the device pictured here, which it was showing off at product showcase called Digital Summer, attended by a number of vendors in London last night. Belkin tells us that it it not quite ready for the market but will be on sale soon, and we were told little about it except that it it turns your iPod into a recording studio.
From the controls on the device tou can see that it takes stereo input from its own mics or from external devices.
Both of these devices will be of interest to musicians, radio journalists, podcasters, and even old steam print hacks. These are relatively small markets and one wonders if the big money is going to come from people who want to make bootleg recordings of concerts.
What happened to the LED projector?
In early 2006 I looked at one of the first LED projectors - the SP-P300ME. Since it used LEDs to project images as opposed to traditional lamps, it was incredibly small (172mm wide, 95mm deep), ultra-quiet and weighing just 700g.
With brightness rated at a pitiful 25 ansi lumens, it needed a near pitch black environment to display a viewable image, but it was the first of its kind and, as you can see from my first impressions, it was able to project a perfectly watchable 80in display.
The SP310 soon superseded it, but at a Samsung press event last Christmas I was told that there are no new LED models planned. Indeed, I've heard very little regarding new LED projectors from any manufacturers.
Yesterday, Optoma announced its latest 'miniature' projector - the EX330 (pictured below). Although the 165W lamp means it can project much brighter images, it's bigger, heavier and, at £821, is more expensive than Samsung's £499 LED model.
We'll be getting in a review model soon, but personally I'd like to see more LED projectors.
GTA IV smashes sales records
GTA IV broke the UK one-day selling records for a game when it launched on Tuesday this week, Chart Track has revealed.
Early estimates say a total of 609,000 copies were sold in the first day, whizzing past the previous record of 501,000, held by GTA: San Andreas in 2004.
Xbox 360 version sold 335,000 while the PS3 version racked up 274,000, both one-day records themselves for their respective consoles.
GTA IV could go on to break many other records, since an analyst at Wedbush Morgan has reportedly predicted 13 million sales worldwide are achievable by the year's end.
I was one of the many punters who queued for the game; but first I had to buy an Xbox 360. My only option was to buy the console bundled with three games because standalone copies of the game were sold out. And once I had added an extra controller, I was £290 out of pocket.
Now, realising my 15 year-old TV can't handle 60Hz Pal (needed by some Xbox360 games), I'm also going to have to buy a new TV. And since buying anything with less than a native 1080p mode and 1:1 pixel mapping (so I can use it as a big PC monitor) seems a waste of cashola, GTA IV is, in essence, going to cost me around £1,000. Great game though.
