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Asus unveils £449 touchscreen desktop
Asus has launched a smart-looking touchscreen looking faintly like HP TouchSmart series but with a smaller screen and at a fraction of the price. The Eee Top 1602 packs a PC into 15.6in widescreen monitor, packing a mic and a 1.3megapixel camera for video calls, and costs just £449 in Vat.
It runs XP Home on a Atom N270 processor with 1GB Ram, and uses what Asus calls Express Gate technology to boot in a claimed eight seconds.
Also unveiled at the Stuff show in London was a rather eccentric design called the Bamboo, a high-end notebook expressing Asus's "commitment to green principles".
The company points out that the tensile strength of bamboo rivals that of many metals, including steel, and is "possibly the perfect renewable resource" as it regenerates at a rate of up to 60cm a day,
There are 11.1in and 12.1in versions, weighing respectively 1.25Kg and 1.57Kg, and using a 2.53GHz Core 2 Duo processor with 4GB or Ram. Prices start at £1349 inc Vat.
"Frameless" LCD panel unveiled
Nikkei's Tech-On blog reports that AU Optoelectronics of Taiwan has shown off a 'frameless' 2.2in LCD panel at the FPD International 2008 exhibition. The effect is created by placing a clever lens on top of the panel that refracts light near the edges, giving the illusion of a frameless display.
The picture here shows two of the panels placed side-by-side.
Try Humyo synchronisation for free
Online storage site Humyo.com is offering users of the free version of its service a 14-day trial of its new client, which includes a synchronisation feature similar that in the Live Mesh service being developed by Microsoft.
Both services, as we reported yesterday, provide online storage accessible from any browser. Synchronisation allows files changed on one machine to be updated automatically on others, as well as being backed up in secure remote storage.
Microsoft's Live Mesh is at the public test stage. Humyo's synchronisation is available in version 2.0 of its client software, which transforms remote storage into a virtual hard disk addressable as a drive letter Do you use more than one computer?
Humyo offered synchronisation previously but says the engine has been completely revamped in the new version.
Windows 7 gets its head in the cloud
PCW's Tim Anderson was trying out the new Windows 7 at the Microsoft Professional Developers Conference yesterday. Iain Thomson, our Man in America, was also there, concluding the new operating system looks like everything Vista should have been but wasn't.
Meanwhile techie hacks like myself, stuck in wintry London, were also being briefed on the changes to come.
John Curran, head of Windows Client for the UK, got off to a bad start by promising that W7 will run on Vista hardware. None of that buying a new machine and then finding you have to upgrade it to cope with the new OS. This, he said, was a core aim of the new code.
Now this may well turn out to be the case, given that Microsoft is trying to streamline the code. But having been given this promise before every major Windows launch since Windows 95, only to be find that upgrades were needed, I begged leave to be sceptical until W7 is launched - which will be late 2009 or 2010 on current schedule. (It was also the case with Windows 3.0, the first version to take off, but there was some excuse then because hardware was still way short of the needs of current software).
Also, clearly, touch screens will be needed to take full advantage of promised improvements in gesture control and handwriting recognition. Few current desktops have touch screens. I've tried HP's lovely TouchSmart PC, which is great for tasks such as flicking through photo albums; but touch input adds comparatively little to the sit-up-and-beg mode of using a computer and is not a compelling reason to upgrade a desktop monitor.
It is dangerous to make predictions on such matters, but it does seem possible that mobile and desktop interfaces will diverge to the extent that they will have completely different front ends. This has already happened with Apple's iTouch, but that is not a proper workface. Anyway, Curran says there is no chance of W7 having different faces for the mobile and desktop.
The increased emphasis on non-keyboard input also raises questions about the hardware. Much of it would benefit from specialist processors, or processor cores, rather than dumping all the work onto a general-purpose device. Microsoft will presumably be encouraging hardware designers to optimise for the emerging software, taking W7 machines further away from current designs.
Before I get into the cloud, here's some of Curran's W7 bullet points:
• The OS will retain the Vista kernel to avoid the compatibility problems that happened with the transition from XP.
• The taskbar is to be revamped, organising icons into groups. If you hover over an icon it will be enlarged.
• Home networking will be more plug-and-play, using "home groups" similar to Vista's workgroups. It will be far easier for the family to share (or not) files and resources like printers.
• Leading on from this. You will be able to push content to devices using technologies such as UPnP and DNLA - provided, of course, that the devices are compliant. For instance you could tell you PC to play a video on your kitchen TV.
Two other benefits are of more interest to companies:
• Bit Locker, offering full drive encryption, will be extended to USB drives. Any W7 machine will be able to decrypt your data
• Direct Access. Secure remote access will be built into W7, allowing you to connect easily to your home or office machine with the security of a VPN without the hassle of setting it up.
The cloud on the horizon appears with Microsoft's announcement that it is to drop Vista's Calendar,Mail, Photo Gallery, Movie Maker, and Contacts applications. This small and apparently pointless move is in fact a counterstrike against Google, which is offering a suite of office applications that can be used on and offline.
Microsoft will offer online versions of the client apps, plus cut down versions of apps such as Word, that can be used online via a browser using a variety of devices. Also available will be a set of client apps that you can download - or that may be bundled with a PC, if the vendor wishes.
Presumably vendor wishes are being considered because one reason Microsoft got into trouble with the anti-trust authorities was the accusation that it was using the Windows desktop to push its own products at the expense of rivals. That particular issue looks rather dated now, considering the power of Google and the way Apple shamelessly locks its users into its services.
The point of the client apps, which Google also offers, is to combine the advantages of online and offline work, Online work can be accessed by any computer and is automatically saved, but you need a good connection; the client apps allow you to keep local copies, work on them offline, and then synchronise files when you go back online.
What this is going to do to Microsoft's lucrative Office suite revenues is anyone's guess but the company has long known that it could not corner the market for ever. All the processing will be done on the new Azure platform and its awesome data centres. Each user will have 5GB of free storage space.
One of the most interesting new offerings is called Live Mesh, a beta version of which you can try out now. If you use several computers you can set up a "mesh ring* with a shared storage space accessible by any of them. You can set up folders just like on you own PC and any changes to documents will be mirrored on any of your meshed computers when they go online.
Online storage sites Humyo already offers something like this but Microsoft is taking the idea further. For one thing any meshed computer can have remote desktop access to any other one in the same ring. Also you can invite other people into the mesh to share folders and enable collaboration on projects.
Live Mesh product manager Ian Moulster says it is also possible to build applications on the Mesh platform.
All this adds up to a sharp change of direction by Microsoft, perhaps its biggest since it jumped on to the web bandwagon. It was behind the curve on that one but managed to strongarm itself into a leading position. Its rivals these days (unlike browser pioneer Netscape) are too big to bully and even if they weren't Microsoft could not get away with crushing them.
Windows 7 is still perhaps 15 months away, which is a long time for Google and Amazon and the rest to get their heads firmly established in the Cloud.
Gold USB drive defies recession
Good to know the recession has yet to bite everywhere. California memory specialist Super Talent is selling s limited edition of an 8GB 18-carat gold USB memory drive etched with your chosen text or graphics at a dealer price of $599. The one concession to the economic uncertainty on the company blurb is a warning that the price may fluctuate. The price of gold is rising as buyers rush to it as a haven in the financial storm but whether the bling drive would qualify as an investment must be questionable. And would you entrust your precious data to an device that is asking to get stolen? But it does come with AES-256 encryption.
Pinnacle TV-to-go to stay
Avid has clarified aspects of its sale of the Pinnacle PCTV line, which we report today. Hauppauge will continue to develop and support both the hardware and software components of Pinnacle's PCTV product line when the deal has been finalised, a co. This means the PCTV teams based in Braunschweig, Germany, will not lose their jobd.
Hauppauge is NOT taking over the following product lines: Pinnacle PCTV to go, Soundbridge, ShowCenter, Pinnacle Video Transfer. Avid will continue to support these. Hauppauge will take full responsibility of customer support and after-sales services for all PCTV products, though exact terms and conditions have yet to be defined.
Sonos boosts net radio system
Sonos has released two free software downloads allowing its home-networked audio players to be controlled from an iPhone and providing enhanced access to more than 15000 web radio stations.
The iPhone controller, available from Apple's App Store, allows you to control the music playing in any room containing a Sonos player.
Senior product manager Craig Wisneski said the company had made a point of ensuring that new software always runs on all of its legacy products.
Sonos System Software 2.7 comes with a new radio guide that allows you to search or browse for radio stations, and add any you like to a favourites list. It now supports the RTSP streaming protocol, expandings its radio coverage.
The company introduced two new products in August: the £349 Sonos ZonePlayer 120 (ZP120), its smallest player yet; and the £249 Sonos ZonePlayer 90 (ZP90), which allows existing home theatre and audio equipment to be controlled by the Sonos system. Both use the SonosNet 2.0 wireless mesh system, with double the range of the previous version. A two-room system with both these devices pls a controller costs £699.
Google Earth for iPhone launched
Never one to spurn a platform, Google has just launched a multitouchy-feely iPhone-friendly version of Google Earth. Available for free through the iTunes AppStore for iPhones or the iPod Touch, you can now visit those far-flung places from the comfort of your handset.
Badaboom harnesses graphics card
NVidia has been pushing its CUDA software-developer kit and C compiler for some time as a way to use the massive parallelism of its graphics processing units (GPUs) to take on tasks currently done by the central processor. Yoking graphics cards together using its SLI technology can provide supercomputer-class processing of tasks that can make use of the parallelism.
This is generally of interest to academics and others who need to crunch a lot of lnumbers for tasks such as visualization. But for the first time a consumer (well, geeky consumer) application has gone on sale.
Badaboom, which costs $29.99 from the nVidia and Elemental Technologies, harnesses nVidia GPUs to "dramatically" reduce the time to convert video formats for use by media players. A trial version will also be available for download.
'Smallest' wireless colour laser
Samsung has launched what it claims is the smallest wireless multifunction colour laser printer. The CLX-3175FW integrates the functions of a copier, printer, scanner and fax in a product measuring just 41.5 by 37.3 x 34.2cm. It offers 2400dpi x 600dpi print resolution and is designed for a workload of up to 20,000 pages per month. Prices have yet to be announced.
Vista Service Pack 2 beta released this week
According to the official Windows Vista Team blog, the first developer beta of Service Pack 2 for Windows Vista will be released on Wednesday 29th October.
The blog states that SP2 adds the following features to Vista:
- Windows Vista SP2 adds Windows Search 4.0 for faster and improved relevancy in searches.
- Windows Vista SP2 contains the Bluetooth 2.1 Feature Pack supporting the most recent specification for Bluetooth Technology.
- Ability to record data on to Blu-Ray media natively in Windows Vista.
- Adds Windows Connect Now (WCN) to simplify Wi-Fi Configuration.
- Windows Vista SP2 enables the exFAT file system to support UTC timestamps, which allows correct file synchronization across time zones.
There's no indication when the final release of SP2 will be.
Hate photo scanning? Get someone else to do it
Let's face it, digitising old photos isn't the most exciting way to spend a weekend. But if you want an easy solution, scanning service Click2Scan might be able to help. From just £19.99 for 150 photos, they'll take your pics (you need to send them in via registered post), scan them to JPEG format at 300dpi and send them back to you on a CD (with your original pics, of course). 600dpi scans are also available at extra cost.
And for £69.99, they're currently offering a 7in. digital photo frame preloaded with up to 240 of your digitised pics.
Click2Scan also offers other services such as DVD slideshows & photo books.
3 gets in on the 3G router act
We reported on T-Mobile's cute little 3G router on the Test Bed earlier. Now 3 has followed suit with the Huwaei D100 wireless router.
Costing £69.99 for a one-off purchase, this little box gives 802.11g Wifi access to your 3G USB dongle (only 3-branded dongles are supported). It's available in black or white, and includes a single wired Ethernet port.
Super Talent launches 64GB USB stick
Time was when a 1GB USB stick could cost you a major body part. How times have changed, with the latest 64GB Luxio models from Super Talent retailing (in the US only at present) at around $149 (currently £91, but increasing rapidly).
These premium drives come in a gift box with a custom leather carry case and a choice of wood-grain (pictured), black or silver finish.
Evening with Colossus
Tony Sale, who led the team rebuilding the wartime Colossus codebreaking computer, will give a talk at The National Museum of Computing, Bletchley Park, on 6 November at 7pm. He we also demonstrate how Colossus broke the World War Two Lorenz SZ42 cipher. See here for booking details.
Only in the past few years has it become half-way clear how much the codebreakers affected the course of the war. On November 30 Sir Martin Gilbert will give a lecture at Bletchley Park, entitled 'Churchill and Enigma', in which he will examine the wartime leaders policies and show the place of signals Intelligence in the evolution of strategy. Tickets cost £10. To pre-book for limited places available contact Victoria Pether on 01908 640404 or email info@bletchleypark.org.uk
It's time for someone to chance their ARM on a proper mobile
An irony of Apple's sensational switch to Intel processors was that the company has done more than any other to show that the classic x86 PC engines are not the be-all-and-end-all of personal computing. Apple's iTouch and iPhone use ARM-based processors to provide a revolutionary way to view content and messages on the move.
Their success has overshadowed the fact that they only do half the job. They deliver information, but their facilities for inputting information are rudimentary. The almost universal view among device makers is that this is all people want in a device of this kind: that if they need to input, they will buy a notebook.
Yet, if this is the case, why do people bust their fingers and squint at tiny screens to send text messages and emails on machines patently unsuitable for the task?
Notebook makers for years claimed that people did not want small machines. At launch after launch for at least a decade, I bored product managers to death asking why they did not make true portables. People did not want them, they said. Journalists want them, because they need to work on the move. But journalists are a niche market.
It might also have been that journalists knew what they were talking about, having used proper mobiles from the mid-1980s when the Tandy 100 and 102 were standard issue for hacks.
They were little more than portable word processors and email machines with a four-line (later eight-line) screen, but they had an excellent keyboard and ran for days on a set of AAs.
People were using them for more than a decade because there was nothing around as good. Vendors were taken aback by the success of mini-notebooks but we old hacks weren't.
Intel is trying to push down power consumption to give modern true portables a battery life comparable to those two-decades-old Tandys. Yet ARM-based systems-on-a-chip, as used in Apple's handhelds, can already deliver all-day, instant-on computing given the larger batteries enabled by the emerging ultra-mobile formats; and they are becoming both more powerful and more power efficient. A couple of ARM-cored minis have appeared on the market but they have been disappointing, to say the least (see here for a view of the Cuol mini).
Apple seems uninterested in designing an ultra-mobile. Steve Jobs, at the launch of the latest Apple portables, pooh-poohed the idea of touch screens in larger devices and declared a "wait and see" strategy with regard to the smaller MID format.
This could simply be a case of Apple holding its cards close to its chest; if not, Apple could be making a big mistake. It seems plain to me that we are evolving the new book, the working and playing platform of the future, and one you can write on as well as read.
My hunch, again going against vendor consensus, is that it will be more or less general purpose and that today's narrow-focus products are transient designs destined for the dustbin of history.
The new mobile will be larger than the Apple handhelds, if only because it will use handwriting recognition, which is too fiddly on small screens. And it will be pocketable, even if we have to reinvent pockets, though the development of folding or scrolling screens could mean that we will not need to. It's anyone's guess when or whether the keyboard will disappear, but you can always use an auxilliary one if need be.
Another crucial development will be a good screen surface for writing on - a failure of every tablet I have ever seen.
The technology is already half-way there for these developments. There is more than a little scope here for a seminal design and if Apple doesn't do it, someone else will. Either that or we shall have to wait for Intel chips to get a lot less thirsty.
22in widescreen for £109.99
Monitor vendor HANNSG, is offering a 22in monitor with twin 1w speakers for just £109.99 inc. VAT. The company itself describes the HG221AP widescreen as "basic in design an connectivity" though it offers 1680x1050 resolution and a reasonable 5ms response time. The only inputs are VGA and audio. It is available now from Misco online with a three-year warranty. The same site has a Fujitsu 22in for £117 in Vat,
£59 3D webcam up for award
There is something extremely eerie about 3D video telephony judging from my own limited experience, a few years back at the Cebit show in Germany. I turned a corner and suddenly found myself talking to a man 300 miles away.
It was obvious that the life-sized 3D image in front of me was not a physically present person, but all the visual cues that give us a sensation of 3D person were there. The effect was startling - far greater than the difference between mono and stereo audio - and showed how much we miss in 2D images.
Now comes news of a 3D webcam aimed at the consumer market. The British-designed Minonu has just been shortlisted for the US Consumer Electronics Show award. It will cost less than $100 (£59), and comes with five pairs of bi-colour spectacles for 3D viewing.
It can be used with Windows Live Messenger, Skype, AOL Instant Messenger, OoVoo and other video conferencing packages. It will also act as a normal 2D webcam.
PDT, the company behind it, is looking for distributors worldwide. See here for picture gallery.
CMC system promises plug-and-play laptop recovery
CMS has launched a backup system designed to provide foolproof instant system recovery for notebook users whose hard drives fail.
The ABSplus drive system combines a shock-resistant USB drive with BounceBack software that automatically backs up all the files in a hard drive. If this crashes, or gets a virus, you can simply plug in the ABSplus drive and boot from that.
The drive uses a standard 2.5in notebook disk that can be taken out and installed in the crashed notebook if necessary.
CMS president Ken Burke said rival hard-disk recovery products tended to simply mirror the system being protected. The ABSplus system does this in the first instance and then backs up only changes - and you can choose to encrypt sensitive files.
"There is no point in having a back-up system that is to difficult for people to use. Our system is designed simply to work when you plug it in," he said.
Prices start at around £100 for an 80GB system.
EEE PC SSDs available 'in weeks'
More on the low-cost solid-state-disks deasigned for EEE PCs, news of which we reported yesterday: Vendor Super Talent says they will fit all but "some of the lower-end models that do have the mini PCIe slot." UK distributor Simms will probably get some in stock in a few weeks. "You can also check with our UK etailers, Scan and Aria," says the company. They will also be stocked by US etailers NewEgg and eWiz).
Using a camera as a scanner needs an HP-style stitch-up
Graphical invites are one of the minor irritations of life as a technie journalist (indeed, I guess, anyone who gets these things by email). PR companies like to project themselves as being smart and trendy, and plain vanilla email text is, well... so common. So they hire a designer at vast expense to send out a beautiful design with all the details of the time and venue of some launch event.
The trouble is that plain vanilla text is preferable because you can simply paste it into your calendar. If the information is in a graphical format you have to type it all over again. This is not so hard if you have twin screens; otherwise you have to contrive to get the image in view on the same screen as your calendar.
Abbyy has just launched a product called FotoReader, which comes with with a utility that in theory gets round this. It will turn screen images of text into text files.
The main purpose of the software it to translate digital camera images of text, enabling you to use your camera as a portable scanner. The feature has be part of some optical-character-recognition (OCR) packages for some time but Fotoreader is sold as a £39.99 standlone.
The difference between OCR-ing a scanned image and a camera shot is that the latter tends to introduce distortion according to where the picture was taken from. The Abbyy utlity allows for this.
From the bumff we have on the software, the utility does lack one desirable feature, which was the star act of HP's excellent Capshare handheld scanner of around a decade ago: it stitched scanned images together.
You would be hard put to take a single camera image of a broadsheet news page that was not heavily distorted, or taken from so far away as to be unsuitable for OCR. With the HP software you could take two or three scans and stitch them together at the click of a button.
Still, FotoReader sounds interesting and we will be reviewing it soon.
T-Mobile shows off the G1
We were finally allowed to get our paws on a T-Mobile G1 Android last night, though sadly not for long enough to give it a sensible review. First off, it has to be said that its importance (if any) is more as a new platform rather than as a new device.
The G1 is not as funky as Apple's iPhone, and if it were not for the involvement of Google, and the interest in Android, I am not sure that it would have got any more attention than some of the other phones in T-Mobile's range.
This is not because the design is bad; quite the contrary. It is because the fuss over the iPhone has obscured how good rival mobiles have got.
That said, the G1 is a useful, well designed little device offering some of the gesture navigation of the iPhone. Below the screen are four buttons for answer, home page, go back, and hang-up, plus a rather sensuous little trackball that doubles as Enter and facilitates navigation very well. In addition, a central menu button brings up an on-screen choice of applications: dialler, contacts, browser, and maps.
The screen slides across and back to reveal a five-line qwerty keyboard - one feature it has over the iPhone.
The 3.2in TFT 320x480 touchscreen is bright and responsive and a microSD slot at the side allows you to expand storage to a (theoretical) 32GB from the on-board 256MB of ROM and 192MB of Ram.
T-Mobile confirmed pricing as free with a £40-a-month contract for a minimum 18-months, but it will be offered at an unspecified price on cheaper pre-pay deals. There will be a "soft cap" of 3GB downloads a month, which means you will be hassled to upgrade your contract if your exceed it regularly.
Incidentally, T-Mobile also demonstrated this little docking station that allows you to share a 3g data connection in the home. You link to it using Wifi and it links to the web. It doubles as a router but there is just one hard ethernet port at the rear. Presumably the reasoning is that if you are relying on a 3G connection for your internet needs you are not ablout to hook in a lot of devices. The share dock is free with a £20-a-month contract.
Firewire travels further with Lindy
A big advantage of Firewire is that is supports peer-to-peer links, allowing you to swap data between devices without the help of a PC. A snag is that it only work across a a distance of less than 10 metres. Lindy's Firewire extender extends this to 70 metres using Cat5 (or higher) cable. It costs £249.99 inc Vat.
Yahoo gives home a makeover
Search portal Yahoo! is to give its home page the biggest ever makeover, merging the current general and personalised views.
The new look is part of a drive to shake off the dust of Microsoft's failed (so far) takeover bid and to emerge from the shadow of Google.
Janine Shaw, EU director of Yahoo Front Page and My Yahoo, claimed the Yahoo portal is the world's most used home page, with 31 million unique users in Europe alone.
The new home page (click thumbnail fro larger image) is currently being beta tested by a small number of users. Ithas a cleaner and less cluttered look than its predecessor, with a sidebar at screen left providing access to personal information such as email, finance, and local cinema listings and bews about friends and contacts pulled from services such as My Space.
Third-party vendors can use an open API to develop applications to plug into this space. Users will be able to choose which the use.
In the central column, in addition to running news and features, there will be headlines from national newspapers, selectable by tabbed title. Clicking on a story will take you to the newspaper site.
Some in the newspaper industry have complained that Google gets advertising revenue from the back of their content, and should therefore pay for flagging it. But Shaw said papers had been co-operating with the Yahoo! system as it generated traffic to their sites.
Other innovations planned by Yahoo include smarter searching, with pop-up boxes auto-completing search terms. Yahoo! has launched a service called Boss (Build your own Search Servce), allowing companies to customise its search engine for their own sites.
(It's an unfortunate acronym for South Africa, where the term stood for the notorious Bureau of State Security in the worst years of the apartheid regime).
The new home page will be introduced next year, after a series of rolling beta versions with progressively more users,
