Wednesday, October 8th, 2008
The Wind hasn’t been around for that long but the latest news shows that MSI are keen to dig even deeper into the lucrative netbook market. The folks over at EnGadget have posted an article which suggests that the Wind U120 will be arriving in November. On top of that, the U100 will soon be available from a “large national retailer,” - no specifics here as yet. And, as you’d expect, the Wind U120 (Wind 2 as it’s been called) will hit the US first - you’d never believe they used to be one of OUR colonies ;).
Director of US sales for MSI has stated that the Wind 2 will feature “a whole new look,”. Some of the specs already in the wild include new HDD / SSD options and inbuilt 3.5G WWAN connectivity for under $600. There’s no news on a UK price yet but I reckon it’ll come in at around £450 (based on the specs we already know).
Yesterday we posted an article regarding the forthcoming Eee PC S101 which should make a formidable sparring partner for MSI.
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Tuesday, October 7th, 2008
The PC manufacturer Asus have decided it’s time to take on Apple in the super-slim computer market. The new Eee PC S101 is said to be a much cheaper alternative to the hugely popular MacBook Air and, according to Asus has a better spec.
Here’s what’s on offer:
- Intel Atom processor
- Intel 945 Express (GMA 950) graphics
- 10.2-inch screen (1,024 x 768)
- 3 x USB ports
- built-in 4-in-1 card reader
- Ethernet port
- Wi-Fi
- Bluetooth
- Battery life of about five hours
- weight - under a kilo
- 18-25mm thick plus multitouch trackpad.
The S101 will come in two flavours - crappy old Windows XP Home versions (16GB SSD), with two Linux versions featuring 32GB or 64GB of SSD. Following in the Asus tradition of not quite giving the users all they want you’ll find the S101 fitted with a 0.3-megapixel webcam!
The S101 will be available in a range of colours to suit all, well, just about all. The latest Eee PC should be with us in November with a rumoured price tag of about £449. Not as cheap as my Akoya mini, which I really like. We’ll test run it when we get hold of the S101.
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Tuesday, October 7th, 2008
Not only have Blackberry added new features like copy and paste to their handsets but they’re also going after Apple’s home turf with their own Application Centre. The new service will be launched on version 4.7 of the Blackberry OS (the OS on the Blackberry Storm).
The Application Centre is designed to function in pretty much the same way as Apple’s App Store; users can find, browse and install/upgrade 3rd party BlackBerry apps hosted by carriers. This means that the Application Center is effectively an interface between the user and the carriers application offerings. The interface will also provide users with a description and marketing information about each application.
The complete solution will consist of a device based application talking to backend sesrved hosted by RIM that the application will interact with to retrieve up to date application list of applications hosted by the carriers.
Application Centre Features
- Available on OS 4.7 Storm devices
- designed for the Storm touch screen UI
- Carriers will be responsible for hosting the application data and sending updates to the directory to RIM.
- Users will be shown a list of all install candidate applications based on the hanset model and OS version. Incompatible applications will not be displayed
- One click installation of applications
- Users can delete apps from within the App Centre
- Notifications on application status will be delivered through the interface i.e. last update of the app list, notification of application updates etc
- The Application Centre checks for updates daily.
There’s some debate over the actual launch date of Application Centre with some sites suggesting it may not even be available when the Blackberry Storm is launched. It’s either a case of the app not being ready or, more simply, may mean that RIM has done rather a good job of hiding the progress. Either way, the Blackberry Application Centre will no doubt be a massive hit with users - as long as the carriers keep the prices down.
images courtesy of crackberry.com
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Monday, October 6th, 2008
Good news for all you fringsters - you can now talk, chat and interact with other fring users on your Apple iPhone and iPod touch. That includes all of the the fring online communities as well -Skype, MSN, Google Talk, ICQ, Twitter, Yahoo! & AIM.
Some of you are already aware that an R&D version of this iPhone app has been around since April this year. What nobody expected at the time was the sheer volumre of responses that were received in the intervening months. fring took in all consumer feedback and used this information to build what looks to be an excellent application. The fring app (available through Apple’s App Store) lets users join the fring community and use their applications on the move.
fring is huge - covering users in over 200 countries around the globe. With the consistent growth of the iPhone 3G’s user base I’d expect the fring app to be a big hit.
In case you haven’t heard of fring, here’s a bit more info:
- launched in 2007
- users in 200 countries around the world
- mobile internet community
- service allows users to talk, chat and interact with other fringsters and their internet communities from their mobile phones
- fringsters can also communicate with contacts from Skype®, MSN®, Google Talk™, ICQ, Twitter, Yahoo!™ & AIM
- has its own Voice over Internet Protocol (mVoIP) and is optimized for the 3G network
- best of all, fring is 100% free to download and use - no subscription costs. You just pay for the data you use on your network
- fring is supported on about 1000 of the worlds most popular mobile handsets - see www.fring.com for a list of all supported
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Friday, October 3rd, 2008
Considering recent events (like the Yahoo deal/no deal/deal/no deal) you would have thought that Steve Ballmer would choose his words more carefully. Guess what? He’s spinning the same old lines. This time he’s been talking about the Google G1 handset. Apparently, Microsoft aren’t the least big worried about losing market share - because they don’t think the G1 has the grunt to compete!
At the recent PDC here in the UK, Ballmer stated that the G1 won’t cut it because “they’ve got one handset maker, we’ve got 55. They’re available through one operator, we’ve got 175.” Err, didn’t he say pretty much the same thing about the iPhone? I think the phrase ‘iphone enterprise adoption’ sort of sums it up! Oh, I mustn’t forget the huge community behind the open source Android OS.
You also have to consider if this is a collective viewpoint within Microsoft. If so, do they really think that the netbook/UMPC/MID community are in the same boat? i.e. only MS products will gain acceptance in an ever growing market? Guess again MS. Linux is creeping up behind you in the form of ultra mobile products are pushing acceptance of the free OS by taking out the complexity that has long been associated with Linux. Point, click and go!
If MS continues their ‘head up their own arses’ approach they can expect to lose significant market share and soon. Yeah, go for it Microsoft!
P.S Although Motorola haven’t firmly committed to the G1 just yet I think you’ll see them jumping onboard pretty soon.
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Thursday, October 2nd, 2008
Not content with building and selling laptops, PC’s, UMPC’s and netbooks, Lenovo has decided to dig into another market sector. The Lenovo P960 mobile phone features…a fingerprint scanner! No, really. Here’s what MobileWhack had to say:
“We might find many laptops packing a fingerprint scanner, but there aren’t many in the mobile realm that could boast of this feature. Still, it is not the most sought after feature in a cell phone like GPS or 3G support (which the Lenovo P960 clearly lacks with dual-band GSM and GPRS support). The P960 (not to be confused with the Samsung SGH-P960) has a big enough 2.8-inch touchscreen display and a passable 1.3 megapixel camera, but there are other features that could come in handy if you are a government agent or a mistrustful husband. Apart from the fingerprint scanner, the P960 also has a “VIP recording” feature that will record calls automatically from designated numbers for later perusal and unbound merriment. ”
As yet, there’s no specific information around this handset. Once we get more info and pricing we’ll let you know.
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Wednesday, October 1st, 2008
‘6 on 6′ - basically, it means IE 6 running on Windows Mobile 6.1. This might not seem like a big deal for many Windows users until you consider this - the code base for the current version of IE on Win Mobile is basically IE 4.x (circa 1997!). Scarey, eh?
Even though the code is being updated it looks like MS are definitely going for the retro look - look at the scroll bars in the shot below. Remind you of any massively outdated browsers?
I’ll update you when I have a hands on. To be honest, there are other browsers aimed at the mobile market which look good and give great functionality i.e Opera 9.5. The likes of Mozilla are also at the gates so MS had better come up with a compelling offer or we could see them losing out in the mobile market.
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Thursday, September 25th, 2008
The Glofiish M810 reminds of the HTC handsets; attractive and functional. But there’s more to this high spec, Windows Mobile enabled device than just pleasing lines. The M810 has a huge range of features including GPS, HSDPA, FM Radio, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, software add-ons galore, video calling…pretty impressive, eh? That said, the M810 isn’t cheap - around £400 for a SIM free handset! One really interesting aspect is the ability to send your current position (Lats and Longs pull from GPS data) via an SMS message which could be handy in an emergency.
The Glofiish M810 features a 2.8-inch screen with only two softkey buttons - one for calling and the sedcond for ending a call. If you need anymore functionality you’ll need to pop out the sliding keyboard.
Battery life is apparently around 6 hours of talk time and 5 hours of GPS usage. Not great but fairly reasonable. In itself this handset doesn’t bring anything new to the table but, if you’re interested, will give you all the features of a top of the range Windows Mobile device - at a price!
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Wednesday, September 24th, 2008
I’d never heard of Porient until I went over to Pocketables and found an article on these tablet devices and I must admit that I’m pretty impressed. There have been a few versions of the Porient tablet, the latest being the H12 (which replaces the H9). The H12 is a pretty attractive that easily fits in the hand (4.8″ ). Another interesting point to note is that the H12 has no hard disk - but it does run a Linux OS. Powering the device is an Xscale processor (yeah, it’s not a scratch on the latest devices running the Intel Atom but it still usable for internet browsing. To be fair, event he Nokia N800 can outperform the H12 in just about every department. - apart from price. TechCrunch are proposing a tablet device for $199 - if they decided to base it on the H12 they could take the market by storm.
You’ve probably guessed that there aren’t any pricing details as yet but Pocketables are in contact touch with Porient so we might hear something soon. We’ll keep you posted.
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Tuesday, September 23rd, 2008
The battle for the netbook market just got a little hotter. Averatec already have a good name in the laptop market so this looks like a logical move into the UMPC/netbook sector. This piece of hardware, the Buddy netbook, is yet another device that seems to be pushing at the boundaries between notebook and netbook. The Buddy features a 10.2 inch screen (1024×600 resolution) which puts it amongst the larger netbooks currently on the market.
Even though this is a fairly large netbook don’t expect any huge surprises under the bonnet. The Buddy is powered by the new Intel Atom N270 1.6GHz processor. In addition, the standard unit ships with 1GB of DDR2 memory, Intel GMA950 integrated graphics, a 160GB hard drive and WiFi connectivity. Bear in mind that this is a netbook, designed for mobile use and browsing - it wasn’t built for die hard gaming fanatics which means these hardware specifications should be more than adequate for the intended target market. The Buddy looks to be shipping with Windows XP Home but what’s to stop you installing your choice of Linux? t
Pricing - $449 from all major online retailers. Customers can also order theirs direct from Averatec.
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