Best New Technology

Lenovo’s X300 notebook, an ultra-thin model arriving just in time to take on Apple’s similarly skinny macbook air, received its official nod today. The gates are open, but why spend $2,500 or more on a laptop?

"It’s the best thing we’ve ever done," said Tom Ribble, Lenovo’s director of Thinkpad marketing. He rolled off a list of features that sounded like a denunciation of what Apple’s own new toy lacks: a DVD burner, triplet of USB ports, WWAN, GPS, an easily-replaceable battery and stereo speakers. "You don’t need to trade off. You don’t need to compromise."

It’s my own fault for hyping up that angle in our conversation. I couldn’t resist: though Ribble said the X300 has been in development a long time, it’s hard to ignore comparisons. Both models have custom-shrunken processors from Intel, though the 1.2 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo SL7100 LV in the X300 isn’t as beefy as the one in the Air.

Nor is it as thin: the X300 is a third of an inch thick at its sharpest point, whereas the Air is only 0.16" thick. And that classic IBM styling is more Cayce Pollard than Cupertino.

"We think the Thinkpad does look good," Ribble said. Business travelers, however, might prefer to slip out the DVD player and slip in an extra bay battery for 10 hours typing time.

With 4GB of RAM, a 64GB SSD and a 1440×900 13.3" display, the X300 weighs about 3lbs with the optical drive and has wired gigabit ethernet.

Ribble confirmed there’ll be no hard-drive option at a lighter price. This is, he said, simply a matter of not compromising.

It strikes me as a wise decision, albeit one that sets the entry level too high for most consumers. Looking at previous superthins, like the Sony X505 and Sharp Actius MM20, the killer was often poor performance — it’s easy to imagine an impatient business user quickly becoming frustrated with those pretty but puny machines.

This leads us to what both the X300 and MacBook Air share: a strict marketing mantra of "no compromises." What counts as compromise to a Mac user clearly differs from what counts as such to an IBM/Lenovo grognard, but both companies are singing from the same sheet. Announcing the Air last month, Apple CEO Steve Jobs was careful to point out that the new machine was not a subnotebook, as many expected it would be. It has a full-size keyboard and a mid-sized 13.3" screen.

Given the slow growth of genuine ultraportables, is thin the future for portable PCs?

Sony has just introduced a new dock for iPhone and iPods, that has the double function of working as an alarm clock - call it the ICF-ClipMK2.

In terms of functionality with the Apple products and making life easier for the users, there is a remote control to navigate on the iphone and ipod menus, so you can easily pick a song, change the volume, etc.

As for the alarm clock, it offers 3 ways to wake up: the normal and irritating buzzer, radio, or your favorite songs. While this is a dock made for iPods, you can also connect other players thanks to line-in jack, and the included cable.

The Sony ICF-ClipMK2 is priced at $100 and will become available in May.

Adjustable brightness control over the LCD display provides easy readability.

via Akihabara

MacBook Pro users will soon be pinching, swiping and rotating away along with their Air counterparts thanks to today’s refresh. But strangely, while Apple added its multitouch goodness to the high-end laptop, it neglected to alter the size of the trackpad.

Recall that the macbook air — Apple’s first notebook to incorporate some of the same multitouch gestures found on the iphone and ipod Touch — features a trackpad of substantial girth, the theory being that a larger pad facilitates these new multitouch gestures.

Some analysts expected that when Apple was ready to incorporate the same technology in its other notebooks (which does require a new trackpad and controller) the fatty variety would be incorporated too. Apparently not.

The reason for the omission, according to Yankee Group analyst Carl Howe, is entirely practical and related mainly to issues of design and consistency.

"The Pro has a lot more components than the Air," Howe says. "All those parts need electronics that connect to them. If you take the trackpad out of the Pro, you’ll notice that to the left and right of it there’s very little real estate."

So there you go. Adding a new, wider trackpad would likely require a complete redesign of the motherboard and some serious re-jiggering of the Pro’s innards — basically a MacBook Pro redesign. In the end, while Apple probably felt that multitouch was an important addition, it was one that warranted a complete design overhaul…yet. 

"This is not the revolutionary MacBok Pro, this is the evultionary one," Howe says.

Apple has quietly updated the MacBook Pro line, and it’s a pretty big bump. Most importantly, the pro notebook gets the macbook air’s multi touch pad. The 15″ models come in at 2.4 and 2.5Ghz, with 200GB and 250GB hard drives, respectively, and the 17″ shares specs with the top end 15″. All three come with the NVIDIA GeForce 8600M GT as standard, and all three keep the same prices as the previous lineup, starting at $2000.

Interestingly, the case design seems unchanged. The new trackpad, despite the multi touch features, doesn’t look to be any bigger than the old design, and Apple has chosen to keep the traditional keyboard instead of the sleek new pseudo-chiclet one found on every other Mac.

Product page [Apple]

I don’t know whether kids these days love to look for buried treasure in their own backyard with a metal detector, but I surely had a field day back in my early years. Here’s a way to make your very own metal detector for the more prudent dads who are reading this. All you need is an AM radio, some tape, and a calculator in order to produce a radio frequency signal which can bounce off metal, allowing the radio to produce a rather grating tone. Now if only I can dig out an AM radio with everything gone digital…

The Calmee Space from Fujitsu is one weird gadget that lets you dock your spare hard drives instead of stacking them up like a tower. No idea on whether the Calmee Space is compatible with just IDE, SATA, SCSI or all, but if it works with the former two in addition to being notebook hard drive-friendly, then it ought to be a pretty sweet buy. So far, we know that Fujitsu will be releasing the Calmee Space in Korea at the end of the month at an unknown price.

Nightflyer Discs
Don't let the sun go down on your fun, these Night-Flyer light-up flying discs allow you to play all day and all night (though that sounds very exhausting).

You can have this for ?9.99

For the last few days we have known that we would be getting some Apple news today, and Jobs and team did not disappoint. The announcement ended up being an incremental upgrade to the MacBook and MacBook Pro lines, each of which was ready for some changes. The big happenings were the addition of multi-touch to the Pro and the move to Penryn-based processors along both lines. Also 2GB of RAM become the new standard for most, but not all, of Apple’s notebooks.

The refresh that came out today was really just a collection of small upgrades which will make the MB and MBP competitive with the computers that have recently been coming out from other manufacturers. The MacBook received new processors (2.1GHz and 2.4GHz) and more storage (up to 250GB). The MacBook Pros got the multi-touch trackpad that we saw released on the Air, as well as faster processors (2.4GHz, 2.5GHz, and 2.6GHz), and improved graphics, with up to 512MB of video memory. The MBPs also moved to LED-backlighting across the line, though this is a $100 upgrade for the 17-inch models. The good news for prospective 17-inch buyers is that the display can be ramped up to 1920×1200 if you opt for the high resolution upgrade.

Read Apple’s press release for all the details.

So Oakley’s range of mp3 player sunglasses did not exactly capture the world’s imagination by storm, but they surely must have made a fair splash to warrant future releases. Jamiroquai has been roped in by Oakley to launch his limited special edition pair that shares similar hardware with the vanilla Split Thump sunglasses, save for the special white and purple camouflage pattern located on the arms and the lilac ‘O’ located at the integrated control system on the sides. Only 500 of such pairs will be made available through the world, with 50% of that amount in the UK for obvious reasons. Each $569 purchase comes with a couple of pre-loaded Jamiroquai songs that consist of exclusive remixes from his album launched 15 years ago - Emergency on Planet Earth. This is a wee bit too expensive for my taste, how about you?

When Sony first announced the Mylo Com2 during CES, they also announced the upcoming availability of Mylo Labs. The labs will allow users to join the developers community and create their own personal widgets that they can then share with other Mylo users.

The Mylo Com2 comes with a few widgets pre-installed to include Google Search, Facebook Notifier, My Contacts and YouTube. In addition to the opening of the Mylo Labs, Sony will also be adding other “official” widgets on a regular basis.

Currently there are some additional widgets available for download to include a calculator, world clock and to-do list. The Developers page will be opening in March for you to begin creating your very own.

Read [SonyStyle]

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