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News Week of April 20, 2008Making a Big Point With Your PC Pen He looked, in vain, for a program that would enlarge the cursor. And finally he gave in, remembered he was a computer scientist, and wrote a program himself. The result is PenAttention, and it turns that minuscule dot into a minuscule dot with a big colored spotlight around it. It’s a little more distracting to write with this kind of cursor, but his class can finally see what he is doing. The program is free, works on tablet PCs running XP and Vista, and can be downloaded from a link in Mr. Mock’s blog post describing it. (Source Josh Fischman, The Chronicle of Higher Education) More than a PDA, less than a laptop Most notebook makers love to brag about how big their screens are; Fujitsu has turned that around by making one of the smallest convertible tablet PCs on the market. The LifeBook U810 weighs in at just 725 grams and measures 17 by 15.25 centimetres and is 2.5 cm thick. Called an Ultra Portable PC, this machine would easily fit on a drop-down economy-class food table, but the shrunken keyboard and screen are too small for much more than simple document review and Web searching. For those with aging eyes or poor vision, it's a real struggle. (Source: Ian Harvey, The Globe and Mail) MobileTechRoundup 130 HOSTS: James Kendrick (Houston), Matt Miller (Seattle) and Kevin C. Tofel (Philadelphia) TOPICS: Fujitsu LifeBook P1620 Unless your name is Mini Me, this ultra-portable, tablet-convertible notebook might be a tad inconvenient to use. Its keys are approximately 1.4cm wide and the entire keyboard is 22.5cm wide, so it's almost impossible to type more than a few words at a time without hitting the wrong key. Thankfully, the notebook can be turned into a tablet, so you can write on its passive 8.9in screen and copy your text to an open document. The screen doesn't pick up movements and gestures with perfect accuracy — especially when writing in cursive — but it does a decent-enough job. Once you get used to it, you can write fairly successfully using the supplied pen; it will also recognise human touch. This wasn't a problem: we could lean on the screen comfortably without affecting the pen input. Inside the tiny chassis of the P1620, Fujitsu has installed an Intel Core 2 Duo Ultra Low Voltage U7600 CPU, which runs at 1.2GHz. Coupled with 1GB of DDR2 RAM and a slow (4200rpm) 100GB (92GB formatted capacity) hard drive, it ran our WorldBench 6 benchmark without any problems. Of course, it was relatively slow — it scored just 49 — but it showed that it's got enough guts to handle most office productivity applications very easily. Because it's a dual-core CPU, you will be able to work effectively on two applications at the same time. (Source: Elias Plastiras, PC World) Microsoft: Forget about touchscreens , twist your gadgets with force Microsoft has just introduced to us its new way of how to operate a gadget in a "proper" way - by twisting, squeezing or stretching the gadget with force, which is deemed the most effective way to get your gadget listen to you! In order to get those gadgets to listen to your twisting or bending actions, they need to be equipped with force-sensing technology. The force-sensing tech is sensitive to all sort of actions by force. Applying different kinds of force to the gadget will make it respond well to various actions such as flipping through document pages or swinging through applications. (Source: Huliq.com, TechChee) Will the Eee spell disaster for the Oqo? To be fair, the Oqo is certainly pretty--the screen is bright and clear--but it's not very consumer friendly. It's heavy and with the slide-out keyboard, the form factor is more smartphone than mini-notebook. But the biggest weakness of the Oqo is the price. Why someone would opt for the Model 02 instead of, say, the Eee PC, or now HP's Mini-Note, confounds me. The Oqo is $1,300. The 7-inch Eee PC from Asus starts at $399 with Windows XP, and though the keys are tiny, functions more like laptop and isn't that much bigger than the Oqo. The Mini-Note from HP comes with Vista starting at $599. (Source: Erica Ogg, CNet) HTC Shift ultra mobile tablet PCs 1-pound Oqo PC faces a huge challenge The Model 02's portability and wearability have made it a word-of-mouth hit with self-professed geeks like Craig Newmark of Craigslist as well as hard-nosed corporate types like Gregg Davis of San Mateo construction firm Webcor Builders. "I've had my Oqo since last August," said Newmark, who bought the optional $149 cellular modem so he could answer customer service queries anywhere. "If I can use a half-hour cab ride to get work done, that makes the rest of my life easier." Davis is chief information officer for Webcor's 800-person staff. He has purchased about a dozen Model 02s at an average cost of $2,600 apiece after adding bells and whistles - like the retracting belt clip so project managers never put the tiny PC down. (Source: Tom Abate, San Francisco Chronicle) Review: Axiotron ModBook tablet Review: HTC Shift (CDMA version) If you’re a mobility buff, you’ve no doubt heard of the HTC Shift and as far as UMPCs go, the Shift is hard to beat when it comes to price, features, and performance. It probably won’t replace your desktop or big-boy laptop, but it could, depending on what you’re doing. Road warriors, especially, will absolutely love this machine. If I had $1500 to burn plus another $60 or so per month for unlimited data access from Sprint, I’d definitely buy this machine just for airport and couch use. If you’ve got the moolah and you like to stay connected, the Shift is a great choice. (Source: Doug Aamoth, CrunchGear) |
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