Author: Daniel Sung
Mass Moonwalk for Michael Jackson – London Liverpool St
London 6pm saw thousands gather in a flash mob tribute to Michael Jackson with a mass moonwalk in celebration of the life of a legend. Word spread in the afternoon on Twitter and all over the web just hours before the meet at Liverpool Street Station.
Billy Jean, Thriller and Bad played out in the streets as peoplle danced with white gloves made of A4 paper pointed into the air, hung from lampposts and stood on phoneboxes or any place to get a better view of the party below.
It may not have been as underground and unfettered as flash mobs of old but there was more passion in the crowd than ever. Michael, I hope you were watching.
What is a netbook?
Paul and I were having a chat this morning. Actually, it was more of a go at marketing departments. Packard Bell were the ones staring down the barrel, as it goes, but it could have been any laptop makers.
“Packard Bell launches the first netbook with AMD,” the press release read, and as my colleague said, we’re not so sure.
The problem is that we’ve got no proof. No one’s really set the definition of what makes a netbook and when a netbook becomes a notebook. We’re all clear that the Asus Eee PC 700 is a netbook but things start to get very laptoppy by the time you get to the Packard Bell dot m/a.
So, I think it’s about time we made some hard and fast rules on the matter here at Tech Digest. There’s some obvious categories we can look at, like size and weight, but, before we do, it’s important to remember what a netbook is all about. What’s it for? What’s the niche?
Well, according to Wikipedia, for the want of anywhere better to look –
“A netbook is a laptop computer designed for wireless communication and access to the Internet. Primarily designed for web browsing and e-mailing, netbooks rely heavily on the Internet for remote access to web-based applications and are targeted increasingly at cloud computing users who require a less powerful client computer.”
Ok. So, straight off the bat we’ve got our first stipulation.
TECH DIGEST RULE ONE OF NETBOOKS – A NETBOOK MUST HAVE WIRELESS ACCESS TO THE INTERNET
So, all netbooks must have Wi-Fi and or 3G access built-in. External dongles do not count.
Ok, what next? Well, it says they’re designed for web browsing and e-mail and rely heavily on the internet for remote access to web-based apps. Right, so it’s not a home or work computer, as we would expect. It’s for access to files when away from your base. It’s a mobile machine in other words.
TECH DIGEST RULE TWO OF NETBOOKS – A NETBOOK IS FOR USE ON THE MOVE
If it’s for mobile computing, then it’s got to be light and you have to be able to fit it into the kind of bag that you’d be carrying round anyway, regardless of where you were going. We’re talking size and weight here, and the question is – what are you prepared to carry around or, more to the point, what extra burden are you unlikely to notice?
Anything under a kilo qualifies in my book. That’s less than a bag of sugar. I can carry sugar. Two kilos is definitely too much. Hang on. Quick straw pole of Shiny Towers…
…right, it seems the average weight of the bags here is around 2-3 kilos. I’d suggest 50% more in your bag is too much, so I’m ruling 1.5kg and over out. I reckon 1.3kg is fair.
Sizewise, we’d have to rule out anything over 12-inches straight away. Wouldn’t fit in my bag. Ten inches is definitely ok. I’d say the biggest a netbook could be is 11.5-inches.
What else? Well, the apps are largely cloud-based and a less powerful computer is needed and, through that, the netbook can save battery life because, being a mobile machine, a long life is more important than high performance.
TECH DIGEST RULE THREE OF NETBOOKS – A NETBOOK MUST SACRIFICE PERFORMANCE FOR AS MUCH BATTERY AS POSSIBLE
First up, a discrete graphics processor is right out. Any juice for powering a GPU could be used for prolonging battery life, so a big “no” there. Integrated graphics, I’ll allow and certainly the likes of the Nvidia Tegra “system-on-a-chip” which inTEGRAtes a CPU and GPU in one silicon lump.
I’m rolling the idea of single-core CPUs in my head as well but, as much as I can see how that netbooks are only really for internet based activity, I can also appreciate that they could still involve a degree of multi-tasking and, provided efficient low voltage two core and above processors can be manufactured, then I’m happy to let that go.
So, that’s size, weight, power, battery but the last area I’d like to look at is cost. These things need to be cheap.
TECH DIGEST RULE FOUR OF NETBOOKS – A NETBOOK MUST BE CHEAP
We’re getting under powered, tiny little machines here. They have less hardware and less metal and they can’t do as much as their bigger brothers. There’s no way they should cost anything like as much. So, I’m setting a ceiling of £400. You can get a full size Dell for less than that, so that’s an absolute max.
Conclusions
So a computer is only a netbook if it…
has Wi-Fi and/or 3G
weighs 1.3kg or less
has a screen less than 12-inches
sacrifices performance for battery life
has no discrete GPU
cost less than £400
So, as we suspected, by that measure, the Packard Bell dot m/a is not a netbook. Other manufacturers, please take note/net.
SHINY REVIEW: iPhone 3GS
I had no idea I could talk for eight minutes on a handset that’s largely the same as the model before, so I’ll try to keep it short now. The bottom line is that the iPhone 3GS is a great phone. There’s no two ways about it. It’s a pleasure to have in your pocket and, just like the previous incarnations, it’s achingly slick.
To be picky, I’m not convinced on the usefulness of the voice control or how well it works on the street. The camera is a vast improvement and although it would be nice to be able to change the focus mid-action, the video capture works very well too.
If you have the money, then I would recommend this phone above any other I’ve used – bear in mind I’ve yet to get a proper hands on with the Palm Pre and Toshiba TG01 – but it does come at hefty price above and beyond any other smartphone out there. Probably the only mobile phone I’d bother insuring and certainly the only one I’d ever shell out up front for too.
iPhone 3GS on O2
Prices on the Panasonic HD BD Freesat recorders
We took a look at the Panasonic Everything range of three HD Freesat recorders when they were launched a while back and only feared how much such high spec, high end recorders can cost. Well, the wait is over today and the answer is that they’re reassuringly expense.
The DMR-BS850 and DMR-BS750 are the same beast only the former has a 500GB HDD and the latter 250GB. They record and play Blu-ray and Freesat, support and encode the H.264 file format and work with both DTS and Dolby HD surround sound standards. They’ll cleverly cost you £1,000 and £900 respectively. Who isn’t going to spend the extra £100?
The third choice is the £750 DMR-XS350 which only writes to DVDs and not Blu-rays but will, of course, still supply and store all the HD content you need.
Nice little items, the three of these. Good quality looking products if you’ve got the cash for them. Stick to HD internet downloads played via USB on your TV if you can’t.
Guitar Hero Greatest Hits & On Tour: Modern Hits out now
Break open your piggy and get an advance on your pocket money because the next two editions of the Guitar Hero family have been born. Guitar Hero Greatest Hits and Guitar Hero On Tour: Modern Hits are available to buy from today from all good retailers both on and off line.
Yes, Activision is delicately rinsing music geeks the world over of their hard earned cash. Greatest Hits is the compilation for the consoles of the best tracks of the first three titles whereas Modern Hits is a 28-track music bundle for the Nintendo DS including Coldplay, Fall Out Boy, Tenacious D, The Strokes and Weezer.
You can pick the former up for around £37 and the latter for £25. Oh, and the finalised track list for the Greatest Hits is as follows:
Guitar Hero Greatest Hits Track List
“Back in the Saddle” – Aerosmith
“Bark at the Moon” Ozzy Osbourne
“Barracuda” – Heart
“Beast and the Harlot” – Avenged Sevenfold
“Carry On Wayward Son” – Kansas
“Caught in a Mosh” – Anthrax
“Cherry Pie” – Warrant
“Cowboys from Hell” (Live in Moscow 1991) – Pantera
“Cult of Personality” – Living Colour
“Electric Eye” – Judas Priest
“Free Bird” – Lynyrd Skynyrd
“Freya” – The Sword
“Godzilla” – Blue Öyster Cult
“Heart-Shaped Box” – Nirvana
“Hey You” – The Exies
“Hit Me with Your Best Shot” – Pat Benatar
“Love Rock ‘n Roll” – Joan Jett and the Blackhearts
“I Wanna Rock” – Twisted Sister
“Killer Queen” – Queen
“Killing in the Name” – Rage Against the Machine
“Laid to Rest” – Lamb of God
“Lay Down” – Priestess
“Message in a Bottle” – The Police
“Miss Murder” – AFI
“Monkey Wrench” – Foo Fighters
“More Than a Feeling” – Boston
“Mother” – Danzig
“No One Knows” – Queens of the Stone Age
“Nothin’ but a Good Time” – Poison
“Play With Me” – Extreme
“Psychobilly Freakout” – Reverend Horton Heat
“Raining Blood” – Slayer
“Rock and Roll All Nite” – Kiss
“Round and Round” – Ratt
“Shout at the Devil” – Mötley Crüe
“Smoke on the Water” – Deep Purple
“Stella” – Incubus
“Stop!” – Jane’s Addiction
“Take It Off” – The Donnas
“Take Me Out” – Franz Ferdinand
“Them Bones” – Alice in Chains
“Through the Fire and Flames” – DragonForce
“Thunder Kiss ’65” – White Zombie
“Trippin’ on a Hole in a Paper” – Heart Stone Temple Pilots
“The Trooper” – Iron Maiden
“Unsung” (Live in Chicago) – Helme
“Woman” – Wolfmother
“YYZ” – Rush
VIDEO: Michael Jackson dies
MJ, RIP.
PREVIEW: Asus UX30 ultra-light, ultra-powerful, ultra-swish laptop
The chips allow for incredibly high performance at minimal energy cost meaning that you can make very lightweight, powerful machines with batteries that last up to eight hours. They look pretty damn swish too. There’s the 13-inch U30. the U50 and UX50 – all of which are fairly medium sized but sport all sorts of high end specs – but then one I liked most of all was the Asus UX30.
The chips allow for incredibly high performance at minimal energy cost meaning that you can make very lightweight, powerful machines with batteries that last up to eight hours. They look pretty damn swish too. There’s the 13-inch U30, the U50 and UX50 – all of which are fairly medium sized but sport all sorts of high end specs – but then one I liked most of all was the Asus UX30.
It’s a beautiful design, weighing just 1.39kg with the Li-polymer battery inside and powers along with 4GD of DDR2 RAM and a 500GB SSD. It’s got a 13.3-inch edge-to edge HD LED backlight screen and, most interestingly of all, boasts an 8 second boot up speed when using the Asus Express boot minimal desktop program. In practice, it worked out more like 5 seconds.
It’s available from September for £999, as are the rest of the range save the U30. A very nice offering from Asus.
Asus
PREVIEW: Asus G60 multimedia monster out next week
There were enough products for about three launches from Asus today but one of the big stars of show for me was the super-high spec multimedia laptop, the Asus G60. It’s built like a hot rod – on the inside and out – and sits branded with a badge that reads “Republic of Gamers”.
At its heart beats an Intel Core 2 quad core processor and a mighty Nvidia GeForce GTX 260M GPU with 1GB of DDR2 RAM. You could probably run your machine off that alone but naturally there’s a beefy 4GB of standard DDR3 RAM to play with too. It’s got a 16-inch, HD, LED backlight screen and isolated light-up keyboard and up to a measly 1TB of SSD storage.
Naturally, there’s all the trimmings too, including gigabit Ethernet, Bluetooth 2.1 + EDR, SRS sound speaker set up, a 2-megapixel webcam, HDMI, 4 x USB, eSATA and a Blu-ray drive too. It also runs 64-bit Vista. At least for now.
It starts from £1,499 or you can get the limited edition Lamborghini version called the Asus VX5 and take it up to a full grand. That’s if you’re into leather hand rests and black silk sheet most likely too. You can pick them both up as of next week.
Asus
Asus Keyboard streams HD video to your TV
While Asus was busy launching every laptop under the sun, their marketing executive, John Swatton, confirmed to Tech Digest (me) when the infamous Asus Keyboard will be landing and what it’s actually for.
The self-sufficient computer-in-a-keyboard conundrum is supposed to be a controllable media centre primarily for your living room but, in practice, could be as portably useful as you want it to be.
It will stream HD content, stored on its 32 GB SSD, via a wide-band HDMI standard to your TV, a monitor or just about anything else with a panel. At the same time, you can use the built-in 5-inch touchscreen to do your e-mails, your shopping or whatever else you like in front if the box.
It all sounds quite fun and the main reason it’s taken since CES to get the product to market is because Asus hasn’t been too sure what it was all about either and to create another niche – as they did with the Eee PC – you’ve really go to have some idea of the best environment to put your innovation.
Seeing as no-one else is sitting on anything quite like the Keyboard, the Taiwanese tech master has had the luxury of time to perfect their latest product but the company memo seems to be that the end of August is the date we’ll all be getting a look. Can’t wait.
Asus Lamborghini VX5 preview:
Habitat makes Twitter no-no
Here’s a rather curious case of public relations. Habitat, the UK furniture shop, has been spotted abusing popular Twitter search terms in order to get their products and offers seen by more people.
The company’s social media arm has been hashtagging their tweets on sales and promotions with #mousavi and #iPhone amongst others and is now being seriously frowned upon for taking advantage of the situation in Iran as well as misleading Twitter users in general.
Habitat has since deleted their tweets such as #iPhone Our totally desirable Spring collection now has 20% off!www.habitat.co.uk/pws/Home.ice and #MOUSAVI Join the database for free to win a £1000 gift card http://bit.ly/2wPLO (expand) ? Now!! but you can still see them here.
The incident’s being cited as how not to use social media but then, here I am writing about and I wouldn’t have known about their £1,000 gift card. Will more people remember this transgression than’ll sign up to their database and spend money in their sale?
Not a trick Habitat can or would repeat twice but an interesting way of spamming Twitter in general. I wonder how long until ViAgRA salesmen start doing the same?
