I’m taking my first trip with the Lenovo Yoga I recently reviewed. The Yoga’s only caveat is that it has just 128GB of storage. Fortunately SanDisk’s Cruzer Fit, which Dan recently wrote about, is a perfect solution; it packs 64GB inside its tiny body, while SanDisk’s Cruzer Force also holds 64GB. Guess which one is now installed inside my Yoga?
While waiting for a Lenovo video to load, this hilarious Poo-Pourri ad popped up. Usually I click SKIP as soon as the option is available, but not this time. Maybe it’s the 5th grader still trapped inside of me, but this video made me laugh; even funnier is that it’s a product I know works as advertised. Don’t ask; just enjoy.
Over the last couple of years I have reviewed the Hewlett-Packard (HP) Elitebook 8440w and 2540p, declaring them each as a laptop that I would love to be able to keep and use in my daily life, and as the two of the best business laptops I’d ever used. Well, HP has taken everything that made the 2540p and made it better in the form of the Elitebook 2570p! Let’s take a look!
A couple of weeks ago there was a supposed leak found in the header of an Aspyr newsletter pointing to the release of the iPad version of the classic Bioware RPG Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic (KotOR for short). Since we don’t do rumors here I just fished through my .Mac mail to see the evidence (I hadn’t noticed it at first), then filed it away under OHPLEASEOHPLEASEOHPLEASEOHPLEASEOHPLEASE … This morning we got everything but the final official confirmation, with a full review up at gaming site IGN. The review notes that some text is small, moving around…
It’s been widely reported over the web that Acer and Asus are pulling out of the netbook market as of today effectively ending the netbook as a viable platform. It says a great deal when Asus, who practically invented the netbook, has said they are done. I write not to bury the netbook but to praise it for what it was: a great and cheap way to get things done on the web. I remember the very first netbook, the Asus EeePC 701. It wasn’t the most powerful thing out there. It had a 900 MHz Celeron, 7 inch screen…
As long as I can recall – since the days when I had an Apple ][+ at least – people have been quick to call out Apple for high prices. For me as a multi-OS person who also happens to like Apple products, it has been a roller-coaster. For a long time in the 80s the utility of Apple ][ and later the Mac made it very much worthwhile – and for some things a complete necessity. Yet there have been many times – like most of the 90s – when the price to performance ratio simply wasn’t there. By…
Skooba Design was Gear Diary’s first advertiser back when Judie first launched the site. They were also the first company to become a Newsletter Underwriter. We tell you that in the interest of full disclosure, but what’s more important is that we really love AND use their stuff. Most recently, we were both taken by the new Skooba Design Laptop Weekender V.3, and are already getting a lot of use out of them. (Read the review here.) Skooba makes great products, and now comes outside confirmation of something that we’ve known for some time: they provide great customer service. Skooba…
For nearly two years I have been like a broken record: I simply never believed the numbers Samsung was supposedly selling in terms of tablets. Worse still, having put out a single unofficial number before switching to ‘percent improvement in shipments’, groups like the IDC and Gartner grabbed the initial number and then just applied the percent increase. This played out again last week in the numbers reported by the IDC showing that Samsung held the #2 tablet slot with 9.6% market share with ~2.4 million units sold. I like the Samsung tablets pretty well and they have created a…
Raw power is irrelevant if the apps running on the device don’t use it efficiently. Intel knows that and is making sure app developers have the tool to not only create great apps but to create great apps that are also highly efficient.
We’ll be heading into “CES Unveiled: The Official Press Event of the International CES” shortly. Unveiled is an annual tradition for us and is the first chance to see some of the new items that will be coming in 2012. As the event blurb explains, …see the new year’s products at CES Unveiled with a pre-show look at who will be making news headlines before the show officially opens. Catch all the latest products in one room. Plus, get a sneak peek at the product debuts from our Innovations Design and Engineering Award Honorees. We’ll see some old favorites like…
Zinio isn’t about to let Apple and Amazon slow down their momentum. No way, no how. And to help make sure they remain the eMag service of choice they are introducing a shopping perk program that puts a $25 credit into the accounts of all new Zinio registrants from now until March 2012. Better still, this credit can be used to purchase magazines across the company’s entire global newsstand. In addition, the Zinio app is now available in the Amazon Appstore. The timing is key since many of us will be getting our net Kindle fire’s today. As Chris Wilkes, vice…
The tech press has maligned Android tablets. There just hasn’t been one that has caught the up to the iPad according to many people. That may soon change with tablets like the one I have, the Asus’s EeePad Transformer. Hardware Much of the hardware on the Android tablet front has eerily similar specs. Like most Android tablets that have a version of Honeycomb, the Transformer has an Nvidia Tegra 2, 1 GB of ram, 16 or 32 GB of Flash (mine has 16), WiFi (B,G and N supported), Bluetooth V2.1+EDR, HDMI out, MicroSD Slot, a 5 megapixel camera on the back and a…
We have talked about the so-called ‘Tablet Market’ as really being the ‘iPad Market’, with some marginal players scraping for scraps. Some of us have bought or spent considerable time with one or more of the various tablets that have come out over the last year – the Samsung Galaxy Tab, Motorola Xoom, BlackBerry Playbook, HP TouchPad, HTC Flyer, Acer Iconia, and on and on. Yet in all of these cases there have been some serious flaws that have derailed the tablets and ultimately resulted in the failure of the tablets to gain market penetration. Last week the IDC released…
Recently, I was laid off from my day job. As a result, for the first time in my life (literally!), my main system will be an Apple system, specifically 15″ MacBook Pro running OS X “Snow Leopard”. And as I’ve made the move, copying my iTunes library over, setting up a backup disk, and all the other nonsense in which one must engage when one makes a big move of this type, I’ve noticed a few things. If you’re someone who is considering making the jump, but has been hesitating for one reason or another, maybe my experiences here will…
Last year I looked at the HP Mini 5103, which was a traditional netbook in many ways, but also came packing the nVidia ION chipset … and a $750 price tag. In many ways that system represented the death of the traditional netbook, which was followed by what many call ‘notbooks’ – computers that offer sub-12″ screens and easy portability with great battery life, but also with reasonably low-end notebook performance and a palatable price tag. The HP Pavilion dm1z laptop falls into that category, and I was thrilled with the opportunity to see what I could get from a…
Recently the Acer Iconia A100 Android tablet went on sale, and I have had a couple of weeks to play around with one and formulate some opinions. Dan also grabbed one, and we had been chatting about the Iconia back and forth until he returned his. Even before I got the A100 there were a few things I had read about it that were troubling, and other things that had me quite excited! I wanted to document some of the great things about the tablet and latest version of the Android OS … and some things that make the moniker…
It’s simply the latest variation of that popular topic: is your [thing] better than my [thing], or is it the other way ’round? Wine, or beer? Ford or GM? Tastes great, or less filling? Mac or PC? “Firefly” or “Buffy”? (“Firefly”, dammit!) Yesterday, your faithful Gear Diary team was hashing over the topic of iPad, or Android tablet. As you might expect with a collection of Appleheads, PC mavens, UNIX and Linux folks, and all the rest, it got heated, involved, and nerdly. It started with a friendly discussion between Francis and Joel as to which device Joel might…
My computer usage has undergone a radical change over the last year. Actually, that is not entirely true. The fact is, my computer usage has undergone a series of radical changes over the last year as I have experimented with a number of different device arrangements. At this time a year ago I had a 27″ iMac and a 13″ MacBook Pro. In the fall I got rid of the 27″ iMac and went to using the 13″ MacBook Pro full-time. The MacBook Pro was replaced by a 13″ MacBook Air as soon as the updated version became available. Then…
Defining Our Terms The mention of the word “tablet” to most people today would conjure up an image of an iPad or a similar looking product. What they may not know is that the tablet has already been in existence for roughly a decade. The original tablet PC was Microsoft’s vision of a mobile computer that maximized productivity. It was a laptop with a swivel screen that allowed you to write on it. The term used for it describes it well, they called it a convertible-tablet PC. I believe they had some good ideas and it can be seen in…
photo credit: spike55151 If you don’t mind filling out a simple online survey form, then you may be rewarded with a ThinkCentre M75e desktop plus two 19’’ monitors for your time! Ivy Worldwide is gathering information on small and medium-sized businesses’ technology purchasing habits. This is the second SMB survey that they have conducted, and this time the goal is to gain a “deeper insight not just into what information sources are important to SMBs, but also what triggers the action of purchasing (or not) once a potential buyer is feels him/herself to be well informed about a product or…
The modern computer is an amazing thing. It is a work device, a communication device, a jukebox, and a video machine. I don’t know about you, but I probably watch just as many shows through either iTunes or Hulu or Netflix as I do on my HDTV these days. Yes, a huge amount of video entertainment comes through our computers now. The real challenge is getting that video, and the accompanying audio, seamlessly pushed over to a large television for enjoyment. Apple is making a huge play in this area with their AirPlay technology, but that requires you to use…