Saturday, July 19, 2008
Friday, July 18, 2008
Laptops tops tops
As the MSI Wind lands, the final piece is the netbook puzzle slots into place. But how does it match up to its competitors?
The flurry of inexpensive laptops has finally reached its peak. First, HP's Mini-Note 2133 , then Acer's Aspire One attempted to recreate the success of Asus' pint-sized Eee range . Now MSI's own contender, the Wind U100, is upon us.
The burning question is whether it can truly live up to such stratospheric expectations.
After our initial, and admittedly curt, encounter with MSI's Wind we were already excited. Really excited. We'd already heard the peals of dissent from the Eee faithful. "It's too big and heavy," they cried. "What's the point of a 10in screen?" they continued. For us though, from the first moment we clapped eyes and hands upon its smoothly contoured form, something about the Wind just seemed inexplicably right.
Vital statistics
Measuring 260 x 180 x 37mm (WxDxH) it is indeed larger than either Acer's Aspire one, or any of Asus' Eees. And at 1.15kg it's heavier too, but not by much.
A few hundred grams is a small penalty to pay for the fine build quality. Wrestle with the base and there's a little flex accompanied by a quiet creak, but it still feels sturdier than all its rivals bar the HP Mini-Note 2133. The lid is pleasingly stiff, and it's not until you twist or prod with extreme force that any show-through is transmitted to the display itself. So far, so great.
MSI has put the Wind's extra girth to good use too. The keyboard reaches right to the edges of the chassis, and compared to the Acer Aspire one's fine example, it's another three or so millimetres taller and 10mm wider. One thing it has in common with Acer's model is its superiority over the Eee's cramped keyboard. Touch-typing is effortless, and whether you're at a desk or in the cramped confines of a sweaty commuter train, there's very little to complain about.
Well, okay, the layout isn't quite perfect. The positioning of the Fn key to the left of the Ctrl key takes a bit of getting used to, and having to depress the Fn key and use the up and down cursors to emulate PgUp and PgDn is a fiddly workaround. But, given the full height Enter key, and the amply-spaced, positive-feeling keys, these are compromises we could learn to live with.
And while we were prepared to put up with the Aspire one's aggravating trackpad layout - with buttons arranged to the left and right of it to save space - the Wind's traditional trackpad is a breath of fresh air. It might look like a Mac-style single button, but it's hinged in the middle to allow for left and right clicks, and we had no problems with it at all.
The 10in screen shares the same 1,024 x 600 pixels as its competitors, but the extra inch or so of screen size makes everything just a touch more legible. And thanks to the LED backlighting it provides impressive brightness.
If anything, it's too bright at times but while this, and the matte finish, make it perfect for tapping out emails and surfing the net in the garden, it has a somewhat negative effect on colour accuracy. Skintones tended to look just a touch too washed out, and detail in bright areas was missing. It's no deal-breaker but, again, it stops short of perfection.
Strong at heart
Much of the Wind's technological blueprint is startlingly similar to its rivals. But it's hardly surprising that the Wind and most of its ilk (HP's Mini-Note 2133 being one unfortunate exception) have adopted Intel's Atom processor. This, the top of the range Wind, boasts an Intel Atom N270 processor beavering away at 1.6GHz, backed up with 1GB RAM and an 80GB hard disk loaded with Windows XP Home. It's not a particularly potent combination, but with a score of 0.38 in our application-based benchmarks, it's clearly capable of everyday tasks.
The rest of the specification is perfectly serviceable. Wireless networking is catered for by 802.11bg and Bluetooth 2.0 - though there's no draft-n as found on the Eee PC 901 - and 10/100 Ethernet is present too. Three USB ports punctuate the sides along with a 4-in-1 card reader.
Much of the Wind's allure has, happily, remained intact since our first look, but the 4,400mAh battery has been supplanted by a frugal 2,200mAh three-cell unit. Battery life suffers as a result, and where the original high capacity model promised six or seven hours of light use, the 2,200mAh cell lasted minutes short of two and a half hours. Heavy usage saw that sink down to just over an hour and a half. Given the premium price, the omission of a high-capacity battery is more difficult to forgive than it is with Acer's Aspire one, but it's a tribute to the Wind's all-round brilliance that this doesn't dent its appeal too badly.
Lacking in life
We weren't so forgiving of one of the Wind's more aggravating quirks though. Once our battery tests had drained the battery our review model simply refused to boot up again. One solution was leaving it to charge for quarter of an hour or so, and the other required us to remove the battery, unplug it from the mains and disconnect both battery and mains supply. A bit of a faff, in other words. Fortunately, a BIOS update on MSI's website , fixes the issue, but it's still disappointing that it slipped through the net to production models.
Conclusion
So, the Wind is, in the main, the breath of fresh air we'd hoped for all along. It looks good, feels good and its ergonomics are by far the best of the mini-laptop bunch. Its pricing brings it dangerously close to fully-fledged laptops, and leaves the value-for-money crown firmly in the Acer Aspire one's possession, but for less than a quarter of the Sony VGN-TZ31's cost, you simply cannot buy a better ultraportable.
Microsoft NEt Income
Microsoft announced yesterday its results for the fiscal fourth quarter ending 30 June 2008 with earnings of $22.49 billion (£11.26 billion) from revenue of $60.42 billion (£30.27 billion).
This represents yearly growth of 21 per cent over the same period last year and comes despite having to write off $1.1 billion (£55o billion) in the fourth quarter of the fiscal year 2007 for increasing warranty coverage on the company’s Xbox 360 games console, which suffered widely from overheating failure.
“Delivering $60 billion in annual revenue is an outstanding accomplishment and a testament to the powerful combination of great technology solutions and strong execution by our partners and global sales and marketing teams,” said chief operating officer at Microsoft Kevin Turner.
“The outlook for fiscal year 2009 is positive given the breadth of our impressive technology portfolio and the expanding collection of online services we are bringing to market,” Turner added.
Microsoft launched several key server products over the past fiscal year such as Windows Server 2008, SQL Server 2008 and Visual Studio 2008.
The company says that revenue growth was primarily driven by continued customer demand for all products, including Windows Vista, which despite being, much maligned has sold over 180 million licenses since its launch. Other revenue generating areas included Microsoft Office 2007 and Xbox 360 consoles and games.
MoUsE
Advances in computing power are enabling the emergence of practical alternative user interfaces based on gestures, movement and facial recognition, according to the analyst firm.
Gartner’s report found that companies such as Microsoft and Intel and Apple are promoting gestural interfaces for future use.
It also found that consumer entertainment companies such as Sony, Panasonic and NEC are demonstrating applications using facial and movement recognition.
Analyst at Gartner and author of the report Steve Prentice declared that using a mouse within desktop environments was fine, but “for home entertainment or working on a notebook it’s over.”
However, there are some in the industry that believe Gartner’s predictions are jumping the gun.
George Foot, director of sales and marketing at Kensington believes that gestural interfaces have advanced, there is still room for the humble mouse.
“There will undoubtedly be change, driven by technology. Just look at the impact the Wii has had and how Wi-Fi has changed how and where we work. People need to be able to use and interact with their data as efficiently as possible, but new multifunctional mice have proven more than capable of meeting this need.”
“Gartner’s predictions for the end of the mouse are ahead of their time. The mouse is an integral part of how we interact with our PCs and will continue to be for the foreseeable future.”
New 3g Iphone
It's the second coming of the iPhone, and this time it's 3G. Some say it's the ultimate phone, but is it truly fit for business?
Making the iPhone more business friendly was a big challenge for a device that sells largely on the basis that it is an iPod Nano with a smartphone grafted onto it. That doesn’t necessarily make for a winning combination for the enterprise.
Nonetheless, Apple has taken significant steps in tweaking and upgrading the iPhone to not only appeal to a wider consumer audience, but also to make it more relevant for business users, at the same time addressing the concerns of many IT managers about the lack of secure integration options between an iPhone and the enterprise back-end.
In a nutshell, the iPhone 3G is a major facelift of the original iPhone rather than a new product designed from scratch. This makes sense; the original was a sound piece of engineering and worked well. What it lacked was functionality rather than needing any major flaws in its design and operation changed.
With this in mind, Apple has set about improving and expanding the capabilities of the iPhone. There are two models, one with 8GB of flash storage, the other with 16GB – the same as the two models they are replacing. A new build of the iPhone firmware, known as iPhone OS 2.0, is installed on the iPhone 3G as well as being available to existing 2G devices.
The biggest hardware difference is the inclusion of Tri-band 3G, with both standard UMTS and HSDPA data services supported, the latter delivering a significant improvement in download speeds for web pages and other data.
With the exception of hardware-specific features like 3G support and a GPS receiver for location and navigation applications like the Google Maps app pre-installed on all iPhones, the 3G and 2G devices are functionally identical.
At a hardware level, the 3G models still have the same 2-megapixel camera as the original, and there is still no flash, mirror or auto-focus.
The back of the iPhone 3G has an all-plastic curved back in place of the grey metal case used on the original. This slightly reduces the weight (by just 2g) but has mainly been done to reduce cost , to accommodate the larger battery fitted in the 3G unit and to help improve reception. The switch to 3G has increased the power consumption of the iPhone, so a slightly bigger battery is necessary in order to offset the impact.
One other minor cosmetic tweak has been made, the headphone socket is no longer recessed, allowing you to use the headphones or wired headset of your choice, rather than using only Apple’s own headphones or having to use an adapter to access the 3.5mm socket with normal headphone jacks that won’t fit into the recess.
Moving on to the software, the enterprise features are a welcome addition, with support for Microsoft Exchange push email as well as ActiveSync, which allows for over-the-air synchronisation of calendar entries and global address lists. ActiveSync support also extends to a number of centralised enforced IT policy and security measures including remote wipe, remote configuration and WPA2 Enterprise and 802.1x wireless security protocols.
For ensuring that remote connections between the iPhone and the enterprise backend are secure, the handset now supports Cisco IPsec VPN protocols with support for two-factor token authentication, as well as conventional password or certificate authentication.
There is a clear improvement in call quality on the 3G device, whether the phone is on a 2G or 3G network, suggesting that some work has been done to improve the audio handling.
The core software set on the iPhone has not really changed, but rather has experienced a series of tweaks to enable more efficient processing of information. For example, the email client can now move and delete multiple messages at a time.
The standard software set is no longer a restriction for users wanting to do more or perform custom tasks without resorting to unauthorised software hacks, thanks to Apple opening up the iPhone platform to legitimate third party software development
Having provided both a software development kit (SDK) ahead of launch and a corner of the iTunes store to act as both a shop front and delivery mechanism for add-on software, there is already a huge crop of business and consumer applications for download. Some are free, some are not.
Software has to be vetted by Apple before it is allowed onto the store, but on the plus side there is no charge for distribution.
Applications can be bought via a desktop iTunes client and then copied across to your iPhone during a sync, or you can choose, buy and download over the air using either a 3G data connection or Wi-Fi. Businesses wanting to restrict access to in-house applications can host and deploy from their own intranet site.
Is iPhone 3G is just the original iPhone in a shiny new shell? To a certain extent, yes it is.
However, this is not a negative but rather one of the biggest positives. The iPhone concept is a sound one, and existing users are happy with the way the iPhone works, with the touch screen interface and with the implementation of the standard software set. The only different thing needed was 3G in order to tap faster data connections. On top of this the iPhone needed to offer more functionality, not necessarily different functionality.
Both phones now use exactly the same software (the iPhone OS 2.0 software was released for the 2G handsets the night before the 3G one went on sale), which means they both have exactly the same core capabilities. For a company, this is great news as it means the IT department can now manage legacy iPhones as well as new ones.
If you already have an iPhone that isn’t broken, why buy a new one?
If you are a heavy web surfer, then you will benefit from the iPhone 3G’s improved data download capabilities.
Email heavy users should also consider devices with a hardware keyboard such as a BlackBerry or Nokia’s e71 smartphone. RIM is about to release its first 3G device which will compete directly with the iPhone 3G in the business market. If you are comfortable with typing a lot on the iPhones on-screen keyboard, then faster downloads will be a bonus, though this is far less important for email than it is for web browsing.
The iPhone 3G is an excellent phone, as was the original.
It is important to understand that the iPhone 3G is a much-needed facelift and tweak, not a complete teardown and rebuild, especially if you are an existing iPhone user. For first-time buyers, the iPhone 3G offers better value for money as well as much-needed enterprise integration alongside the more consumer-friendly features like the iPod and the camera.
SearcH
