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Packard Bell EasyNote ‘Skype Edition’ Laptop: Mini Review: Exclusive
We played with the Packard Bell EasyNote ‘Skype Edition’ Laptop, at its first European showing yesterday. The machine we used was the only one in Europe and had been jetted in from development labs in Estonia.
They claim it to be the worlds first ‘Skype Edition’ laptop, and we’ve no reason to doubt them. While many machines have been selling with Skype pre-loaded on it, this is the first to have a dedicated button built-in to the machine.
If your reaction is, ‘so what? It’s a laptop with a soft-button on it,’ that wouldn’t have been too dissimilar to our initial reaction – before we used it. After having seen it action, our view is more favorable.
Where’s the button?
Our first surprise was to find the Skype button at the top of the screen, where you normally find the catch. We’d expected it to be on or around the keyboard.
As you can see from the close-up photo, the Skype button sits on the right, the microphone on the left and in the centre is a video camera, a la new Mac laptops. There’s an LED between the mic and video camera and another surrounding the Skype button.
How does it work?
The button performs various functions depending on what you’re doing with Skype at the time.
If you’re working on another app and feel the urge to Skype someone, pressing the Skype button, brings the software to the foreground. No big shock there.
When a Skype call comes in to you, pressing the button answers the call, bringing you live.
There’s a LED surrounding the button that shows various states of call as follows
- Orange colored when Skype application is connected to Internet and in idle mode
- Orange/Green alternate blinking when there is an incoming Skype call
- Green when there is an active Skype call in progress
- OFF when Skype application is not connected to Internet or not launched
The green LED between the mic and camera shows solid green to indicated you have a call in progress, perhaps to save you from the embarrassment of slagging off the person you’ve just completed a call with, while thinking the call had finished.
Calling quality
One of the concerns we’d had was the placement of the mic and the call quality that might bring.
We know that the mic on the Apple iBook lid is less than great to be using with Skype. We often find ourselves craning our necks forward, and half closing the lid to get close enough to the mic to make ourselves heard by the other party.
Packard-Bell appear to have got over this. In the call that we placed, the other end reported they could hear us perfectly well, despite us being around two feet away from the laptop and the room that we were calling from being pretty noisy.
On reflection we realised that the palaver we go through with the Mac wouldn’t work on this machine as, if you were on a video call, they’d be getting a view of your space bar.
Video built-in
As I’m sure you know, video conferencing has been included in Skype for a while now (it was one of the most requested features). By including the camera at the lid, Packard-Bell have made it easy to video call while on the move – without having to lash video cameras to the lid of your machine.
Having seen the preview window, we can report that the results were pretty impressive. The quality appeared to be more that sufficient for video conferencing.
General spec and availability
The general spec of this machine is described by Packard-Bell as having a “high-performance Intel Dual-core.”
We’ve absolutely no idea what the general computing function of this machine is – that’s not what we were looking at. Given that PC designs has been perfecting since the release of the IBM XT, we’d suspect that it’s pretty much as you’d expect.
The Packard-Bell EasyNote ‘Skype Edition’ is expected to be getting to retail in August this year at a cost of E899.
Packard Bell
30 June, 2006
Study: Desktop PCs And Laptops Get More Reliable
Something will go wrong sooner or later with nearly one-fifth of all notebooks, with a new hardware component needed to sort the problem, according to a new survey by industry analysts Gartner.
The study found that 15 per cent of new laptops will break within the first year, and over a fifth will break within four years.
The fault could be something as minor as a broken latch, but the most frequent failures were major disasters like knackered motherboards and toasted hard drives – the kind of catastrophe that could turn mild mannered folks into screaming, blubbering wrecks of rage (we speak from experience here).
The picture is better for desktops, with just five per cent of desktop PCs purchased in 2005-2006 breaking within the first year, and only 12 per cent going AWOL within four years.
Although these figures look bad, they actually represent a 25 per cent decrease in annual failure rates for PC hardware over the last two years.
Laptops have also shown a significant improvement, with features like suspension mounting of hard drives and rubber bumpers between laptop lids and keyboards helping keep the damage tally down.
Busted screens
The most common disaster to hit laptops used to be the dreaded broken screen.
Improvements by notebook manufacturers – like adding structural rigidity to the casing and screen bezel and providing more space between the screen and keyboard on closed lappies – have happily made cracked and smashed screens less common.
Motherboard fry-ups and hard drive breakdowns are now the two main sources of failure for desktops, a situation brought about by the increasingly complexity of the things, with more components being integrated into the motherboard.
Years ago, if a network card went down, a quick call to the coke-slurpin’, death-metal listenin’ IT spod guy would have the card replaced in a jiffy, but with the network card welded onto the motherboard, the job suddenly becomes a much bigger one.
According to the study, less common hardware failures include latches and hinges on the chassis breaking, keycaps disappearing into the ether and the time-honoured, “Whoops! I’ve just spilt coffee/beer/coke on my keyboard.”
Gartner
27 June, 2006
Silly USB Devices: Mini Guitar And Underwater Fingerprint Reader
Straight out of the, “What’s The Chuffin’ Point Of That” Dept comes two utterly daft USB devices.
This one goes all the way up to zero The first is a completely pointless guitar shaped USB stick, which comes complete with its own red-felt lined guitar case.
Even if you had the tiniest hands in the universe, you still wouldn’t be able to play the thing because it’s not a real guitar, and it measures a pixie-unchallenging 160 x 46 x 20mm.
Although we can’t help but admire the handiwork – a near perfect copy of the legendary Fender Stratocaster (the “axe” of choice for megastars like Eric Clapton and Hendrix) – we can’t work out who on earth would want to fork out €55 for what is essentially a cheap USB stick with a plastic guitar stuck on.
But if you fancy indulging in a bit of micro air guitar work while carrying around a paltry amount of over-priced flash memory, point your credit card in the direction of geekstuff4u.com
Mini Guitar USB Memory
Underwater windows
If you’re the proud owner of a secret underwater complex and need to have secure access to your submerged laptop while you’re flapping about in your scuba gear, look no further than the SecuTronix waterproof fingerprint reader.
This utterly bizarre invention (pictured here with a mini waterfall running over it) lets users authenticate themselves under water by swiping their fingers on the waterproof sensor.
We’re not sure at what depth the thing keeps on working or why anyone would want to be logging on to Windows in their Speedos, but there’s an English language version of the software available, and the whole sub-aqua caboodle could be yours for just €137.
akihabaranews.com
26 June, 2006
Scythe PowerWatch Panel For PC Modders
Look, we know there’s something a bit sad about wanting a PC that glows brightly with useless dials, flashing lights and obscure read outs, but we just couldn’t hide our juvenile excitement when we saw this new gizmo from Japanese manufacturer Scythe.
Available in a silver or black finish to match the PC case of your choice, Scythe’s new PowerWatch panel comes with enough buttons and dials to keep Lieutenant Uhuru busy through a Tribble onslaught.
The PowerWatch panel is a bit of a hefty beast (148×84× 71mm deep), hogging two CD/DVD-sized slots on your PC, but you sure get a lot of glowing widgets in return.
The panel is dominated by a large, circular colour LCD display giving readouts for computer temperature (centigrade/Fahrenheit, with up to four temperature sensors supported), fan speed, warning temperature and current time.
As well as the built in disco, the panel also adds two of the new PoweredUSB 2.0 ports and a card reader supporting SD and miniSD cards, MMC, RS-MMC and smart media, Compact flash, micro drive and Memory Stick (PRO and DUO).
Wrapping up the feature set, the Windows Me/2000 and XP-compatible panel also includes a microphone in/ audio out connector.
Pricing and availability to be announced. We’ll take two please!
Scythe [Japanese]
PoweredUSB
In case you hadn’t heard of it before (to be honest, we hadn’t), PoweredUSB is an enhanced form of USB that comes with two additional wire pairs.
These wires get past the current USB power limitations and can carry enough juice to power certain components – thus reducing cable clutter.
That all sounds great of course, but only if enough PoweredUSB peripherals start appearing – and we can’t say we’ve seen many in the consumer maket.
PoweredUSB
5 June, 2006
Plastic Logic: Amazing e-Paper Applications
“Would you like a single piece of sheet music that contains all your favourite pieces, and never needs to be turned over?”
Well, duh! yes, of course. No musician has ever been born who didn’t burst into a fury of invective when playing a piece from music, when the page turned itself back three seconds after you turned it over. No musician has ever been born who didn’t lose a sheet of music. No player has ever failed to snap the spine of a book of music, trying to get it to stay on the page you’re playing.
I work with e-paper – a lot. Of course, there is none on the market yet, apart from something pretty primitive from Sony and something slightly less primitive from iRex; but I spend my time playing with the products of 2008 – and this week, I got to see some of them “in the flesh” as part of a design competition at the London Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design. And it was astonishing to me just how many bright ideas are buried in the simple concept of an e-Page.
An e-Page is related to the concept of an e-book reader in the same way that an iPod is related to a CD player. Each is a use of e-paper, designed as part of an entire ecosphere; with authors, distributors, performers and hardware makers and customers all considered, fitted into the big picture, and happy with innovative leaps into the wonderful future.
The universal piece of music wasn’t even the first prize winner in this competition. It was a contest sponsored by one of the world’s leading e-paper technology designers, Plastic Logic, which has demonstrated a flexible sheet of A5 “paper” that has the contrast and readability of real paper, the flexibility of soft cardboard, and the power consumption of a watch. And the prize went to something that is, in the end, “just a book.”
I can’t give all the secrets of the contest away; Plastic Logic is planning a press announcement for later this week, where all the short-listed entries will be showcased. My job was to be one of the judges of the competition (in my role as Founder of AFAICS Research along with my partner, Nick Hampshire, and Tony Chambers, Creative Director of Wallpaper – as well as a senior executive from Plastic Logic, and technology evangelist and financier, Herman Hauser of Amadeus Capital. They were there to make sure the technology was of value in the market, of course.
But it was a genuine eye-opener for me.
When you invent a new technology, you always start off by producing something which you know has a market already, and which you think you can do better.
For example, if you wander around the woollen mills of the early industrial revolution, you’ll see machinery which faithfully replicates the actions and movements of the people who wound bobbins or spun thread. I remember seeing one room full of spindles that “walked across the room” the way a human would have done, winding up wool, then walked back to the wall pulling out a few new feet of thread, before winding up again.
Similarly, the first e-paper concepts take things which are made of paper, and where it’s more robust to use e-paper. One concept that was actually my favourite, was a replacement for tags for patients. In a sense, you could say “It gets rid of the printer” and at a simple level, that’s exactly what it does. But it does far more; because the data is held in digital form, it’s machine readable as well as machine writeable, and the whole thing becomes part of a holistic system.
After the afternoon’s judging, I went home, with my mind buzzing. We sat down and had an impromptu Board Meeting of AFAICS Research, and hopefully, over the next few weeks, I’ll be able to pass on some of our ideas. But the nub of it is: “We really need to start planning the e-Page industry!” because if we don’t, we’re going to end up with a hundred pieces of a jig-saw puzzle, none of which make up the same picture.
2 June, 2006
Endoacustica Spy Mouse
This is the week when our children’s children will look back and ask “Didn’t they honestly know?” – the week we pass laws enabling State ID cards. And what’s the hottest story of the day? A mouse with a microphone!
The mouse is real. Every story written about it looks like they think it must be a joke; but it isn’t. It has a microphone in it.
Stick one of these little bugs in your ear, and you’ll be able to hear everything that the mouse user says.
Endoacustica makes wireless microphones, and wireless audio receivers to work with them. It’s an Italian-based firm which specialises in spyware; digital bugging devices, spy cellphones, shotgun microphones and even voice changers (so you can make a call and sound like it isn’t you). And of course, counter-measures.
In the case of the spy mouse, you’re warned. If someone gives you a mouse looking like this, you can obviously tell it’s not a standard Microsoft or Logitech mouse, and adjust your conversation to suit.
In the case of the Government’s ID plans, you’ve also been warned. It’s one thing being relaxed about Tesco building up a database of all your shopping tastes and preferences. It’s quite another to allow the Government to record details of where you go, who you see, and what you spent money on.
Oh, and like the mouse, what the Government is showing us today, may change in appearance as time goes by…
27 March, 2006
Intel Mac Photoshop Users Face Long Wait
Frappuccino-supping designers desperate to run Adobe’s high-end Photoshop graphics suite on their shiny new Intel-powered Mac computers are going to be in for a long wait, according to Adobe engineer Scott Byer.
Writing in a company blog, Byer said that the costs of updating the latest version to run on Intel-powered Mac computers would prove too high, adding, “There’s no limited-cost option for getting most of the performance available on the platform for Photoshop in a short amount of time.”
Byer went on to say that that building a ‘universal binary’ version of Photoshop for OS X on Intel would be “no small task” because Apple’s XCode development tool wasn’t up to the job.
“Apple is doing an amazing job at catching up rapidly, but the truth is we don’t yet have a shipping XCode in hand that handles a large application well,” he said.
Apple’s switch from PowerPC to Intel chips has forced software vendors to rewrite their code to accommodate the different architecture as the chips don’t share the same ‘language.’
To bridge the gap, Apple created the Rosetta technology to translate PowerPC instructions into Intel code, but this interpreter can heavily impact on calculation speeds, with Vnunet claiming that tests running Photoshop on the new Intel Macs have shown the program running at only half the speed of a previous generation PowerPC machine.
With the graphic design sector making up a large chunk of Apple’s user base, the absence of a fully optimised version of the numero uno design application may prove a barrier to professional users switching to Intel Macs.
Currently, only Apple’s iMac, MacBook Pro and Mac Mini machines are powered by Intel chips, with the iBook and PowerMac machines still using IBM PowerPC chips.
With the current version of Photoshop CS2 being released last April, Intel Macheads may be in for a long wait for CS3, with Adobe’s usual timetable suggesting a projected release date some nine months away.
Finishing on a high note, Byer commented, that it would be “far better to focus on making sure Photoshop CS3 is able to absolutely squeeze every ounce of power out of what I’m sure will be pretty spankin’ Intel-based towers by that point than to do tons of work moving an old code base to new tools”
Scott Byer’s blog
27 March, 2006
Rugged PDA Pocket Loox Announced
All-weather, lantern-jaw outdoor types and motorbike fiends should warm to the “ruggedized” version of the Pocket Loox N520 which has just been announced by the German based Andres-Industries.
Touted as the “world’s smallest and cheapest rugged PDA” or even the, “world’s first waterproof PDA with an integrated GPS receiver,” the all-weather Rugged PDA is designed for outdoor types, motorcyclists and users working in ‘hostile’ environments.
Based on the Pocket LOOX N520, the PDA offers the same functionality with optional extras including a motorcycle mounting pack, car kit, a barcode scanning version and an ‘industrial version’ which sounds well ‘ard.
Despite its beefed up case, the ruggedized (we’re growing to like that word) handheld measures a reasonably compact 121 x 76 x 17.5 mm, and weighs 200g.
Motored by an Intel XScale PXA270 312 MHz CPU, the LOOX offers integrated wireless LAN 802.11g Wi-Fi, SD/MMC slot (with support for SDIO) and a large, 240×320 pixels 3.5″ screen supported by 64Mb RAM and 128Mb flash memory
The waterproof and impact resistant unit can also be wired up to a motorcycle’s battery to reduce the chance of the GPS running out of juice on a hillside desolate.
Available in Europe by the end of this month, the unit comes in various configurations including the basic Rugged PDA at €550 (~£380, ~$670) and a GPS bundle with Navigon mobile navigator MN5, map and motorcycle mount retailing at €699 (~£485, ~$850).
Andres-Industries
21 March, 2006
USB Hub Vanity Mirrors, Ashtrays, Coffee Warmers And Heated Gloves
You know the problem: you’ve rushed into work late, sat yourself down at the desk only to realise that there’s not enough USB ports on the machine so you can’t plug in your DVD backup.
And – even worse – there’s not a mirror around so you can’t check if the chocolate topping from the cappuccino you hastily slurped down on the train into work is smeared all over your face.
And the boss is coming in at any minute!
Well, thank goodness for the thoughtful folks at Brando, who have designed just the thing for you – a combination USB hub and vanity mirror!
The ‘Mini Mirror Hub’, described as “the most tiny, fashionable USB 2.0 HUB,” can connect up to four USB 2.0 (or USB 1.1) devices, supporting 480Mbps, 12Mbps and 1.5Mbps speeds.
Powered by the host USB computer (or via an optional adapter), the teensy-weensy hub measures just 40 x 40 x 10 mm, which makes it of rather limited use as a vanity mirror – although we could imagine some city types finding an, err, somewhat alternative use for its shiny surface.
The Mini Mirror Hub is available from here for $14 (~£8, ~e12).
USB Ashtray
If your company has a no-smoking policy and you’re desperate for a sneaky drag at your desk, once again the diligent designers at Brando have just the gadget for you.
Their USB Ashtray – inexplicably shaped as a little blue car – promises to, “minimise smoke and odours” by passing the smoke through a carbon-absorbing filter – and it’s yours for just $22 (~£13, ~e18) – details here.
USB Cafe Pad
With the winter snap still carrying on, there’s always the chance that your coffee may go cold just a little too quickly for your liking, so once again we are grateful for Brando’s engineers for dreaming up the USB Cafe Pad.
Simply plug it into your USB port, switch it on and slap your beverage of choice on top for permanently hot drinks – for just $15 (~£9, ~e13)!
USB Heating Gloves
Finally, we found ourselves unable to resist mentioning Brando’s USB Heating Gloves.
“Ever experience that your hand freezing and slowing down your reaction when you are playing game?”, asks their Website.
Well, we can’t say we ever have, but we can sleep easy in the knowledge that should we ever suffer any heat-related problems when ‘playing game’, we could shell out $22 and slip on their natty heating gloves.
More details here: USB Heating Gloves.
13 March, 2006
Origami Smart Display
The London book fair, just finished. At it, there was no sign of an e-book reader from Microsoft – which is odd, because all the stuff Microsoft has been teasing us about with Origami looks exactly the sort of thing that the Book Fair would have got excited about.
Unless, of course, it’s the long-awaited portable XBox? Good question. What is Origami, then?
Origami is another “Smart Display” – but one which imitates the Nokia 770 Internet Tablet. You probably missed the Smart Display, anyway; and the 770 was only really revealed last week, at a Linux show, but both are weird devices.
Smart Display: it was a flat display. But instead of being stuck on your desk, it was portable. You pulled the screen out of the stand, and took it downstairs; it had WiFi inside it, and as soon as it noticed it was mobile, it looked for the host computer.
It was back in late 2003 that Microsoft canned Smart display, and at the time I remember writing: “The problem with it was pretty simple. If you got the small one, it was actually smaller than most Tablet PCs – and no cheaper. If you got the big one, it was really too heavy and clumsy to carry around.” And also, if you took it away from the home WiFi, it died. It was ONLY worth playing with indoors, while the WiFi was working. It had zero function out of range.
Origami is smaller still. But it works out in the open. An ideal device for a portable electronic book reader? We’ll find out tomorrow if the hardware is up to it, and one key question will be “can you read it in sunlight?” – but the real reason to be sceptical is “What will be available to read on it?”
That’s where Microsoft loses out. Sony’s Librié may be disappointing, but it will (I promise!) have ten times the battery life of Origami, be readable in bright sun, and easier to read generally. And even if none of that was true, it would still win, because Sony has done an iPod on it, and signed up all the book publishers.
Microsoft can’t do that, because it isn’t making Origami. It has designed it; people like Samsung will actually make it.
So Origami isn’t an e-book reader. It’s not a pocket PC either, and it’s not a phone. It’s a light-weight Smart Display, with a “go anywhere” wireless. Who wants it?
Clue from PopCap Games. Bejeweled 2, Zuma, Bookworm. Is this, finally, the answer to the Playstation Portable by Microsoft?
9 March, 2006