Category: Portable

Apple Recalls 28,000 Notebook Batteries

Apple don’t have much luck with batteries, do they? First, the iPod batteries were too weedy to play tunes for a day, now the G4 Powerbook batteries are so beefy they overheat with a risk of fire with four cases of overheating reported worldwide.

Although no fires or injuries have yet to be reported, Apple have recalled 28,000 batteries from the popular 15” laptop range, as some of the units manufactured in the last week of December 2003 may short circuit and overheat. I wonder who was on the production line that week? Too many Christmas parties? The laptops themselves would have been sold between January and August 2004.

Apple have implemented a battery exchange programme in co-operating with the US Consumer Product Safety Commission and international safety authorities.

Users are urged to contact Apple with the serial number of their laptop to see if they might be at risk. Apple will then ship a new battery to the customer free within five days, and provide a label to return the faulty unit.

The A1045 batteries were manufactured by LG Chem Ltd, and have series numbers beginning with HQ404 to HQ408. No other batteries are part of the recall.

Apple’s battery exchange

HP’s Linux Notebook

The HP Compaq nx5000 is the first laptop PC from a major manufacturer to come preloaded with a Linux distribution. In this case, HP have chosen SuSE Linux as an easy to use desktop operating system alternative to Windows. The laptop is priced at about US$1,140 (€950) – which in turn makes it roughly US$60 (€50) cheaper than the same model with Windows XP installed.

The nx5000 is fully featured and includes a CD burner, DVD player and wireless networking. OpenOffice is included as a replacement for Microsoft’s Office suite.

A sixty dollar saving is hardly likely to tempt a Windows user to try out a new, unproven OS, but having Linux preloaded and preconfigured will please a lot of established users who want a Linux laptop without having to buy a Windows license and do all of the configuration themselves. Laptops are notoriously difficult to run Linux distributions on because of the amount of proprietary hardware and tricky drivers involved. This is obviously not a problem for HP as they’re the hardware maker!

Power management, often an issue with Linux, is fully enabled – and the laptop comes with HP support. Other specifications include a Celeron or Pentium processor, 30 to 60 gb of disk space and a 15” screen.

Linux distributions are now second place behind Windows, with Macintosh a close third for the title of most popular desktop operating system – with more and more manufacturers providing Linux alternatives, the open source OS will increase in popularity over the next few years.

HP on the nx5000

ATI’s New Mobile Graphics Chip

ATI have unveiled their latest mobile graphics chip – the Radeon Mobility 9800. The DirectX 9 card is actually based on the new Radeon X800 core, and will first appear in Dells Inspiron XPS and Inspiron 9100.

Graphics capabilities have become far more important in recent years due to three factors: screens have become far better, good TFT screens are cheaper, and many people are buying laptops not just for business, but because they don’t have enough space at home for a full sized PC. And many of those people want to play games.

“Thanks to the new Mobility RADEON 9800, the Dell Inspiron XPS is the first laptop in the world with the power to run the Splinter Cell 3 E3 Weather demo at above 30 fps.” said Dany Lepage, Splinter Cell 3 lead programmer at Ubisoft’s Montreal studio. “The strong performance of the Mobility RADEON 9800, with antialiasing and the widescreen display of the Inspiron XPS, should allow players to experience Splinter Cell 3 in the best possible conditions.”

“ATI continues its outstanding graphics performance with the MOBILITY RADEON 9800 and enables us to be more creative with the visual effects in our games,” says Peter Molyneux, founder of Lionhead Studios. “Gamers can now experience the advanced 3D graphics in applications like Black and White 2 previously available only to desktop users.”

The Mobility 9800 has eight pixel pipelines and uses ATI’s Smartshader technology. A powerful graphics processor will basically eat your laptop battery in one gulp, but ATI have developed Powerplay to make sure you can actually play Splinter Cell past the loading screen.

Paradoxically, the chip runs at 100MHz less than its predecessor the 9700, but it has a staggering 110 million transistors – more than twice that of the previous offering.

Mobility Radeon

Tissot’s New Touch Screen MSN SPOT Watch

Tissot have launched a new watch that uses Microsoft’s SPOT (Smart Personal Objects Technology) platform – allowing the US$725 (€595) wristwatch to receive email, news and schedule information through the MSN Direct service.

There are now seven SPOT watches in the market, with two manufactured by Suunto and four by Fossil.

MSN Direct sends information to SPOT devices through part of the FM spectrum. The service is not available in Europe yet, though Chris Schneider, programme manager for SPOT said: “We are looking at expanding into Europe and other geographies where it makes business sense. However, we are focused on the North American market for this holiday season.”

Indeed, since the vast majority of all watches are sold from October to December, this autumn will be a good indicator of whether the public are ready for SPOT. Thousands of watches have already been sold, so Christmas may be a bumper time.

Microsoft are expanding the information and services on MSN Direct to draw more subscribers, and will be featuring information on films and sports, and manufacturers like Citizen are planning to add more watches to the range.

Tissot

SPOT

RealNetworks Deliver iPod Compatibility Through Harmony

RealNetworks have unveiled Harmony – a DRM translation tool that now makes it possible to transfer and play Real music downloads to Apple’s iPod. This new development means that Real’s music service is compatible with virtually every music player in the market.

Harmony is obviously Real’s answer to the resounding silence they met with after Rob Glaser contacted Steve Jobs with about Real and Apple working together.

Apple’s response is sure to be interesting as it means that iPod owners now have a choice of digital music online stores to fill their players from, and so they might not be entirely happy.

Real’s developers worked out how to make their player FairPlay-compatible purely by analysing publicly available information. This could be seen by some against the DMCA which expressly forbids reverse engineering and tampering with content protection systems.

This shouldn’t cause a problem with the legislation, however: Real are not defeating the FairPlay copy protection system, rather they are wrapping their own files in the FairPlay DRM.

Although potentially bad news for Apple, Harmony is great news for digital music fans – they can now transfer music from their various music stores to any music devices they may have. Not only does Harmony work with the iPod, but users can now perform the same trick with their Windows Media Player hardware too.

Harmony is built in to RealPlayer 10.5, which is available for download now.

Real.com

The Jackito Tactile Digital Assistant

Billing itself as more of a TDA than a PDA, the Jackito Tactile Digital Assistant has a user interface that’s operated by your fingers and thumbs.

Moving away from the traditional stylus interface means that the Jackito has a different form factor than the usual hand-helds out there – the Jackito has a landscape orientation, and it’s operated by your thumbs at the sides.

The display is unique in that it can read two simultaneous touch points – try poking the touch pad on your laptop with two fingers and you’ll see why this is a good thing.

The device is manufactured by a Novinit, a Paris-based company created in 1999 and is an attempt to get away from the “scaled-down PC” mentality of many of the PDAs on the market.

Novinit’s TDA has no less than seven parallel processors, and features its own custom OS – it’ll be available with a choice of screens: black and white, colour and bistable. It seems to have just 2.5mb of user RAM though, but has two SD/MMC slots for expansion.

At US$600 (€490) it’s a bit on the pricey side, but I’m sure you’ll be sat next to an early adopter with one on a plane soon.

Jackito

Survey: 10.8 million Next-Gen Music Players to be Sold in 2004

New research from Informa Media predicts that the world is going to rush out and buy 10.8 million digital music players in 2004. By the end of the year, there will be 21.5 million of them – most of them on the Central Line, I predict.

Informa say that this spending will have a mixed effect as consumers will fill the players with their existing CD collections before venturing out to buy music from online stores. “It’s great news for the actual manufacturers, but for the music companies at the moment it’s not going to be an instant boom,” said Simon Dyson, an analyst with Informa.

I know my own music purchasing took a dip as I spent my first couple of months with my iPod listening to things that I’d bought years ago and not really bothered, with before buying new music.

Online music services are doing spectacularly well nonetheless, and will only do better as more players get into the market and people experiment with new music.

Projected snags are the public’s realisation that they can’t transfer tunes from devices and that many music stores are incompatible – something bought from Napster won’t play on your iPod, for example. Writing about music services means that I have a vast array of music in different formats and remembering what track plays in what programme or device is extremely irritating.

“Incompatibility between some downloads and the most popular portable players could become an issue in the very near future,” Dyson commented.

You don’t say.

Informa media

Duke University Gives Away iPods

There was a time the idea of handing out a device capable of holding 5,000 MP3s free to students would have caused sweating, outcry and at least a couple of writs from the music industry, but Duke University have made this into a unique opportunity.

New freshmen at Duke will receive a 20 gig iPod loaded with course information, calendars, and maps – and students will be able to download language lessons, music, recorded lectures and audio books from the university’s website. They’ll even be able to buy music from their own music store. Students get to keep the iPod, but will have to pay for its replacement if they lose it.

Duke will be handing out 1,650 iPods on August 19th during the freshmen orientation sessions.

Apple have long had a relationship with academia, from donating Macintoshes and equipment to schools to offering iTunes on Campus. This new version of iTunes dissuades students from downloading music illegally by giving them branded alternative whilst at the same time giving academic institutions another communications channel with their students.

iTunes on Campus

Virgin’s Portable Music Plans

But where do you keep your headphones?Virgin Electronics, a new division of Richard Branson’s Virgin Group have opened new offices and launched a new product: the Virgin Electronics Wearable 128mb MP3 Player.

The US$99 (€80) player isn’t competing with the iPod as it only holds about 40 songs. Instead, it’s going for convenience, size and simplicity.

“When we called it the Wearable 128MB MP3 player, we meant wearable. The product is so small and light it can be worn comfortably around the neck, arm—anywhere. No pockets required.” said Joe Sipher, senior vice president of marketing for Virgin Electronics.

The device doesn’t require a power adaptor – it charges from the USB connection to Mac or PC. The user interface is extremely simple too – two buttons control everything. Virgin’s digital music store is expected to launch later on in the summer, and no doubt there will be interesting tie-ins between the new player and the store.

Virgin Electronics’ second release is a pair of noise-cancelling headphone – you can see where they’re going with this can’t you? The US$40 headphones are amongst the cheapest available, but Virgin are keen to stress that they are high quality devices. No doubt both pieces of equipment will be coming to an in-flight magazine near you soon.

Virgin Electronics have also just moved into new offices in Silicon Valley, upping sticks from New York. Virgin’s new appointments will be filling those nice premises – Greg Woock as CEO (formerly Handspring and Creative Labs) and Joe Sipher was once an exec at Handspring and Palm.

Virgin Electronics

PocketPC Virus Found

The first ever PocketPC virus was discovered over the weekend – but it’s a proof of concept project and carries no payload. Given how long devices running Microsoft’s PocketPC operating system have been available, it’s surprising that we’ve been lucky up until now.

The virus, Duts, was written by one of the 29A virus group – a group who write viruses as an exercise to analyse dangers and provide information for anti-virus companies. The same group produced the Cabir Symbian virus last month.

Duts is safe even if it gets out in to the wild as it asks for permission before infecting other files, and only affects a limited number of file types. However, it may not be too difficult for someone to reverse engineer the code and produce a malicious variant.

Viruses and trojan horses are now spreading to other platforms, meaning that PDA and phone users, nit just PC owners will have to take anti-virus measures very seriously indeed.

29A Labs

F-Secure on the Duts virus