Recently on my travels looking for a tablet computer, I noticed that they have dropped the price of the BlackBerry Playbook. It comes in 3 models 16GIG – £249, 32GIG – £329 and 64GIG – £409. If you were just to look at this from a normal ‘person on the ground’ view point, you  could argue that at £249 it is £150 cheaper than the iPad, smaller which means easier to carry around and it all does the same thing right? While I have not bought one as of yet, this is what I found out so far about the device.

Applications

No matter how good a device, without having any decent applications to run on it means it will be left sitting idle a lot of the time. I spotted it had dual camera’s, so lets go through some specifications.

7″ LCD running at 1024×600, 425g in weight, 1GHz Dual core CPU, 3MP front facing camera, 5MP rear facing camera.

When thinking about a use for this, Skype comes to mind but my searching on the internet left me with no way to run skype on this thing. There is a webage you can go to and get it that way but no native application you can get right now.   As the Playbook supports flash what about Google+ Hangout feature? Well again this requires an install of a plugin so this is also a no go.

Is the price right?

While dropping the price is a good thing, it tells me that the device is failing and they are trying to get rid of them quicker. More devices out there means more people writing applications for the thing. If they had the price as £150 at the very max, it ‘might’ have sold more but maybe not. I noticed they dropped the Xoom to £329 (from £399) but by the time I went back in, they had already removed it from the shelf.

The fact of the matter is quite simple, I saw not a single person looking at the tablets or the netbooks and the floor space they give to these things are shrinking fast. I can only see the two main runners been Apple with iPad 2 and some of the higher end Android based tablets. The end result is I will give this device a miss, it looks nice but without any major applications, it is a waste of money to me.

The Axis M7001 Surveillance Kit is a two part device in that the actual M7001 part is a video encoder that run via PoE (power over ethernet) and can drive two streams, one been the supplied camera and the other is ANY CCTV type camera (BNC Connection). Due to the small size and the fact you do not need any power for the external camera, you can place the CCTV anywhere you need. It scales up to 704×576 for high quality video.

Recently I had to stock up at work on USB Flash drives, the capacity was not so important and the main aim was price I guess. I spotted the Kingston DataTraveler 108, the price was a s chap as the rest of the 4 GIG flash drives and it looked tiny. We bought five of these and I gave one a run through once it arrived.

Kingston DataTraveler 108

As you can see from the shot above, the drive is probably the smallest a drive can be and it is very light indeed. Upon plugging this into a computer, I would say that the thing feels like it is going to break and it has a small clips to get on your keyring.

It Does come with some sort of software called urDrive but after reading about this, it is not something I would use myself. All in all then, well worth the money given they are about the same price as the other of the same capacity.  Comes in 4GIG, 8GIG and 16GIG, each a different colour.

I have heard the USA Based Tech Hosts declare that the end of notebooks is in sight and they serve no real purpose in life and things such as the Apple iPad will overtake the notebook market by next year. I own a netbook myself (the first gen Acer One) and while it does serve some handy purposes, it is not about to replace my laptop any time soon. Do you think the bell’s are sounding for Netbooks as yet another passing fad or do you think they are here to stay?

From a Retail point of view

Last weekend while out shopping for a washing machine, I was in the local Comet Store and in the PC Section we had a row of Desktops (limited mainly by the touch screen variety), a row of Laptops (large number of 17″ Models) and finally TWO rows of Netbooks – a good enough sign if ever I needed one. It is simple enough to understand, the price of these computers are cheap, far cheaper then the Laptops and the desktop models. They are small, they now feature a mostly normal keyboard and the battery life shown seems to beat most laptops.

If these things were not selling, the various companies would not be making them, every single company had a netbook model out there such as Acer, ASUS, IBM, HP, Dell and others. If these things were not selling, Comet would not waste floor space on them – people were indeed checking them out and indeed buying them while I was there.

From a work point of view

There has been a requirement for small portable computers for various tasks and while we looked at the likes of the Apple iPad as something we could maybe use – the fact we could not load the software we needed to operate made us instead turn to the various Netbooks and tablet computers on offer. If we ignore the models with very small keyboards – these are more then usable on a daily basis.

The problem with Netbooks

The first issue that comes to my mind is the keyboard and mouse pad, if these are too small, you cannot really use a netbook properly at all and end of pecking away rather than typing. Those people with large stubby hands will have a major problem typing on these things and will be of no use to them, though the majority if people I have come across do not fit into this category.

The next issue is not the screen size but the resolution, fitting a web page or an application means scrolling around, if they could make this bigger (fit more into the same space) – then this would help a lot – as it stands now, this is a major thing holding these things back.

Speed – when I was building 6 of these things at work, I noticed how slow these are to go from start to finish but once working, they do serve the purpose well. Remember that the Atom is about the same speed as the old P4 CPU – so no speed demon.

Will they disappear?

I can understand somebody who does not deal with the larger world of corporate buying decisions and looking at the retails stores at what is out there, then they can see that something such as the iPad will overtake the world of Netbooks by next year. I beg to differ on this thought and see the Netbooks getting faster and more models coming in. What are your thoughts? Do you think they will die or do you think they will just keep on coming?

A very brief review of the Dell Latitude 2110 Netbook (USA people click HERE). There is a few good reasons why this might suit your needs over the Acer and others out there and the price range is $400+ or £289 – a lot depends on the specs your choose of course such as operating system, memory and hard drive etc. This is just an overview as I only had one day to take a look at this device and get it ready with Windows XP.

First the Specs

It is running an Intel Atom N470 which runs at 1.83Ghz with 512KB L2 Cache.

The Chipset is Intel NM10 Express

Display options are all 10.1″ but can either be 1024×600, 1024×600 with touchscreen or 1366×768 TrueLife LED

Graphics is powered by Intel GMA 3150 (optional Broadcom Crystal HD media accelerator

Memory can be up to 2 GIG Ram DDR2 (One slot)

Hard Drive is 250 GIG or 64GIG SSD

3 x USB, VGA port, Network port, Audio.

Built in Webcam

The beast in action

Model Tested

The model I had to get ready was the 10.1″ 1024×600 with touchscreen and 3G card fitted (for mobile broadband) with 2 GIG ram and 250GIG Drive fitted plus the 6 Cell Battery. It came pre-installed with Windows XP Pro from Dell and pre-built with all there apps.

Initial testing

The screen size presented a problem (as it does with all netbooks) and the first task was to update windows with every single update and this process was very slow indeed. After the first round of 23 updates and a restart, Explorer would crash upon starting and finally fixed this by de-installing Explorer 8 and reverting to 7 until it self updated itself later. Dell had managed to install Windows Search which made a already slow laptop slower and more work to get rid of all the junk.

3G Problems

With a sim fitted – it stated it could not find the 3G Card (that’s the hardware not the sim) and eventually had to get on the phone to Dell who took control and 3 engineers later – finally they installed some Vodafone software, they could not explain why there software did not work.

What about the laptop?

It has a rubberised coating both top and bottom and feels quite durable and the chic keys are something you either love or hate. The speed of the device felt very sluggish though this might have something to do with all the junk Dell like to Install. The only user serviceable parts is when you take off the battery allowing you to slot in a SIM Card for the broadband. What if you had a lot to built – this is were another call to Dell comes into play…

Getting down and dirty

I was un-sure how you took the hard drive out and called Dell – they were shocked I needed to remove the hard drive and questioned me why. After explaining that I need to make an image and build a lot – they soon got the manual out. You have to remove that battery, remote Two screws and now the Keyboard comes out, unclipped the connected flat cable of course. Now you need to remove 3 Screws and flip the thing over, remove another 4 and now the Laptop comes apart - revealing the motherboard. From here you need to take another 4 screws out of the hard drive and you can now image that beast. I am not looking forward to repeating this over and over again – Why on earth did Dell not make it easier?

Thoughts

The battery (6-Cell) forms a sort of stand and lasts quite some time and the touch screen is sort of responsive but not amazing. I personally think it is no better then any of the other Netbooks out there and seems to cost more. The 3G built in is a nice feature though and may suit some people.

The Acer Revo R600 is what is termed a NetTop PC, this been very small form factor, cheap and low wattage desktop computer. I Spotted this on sale at ebuyer via a mail shot for £149.99. What do you get for the money? Is it a good media centre PC? Can it play games? Read on to find out more.

Specs

Intel Atom 230 1.6GHz

NVIDIA® ION™ chipset

1 x 1GB DDR2 800 SDRAM

160GB Serial ATA II

nVidia ION Graphics

High Definition audio (7.1) Audio

Wireless & Wired connections

Interfaces

• 6 x USB 2.0 ports
• Four-in-one card reader
• High definition headphone and microphone jacks
• DC-in jack
• Ethernet port
• D-Sub VGA port
• HDMI port
• eSATA port

Dimensions : 180 x 180 x30 mm

Verdict

The Intel Atom 230 CPU running at 1.6Ghz is about right for this small a desktop and while netbook struggle to cope with HD, when paired with the nVidia ION Graphics, it can handle HD in 720 and with a few tweaks to the settings, can even handle HD 1080P. Game is not realyl on the cards, maybe at a low resolution and settings but this is not what this machine is aimed at. If you wanted something small and cheap which can run 24/7 without burning to much electricity and no noise – such as running a web server, then this is also for you.  

Puppy Linux is a small and fast Linux Distor designed to run from a USB Drive with the goal been to plug into any computer (say at work) and then work outside the confines of Windows plus take your work with you. In line with Cloud OS – I choose to give this a try and see how it coped and was it a workable system?

Download the ISO

The first thing I did was download the ISO and instead of trying to follow various guides on installing this a USB Stick or wasting a CD-R, I went for plan F – I Installed it inside a Virtual Machine (VMWare in my case). One it had booted up, there was an option to install to a USB Sitck, I had already mounted a 512MB Stick (first thing I picked up) and followed the screens.

Now to test it

I Booted a Laptop from USB and it went through the very same screens as the ISO did – seleting Keyboard and the like but at the Video screen, where the virtual machines worked fine – this fell over, maybe as it had ATI Gfx card? I did get a graphical screen up but it was low resolution and very slow – I am missing the point of this program, can I not plug it into ANY machine and it works?

Thoughts

Thee is already a way to make Ubuntu 9.10 run from a USB Stick and use some of the space for Virtual memory / Harddrive, this works better then this Puppy Linux thing for sure. There is two train of thoughts here for portable Operating Systems:

• Cloud based to run inside a browser on any machine – using the OS already installed to run from (Google OS etc)
• Bootable USB version – by-pass the installed OS to run a version of Linux – all work is local.