You’ve probably read all about the new MacBook family of laptops, by now. You will have digested Steve Jobs’ speech. You may even have shrugged your shoulders and said: ‘meh’. But, having just had our first play with the the 15.4in MacBook Pro, however, we can reveal right now that the new MacBooks are certainly not to be sniffed at.
The first thing that strikes you about the machine is its incredible build quality. Jobs made much of Apple’s new manufacturing process – pioneered with the MacBook Air – where the main part of the chassis is hewn from a single block of aluminium, and it certainly makes for a very robust-feeling machine. The original Pro was no pansy in this regard, but if that was solid as a rock this is positively granite.
I’ve been attempting to buy an Ebook reader from WHSmith over the past couple of days… with “attempting” being the operative word.
The WHSmith website sensibly allows you to enter a delivery and billing address for your goods, and so I opted to have the reader sent here to PC Pro Towers. The website took my order, the confirmation email duly arrived, and all was well and good.
Until a day after I placed the order, I received an email saying:
“Unfortunately we have been unable to obtain name and address verification from the card issuer for this transaction. As such I would appreciate your assistance by faxing to us a copy of your bank statement. (Please note that we do not need to see your current balance).”
Toshiba calls the Satellite NB100 the “Netbook from a brand you can trust,” which I think we can safely take as a dig against less established notebook brands such as Asus and MSI, and it certainly feels quite ruggedly built.
Despite weighing a shade over 1kg, there’s little flex in this tiny machine, and it also looks great. The shiny black lid gives it a real touch of class, and it’s backed up by a good set of specs that make this netbook more than capable when it comes to the everyday tasks it’s designed for. There’s Bluetooth 2.1, 802.11bg networking, a 1.6GHz Atom processor and 1GB of RAM.
Toshiba describes the Portégé A600 as the little big brother of the Portégé R600, or perhaps the big little brother. The reason for the swappable adjectives is that it’s going to be cheaper than Toshiba’s flagship ultraportable, but it’s also notably thicker.
The A600 uses a conventional keyboard that feels comfortable enough to type on without being remarkable. For instance, the keys don’t give any substantial feedback when you type. However, the keys themselves are large - most notably the Backspace and Enter key - with only the height of the Function keys being compromised.
At first touch, the screen feels flimsy, but Toshiba is at pains to point out that the flexibility of the lid is in fact a design feature. You can see a semi-official video of the screen protection in action in this YouTube video.
At first glance, there’s very little to distinguish the R600 from the R500, but the devil is in the detail. For one, Toshiba has strengthened the base - protecting the all-important motherboard - by adding ridges for extra rigidity.
It also claims to have made the screen better protected, with Toshiba’s interesting spin being that the lid’s flexibility - which might initially make people feel that the R600 is a bit fragile - actually increases its reliability. Certainly we gave it a good old flex and it stayed in shape, which is fortunate as this was the one European sample.
I’ve spent the morning chatting to a few guys from Opera, and a lovelier group of folk you couldn’t hope to meet. In a wide ranging chat over Espressos, we discussed everything from who the best drinkers are among the current crop of browser developers, to the importance of web standards. However, the one thing that really caught my attention was a point raised by Opera’s product manager, Roberto Mateu.
“There’s places in Eastern Europe, Indonesia, China where huge amounts of people are leap-frogging desktops altogether and going straight on to browsing on phones. In those places 2.5G is going to be around for a while, and it’s about giving them a choice.”
There’s something in this. I spent a year of my life living in China and the culture surrounding the desktop is very different to Europe. Chinese people get incredibly subsidised packages on mobiles, and the network charges are buttons. Computers, on the other hand, remain expensive. As a result there’s a huge swathe of people using their phones to browse, and not touching the desktop at all. When they do, it’s generally in internet cafes and for gaming, meaning the browser doesn’t get a look in. This is now a cultural thing, a way of seeing the desktop computer and its potential uses. It’s also unlikely to change in the near future.
It started off quite well, with the mail purporting to come from HSBC bank, and the actual email address was security@hbcs.com, which might just squeeze past some people’s radar.
But what went on with the embedded link? It contains the top-level domain “inhabit.com.au”, which doesn’t sound much like HSBC to me, nor I suspect to anyone who’s technical enough to launch a web browser.
Then again, these things must work or they wouldn’t bother sending them. My question is, has anyone actually received a less convincing phishing message?
Bustling through Victoria Tube station this morning, the ticket barriers seemed a little more crowded than usual. Which is to say, rammed to the rafters, rather than merely heaving.
What caused this extra congestion? A bomb threat? Signal failure? No, London Underground has “decided to do its bit for the environment” by turning off “unnecessary” escalators to save energy.
The very same escalators that recently had their zero-watt poster slots replaced with dozens of energy-chomping LCD screens. Which lead down to the lobby containing another half dozen, six-foot LCD screens showing bigger versions of the same video adverts. Which leads to the platforms, with six newly-installed, ginormous projectors blasting video ads on to the platform walls.
If that’s London Underground “doing its bit”, Victoria’s going to be a seaside resort before we know it.
IT accounts for a shocking 2% of worldwide carbon emissions – that’s the same as aviation. While your desktop might be relatively frugal, it’s just the tip of the slowly-melting iceberg. Right now I’m using GMail, Bloglines, my work email, a forum which lives on a server in London and Slashdot – I’m using power all over the world. Take into account all the networking gear sitting in the middle, and the true energy usage of my PC could be astronomical.
Maybe we need to start thinking about our carbon netprint (it seems like as good a phrase as any) when we look at our carbon footprint; do you really need that Facebook, MySpace or Bebo account? It’s not just actively using these services that consumes power; a MySpace account sitting idle, not accessed for months, still requires power to store – and more than you may think. Read the rest of this entry »
Could someone check down the back of the sofa, please? It’s just that Microsoft seems to have disappeared. To be fair, not the whole thing. I’m pretty certain there’s still a large group of buildings in Redmond toting the Microsoft logo, and Reading for that matter, but if you speak to Microsoft execs these days you can be pretty sure their sentences will start with “Windows…” rather than “Microsoft…”
Of course, it’s all about the brand. Somewhere in a high-level board meeting, someone’s decided that the Windows brand is more important than the Microsoft brand, which is after all creaking at the seams now. There was a time when it was cutting edge to be SomethingSoft, but those were the days of the 80s when Rick Astley was an up-and-coming young hipster. Read the rest of this entry »
The first thing that strikes you about the machine is its incredible build quality. Jobs made much of Apple’s new manufacturing process – pioneered with the MacBook Air – where the main part of the chassis is hewn from a single block of aluminium, and it certainly makes for a very robust-feeling machine. The original Pro was no pansy in this regard, but if that was solid as a rock this is positively granite.
