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Posts Tagged ‘Portability’

College offers freshmen a choice: iPad or MacBook

Filed under: Education, MacBook, iPad

A few colleges offer a laptop to incoming freshmen (paid for out of their tuition, of course), but Oregon’s George Fox University is, so far as we know, the first college to give students the choice between a MacBook or an iPad. According to Macsimum News, George Fox University’s chief information officer, Greg Smith, said, “The issue for us is the changing landscape of educational computing and the value dilution of a laptop for a traditional undergraduate.” Smith says offering the iPad as an alternative to the MacBook is well-suited to students who already have a laptop of their own, or students who think the iPad will be a better fit for them than a full-sized MacBook.

Smith is aware that the iPad has potential issues associated with it, and he wonders if the iPad will be able to fully meet students’ educational needs. According to Smith, “These are the kinds of questions we really won’t know the answer to until we get started.” The university hasn’t supplied any information on which models of iPad they intend to offer to incoming students, but I’m willing to bet that the 3G-enabled models probably won’t be offered.

It will be interesting to see how George Fox University’s experiment plays out over the next year. Personally, something like an iPad would have been a fantastic tool for me during my undergrad studies, especially compared to the ancient, leaden brick of a PowerBook G3 I was toting all over campus. Whether students will choose to sacrifice the higher performance and flexibility of a MacBook over the ease of use and portability of the iPad is, as Smith says, something that remains to be seen.

TUAWCollege offers freshmen a choice: iPad or MacBook originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Tue, 23 Feb 2010 20:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Dell Mini 5 prototype impressions

Dell’s puzzled the world for quite some time with its outlandish Mini 5 — at first glance it’s just another Android-based MID, but a quick fiddle with it reveals the full-fledged 3G phone inside. So will it fit in a pocket? Can we carry it around like a normal phone? Is this the future form factor that will bring the ultimate balance between portability and practicality? With such heavy dose of curiosity, we eventually traveled all the way to Shenzhen literally just to grab this prototype. Now, before you read on, do bear in mind that some of its features — especially the OS — may not make it to the final design when it comes out later this year, nor do we know what stage this prototype was at. We good? OK.

Let’s start with the basics: the main specs on our unit include Android 1.6 (which will definitely be obsolete for the final product), five-inch 800 x 480 capacitive touchscreen, Snapdragon QSD8250 chipset (with CPU clocked at 1GHz), Bluetooth, WiFi, GPS and WCDMA radio. Sadly, we have no info on whether the Mini 5 will have other cellular radio options, but it wouldn’t hurt to send Dell a petition regarding this matter. For those who want the dimensions and weight in numbers, it’s about 152mm x 78mm x 10mm at 8 ounces (including the battery, which lasts for almost a day for normal usage on 3G). Memory-wise there’s 405MB RAM and 1.63GB of internal storage — a slight let-down for the latter, so let’s hope the retail unit will be given a more generous dose of silicon. You can add a microSD card next to the battery on the back, but it appears that the mysterious second card slot we saw in the earlier teardown only gave us false hope — we couldn’t find a way to get to it without prying open the housing. Connection to your computer relies on a proprietary port — similar but slightly larger than the iPod’s — to USB cable, which may suggest that we will see some more peripherals made for the Mini 5 and its future siblings.

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Dell Mini 5 prototype impressions originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 19 Feb 2010 12:16:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Engadget’s Holiday Gift Guide: Desktops
Welcome to the Engadget Holiday Gift Guide! The team here is well aware of the heartbreaking difficulties of the seasonal shopping experience, and we want to help you sort through the trash and come up with the treasures this year. Below is today’s bevy of hand curated picks, and you can head back to the Gift Guide hub to see the rest of the product guides as they’re added throughout the holiday season.

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Engadget’s Holiday Gift Guide: Desktops originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 17 Dec 2009 14:35:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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A review of the iMac 27" Core 2 Duo: yep, it’s still an iMac

Though users in general—and Mac users in particular—are quickly moving to a notebook-dominated world, Apple’s iconic iMac remains a strong seller in the desktop market. And for good reason: aside from the obvious portability offered by a notebook, the sleek machine offers more bang for your buck than a mobile, but without any of the ugliness that typically comes with a desktop machine. Apple’s latest iMac offerings continue this trend by refining the cosmetic aspects of the machine and adding just enough new stuff on the inside to make things interesting.

It has been just over two years since Apple last revamped the iMac’s design, and the refinements are largely worth it. The new iMac now comes in three processor flavors and two screen options. The stock processor options are either the 3.06GHz Intel Core 2 Duo (the same processor offered in the last-generation iMacs, but with faster configurations) or a 2.66GHz Intel Core i5 (the first quad-core option to come to the iMac), and you can get a 2.8GHz Intel Core i7 as a build-to-order option. For the display, the 21″ iMac has now morphed into the 21.5″ (to accommodate a 16:9 aspect ratio), and the high-end option is now 27″.

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The ABCs of securing your Windows netbook

Netbooks are likely to be a popular gift this holiday season—they’re cheap, highly portable, and the kind of thing that you can give as a gift to a relatively novice computer user who needs a laptop but doesn’t need the power or responsibility that comes with a more expensive portable. Netbooks are also looking increasingly good to business travelers, due to their portability and low hardware replacement cost in case of loss, damage, or theft. But even though a netbook itself can be cheap to replace, losing an inexpensive netbook PC can still be very costly. Sure, a stolen or lost netbook will set you back a few hundred dollars for the device, but you have to consider how much the data stored on it is worth. That lost netbook can open you up to identity theft, empty out your bank accounts, or even cost you your job. That’s something to think about before you walk out the door with that $300 wonder.

However, with a little bit of planning, a little bit of effort, and perhaps some additional software, you can ensure that if you lose your netbook, whoever finds it has nothing more than a useless, two-pound hunk of plastic and silicon. Not only can you protect and encrypt your data from prying eyes, you can also set your netbook to self-destruct all the data onboard if you lose it.

In this article, we’ll give you a basic introduction to securing your Windows netbook in case it’s stolen. Advanced Windows users will already know most of what we’ll cover, so this article is aimed more at the user who has a new netbook and no idea how to secure it.

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The Ultimate Gift for the iPhone Developer in Your Life: Notepods

We’ve discovered an adorable yet highly useful little product that could significantly ease some pain and lead to greater levels of productivity for smartphone developers.

It’s ridiculously simple as a concept, yet it allows for more creativity, freedom, and portability than any other tool we’ve seen for mobile developers, hands down. The product of a design shop and a web development lab, both based in Australia, these nifty and inexpensive toys have been popping up in offices all over Silicon Valley. Read on to learn the secret behind your favorite mobile dev’s favorite Christmas present.

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It’s made of paper.

Yes, the Notepod is the Moleskine of the digerati, an ingenious little sketchpad shaped like an iPhone. The front of each sheet features “52mm by 77mm of blank space floating in darkness,” and the back of each piece is a blank grid of graph paper, perfect, as the site says, “perfect for notes or jotting down the phone number of a hot geek.”

Notepods each contain 100 pages, and you can snag a 3-pack for around $18USD. Shipping will take between 7 and 12 business days, unless you’re lucky enough to live in Australia or New Zealand.

As we all know, the best ideas often hit you at inappropriate or inconvenient times. As Inventive Labs posted, “It’s incredibly fun to come up with an idea in the pub over a few beers;” however, how fun is it to decipher those indecipherable, scrawled-on and soggy cocktail napkins the next morning? Keep one in your bag, one on the nightstand – wherever inspiration strikes. It might be made of paper, but we think smartphone developers will find it a fun and simple productivity tool.

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Firefox’s Plan to Kick the Login’s Butt

Firefox gets distributed social networking and identity management.

The good people who work on the revolutionary, open-sourced, and occasionally maligned browser have been hard at work on making cross-site navigation and portable IDs a solvable problem. A discrete button to the left of the URL that can tell users whether or not they are logged in to a particular site and allow them to log in without further navigation? Accuse us of punning, but definitely sign us up. Google Chrome: Start taking notes.

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Our friends at Mozilla posted this teaser back in the spring, when they touted a way to eliminate clicks and keystrokes between navigating to and being recognized by a given website.

Our own Marshall Kirkpatrick enthused, “Earlier this week, we argued that browsers and social networks were fast converging, and that with more users and some feature advantages, Firefox could be the best real competition for Facebook… This is just one more chapter in a much larger story – but look how easy this makes OpenID to use!”

But now, Mozilla’s UX chief Aza Raskin has posted more updates to his personal blog that indicate new hotness is coming soon. The new feature will harness the power of Mozilla’s Weave to make your online identity something that’s stored in your back pocket more than it’s stored in your cookies or a third party’s server.

Decrying redirects and iframes, Raskin tells of a brave new world where an in-browser button that defies navigational difficulties allows for something closer to true identity portability than we’ve seen yet:

Identity will be one of the defining themes in the next five years of the Web. Nearly every site has a concept of a user account, registration, and identity. Searching for “sign in” on Google yields over 1.8 billion hits. And yet, the browser does nothing to make this experience better save for some basic auto form filling. The browser leaves websites to re-implement identity management, and forces users to learn a new scheme for every site… Your identity is too important to be owned by any one company.

Finally! They said it!

And now, we give you screenshots:

So, what’s the verdict, readers? Does this surpass Chrome’s identity-porting capabilities? Does this create massive privacy issues for users who don’t want their personal traffic tracked?

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ASUS G51J 3D sports NVIDIA 3D Vision with 120Hz display to bring "real" 3D to laptops

No knock on Acer, who got here first with the Aspire 5738DG, but it sounds like the ASUS G51J 3D has the technology edge in the nascent 3D laptop category. We’ll have to see it in action to be sure, but the laptop is using NVIDIA’s 3D Vision tech for extensive game compatibility (around 400 games currently work with it), and a 120Hz, 15.6-inch screen paired with some active shutter glasses. We’ve found the shutter method to be typically a more enjoyable 3D experience than polarized solutions, with no knock on frame rate or resolution. The GeForce GTX 260M card with 1GB of DDR3 memory doesn’t hurt either, but that hugegantic USB IR blaster that has to sit on the desk and sync up with the glasses could be a problem for 3D-on-the-go. Of course, the benchmark friendly Core i7-based G51J which this machine is based on (the only real difference is the screen) was never much of one for portability. The laptop will be out soon, with a starting price of $1,700.

Filed under: Gaming, Laptops

ASUS G51J 3D sports NVIDIA 3D Vision with 120Hz display to bring “real” 3D to laptops originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 17 Nov 2009 20:23:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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