Lenovo Ideapad U1 – fantastic 2

LenovoIdeaPadU1Hybrid21_thumbIt’s good to see new idea implemented. Now it’s Lenovo’s turn. The idea of having tablet and the base is not that new since always innovating introduced a while ago although they don’t do mass production as of yet [or can’t build enough.] However, Lenovo came up with a similar idea, but it seems to be much more practical. Instead of having 1 machine which can be separated into 2 pieces, they decided to have 2 separated machines that can be merged into 1 device. Really interesting!

A tablet part is running by 1GHz ARM processor, 16GB SSD, Wifi-n, 3G, resistive touch, webcam, and battery. It’s powered by Lenovo-customized version of Linux. A base part is another machine running by Core 2 processor, standard HDD, memory, HDMI, Wifi-n [another NIC for base!!], and battery which is operated by Windows 7. You might wonder if they can really run as 2 devices; They can! according to laptopmag.com. You can use your TV or monitor plug to HDMI for the base while playing with the tablet part somewhere else.

How do they work? There is some sort of synchronizing program when 2 parts are joined. You will not lose anything when running on each device. For example, you are browsing Google Reader on tablet part. When you merge it to the base, that page will show in Windows 7 too. Well, I’m looking forward to it!

Lenovo blog says it is believed to cost $999 as starting price point and will be available in April, 2010. Not too shabby.

More information:
Hand-on video @ laptopmag.com
A lot of pictures @ pocket-lint.com
Inside info @ Lenovo blog

Popularity: 1% [?]

January 9, 2010 | sipp11 | No Comments »

Pandora is real now; so close!

well, I wish I had Pandora with me now. MWeston was showing/playing trying to make us want Pandora even more !!

Like someone in the community said, “take your damn time, but it’s better be damn good.”

Yeah, I can see that’s coming!! hold your breath, it’s so darn close now.

Popularity: 1% [?]

December 11, 2009 | sipp11 | No Comments »

Windows or Mac or any OS – they all are the same

Mac OS X crashes

 

Regardless of OS  we choose, it’s always giving us problems and also pleasures. No more arguing since you probably have seen tons of BSOD or error dialog from Windows; Mac OS is the same story. They all are ‘”garbage in, garbage out.” Nothing is perfect in the world. Just choose what you like and get the best out of it.

Happy Thanksgiving, y’all!

Popularity: unranked [?]

November 24, 2009 | sipp11 | No Comments »

Must have – Flash w/ video hardware acceleration

Flash Player 10.1

Flash, these days, is just an evitable plug-in to the world of the Internet; no one can avoid using that although some, like me, don’t prefer to use this resource hog app that much.While Flash never had any hardware acceleration involved, all HD content pushed Flash into limit. Even some Intel Core 2 Duo might not get smooth Youtube or Hulu HD videos or even flash games.

Now Adobe decided to help us a little bit by putting effort on video hardware acceleration too. Yeah, it’s been a while people asking for this, ARM and x64 support are another highly requested. Although this release is a beta one, as for myself, I have tried and it works way better than Flash 10. I don’t get any few seconds pause in any HD video anymore. Also, games like Farmville, Fishville, that sort of stuffs, won’t make a problem like they did before. I bet Netbook would get the real benefit of this release for sure. Try for self; you will like Flash content better.

Grab it @Adobe labs. Plus, if you use Adobe AIR too, there is AIR 2.0 coming out. Check it out!

note: I still hope that Silverlight would be more widespread use than this. We need competition to get moving forward faster.

Popularity: unranked [?]

November 18, 2009 | sipp11 | Tags: | No Comments »

Dell Inspiron Zino HD – cheap nice-looking HTPC

Dell Zino HD - colorful

I’m always interested in small form factor PC. yeah, Mac mini is pretty good too, but $500+ is just a bit too steep. When it comes to Dell, Studio Hybrid was introduced late last year, but by the fact that its price is not that different to Mac mini, people might reluctant grabbing one. Now, Dell offers a new line of tiny desktop again. It’s Inspiron Zino HD which has starting price as low as $230. Whoa, what an aggressive move from Dell, I think.

For specification, nowadays anything cheap, I bet Intel Atom is involved. Surprisingly, yes and no. Yes, for Zino [non-HD], it’s powered by Atom which I don’t care much since it isn’t available in the US as of now. However, Dell chooses to do different route for Zino HD. AMD rules this time. If you keep track of CPU market, Athlon Neo probably comes to your mind and it’s the one although there are options for Athlon X2 as well. Let’s see what we will get for Zino HD:-

CPU: AMD Athlon™ 2650e (512K L2, 1.6GHz), 2850e (512K, L2, 1.8GHz), X2 3250e (1MB L2, 1.5Ghz), or Neo X2 6850e (1MB L2, 1.8GHz)
Memory: 2-8GB (PC2-6400 or DDR2-800 SODIMM eventually DIMM?? I don’t know if it’s really DIMM or typo)
Hard drive: 250GB-1TB 7200rpm (supposed to be 3.5” since 1TB is available too.)
Optical drive: CD/DVD burner and Blu-ray as an optional
Graphic Card: ATI Radeon HD3200 or HD4330 512MB as an optional
Wireless: Dell 1397 (802.11b/g) or Dell 1520 (802.11n) [both optional]
Ports: 1*SD reader, 4*USB, 1*HDMI, 1*VGA, 1*Gigabit LAN, 2*eSATA, 1*Mic, 2*Speaker (back and front)
Dimension: 7.8”x 7.8” x 3.4”, 3.53lbs (1.6kg)
PSU: 65W or 75W if you choose HD4330

Well, CPUs are somewhat unknown since they don’t appear anywhere, but on this little box. They are absolutely better than Intel Atom though. According the review@AMD blogs, they claimed that it handles Hulu and Media Center smoothly, but no words on HD contents like 720p or 1080p or mkv. I hope the single core CPU could handle things w/o any hiccups. Guess we have to wait and see more reviews about this.

At $230, I honestly don’t think it will satisfy anyone which choosing this over nettop which is powered by Intel Atom + ION platform, but it’s cheaper, who cares? As for only surfing web, checking mail desktop, $230 is such a good deal to me. Nonetheless, as for HTPC, AFAIK, ATI HD3200 won’t deliver 7.1 sound via HDMI—only stereo, you’d better off with HD4330, $75 more, which will do anything you throw in. Also, dual core CPU is like a must here with $60 more. For RAM and such, you can add your own much cheaper than Dell offers. By this configuration, this little box would cost you roughly $230 + $75 + $60 = $365. It’s not that cheap, but not too expensive.

My opinion? only if Dell comes up with a good coupon dropping price a bit, it will sell pretty good. By the way, I’m the one who waits this baby on Dell outlet; that will be darn good deal indeed.

Check it out @ Dell.com or review @ blogs.amd.com

Dell Zino HD Dell Zino HD Dell Zino HD

Popularity: unranked [?]

November 13, 2009 | sipp11 | Tags: | No Comments »

Change Login Screen background in Windows 7

login screen win7 If you are sick of vanilla login screen background, there is a way to change =) You have to tweak in registry a bit though, Microsoft just made it easy for OEM partner only :-P

First of all, you have to prepare your new background. Crop your image to 1:1 to your screen resolution. The catch is you should save your image not to be larger than 256kB. You might think it turns to crap one, but believe me that’s good enough =)

After getting an image you want, rename it to “backgroundDefault.jpg”. Then copy to the folder

%windir%\system32\oobe\info\backgrounds

in case it doesn’t exist, create your own.

Secondly, enable the background in Registry, by getting into “regedit”

HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Authentication\LogonUI\Background

regedit - OEMBackground

Create new key DWORD 32-bit, value 1 (1 as enable, 0 as disable) Also, if any of these doesn’t exist, create your own =)

That is it!, you may lock the computer and appreciate your personal login screen. Make your PC personal again!! lol

Popularity: unranked [?]

November 10, 2009 | sipp11 | No Comments »

Free Windows 7 themes

I’m not a big fan of customized desktop since I regularly clean up my OS every now and then. This is much easier way to spice up the feeling a bit =) Yeah, it’s free.

image

Also, it has a lot of interesting wallpapers which, of course, are nice. It’s like looking through Flickr with rotating desktop wallpaper, a feature which Microsoft eventually get after Apple has for many years :-P

Check it out @ Personalized Gallery

Popularity: unranked [?]

| sipp11 | No Comments »

Palm Pixie: epic fail again

You may recall that Palm Pre is kinda sucess, but, in fact, it’s sorta fail. Being in NYC, I usually see any new device being used at all time. Few years ago, Palm Treo was the one. Every time Palm released the new one; yeah, there were tons of them everywhere. For Palm Pre, I honestly say that I haven’t seen one being used yet. The sale figure is just too minimal, esp. when Sprint decided to stick Pre with Simply Everything Plan *only*skull_hero

Palm made news again! Palm Pixie, aka. stripped down version of Pre or Centro series of webOS. It looks badly similar to Palm Centro, but with webOS, it’s much much more interesting (or not?) At the very first, I was about to grab if Sprint doesn’t tie this tiny phone with any plan. Now I just see that it’s missing WiFi. WTH? My best bet would be like Sprint has something to do with it. They just want everyone to have this tying with data plan, so they can get $ more. No-go for me indeed. Why would I have to pay $30 for data while I’m paying $10 a month for data on my Treo and get the same thing. But if Palm won’t release either Pre or Pixie on GSM board + Wifi on board. Then PALM, this 4-letter, will fall out of the market pretty soon. Not to mention whether they are following App store’s policy from Apple or not.

Popularity: 1% [?]

September 18, 2009 | sipp11 | No Comments »

WPA + TKIP has been cracked

Wireless Network is the most popular target for any attacker these days. No doubt, it will get even worse. After WEP has been cracked *easily* for a while, now it’s WPA + TKIP’s turn. Japanese scientist has developed WPA encryption crack system that can break WPA that uses the Temporal Key Integrity Protocol (TKIP) algorithm in matter of minutes. Well, some might say this is not new stuff since WPA *can be* cracked for a while now. However, cracking WPA this fast shows that it’s getting worse and worse and using WPA w/TKIP is as much vulnerable as using WEP nowadays.

Last November, security researchers first showed how WPA could be broken, but the Japanese researchers have taken the attack to a new level, according to Dragos Ruiu, organizer of the PacSec security conference where the first WPA hack was demonstrated. "They took this stuff which was fairly theoretical and they’ve made it much more practical," he said.

The earlier attack, developed by researchers Martin Beck and Erik Tews, worked on a smaller range of WPA devices and took between 12 and 15 minutes to work. Both attacks work only on WPA systems that use the Temporal Key Integrity Protocol (TKIP) algorithm. They do not work on newer WPA 2 devices or on WPA systems that use the stronger Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) algorithm.

According to the report, the best practice so far is like what we already know, moving to WPA2 with AES encryption: you will have a strong defense and gain the performance as well, as you may know, with WPA2 with AES, you will lose only less than 10% of bandwidth to all encryption stuff while the rest will waste more than 25% to all the key & stuffs. That’s like a bonus. Nonetheless, if you still carry stuffs from 2006 or older, using WPA/WPA2 might be the best practice. Well, putting your guard down can’t be that bad if you know what you are doing!

via Yahoo! Tech

Popularity: 1% [?]

August 27, 2009 | sipp11 | Tags: , | No Comments »

Always Innovating starts shipping the Touch Book out

Some people who were on pre-order this little slate tablet PC are receiving =) That’s darn good news considering my Pandora’s future is still unknown. What really interesting about this machine is it’s powered by ARM architecture CPU which you will see more and more often these days. I don’t know if it can perform up to par on bigger type of machine or not. I bet you will see that sooner or later.

Hardware specifications have been changed just tiny bit from what we have known back in March.

  • Texas Instruments OMAP3530 with Micron 256MB (RAM) + 256MB (NAND) Memory
  • 8.9 inches 1024×600 A+ screen
  • Main storage: 8GB SD card — we decided to change from Micro SD to standard SD, so that you can easily upgrade it
  • Internal USB wifi 802.11 b/g/n powered by a Ralink 3070 chipset
  • Internal USB bluetooth class 2.1
  • FCC, CE, UL-certified, 5V, 3.5A power adapter
  • 8.9 inches pressure sensitive touch screen
  • US Qwerty 24cm-large keyboard — around 95% of the size of a standard keyboard
  • Cirque Touchpad
  • Two Owolff high-quality internal stereo speakers
  • 3D accelerometer
  • Two internal batteries 6000 and 12000 mAh — it can be replaced with a screw driver
  • 7 USB ports: three external, four internal, three of them may be reserved for wifi, bluetooth and keyboard
  • Bi-color silver/black case — see photos — with a beautiful dark-red back cover (we decided to go only for red for the first batch as it really jumps out, you won’t regret it).
  • Secured attachment system of tablet into keyboard
  • Independent magnet system for the tablet — we don’t want your Touch Book to un-magnetize all your credit cards while carrying it in your bag!

For the time being, twitter might be the best resource catching up all info about this machine.

Always Innovating - Touchbook Always Innovating - Touchbook Always Innovating - Touchbook Always Innovating - Touchbook Always Innovating - Touchbook

These above pictures have been posted by sfeger. Follow him if you are interested in Touch Book.

For me? it seems to be too thick for my taste, but you’ll never know, if you haven’t touched/seen in person. I still look forward to getting a good news from Pandora, or Zune HD if I can’t resist when it comes out next month.

Pre-order @ alwaysinnovating.com if you feel this is right for you!

Popularity: 1% [?]

August 19, 2009 | sipp11 | Tags: | No Comments »
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