ZigiboX

The search for a powerful laptop ends here. It is one of the most impressive machines that one can get in the market today. It can run the heaviest of application and the most demanding of games with great ease and with little or no strain at all. It is one such laptop which will get you addicted to HD videos. You have eight different options to tweak the way yuor keyboard glows. You can manually select wach of these backlights by using your mouse to choose the one that you like. The overall look of the laptop is also pretty impressive. But the downside is that it has a battery life of less than two hours and the configuration can cost you as much as $5000. It is also heavy at about 15 pounds which lets it down.

For those of you who wanted a low cost notebook that you could lug around for your basic computing needs and felt the netbooks were just cheap tiny wannabes with no point at all, Compaq has come up with a new notebook just for y’all.

The new Compaq Presario CQ60 is priced $299, that puts in right in the netbook price range, but for your money you get a notebook with 15.6-inch screen, a 160GB hard drive, 3GB RAM and a DVD burner. Thanks to the large, well-spaced out keyboard design you’ll will never be fumbling around for the number keys cos’ you get a dedicated number pad.

The notebook runs on a single core 2.1GHz AMD Sempron SI-42, which should perform pretty well for this price range. This is no mean performer, but should be more than enough for quick word processing, media applications and email. And ofcourse the CQ60 would perform much better than the netbooks in the same price range.

The display is a 15.6-inch wide-screen with 1,366×768 resolution and is pretty well built and looks good. The inbuilt speakers are also quite good adn the only sore point in this department would be the volume control clubbed into the numeric keypad with no dedicated media keys. Also this notebook does not have a webcam, and as a result the space above the screen looks rather empty. The connectivity is also very basic with a VGA out, 3 USB slots and a Ethernet jack.

The CQ60 runs a Windows Vista Home basic and has a year long warranty.

Modu 2 is already available in Israel. But the news that is making headlines is that the product will be available to the World market only by 2010. The CEO of the company has proposed plans to implement 3.5 G and also full touch screen feature to meet the needs of the customers in America and Britain. This has been wrongly quoted in media as “just isn’t good enough for demanding Brits and Americans who like to surf the internet and stay connected.” Thats would have been a bold thing to do though. The phone would also boast of a qwerty hard touch key board thus making it easy for people who prefer it. The other attractive aspects being a new form factor and also a digital picture frame for displaying the user’s favourite pics.

Home networking has been taken to the next level. The Asus has come up with its latest router the RT-N13U. It supports the 802.11 b/g/n bands and it also has a USB port to go with four ethernet ports for all the non-wireless systems in your house. The best part about this model is that it is focussed to make the product simpler to configure and use. The all new EZ UI makes it all the more comfortable to use and configure. The EZ QoS application lets you priorotize bandwidth the way you want. This would be a great boost to people whos use many devices together. The EZ All-In-One printer sharing feature helps you use a printer in a network without needing a server to help connect it. Also, this device lets you download data from the internet without the use of a computer. All you have to do is just ensure that you have a storage device attached to the device. How is this for a new age home networking device?

This is the latest camcorder from Kodak in the market. The Zi8 is small and fits in easily in the pocket. Trust me, you won’t have it in for long. You’ll be amazed to know that you will have it in your hand always. You would be using it to get some great shots on it or you’ll be busy viewing something on it. It looks very elegant and it is pretty handy as well. It can capture HD 1080p videos at 16:9 aspect ratio. It will allow you to record for 10 straight hours corresponding to 32 Gb of video. That is very impressive. It has slots for SD cards and you can just swing open the USB arm to transfer data. It comes in three colors – black, aqua and raspberry. You can also click HD 5MP photos through it and it would also allow you to capture snaps from the video. The videos can also be watched in slow motion. The videos and pictures look great due to the image stabilisation it has in it. It is priced at $179 and it is worth it. For more details, check out the Kodak website.

Nokia’s ‘best mobile imaging device’ ever the N86 8MP is now shipping.

The new offering from Nokia is in the slide form factor and the from initial reviews the looks of the phone is totally subjective.  It has a 8 MP camera with Carl Zeiss Tessar optics. The imagine department is made interesting by the variable aperture feature which makes good photographs even in low light scenarios.  The mechanical shutter is faster and reduces blur in your fast shots also there is an extra Automatic Motion Blur reduction util which makes the photos even less blurrier.

The 2.6 inch AM OLED displays makes sure the photos you click look good while on the phone. The phone has a 8GB internal flash memory and supports external cards up to 16GB ( the usual).The battery is good for 25 hours of music playback in offline mode which is pretty good by smart phone standards. Also the GSM talk time is more than 6 hours.  The A-GPS and the digital compass options make this a good navigation aid too.

Google is entering the ebook selling business by the end of this year. Book publishers are a relieved lot, cos’ they’ve been waiting for someone to end the almost monopoly of the ebook market by Amazon.

With Google publishers are hoping to set their own prices after being made to follow the $9.99 pricing for most Kindle ebooks regardless of the retail price. Google however says it will decide the final price of the books when it comes up on sale but publishers would get to set a suggested retail price.

Google’s plan is to allow users to read ebooks on any device with Internet access, so you could use you PC, netbook or mobile phone to browse these ebooks. You don’t have to buy a Kindle to read those ebooks any more. Also, the ebooks can be browsed when offline from the browser cache.

Before you read this, if you’re still using the ancient WPA security on your Wi-Fi router, rush and change over to WPA2.  Now, researchers from Japan have proved that the WPA security takes just a minute to break using the weaknesses of the TKIP algorithm.

Now, if your still on the primitive WEP security, your network is as good as open and even a smartphone has enough to break into the network in less than few minutes.

The safest security protocol at the moment is the WPA2 which has the full security standard implemented unlike its predecessor. But, the if you’re still on your old hardware you have no other option but to use other techniques like MAC authentication to keep your network safe.

The first netbook with the new Intel Atom N280 processor is out now, and what more ? the new Eee PC promises 9.5 hours of battery life and is available for just $399 ( and a $25 discount if you order through the Asus Eee PC group on Facebook.

Other features include a 160 GB HDD plus 10GB of online Eee storage, 10-inch backlit LED display, an all new keyboard design. The netbook also has the Super Hybrid Engine (SHE) which allows you to increase CPU power to boost performance or lower it to save on power.

The netbook comes with inbuilt WiFi 802.11b/g/n network for wireless networking and has Bluetooth 2.0 for additional connectivity.

Check this page for a comprehensive review of the Eee PC 1000HE

Apple has unveiled the 17inch version of its most popular notebook series. The 17inch mammoth notebook has a high resol LED backlit display and of course comes with the new Multi Touch Glass trackpad. The most advertised feature of the new notebook is the battery which is said to be good for 8 hours of usage and 1000 recharges.

This would be the most powerful Macbook ever with Core 2 duo options upto 2.93 Ghz and DDR3 memory upto 8GB. There is a option battery – performance option between NVIDIA GeForce 9400M and NVIDIA GeForce 9600M GT.

The notebook should be available in stores by the end of this month and the expected retail price is $2,799 (US) for the base version.