Gadgetell | Tech News, Reviews, and Interesting Things

There can be no doubt about the direction laptop manufacturers are taking with their new offerings – provide top specs and performance and create a laptop that’s truly personal and eye-catching.

With Sony, HP, and Dell towing the line, Fujitsu is quick to follow with a stunning “pink” new offering - the Fujitsu LifeBook P8010 Limited Pink Gold Edition. The original LifeBook P8010 was already a solid laptop in its own right, but it looks downright pale when compared to the Limited Pink Gold Edition. With the new sleek look, signature chrome hinges, and high-gloss finish, you’ll be hard pressed to find a machine more easy on the eyes.

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Windows XP is dead! Long live Windows XP!

That traditional cheer for beloved kings may well be on the lips of most Windows users as Microsoft goes through with its deadline for Windows XP.  Today marks the first day that PC makers are no longer allowed to sell XP-based PC’s. 

Despite widespread criticism of Windows Vista, and the “Save Windows XP” movement, Microsoft did not change its deadline for the seven-year old operating system.  Microsoft reports that it has already sold 140 million copies of Vista, which is a bit surprising since most consumers actually prefer the older OS, resulting in a ‘downgrade’ option which can be obtained with some new PC’s, and even big companies have decided not to have a Vista deployment at all.  Intel’s IT department even said that it “found no compelling case” to switch to Vista.

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The buzz on Wall Street is speculating that Sprint-Nextel may be on its way for a turnaround. Executives from Verizon Wireless and AT&T are saying they see fewer Sprint subscribers are moving to their own networks.

As unsupported as this rumor stands, the speculation boosted Sprint’s stock price to a 13% growth last week and another 5.84% jump last Monday. 

Several things, at least, is happening with Sprint.  An aggressive marketing campaign starring its CEO Dan Hesse is on the way.  New products, such as Samsung’s Instinct smartphone, have been released.  The company also announced it will begin to rollout its WiMax assets.  And there have been rumors that Hesse wants to let go of the Nextel business, which has been its weaker leg.

The Wall Street Journal, however, warns investors not to expect a quick turnaround for the company.  The coming of the iPhone 3G and Verizon’s BlackBerry Thunder could only mean more problems for the struggling Sprint.

Read [CNET]

Rogers Wireless and Palm have recently announced the Canadian launch of the ever-so-popular Centro.

With a focus on bringing all communication needs in one compact device, the Centro delivers a full-featured package in a cool, stylish and modern design.  Brodie Keast, senior vice president of marketing for Palm, Inc. says,

“More and more people need voice, text, email, web, contact and calendar capabilities all wrapped in one compact device so they can stay connected with everyone who is important to them. Centro delivers all that and more.”

All the applications that have come to be the norm on Smartphones – email, text messaging, news services, picture management, media playback and sharing – come on the Centro, and then some. The full keyboard promotes ease-of-use in typing complete thoughts and sentences in text messages, and it even comes with Google™ Maps integrated. The Palm Centro from Rogers Wireless is packaged with the standard features that we have come to expect; including Bluetooth support as well as a complete line of software to include Documents To Go, HotSync, Pocket Tunes, Web Blazer 4.5, World Clock and a lot more.

Rogers will be offering the Centro for $199 CAD for existing customers and $299 CAD for new customers, both however will require a three-year agreement with a required voice and data plan.

Read [BusinessWire]

There has been a lot of hype surrounding Sony Ericsson’s newest Windows Mobile QWERTY device, the XPERIA X1. From hands on experience it seems to be really worth the wait.

Combining mobile communication functionality with remarkable multimedia features, the XPERIA has practically been the most-awaited Windows Mobile device for this year. The X1 has a whopping 3-inch wide 800 x 480 touch-screen display, an optical joystick (can you say “whoa!”), 3.2 megapixel camera, A2DP Bluetooth, aGPS, WiFi, and is expandable with microSD (it has 400MB onboard). It also has that QWERTY keyboard to take prime advantage of the Windows Mobile 6 operating system.

As a phone, it’s got quad-band GSM/EDGE, and 900/1700/1900/2100MHz UMTS/HSDPA/HSUPA (or 850/1700/1900/2100MHz in what must be a US-bound model).

The design is cool and very easy on the eyes. The keyboard touch and feel may flatter it a bit, as the response is not that great. All in all, there’s quite a bit of potential in the XPERIA, and people are going to be pleasantly surprised when it releases this second half of 2008.

Read [BoyGeniusReport]

As far as 3 years back, Flock has been trying to integrate it all together –multiple online accounts, activities, profiles, feeds and the like. While version 1.0 was not necessarily bad, Flock version 2.o – built on Firefox 3 foundations – looks to be a solid integrative application, even at beta testing stage.

The first thing users will notice on Flock 2.0 is the speed. Switching between features is very smooth, unlike the first version in that while it was never slow, it used to process feature-switching a bit more. And it is a bit-more feature-packed the second time around. New features like auto-completion where it was most needed, and the improved password manager, were integrated into older, more familiar features like Pownce, Digg and AOL mail sidebar access.

There’s always room for improvement, and maybe Flock should pay more attention to the feedback they’re getting. Considering the integration that Flock is hyping on, the blog editor (an often used feature) is a bit… weak, for lack of better terms. Also, a choice of more skins for the application would be a fresh addition, especially since this is a major strength of the Firefox 3 engine.

All in all, Flock 2.0 is a huge leap in the right direction of “bringing everything together”.  A couple of tweaks here and there and Flock might just convince most web-empowered people to drop IE or regular Firefox.

Read [Mashable]

The Nokia E series has been known for feature-packed offerings for business professionals. With the new E71, the Finnish mobile giants promise all that you would come to expect out of an E-series phone – the pleasant surprise is that it’s one of the thinnest phones Nokia has ever produced.

As Nokia finally gives out details of its new QWERTY phone, you will see that the slim design doesn’t necessarily compromise on features – there’s still WiFi connectivity, HSDPA, A-GPS, a 3.2 megapixel camera, AND the smaller front-facing camera for video chat. While the E71 gives up a little on screen size from its predecessor the E66 – 2.36-inch QVGA screen, just a fraction of an inch smaller – the E71 manages to put in an extra battery to its package, giving it a relative advantage in talk time.

Most people who have come to love the E-series will immediately notice the smaller screen, but will actually be happy to find out that it doesn’t compromise on resolution (same number of pixels as the E62). And with the extremely pocket-able size, the E71 is sure to be hit. 

A rumored $500-ish release price isn’t really that friendly, and Nokia doesn’t have any info on carrier subsidies just yet. But it will be available with full 3G US bands sometime Q3 of this year, so watch out for it.

Read [engadgetmobile]

Change is messy.  Paradigm shifts, revolutions, restructures – any way you phrase it, widespread change entails considerable effort and uncomfortable periods.  The same rings true with digital alterations.  Challengers to the ubiquitous MP3 format face serious challenges despite their technical superiority to the old standard.

The foremost contender is the MT9 format.  This upstart enables every user to split an audio file into six channels—vocals, guitar, bass, percussion and so on –- effectively making ordinary Joes into amateur recording producers.  The format provides unprecedented widespread technical access to users as they isolate specific channels in their audio files.

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Yet again, Nvidia unveils another next-generation multi-core GPU to satisfy all the gamers and performance freaks out there. Enter the Nvidia GeForce GTX 200 series.

Holding true to their multi-GPU design (starting from the 9800 GX2), this series is a dream for Nvidia’s power-hungry enthusiasts. But the GTX 200 series is also incorporating NVIDIA CUDA technology – the world’s only C language environment that enables developers to write software to solve complex problems in a fraction of the time by tapping into multi-GPU technology – which means that this video card series is potentially a strong platform for numerous CUDA-enabled rich-media and visual-computing applications. Such applications are becoming more commonplace in the medical and scientific field because of the phenomenal boosts that CUDA gave programs when it was released. The series’ tagline “Beyond Gaming” really is not such a far-off notion because of CUDA.

Nvidia is also hyping on the boost that this series can give to everyday media tasks – video transcoding, for example. What would normally take hours could become a task that could be finished in minutes.

For gamers (who would normally be the first partakers of this new series), 448 to 512-bit processing is available, with GDDR3 already being a standard for Nvidia’s high-performance cards. Combined with PhysX (Nvidia recently acquired AEGIA) and SLI technology (Nvidia is moving now from three-way SLI to Quad-SLI), enthusiasts and gamers could be in for a whole new world of facial animation, flowing smoke and fog effects, awesome clothing flow simulation, staggering physical debris and explosions – all the standard eye-candy that we require to be norms.

Believed to be released in 2 variations, the GTX 260 and 280 (868MB and 1GB models respectively), expect a lot more hype and innovation as game developers and software designers move to catch up with the multi-GPU revolution.

Read [ZDNet]

A TV with its own robot?  While the concept might be a bit Blade Runner-esque, Bang & Olufsen says the technology will ensure rich and natural colors throughout the lifespan of their plasma screens.

The audio and video equipment manufacturer recently launched the sleek, 50-inch BeoVision 9 plasma TV.  The device boasts of an Automatic Colour Management technology that adjusts the color temperature of the plasma screen to compensate for the tendency of TVs to feature a yellowish tinge in the picture after hundreds of hours of use.

Here is where the robot comes in.  When a user activates the Automatic Color Management technology, a short robotic arm with a camera swings down from the upper portion of the screen.  The camera films a test picture on the screen, analyzes the light and dark areas, then adjusts the color balance to correct coloring errors caused by aging.  The feature automatically activates every 120 hours of use but can also be manually activated.

Aside from that, the device also automatically adjusts the brightness of its image according to the ambient light of its location.  The product ships with a built-in center channel speaker with acoustic lens and digital surround sound capabilities.  The price, at $19,900, is a bit steep –- if only it restocks its own beer, perhaps couch potatoes won’t mind.

Read [Twice]