Cool Tech Reviews

Yes, you can still buy a new PC with Windows XP installed on it. Windows XP ceased to be available at retail on June 30, 2008 but there are a number of exceptions. The relevant exception for a consumer or a small business owner is that "OEMs can downgrade Vista Business or Vista Ultimate licenses to Windows XP Professional or Tablet PC versions for customers indefinitely," where OEMs are the large PC manufacturers.

However, there’s a difference between "can" and "will" or "will with no hassle" so Christopher Null at PC World tried to purchase a PC with XP from Dell, HP, Gateway, Toshiba, Acer, Fujitsu, Lenovo, and Asus and reports on the very mixed results. Hit the article for the full details on each, but the best bets for an machine with XP preinstalled are:

Consumer PC: Toshiba, Fujitsu, Lenovo

Business PC: HP, Fujitsu, Lenovo

If you are willing to pay extra or install XP from a CD, the choices are even more numerous. Also Asus has its line of Eee ultra low-cost PCs (ULPC) which come with XP under a different exemption in the rules.

Solid state, non volatile disk storage replacement has been a dream for a lot of years and while flash disks are finally killing the floppy, advances in hard disk technology have always kept the price per byte low enough that solid state didn’t have much leverage except for special use devices. That may be starting to change as laptop manufacturers have started introducing new models with flash disks instead of hard drives in some notebook models. Martyn Williams at PCWorld:

Sony will replace hard disks with flash memory when it launches a new model of its Vaio U laptop next week, it said today (June 27 - ed.).
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Flash has long been eyed as a potential replacement for hard drives because it is lighter, runs silently, offers faster data access, and uses less power, but price has always been an obstacle.
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The Vaio UX90 will come with 16GB of flash memory storage in place of the 30GB hard drive on the original model. It will cost around $1805, or about $345 more expensive than the disk-based model, and go on sale in Japan on July 3.

The UX Micro PCs look like a PDA on steroids, but they run Widows XP Professional and regular Windows applications as well as having some media player functionality.

Samsung Electronics launched a couple of PCs with flash storage earlier this month. The Q30 laptop and Q1 ultra mobile PC both use Samsung’s “solid state disk,” which packs 32GB of NAND flash memory into a case the same size as a 1.8-inch hard drive.

The Q1 is Samsung’s entry in the oddball Origami (AKA UMPC) tablet PC form factor developed by Microsoft and Intel, while the Q30-SSD (Solid State Drive) is a regular laptop:

Sammy just announced that their sweet, sweet NAND-based Q30-SSD we first got down and dirty with at CeBIT will hit the shelves in Korea (only) from early June onward. Yeah, it’ll fetch a steep $3,700 US-equiv (a roughly $900 premium) on that aging 1.2GHz Celeron M Q30 platform, but that 32GB of NAND reads 300 percent faster (53MB/s) and write 150 percent quicker (28MB/s) than normal hard drives while offering better protection against shock, 25-50% faster boots and sleep recovery times, longer battery life and reduced weight all in a completely silent, fanless package. Hoozah!

To which, I guess I have to add, ouch! The prices still have a way to go to attract the average consumer. More on Samsung’s solid state hard drive here.

Over at his PC Magazine blog, Michael J. Miller has a preliminary review of the Toshiba Portege M400 convertible tablet PC. Frankly, it doesn’t seem all that different from other convertible tablets except for the compact 12 inch screen size which is the main point:

I’m a big fan of both small notebooks and tablet computers. I like my laptops light, because I’m a train commuter, and carry my laptop a lot. And I like tablet computers mostly because I like reading on them (with the screen in a vertical position), and for occasionally annotating notes and documents with the pen.

Ultimately, Miller remarks that he prefers the Lenovo Thinkpad X41 12 inch convertible tablet which is even lighter at 3.7 pounds than the M400 at 4.5 pounds. At the opposite end of the spectrum is Eric Mack who teases his readers with news of an “ultra-wide screen” tablet PC that he is expecting shortly from an unnamed manufacturer:

I just got off the phone with an excited representative from a well known computer manufacturer who called to let me know that, because of my blog, I’ve been selected to evaluate one of their new ultra-wide screen Tablet PCs. She promised me that it was perfect for Tablet PC mind-mapping and that I would be very happy with the display resolution and size.

Since Mack also says he’d “be happy with a 2.5″ thick Tablet the size of a Tecra M4 with a fold-out screen twice the size of an M4″ which is 14.1 inches, it’s clear he’s not worried about portability.

I can see the merits of both points of view, but the real problem is that the amount of time I really want a tablet PC of either size is vanishingly small. Battery life inhibits true portability and I am not comfortable enough with tablet technology to have some monster version parked permanently on my desk taking up space. I’m hopeful though, that one of these days there will be a tablet that convinces me.

Tom Krazit has the story at InfoWorld:

The Linux-based tablet announced by Nokia Corp. a few months ago can now be ordered from various Nokia Web sites in Europe for about €350 (US$413.35), Nokia announced Monday.

Nokia first announced the Nokia 770 Internet Tablet in May. The device comes with an integrated Wi-Fi chip for browsing the Internet and runs an operating system called Internet Tablet 2005, which is based on Linux and incorporates several open-source applications.

The 770 is a bit of a departure for Nokia, the world’s largest mobile phone vendor. It is much smaller than Tablet PCs that use Microsoft Corp.’s Windows XP Tablet PC Edition operating system, but like those devices it is designed to be used with a stylus and comes with handwriting recognition software.

More details at the Nokia specs page (flash demo here) and a press release indicates it will start shipping the USA in about a week.

As far as reviews go, jkOnTheRun, MobileBurn, debain.org, and Howard Chui all have given it a test drive. Bear in mind that the reviews are for pre-preproduction models, so various glitches (mostly software) may well have been ironed out in the shipping models.

That being said, it’s generally well received aside from the nagging question of exactly what the intended purpose is. It’s not a cell phone and doesn’t really have a full set of PIM/PDA software but the competent Linux software application suite makes it a nice portable web surfer if you can find a Wi-Fi connection, which means a commercial hotspot or to my mind, around the house. (In fairness, a Bluetooth cell phone connection works as well.) There’s no keyboard so you’ll have to use the handwriting recognition or onscreen “keyboard,” but none of the viewers felt it was a note taking device. If I were to sum it up, it’s seems to me that it is an “Internet player” which at about $400 may well find some takers. It’s also a first step for Open Source in the tablet arena. The Open Source 770 community site is http://www.maemo.org/.

Mike Wendland is a Technology Columnist for the Detroit Free Press and he’s also Bill Gates’ “favorite reporter”:

Not to be a name dropper, but when Bill Gates spotted me last week at a news conference in Ann Arbor his face broke into a big grin and he greeted me with something to the effect of “Hey, Mike, my favorite reporter!”

Alas, it wasn’t my journalistic skills that brought the compliment. It was the machine I was using to ply my trade: a small, slate-like computer using the Microsoft Windows XP Tablet PC operating system.

And Bill Gates loves tablets.

The Tablet PC I was using last week is the LS800 from Motion Computing, one of a dozen or so computer makers who put out Tablet versions.

And it (like all of Motion Computing’s tablets) is a slate, not a convertible that has a screen that swivels up to reveal a keyboard.

The unit will also work by wireless Bluetooth with an optional detached keyboard.

The LS800 is the tiniest of the slates made by Motion, weighing just 2.2 pounds and about the size of a thin paperback book — 8.94 inches by 6.60 inches by 0.87 inches thick. A button lets you have the screen appear in vertical or horizontal formats.

I think of it as a stenographer’s pad sized machine and it sounds great for a reporter.

The LS800 and all Tablets come with a built-in microphone. On the LS800, though, is a multidirectional array microphone design and configurable acoustics software called Speak Anywhere that maximizes the sound quality. I recorded the news briefing with Gates, for example. He was two seats to my right around a conference table and the mic picked up every word just fine.
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Battery life ran about three hours for me, using the OneNote application to record Gates and then, as I wrote the story of his news conference, to transcribe the interview.

Well, the battery life could use some work, but that might defeat the form factor. More details by following the link. The LS800 product page has more and there are also other reviews of the LS800 at Mike Wo’s, ZDNet UK, Craig Pringle, and TabletSwitcher. To net it out, there are some complaints about heat and that the screen is too small, but most folks are intrigued with the form factor though even Mike says his favorite is actually the 15 inch Motion 1400 Tablet.

Martyn Williams at InfoWorld:

E Ink, a U.S.-based developer of electronic-paper type flat panel displays, has developed a color version of its screen technology and is showing it at the FPD International exhibition that opened Wednesday in Yokohama, Japan.
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It’s based on similar technology to the company’s monochrome displays that are already in production and can be found in a handful of products like Sony’s Librie electronic book reader.

The main difference is the addition of a color filter. The prototype on display in Yokohama is a 6-inch display with 400 by 300 pixel resolution. That works out to 83 pixels per inch which is half that of the commercial screen used in the Sony e-book reader.

E Ink anticipates the display will be ready for commercialization at the end of 2006, said Bischoff. Potential applications include ATM screens, digital camera viewfinders, and mobile phones, he said.

The E Ink press release has more and some photos. Aside from the lightweight form factor,

E Ink’s electronic ink technology creates an image that looks like a printed page from all angles and maintains the same contrast ratio under all lighting conditions, including direct sunlight. Aimed at handheld devices, the display uses up to 100 times less energy than a standard liquid crystal display (LCD), so product designers can shed weight and greatly extend battery life.

Besides the color display, they are also showing a “tablet sized” greyscale display:

E Ink Corporation in USA, the leading supplier of electronic paper display technology, today announced that LG.Philips LCD, one of the world’s leading innovators of thin-film transistor liquid crystal (TFT-LCD) technology, and E Ink have built a 10.1″ flexible electronic paper display.
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Less than 300 microns thick, the paper-white display is as thin and flexible as construction paper. With a 10.1″ diagonal, the prototype achieves SVGA (600×800) resolution at 100 pixels per inch and has a 10:1 contrast ratio with 4 levels of grayscale.

E Ink® Imaging Film is a novel display material that looks like printed ink on paper and has been designed for use in paper-like electronic displays. Like paper, the material can be flexed and rolled. As an additional benefit, the E Ink Imaging Film uses 100 times less energy than a liquid crystal display because it can hold an image without power and without a backlight.

No word on any applications or dates for this one.