Its Electronica

There’s a lot of buzz around with the final arrival of Macbook Air review hardware in the USA. We’ve aggregated the reviews to give you a micro look at the good, the bad, and the plain ugly from Apple’s new baby.

Coming packaged in 40% less wasteful pretty packaging, the MacBook Air is Apples greenest product so far. Well they had to jump on the Green bandwagon didn’t they?

The Good

It’s thin - It goes from 0.76 inches at its thickest point down to 0.16 inches. The MacBook is 1.08 inches thick (all the way around) and the MacBook Pro 1.0 inches thick.

The weight, just 3 pounds compared to the MacBook’s 5 pounds is a noticeable difference when you’re always on the move with your Mac.

The new LED back light screen is considerably brighter than the older MacBook screens.

The optical drive has gone, and good riddance. Nobody really used it, apart from upgrading the OS to Leopard!

A full size back lit keyboard, just like the MacBook Pro users have! Sexy. The accompanying trackpad has been en-enlarged for the multi-touch capability. The size is great, but the multi touch feature is a bit of a novelty fad - and of little use outside of iPhoto resizing.

The Bad

The minimalist number of I/O ports are crammed in to a small flap - and a lot of cables will have problems sharing the space when connected. The Firewire connection was also dropped, does anybody actually use that on a laptop?

No matter what capacity hard disk you opt for - they are all spinning at 4200rpm - which is slow, iPod speeds. For a fully functional laptop this isn’t a good sign. Any applications which love to hit the hard disk soon bring the Air to a crawl. Examples are Firefox and its disk cache, and copying files from the network. Bit Torrent downloads too. Reviews of the solid state disk (SSD) are not available yet - but the cost for this option is a barrier for most people.

The remote disk software doesn’t allow ripping audio & video discs, nor can you play them.

Sound wise, the Air gets a speaker downgrade. Unlike the MacBook & MacBook Pro, the Air gets just the one speaker. It is louder than the MacBook though.

The Ugly

No upgrade options once you’ve bought the MacBook Air. The usual hard disk, RAM, battery are not accessible to users. If you do break in to the case, you’ll find the 2GB of RAM is soldered to the motherboard!

Migration Assistant software is useless in its new default Wi-Fi configuration. Nobody has managed to get it to work!

With all this streamlined sleekness you’d be expecting some great things from the battery life, don’t. It is nothing like the claimed 5 hours by Apple. The battery life guesstimate is supposed to include wireless use too. Battery life is more like 3 hours tops.

The nail in the Air’s coffin is the price - with all the usual frills dropped from the spec in order to make the MacBook Air more portable, the price doesn’t reflect this at all. Apple’s RRP is 1199 for the entry level spec.

Posted Feb 5th 2008 3:42AM by Thomas Ricker
Filed under: Misc. Gadgets

Look, we know that the Curta Calculator is old. 1948 old in fact, when it was first conceived by Curt Herzstark while imprisoned in the Buchenwald concentration camp. Still, why not introduce the post HP35 generation to what was widely hailed as the best portable calculator of its time? Besides, with that WWII intrigue and satisfying mechanical grind, what’s not to love? See it in action after the break.

[Via HighTech, thanks MistaPrimeMinista]

Posted Feb 5th 2008 5:22AM by Thomas Ricker
Filed under: Cellphones

Bring it, we say. Opera Mobile 9.5 is prepped and (almost) ready for beta release. Version 9.5 is noticeably faster thanks to a re-enginered Presto rendering engine and features a new browser interface and downloadable Opera Widgets. A World Factbook widget pulls data from Flickr, Google Maps, and CIA World Factbook simultaneously. Opera was more than happy to compare their new browser with Microsoft’s Internet Explorer Mobile to demonstrate the obvious — IE mobile is cruel. Opera mobile 9.5 will see its first public unveiling starting February 11th at GSMA with a public Symbian, WinMo, and Linux beta expected soon. Click on through for the video.

Ericsson has just inked a deal with Lenovo, allowing the former to supply the latter with HSPA mobile broadband modules that will target Lenovo notebooks later this year. These modules in theory will be able to offer a maximum download rate of 14.4Mbps, although I’d strongly recommend you take that figure with more than a pinch of salt for real-world performance. Upload rates are a far cry from download, standing at 2Mbps. While Lenovo is Ericsson’s initial client for mobile broadband solutions, there is a possibility that it might not be the last. Pricing and release date details are currently unavailable.

From all the Nintendo related gadgets that we’ve seen at GadgetSpy, this is probably the one less involved with technology. Can you guess what it is?

Looks may deceive, and in this case that seems to be true. The Nintendo Power Mints looks like one of those old controllers, but in reality it is a mint “holder”.

If you’re a fan of Nintendo, or know someone who is, for $3,50 you can make their day and offer a classy product.

And once you’ve chomped through the mints you can use the tin to store other nerdy gamer accessories, like Gameboy cartridges.

Product Page

The new AS-101 Mobile Digital TV single chip receiver comes in a tiny footprint that measures a mere 5mm x 5mm and will be demonstrated at the Mobile World Congress later this month. Touted to be the smallest digital mobile TV receiver for DVB-H/T applications in the world, it comes with a multi-band RF tuner, an advanced OFDM demodulator, memory and interfaces all packed onto a single 90nm CMOS die. Guess the AS-101 will herald a slew of new gadget releases that will come in ever smaller form factors which allows you to view digital TV, but shrinkage of the device size must stop at some point as nobody likes viewing movies and soaps on too small a screen. [Press Release]

Tasty USB Flash Card.

Feb 04, 2008 Have you ever dreamed about an edible USB flash card? The following flash card is not really edible, but looks very tasty.

A 1 GB doughnut covered with white chocolate flash card can be yours. The gadget looks nice and unusual; it will attract a lot of attention. Nowadays, thanks to a wide variety of different flash cards, your card should be exclusive and interesting too. I guarantee you that you won’t lose it in your bag; it will get in your hands at once. Moreover, you won’t lose it in your pocket, because it won’t even go in. I hope that neither your colleagues, nor your pet will try to eat it. Well, that must be one more reason to stand a treat to your friends or feed your pet. There are some more designs of such appetizing cards. Don’t you think that such USB flash card will find its fans very soon?

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For those of you that find it impossible to suffer the indignity of camping without a blender, Coleman has just the thing. With a couple of six volt batteries you will have enough for 20-30 pitchers of blending action. That is at least a few days worth of margarita madness or a mango smoothie a day for twenty to thirty days. It might seem that I am being cynical or even a little sarcastic; I can assure you that I am not. Seriously, I have used a blender a total of five times in the last two and a half years, there is no way I could live without one.  It could be good for barbecues though, I will give it that much.

Price: 77.49 from Coleman

DVICE, Oh Gizmo!