Lenovo ThinkPad X60 Talented Tablet

Lenovo ThinkPad X60 Talented Tablet. The X60 boasts three USB 2.0 inputs, so you won't have any trouble attaching a mouse, printer, or other device. It includes headphone and microphone jacks, mini-FireWire for even faster connections to multimedia gadgets, and VGA for hooking up your monitor or other display.

The Good: Extremely portable; Active Rotate feature automatically adjusts screen

The Bad: Lacks an internal CD drive; relatively expensive

The Bottom Line: It's not much to look at, but it is a capable and easy-to-transport tablet doubling as a laptop.

Fab Features

The X60 has a number of impressive features. As with the X41, the X60 has a 12-in. XGA screen. But unlike the earlier version, it also boasts touch-screen capabilities, letting users manipulate the screen using either a stylus or a finger. 

Another handy feature: the Active Rotate System. When in tablet mode, the X60 automatically detects any changes in rotation or angle and adjusts the picture from landscape to portrait and back. Turn the screen on its side, and the picture changes accordingly. Other tablet PCs require manual adjustments. This was extremely useful as I took notes during meetings. 

Writing on the screen when in tablet mode went off without a hitch. The stylus was comfortable, and the Microsoft (MSFT) Windows Vista Tablet software easily deciphered my chicken-scratch handwriting.

Another pleasant surprise came in the form of long battery life. I put the X60 through what I like to call the Airplane! test. Once the unit was fully charged, I turned on the movie, and when its 87 minutes ended the X60 was still going strong. 

In fact, it didn't need to be charged for another hour. On average, the battery life of the X60 was just above three hours. Much of the praise for this long battery life must go to the X60's extended eight-cell battery, which will cost you $50 and adds heft but is well worth the extra price and burden. 

Let's Hook Up

At 3.77 lbs. and 10.8 in. x 9.5 in. x 1.1 in., the X60 is the optimal size and weight for a portable unit that also works as a laptop. It is slightly smaller than the Toshiba (TOSBF) Portege and comparable to Lenovo's earlier foray into the tablet PC world, the ThinkPad X41 Tablet. 

The X60 boasts three USB 2.0 inputs, so you won't have any trouble attaching a mouse, printer, or other device. It includes headphone and microphone jacks, mini-FireWire for even faster connections to multimedia gadgets, and VGA for hooking up your monitor or other display. Underneath the hood, the X60 has a 1.83GHz Intel (INTC) Core Duo L2500 as well as a 100GB hard drive, ample storage for a portable unit. 

To test the portability of the X60 Tablet, I carried it around for a week and a half in New York City—from daily meetings to lunch on the go—with no complaints. Had I not known it was in my backpack I'd guess I was carrying some pads of paper and a book or two. 

The Down Side

I did have a few qualms about the X60. I would have liked an internal CD drive, but I was willing to part with it in return for portability. 

My biggest gripe is its price. At $2,500, the version I tested lands right between two of its closest competitors—the $3,499 Toshiba Portege R400-S4931, one of the more expensive tablet PCs, and the $1,299 HP Pavilion tx1000. 

So is the X60 worth the money? Unlike other tablet PCs that may cost you an arm and a leg, the X60 will give you a long period of productivity at a very high standard. While it may not be pretty, it sure gets the job done. 

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Apple Removes Nail From Adobe Flash Coffin

When Apple first pulled the plug on third-party development tools for iOS development (including Flash CS5), there were a lot of negative reactions, especially from cross-platform developers. With that, in addition to continually refusing support for Flash on its mobile devices (which may not have been a bad call afterall), it seemed that Apple really had it out for Adobe.

Yesterday, Apple released a statement highlighting significant changes to their iOS Developer Program license, re-opening the platform to third-party development tools such as Adobe Flash. Additionally, Apple posted their full App Store review guidelines. The move has already been touted as a positive step towards App Store review transparency- which in the past has been criticized for its ostensible inconsistency. But why now? And what does this mean for Flash developers?

The change is undoubtedly in reaction, at least in part, to Android's gaining market share. Android's rise is due, to a certain extent, to the openness of the platform and the Android Market. However, part of what makes the App Store so great is the review process itself, which guarantees to users a certain level of quality and UI consistency. By posting the exact review guidelines to developers, Apple has made a terrific compromise between the two models. 

When Apple first pulled the plug on third-party development tools for iOS development (including Flash CS5), there were a lot of negative reactions, especially from cross-platform developers. With that, in addition to continually refusing support for Flash on its mobile devices (which may not have been a bad call afterall), it seemed that Apple really had it out for Adobe. 

I don't expect Apple to support Flash directly on its iOS devices- that is unless Adobe makes significant improvements in performance and touch-based input. However, the way things are going, standards-based HTML5 will take over on mobile (and hopefully desktop) and users will be much better off for it. I'll bet there were an awful lot of Flash developers who, with Wired's latest cover story ("The Web Is Dead") were starting to have existential quandaries. But with Apple now loosening the straps on the App Store, Flash may actually survive on mobile as a code-creation platform.

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Motorola Droid X (Verizon Wireless) Review

The Droid X is the latest member to join Verizon's army, and just like the original Droid before it, it's a beast, but in a good way. The smartphone rocks a brilliant 4.3-inch touch screen and offers some great multimedia features, including an 8-megapixel camera with HD video capture, HDMI output, and DLNA support. However, we'd be remiss if we didn't mention that it does lack some features that the similar-looking HTC Evo 4G has, such as a front-facing camera and, of course, 4G support.

 

Motorola and Verizon aren't afraid to go after the competition, whether it be blatantly calling out a certain phone in TV ads or introducing a pretty killer device right before the launch of another. 

 

The good: The Motorola Droid X boasts a gorgeous 4.3-inch touch screen and great multimedia features like an 8-megapixel camera with HD video capture, HDMI output, and DLNA support. The smartphone can also be used as a mobile hot spot.

The bad: Camera is a bit sluggish. Motoblur software is a lot better but still not quite as refined as HTC Sense. Lacks a front-facing camera.

The bottom line: The Motorola Droid X makes another fine addition to Verizon's Android family, bringing with it a rich multimedia experience and more connectivity features.

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Preventing Smart phone Armageddon

In addition, with cell phones, in some sense the stakes are higher: because bandwidth on wireless networks is at such a premium, if there were as many smart phones enlisted in the ranks of the world's hacker-controlled zombie computers as there are PCs, it would almost certainly affect network performance, making the wireless Web that much more difficult for everyone to access......

If hackers got access to enough smart phones, they could paralyze wireless communications.

In 2009, Scott Totzke, vice president of security at Research in Motion -- maker of the Blackberry smartphone -- told Reuters that his nightmare scenario was a type of attack in which a sufficient number of smart phones in a given area were compromised in a way that they would send so much data through a local cell phone network that normal cell phone service would effectively be knocked out.

Now researchers are working on a way to prevent the kind of malicious access that would allow such an attack. The bad news is it's nowhere near being implemented yet, leaving many smartphones vulnerable to being compromised and exploited.

To understand the attack, which is the cellphone equivalent of what's known as a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack, it helps to understand that something like it has happened before -- on 9/11. On that day a phenomenon common to many natural disasters and large-scale emergencies occurred: everyone tried to call out from or into the Manhattan cell phone network at once, overloading the network and making it almost impossible for calls to get through.

In a smartphone DDoS attack, hackers would have to get access to a sufficient number of phones in the same area, and then, all at once, get them to start pushing as much data through the network as possible. When this happens on the Internet, with conventional PCs and routers, it can bring a targeted Web site to its knees, making it impossible for anyone to access it.

Even if an attack of this kind never happens -- fortunately it's unlikely, given its scale and the still limited reach of smartphone viruses, trojan horses and rootkits -- the growing ubiquity of smartphones, along with the sensitive information they carry, makes it likely that exploits for these phones will continue to proliferate. That could be more than just a route to identity theft - rogue software could also slow the cell phone networks in general.

The solution, proposes a pair of researchers at the University of Colorado at Boulder, is to devise an effective way to check smartphones for viruses. It sounds simple, but the problem is that smartphones don't have the battery life to be constantly running onboard virus-scanning software. So Bryan Dixon and Shivakant Mishra propose running the virus scans on the PC to which smartphones are so often connected.

In this way, the smartphone could send over hashes of all the files on the phone - hashes are small representations of large files - and the PC could use this information to determine which files have changed since the last time the phone was connected, scanning only those files in order to save time.

The researchers admit that their strategy wouldn't be able to defeat a rootkit (software that gives a malicious hacker total control of the phone and to some extent replaces its operating system), but they argue there are also potentially strategies for determining whether a phone has been compromised in this way. These strategies include, for example, timing how long the phone takes to respond to certain challenges - a rootkit might be able to provide the right answer, but it wouldn't be as quick at doing the calculations as the phone's native OS.

Smartphones are now computers, which means that they are vulnerable to the same kinds of exploits as computers. While Apple and RIM have created walled gardens for their software to minimize the access points for malicious software, the Android market does not - it's basically a ratings and trust-based system. In addition, with cell phones, in some sense the stakes are higher: because bandwidth on wireless networks is at such a premium, if there were as many smart phones enlisted in the ranks of the world's hacker-controlled zombie computers as there are PCs, it would almost certainly affect network performance, making the wireless Web that much more difficult for everyone to access.

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Toshiba Recall Signals Larger Trend

The engineering of the internal components of the laptop are critical to provide adequate airflow for the fan to do its job and expel the heat from the case, but that is increasingly difficult as manufacturers work to make smaller, thinner notebooks cramming even more heat-generating components into a smaller space.

Hot Laptops, Toshiba

Toshiba is the latest laptop vendor to fall victim to overheating technology. The recall of approximately 41,000 laptops resulting from more than 100 reports of melting laptop cases and minor injuries follows similar issues and recalls from other laptop manufacturers, and illustrates the problem with cramming so much processing power into such a small space.

Toshiba is recalling Satellite T135, Satellite T135D and Satellite ProT130 notebook computers because "The notebook computers can overheat at the notebook's plug-in to the AC adapter, posing a burn hazard to consumers."

If this feels déjà vu its because it is a relatively common occurrence these days for laptops. In July Sony issued a recall of more than half a million Vaio laptops. Mike Lucas, senior vice president of Vaio for Sony, said in a statement "In rare instances, these notebook computers may overheat due to a potential malfunction of the internal temperature management system, resulting in deformation of the product's keyboard or external casing, and a potential burn hazard to consumers."

The Sony recall was immediately following an HP recall of laptop batteries in May. HP recalled over 100,000 laptop batteries in all as a result of mounting reports that the batteries were overheating, rupturing, and posing a risk of injury to users.

While quality control during the engineering and manufacturing process at Toshiba, Sony, and HP is apparently lacking, the issue goes beyond the individual manufacturers and exemplifies problems associated with the demands placed on notebook computers.

Heat is a fact of life with computers. A significant chunk of the cost of implementing and maintaining a data center is wrapped up in keeping the room at a tolerable temperature. Try turning off all of the computer equipment in your office or home and see how quickly the temperature drops.

Processors run hot. Batteries produce a significant amount of heat. The engineering of the internal components of the laptop are critical to provide adequate airflow for the fan to do its job and expel the heat from the case, but that is increasingly difficult as manufacturers work to make smaller, thinner notebooks cramming even more heat-generating components into a smaller space.

Thankfully, Intel and AMD have developed new processor technologies that incorporate more functions onto a single chip. Combining the core processing and graphics processing onto one chip instead of two greatly reduces the power consumption and heat output for newer laptops.

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mTrip iPhone app uses augmented reality

Developers are dreaming big about the concept, but it's not necessarily for everyone. It was cool, but when the initial ooh-aah value wore off, I found myself wanting to walk around and look at the world. John Boris, executive vice president for Lonely Planet in the U.S., said the feature can only do so much.

The new iPhone application mTrip is a travel guide and then some: It uses the latest in smart phone technology to make it easier to stay on track in a foreign locale.

But isn't getting lost part of the fun of traveling? For me, yes. For others, maybe not.

So-called "augmented reality" became more widely available about a year ago and takes advantage of a smart phone's GPS and compass features, along with access tohigh-speed wireless networks, to mash up super-local Web content with the world that surrounds you.

It works like this: You turn on the application, hit the augmented reality button and then look through your phone's camera at the Brooklyn Bridge or the Empire State Building. Icons pop up that show you other points of interest, or restaurants within a half mile of your location, whether the restaurant is open, and what reviewers are saying about it.

The feature feels a bit like being in a "Matrix" film, but in a good way. I used the application for New York. Being a local, I was impressed with the restaurant selections and shopping options that popped up when I pointed my camera down Broadway in SoHo, or more off-the-beaten-path locations like my neighborhood, Carroll Gardens in Brooklyn.

The mTrip developers partnered with Sparks, a massive travel guide company, to provide content but also rely on user-generated reviews and suggestions. There's a spot in the app that allows you to send a new place back to mTrip for reviews and additions to its list.

The app also has something called mTrip genius, which works similarly to the genius feature in iTunes. You note whether you want more or fewer parks, religion or monuments, and it designs an itinerary for you.

Overall, I felt the app was a bit busy, offering perhaps so much it could distract the user from the travel at hand, but developer Frederic de Pardieu noted it's not necessary to use every feature offered.

"We give you options," he said. "You do with them what you like."

The first phones with Google's Android operating system, which enables augmented reality, came out in the past year. The iPhone became augmented-reality friendly with the compass that debuted in June 2009 on the iPhone 3GS. Apple also recently joined Google in making it possible for software developers to overlay images on the phone's camera view.

mTrip doesn't specify that you need a newer phone to use this feature. I don't have one and had to spend a while wrangling a newer phone to borrow in order to test the app, so beware before buying that you have the right device to take full advantage.

That said, augmented reality still feels like it hasn't fully arrived. The technology can generally pinpoint location to within 30 feet if the user is outdoors, but inside you're lost. Businesses I saw on the screen weren't actually in front of me, though they were nearby. But I'm not sure I'd have known that if I was using the app in a foreign city. Often tags sometimes just kind of dart around on the screen and it honestly didn't make it easier to FIND the locale, simply noting the locale existed.

Another problem: Using GPS for extended periods sucked up the battery life on both my phone and my borrowed iPhone 4 quicker than usual.

Developers are dreaming big about the concept, but it's not necessarily for everyone. It was cool, but when the initial ooh-aah value wore off, I found myself wanting to walk around and look at the world. John Boris, executive vice president for Lonely Planet in the U.S., said the feature can only do so much.

"Travelers want to be able to fold up their phone and see physically in a virtual world what is around them," he said. "We can help you get to the heart of the place, but we can't carry you around."

Lonely Planet has Compass Guides that use the augmented reality feature with the Google Android, all in international cities.

"It's the continuing evolution of the traveler's toolkit," Boris said. "It's an important component of today and for tomorrow. But, there will be another piece of technology right around the corner."

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Acer Aspire TimelineX AS4820T Review

Is the Acer Timeline X AS4820T worth your money? Yes, it looks good. But, the average performance of the GPU switch is what brings it down. If you want a good looking laptop which you can flaunt in the boardroom and will only use it for basic tasks without the headache of switching between the 2 GPUs, this could be a good pick. 

This laptop from Acer's TimelineX Series is the AS4820T. If you have seen the size-zero Vaio X series from Sony, then you will immediately associate the outer body of the Acer with it. 

It has got a nice black metal finish which means that there won't be any finger prints. The shiny metal finish continues on the inside with a neatly laid giant touchpad and a tactile keyboard. Although the keys are great to type with, the build quality is not so. 

The keys are quite wobbly. But in case of the touchpad, it is one of the best we have ever used smooth and responsive. The touchpad also supports pinch-and-zoom with two fingers. There is an obvious lag when you try to pinch or zoom into your photos, but then that's not what this touchpad is primarily going to be used for. 

Clean, glossy lines make up the top with power buttons and almost invisible speakers. All in all, it has a great design. But the best part is that even with a DVD drive, it's extremely light at just 2.1 kg. The screen is a beautiful, bright 14-inch one with backlit LED making Acer 4820TG really good to look at. 

It has an Intel Core i5 -430 M 2.26Ghz processor with 4GB of RAM. In addition, it also has a 500GB HDD and an ATI Mobility Radeon HD 5650 Graphics card. This ensures good video quality when you view your media or even want to play games.

The OS is Windows 7 Home Premium 64 bit which is responsive and works without hassles most of the time. But, if you open more than six applications and then try to watch a movie, it will start to freeze. 

Like Nvidia's optimus technology, this too, has two graphic processing units (GPUs) which switch between high performance and low to give you optimal performance for computing. What Nvidia Optimus does is switch to a high performance GPU, that is ATI, when it has to run programmes with high graphic content and switch to the Intel GPU for the low menial computational tasks. 

But then, you will have to do this manually as it doesn't switch automatically. If you are a new user, you wouldn't even probably know it's there as Acer has not mentioned this anywhere. A dedicated switch would have been better. 

Regarding the actual workings of the switch, Acer recommends that you shut down all applications before you switch to GPU. If you switch without shutting down your programmes, the screen freezes. The 2 GPUS are a pain to switch on. They do their job but with a lot of hiccups.

All standard forms of connectivity are present -- USB, HDMI out, Ethernet, standard headphone jack and Wi-Fi. Multimedia is a pleasure to view on this laptop as it supports full HD in 1080p in 16:9. The speakers are pretty good too and enhance the sound via Virtual Surround Sound making it slightly better than the speakers on most laptops.

Is the Acer Timeline X AS4820T worth your money? Yes, it looks good. But, the average performance of the GPU switch is what brings it down. If you want a good looking laptop which you can flaunt in the boardroom and will only use it for basic tasks without the headache of switching between the 2 GPUs, this could be a good pick. 

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