MOBODOJO » Mobile Gear

ASUS Promotes Mobility Lifestyle With New Site

Tyler Regas — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 18:27:36 +0000

ASUS has just announced that they have just made their new mobility-specific website, How To Be Mobile, available. Now, it will most certainly contain ASUS materials, but ASUS seems to be pretty magnanimous about their new site and will be posting general mobility stories. One of the first stories already available is How To Install Windows 7 story and companion video on the site. It looks like it might end up being a nice resource for lovers of small, mobile gear… HEY!

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Velocity Micro Outs NoteMagix M5 UMPC

Tyler Regas — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 22:23:24 +0000

Almost everyone seems to have forgotten about the UMPC, considering it dead or just an oversized PMP, especially in light of the popularity of Atom-powered netbooks. Velocity Micro doesn’t think the UMPC is dead, and they’re proving it by preparing their new NoteMagix M5. The M5 sports an 800MHz Atom CPU, 512MBs of RAM, 4GBs of SSD, 802.11 B/G/N wireless, Bluetooth, 3G WWAN(I’m guessing optional, but you never know), a 4.8″ 800×480 touchscreen display which slides up to reveal the keyboard (ala Nokia internet tablets and OQO devices), USB 2.0, a 1.3MP webcam, and a microSD card slot. Make it 1GB of RAM and you can count me in at a projected sub-US$500 price point, kids! Hell, I’m not even upset that Windows XP Home is on there. Its one hella value. Unfortunately, there’s no news on the site regarding exact ship date yet. Expect to see it show up at Re- and E-tailers later this year.

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Wazabee To Offer Glasses-Free iPhone 3D

Tyler Regas — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 06:43:19 +0000

Here’s to the company which has the stupidest name while, at the same time, offering the coolest possible technology. I apologize if I offend anyone over at Wazabee, but I think I’m making up for it by saying that their glasses-free 3D display technology is about as freaking cool as you can get. They also sort of popped up out of the blue at CES with their 3DeeShell case and technology which allows you to view 3D media and games with real depth. Its a bit awkward at the moment since you have to slip a lens in and out of the case depending on what content you’ll be viewing, but I can easily imagine that Wazabee will eventually be licensed to everyone and it will all just work that way. The case should be available in March for US$50. Btw, the image to the right shows how the screen works, though its not very illustrative.

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Cherrypal Unveils Bing Netbook

Tyler Regas — Sun, 18 Jan 2009 22:50:47 +0000

I wasn’t clear if Cherrypal was going to make it on the merits of their nifty little cloud computing desktop alone, then they toss me this press release. Today, at the Sundance Film Festival of all places, Cherrypal has announced a new addition to the little family, the Bing netbook. The Bing, which comes with Windows XP Home, and the GreenMaraschino, which ships with Cherrypal’s Linux distro, are standard netbooks in every way (I think everyone is using the same motherboard and chipset combos right now). Here’s the deal they’re offering. You pay US$399 now and you’ll get the C114 desktop and in March you’ll receive the Bing. That deal will only last until 1/25/09, so if you’re interested I’d hurry. Cherrypal has also indicated that they are working on larger and smaller sized netbooks for future release. Could be interesting.

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HP Updates Mini-Note To Atom

Tyler Regas — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 19:25:06 +0000

HP, not content to wait for CES to make its announcement, has unveiled an updated Mini-Note, the 2140. While it all fits in the same case, the new 2140 gets a larger display and swaps out the slower VIA C7-M processor for a more common Intel Atom 1.6GHz CPU. You get the choice of an 80GB SSD or 160GB HDD drive (either 5400 or 7200 RPM speeds) and the 10.1″ display comes in either 1024×567 or 1366×768 resolutions and is powered by Intel’s GMA950 chipset. Operating system options remain the same with FreeDOS, Windows XP Home or Professional, Windows Vista Home or Business, or SUSE Enterprise Linux version 10. All this can be yours starting at a mere US$500 and will be available later this month.

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Dell Re-Ups Inspiron 15 Line Lappy

Tyler Regas — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 10:04:36 +0000

Dell has announced, oddly prior to CES, their reconfigured Inspiron 15 line of standard lappies. They now feature 15.6″ displays with a 16:9 aspect ratio and a 1366×768 native resolution, 4GBs of RAM, a 320GB drive, optional Blu-Ray optical drives, and the other standard amenities. The i15 is now sporting Intel’s T6400 Core 2 Duo CPUs running at 2.0GHz and Intel’s GMA 4500MHD video chipset. Pricing for the base model starts at a very modest US$600 and presumably goes up from there when they start selling them from the Dell site. Until then you’ll have to do with Best Buy.

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Looking For A Netbook Bag?

Tyler Regas — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 08:03:43 +0000

If you’re looking for a lappy bag that actually fits your netbook, then Solo seems to be interested in filling that need. Check out their TSA-approved little gadge bag. They’re nicely priced at around US$40, US$36 from Amazon.

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Lenovo Goes Insane: ThinkPad W700ds

Tyler Regas — Tue, 30 Dec 2008 07:28:23 +0000

Lenovo has finally answered a question I have serious doubts nobody was asking: How can I get more than one display on my laptop? To solve this problem, Lenovo dug deep into its engineer corp and they delivered the ThinkPad W700ds. This is no cool portable game machine, though. Its a monster of a lappy which promises to damage yours spleen if you deign to carry it in a shoulder bag. It weighs 11 pounds and is side enough to have a full keyboard and a numeric keypad. Pricing is set at US$3,600, and for that you get the 17″ main display, the 10.3″ secondary display, a Quad-core CPU, NVIDIA Quadro video, 8GBs of RAM, and nearly 1TB of storage space. Woof. If that wasn’t enough, to the right of the trackpad is an integrated Wacom tablet. What a pig! If you want all of that but don’t need to secondary display, you can opt for the less pricey W700. A larger pic comes after the jump. There’s nothing on the Lenovo site just yet.

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iCap MP3 Rocks Your Head

Tyler Regas — Tue, 30 Dec 2008 06:56:10 +0000

This is seriously mobile gear. The iCap MP3 player is a combination baseball cap/MP3/FM radio player, all for US$119 (special deal US$99). It sports 1GB of integrated storage, an SDHC card slot for up to 8GBs more, SRS WoW audio, a 7-band equalizer, USB 2.0 interface, and features voice recording capabilities with an integrated microphone. You don’t plug in headphones, though, because it has a pair of speakers. Check the jump for a closer look at the underside of the bill. It does have an audio out jack, though. You could plug it into a backpack speaker for some added thump.

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Fujitsu Outs New Stylistic Tablet

Tyler Regas — Sat, 20 Dec 2008 06:55:59 +0000

Speaking of tablets, Fujitsu has recently announced their new Stylistic ST6012 tablet PC. This is not a convertible. In the tradition of Fujitsu’s Stylistic product line, the ST6012 is a true tablet PC which has not integrated keyboard. As such, its very thin and designed to be held. Fujitsu is offering two models, each with two SKU’s (I’ll explain later), both of which feature a 12.1″ touchscreen display, 1GB of RAM, an 80GB SATA drive, integrated biometric security, Gigabit LAN, and hefty 5,200 mAh batteries. The US$2,579 model sports a Core 2 Duo CPU, Intel wireless (making it Centrino qualified), and Bluetooth. The US$1,999 model sports a ULV processor, Atheros wireless, but no Bluetooth. Now to explain the SKUs. If you look carefully at the product descriptions on the site, you’ll see two seemingly identical SKUs for each model level. The second SKU is actually a Vista downgrade option. Make sure to choose wisely when ordering.