So, oh kind wonderful Google, have decided to release a series of videos detailing how this device fell from heaven and what makes it so God damn amazing!
BitTorrent pirates will be scouring the Web for copies of a limited edition retrospective Who album over the next few weeks. Pete Townshend and Roger Daltry, the surviving members of The Who, are getting together for a charity performance on March 30 at the Albert Hall. According to Ticketmaster, members of The Who's fan club will get a "CD of the band's live performances between 1969 and 1776".
How well I remember those early days in 1776 when Peter Townshend became a pupil of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. I recall the shock felt when he quit in a fit of pique after Mozart refused to incorporate the repetitive motif "I want the magic flute" into his 1791 opera. This had a long term effect on the young Townshend especially when his mentor died just months later, aged 35. "I hope I die before I get old," Townshend said in his eulogy.
At this time he was working on Monophenia, his magnum opus covering the anti-Catholic uprisings and street fights, known as the Gordon Riots, in London during 1780. This went through many changes in structure and content, later becoming Stereophenia, and was finally performed as Quadrophenia almost a century later.
He moved from Vienna to form a band with keyboardist Ludvig van Beethoven, a partnership that lasted many years until Beethoven died, blind and deaf. Townshend considered how this severely disabled genius became a colossus of the musical world and transposed it to the world of pinball. The opera was named Tommy after Beethoven's poor lip-reading of Townshend's name.
Those were the days.
The upcoming concert aims to raise cash for the Teenage Cancer Trust and tickets go on sale this morning for "The Who Play Quadrophenia - Seated".
With a degree of irony, The Who's planned performance at the Super Bowl on Sunday will see demonstrations from Protect Our Children. Leaflets from the action group state, "Townshend is a British citizen who was registered as a sex offender in his home country in 2003, for an offense related to child pornography. He will be at large in Miami ... when he arrives to perform at the Super Bowl with his musical group known as 'The Who'. This is a community notification distributed in the interest of public safety."
Townshend was removed from the register two years ago and never faced paedophilia charges. The police accepted that he paid to visit a child pornography site for "research purposes" and found no evidence to the contrary.
Pete Townshend is 264 years old, apparently.
The Mini NB300 is Toshiba's newest netbook, shipping with Windows 7 Starter or XP Home. Initial specs sound promising too, with 11 hour battery life, 1.66 GHz processor. We know because we were sent a press release about it, full of quotes saying how ace it is from some people we'd never heard of. Thanks for that anonymous press release donor!
Toshiba's last netbook, the Mini NB200 was a bit of a bobby dazzler. Powerful, good looking, compact - all that jazz. It was overshadowed a bit by the netbook market's big, budget performers though - the Dell Minis, the MSI Wind, the Eee PC and even PC World's own Advent range. It's a much more crowded market now though.
And, I suppose, it's easy to label 2010 the year of the tablet. Here goes, in fact - 2010 is the year of the tablet! But the netbook still has a hole to fill. The question is, how many netbooks will it take? And what's the netbook's USP?
Musing aloud, typing thoughts half-baked (which is what blogging is for after all), I'm wondering if the idea of a high-end netbook is something of a misnomer, doomed to a slow niche death in such a small slice of market. Aren't netbooks supposed to be cheapo, portable laptop alternatives? An add on for browsing and typing you can just chuck in your bag? The Dell Mini 10, for example: £230. "Free" with a mobile broadband contract from PC World. Comes in lovely candy colours. Right now, I can get last year's Acer netbook models, refurbished, for as little as £140. They do everything I need from a netbook. A Dell Mini 9 will even run Mac OS X, with a bit of not-quite-legal tweaking.
That brilliant Toshiba Mini NB300, though? It costs between £270 and £300 new. Dunno about you, but £300 is definitely at the upper end of our netbook finance tolerance. Especially when you can build yourself a quad core, 4GB desktop PC with half a gig of video RAM - as I did last week - for £280. But, that's another story.
Our question is, I guess, can you market netbooks like phones and laptops? Can you keep adding features and speed and hiking up the price, when the central core of the netbook's success is actually not features and speed, but ease of use, portability and a low price point?
I think this is the year we'll find out - because the netbook market has gone from zero to saturation in a meagre 24 months. My suspicion is that the pie can only be sliced so many ways.
By the way, this entry was written on my personal netbook - an eight year old, 12" G4 Apple Powerbook... It's a bit scratched and the battery life sucks, but it still does word processing and web browsing better than any Eee PC. Resale value? About £50...
The Sony X series has a love it / hate it tag.It's jaw dropping beauty is enough for some but others point to the fact that it's over-priced compared to other laptops in the same price range. I will put the £1,000 - £1,300 price tag to one side for the moment and come back to it in the verdict.
Hardware and aesthetics
Let's start with the fact that this is one of the thinnest laptops in the world at just 13.9mm and weighs around 700 grams. An amazing feat for any laptop regardless of the specifications. But it's the specifications that make the price tag seem overblown.
The X series is powered by either a 1.86GHz Intel Atom Z540 or a 2.0GHz Z550 backed up by 2GB RAM which is good but definitely not great if you're looking for a high-powered VAIO.
The keyboard is small but surprisingly quite comfortable after a few hours use. The keys are not too low and are well spaced, I certainly did not find too much difficulty in typing up reports despite the reduced size.
The touchpad is slightly disappointing in that it's quite small. Looking that the laptop you can't help but feel this could be a bit bigger and it has no multi-touch support.
As you'd expect Wi-Fi and Bluetooth are included, graphics are powered by an Intel GMA 500 chip and the review model we received has a 160GB hard drive though you can get up to 256GB on more expensive models.
Surprisingly, there's no HDMI but it does have two USB ports, a memory card reader, a headphone/microphone jack, a Gigabit Ethernet port and a VGA port for video.
Aesthetics and battery
I doubt you will be able to find a laptop this small with such a fantastic display. The 11.1 inch LED backlight screen has a resolution of 1366 x 768. While this is not out of this world, you find yourself extremely impressed with how sharp the display is and how lively the colours are.
We were told that the X series has up to 14 hours battery life and while we found that it lasted far longer than most laptops, we were unable to test it. I'll agree it must have stayed on for over double figures while in our office so I'll give Sony the benefit of teh doubt.
Verdict
While the Sony VAIO X series certainly puts the Apple Macbook Air to shame, it's still lacking the X Factor. As I said in the beginning of this review that it was a love/hate relationship, I love it but I hate the price.
I like to think of it as a celebrity girlfriend, you'd look good and get attention walking around with her but it's not worth the price tag and hassle.
The look and feel of the X series would make me a proud owner and would add a certain slickness to my tech wardrobe, but the bottom line is 'money can't buy me love'.
Prices for Apple's add-ons for the iPad are starting to appear. These will be supplemented with other third-party products nearer the slate's release date.
The basic unit comes without a physical keyboard. If you want to type anything in, rather than peck at the on-screen keyboard, you'll have to spend an extra $69 (£43) for a Keyboard Dock. The unit holds the iPad upright, recharges the unit, provides an audio output socket and replicates the Apple connector socket thatit uses on the iPad to allow other add-ons to be used simultaneously.
These add-ons include the Camera Connection Kit ($29) which appears to comprise two memory card readers. There is also a VGA (not HDMI) connector for an external monitor ($29) but sound output will have to be taken from the headphone socket on the iPad or just using the inbuilt speakers.
A few reviewers have pointed out that the problem with slates is that their screens are vulnerable to damage as they are carried around. Apple's answer is an inexpensive case ($39) that will also hold the iPad upright or slope it to make it easier to type on the virtual keyboard. No doubt, third parties will appear with cases that also accommodate the Keyboard Dock and cable accessories.
Sometimes old people get an idea fixed in their heads. I'm an old person and guilty of being swayed by pundits who were expecting Apple to produce a slate version of an iMac. Wrong, wrong, wrong.
People like myself have been missing the point about Apple's iPad. It is vot it is, darlings - an entertainment device with a big screen. It really is an iPod Touch on steroids.
The omission of a camera has been criticised but that's not important. Who would want to wave an iPad around to take pictures? Why would you want to make phone calls on a Nintendo Wii, take pictures on a Sony Playstation or type your novel on a Microsoft Xbox 360?
Although the iPad is primarily an eBook reader with music and video players built-in, it shares many similarities to a games machine. If a Wii can do anything other than play games, it usually means forking out for a bit of hardware and nobody complains. Apple's haunted picture frame comes without a physical keyboard. So what? If you want to type anything in, rather than peck at the on-screen keyboard, you can spend an extra $69 for a Keyboard Dock. The unit holds the iPad upright, recharges the unit, provides an audio output socket and replicates the Apple connector socket it uses on the iPad to allow other add-ons to be used simultaneously.
If you want a camera, you'll have to wait for a third-party add-on which will stand separate from the iPad, possibly neatly linked by Wi-Fi. Yes, you can play games on it or do some limited business tasks using the current iPhone library or the dedicated iPad apps that are yet to appear.
I'm particularly annoyed with my inflexible thought proceses because I've long been a believer that the future computer is the thin client. I mean that in the sense of a client using browser interfaces linked to remote number crunchers in a data centre elsewhere on the planet. Maybe a future version of the iPad will deliver handwriting recognition and come with a keyboard dock, or a BlueTooth keyboard, and be able to output data to a memory card or USB disk. Maybe the current model could be powerful and flexible enough to deliver this with third-party help.
I've always envied Steve Jobs' ability to deliver functional, innovative and eye-appealing products. I do hope he continues to recover from his current illness because he is Apple and the company would lose its spark without him - just as Microsoft seems to have lost its spark without Gates' daily involvement.
Watch the video below, hilarious!
My first take on the Apple's iPad is that it is an iPhone gone large (without the phone - oh yes, that's an iPod Touch then) which is a disappointment. If only it had gone the extra few steps to include digital ink and allow handwriting on the screen, it would have been better. Instead we have an e-reader with mini-apps.
What else is wrong. No multitasking, no camera to allow videconferencing, no SD card slot, no USB. If you want USB or SD it will be possible but these will have to be bought separately, and used separately, through the 30-pin connector - so there'll be a lot of swapping and chopping back and forth if you want to use the keyboard as well.
If you want 3G connectivity it will cost an extra £100 and forget any idea of sharing your phone SIM with the iPad. It uses micro SIMs and these are rare gems at the moment. Still, in the UK, we do have until June to sort that out. Although the iPad will be here in April, the need to find telcoms with micro SIMs may delay the launch of iPad 3G further.
Is this an iFlop? Certainly the high hopes pre-launch have been dashed somewhat. A quick scan of the forums will not be comforting news for Apple. An iPod Touch for the hard of thinking seems to be the theme out there. Apple boss Steve Jobs claimed that it bridges the gap between iPhone and netbook but is there a gap? He also says it shows Web sites as they are meant to be seen but this is only true if you live in the Java-free, Adobe-free world of Apple. At best it's overblown hyperbole at worst it may be a lie.
One thing about running iPhone apps that Jobs didn't address was whether you can use apps you've already purchased on your iPhone and iPad. I'll take that as a no, then.
Jobs says the iPad is "magical". I say "tragical".
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