Dell has gotten all fancy recently by launching the tiny Studio Hybrid line of fashion desktops which also manage to be Dell’s greenest. That could be aided by the fact that they are significantly smaller than anything else it makes.
Still, there’s no denying that they are slinky and, if you want a close-up look at just how small and cute the Studio Hybrids are, take a look at one of the first unboxing videos after the jump.
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Fans of the excellent Price of Persia series may not be aware that, rather inevitably we suppose, Hollywood has recently started filming a movie of the hit franchise entitled Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time.
It appears to be based around the events of the game with the same name, and as you can see from the recently released photo opposite, a certain Mr. Gyllenhaal seems to have done a sterling job of modelling himself on the good prince.
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If you’re in the market for a notebook, but aspire to nothing more adventurous than sending emails, word processing and browsing the web you’re probably still paying over the odds even if you bag a bargain basement £300 model from someone like Dell.
A sub-£200 mini laptop might be more appropriate, such as this new miniBook available for Maplin which, up until the 2nd of September at least, will set you back just £169.99.
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Dell know how to make PCs admittedly, but in the MP3 player stakes it has fallen well short in recent years.
It canned its original range, which included the Dell DJ Satellite Radio, a while back but sources from within the company claim it’s about to have another go.
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There’s a story making the rounds about a guy who’s apparently going to jail for selling unauthorized copies of software on eBay, and the software industry is trumpeting what a huge victory this is over “counterfeiting,” by claiming: “The Mondello case demonstrates that these pirates won’t simply get a slap on the wrist when caught. They very well may end up doing serious time in federal prison.” Right, but if you read the details, the conviction wasn’t just for copyright infringement, but for identity fraud and mail fraud. That is, as part of his operation, he illegally obtained peoples’ bank account info. That would appear to be a lot worse than copyright infringement, but the press seems to focus only on the “counterfeiting” angle, because that’s the story the software industry association seems to be feeding the press. They want people to think that they’ll go to jail for piracy, when that’s quite unlikely.
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There’s a growing pile of subnotebooks by the side of my desk, and so far, Hewlett-Packard’s HP2133 Mini-Note is the biggest and the best.
It’s a full-spec ultramobile with a lovely brushed aluminium casing, excellent screen and a keyboard that you can actually touch-type on. As a Wired blog headline put it, it’s “what we really wanted the MacBook Air to be”.
But it’s quite a lot wider and chunkier than an Asus Eee PC900, it’s heavier (from 1.3kg), and it tends to be slow - at least with the Windows Vista running on the version loaned for review. (SuSE Linux is a cheaper option.)
The Mini-Note’s Achilles heel is the 1.2GHz Via C7-M processor, which rates a 1.7 on the Vista Experience Index. In other respects, the machine fares well, with graphics rated 2.9 and the 120GB hard disk scoring 5.2. With the new Via Nano processor, it would be a great machine. An Intel Atom would at least be competitive for its class.
HP knows this, of course. But it’s pitching the machine for educational use (RM is selling it, downgraded to XP), and it had to make deadlines for evaluation purposes.
Waiting for Atom might have meant missing a school year. However, HP may offer an upgraded version when new chips arrive in volume. The Mini-Note is very slow to boot and slow to load programs, but once up and running, the performance is good for its intended uses: word processing, email and web browsing. Vista’s Aero graphics system worked well in 2GB of memory.
The scratch-resistant 8.9 inch screen (same size as the Asus Eee PC900) shows 1280 x 769 pixels, which is in effect the same as the 1280 x 800 you get on the 13.3 inch Dell M1330 or MacBook Air. Everything’s smaller, but that’s fine for younger eyes. The keyboard is a big improvement on rival machines, but should be even better. The Mini-Note keyboard measures 10 x 4 inches, which is only slightly smaller than my IBM ThinkPad X31 (10.2 x 4.2 inches), which has a 12-inch screen. It is far better than the Asus’s 8.3 x 3.1 inch keyboard, but it should be as good as the ThinkPad.
The selection of ports includes ExpressCard (useful for 3G) and SD slots, two USB 2.0 ports, Ethernet and an external monitor port. The Mini-Note also sports Bluetooth 2.0 and Wi-Fi .
HP’s website lists the starting prices as £299 plus VAT for the Linux version, and £349 plus VAT for the Vista Business version tested. Judging by appearances, you’d expect it to cost a lot more.
Pros: High-res screen; good keyboard; big hard drive; well made
Cons: Slow processor; big power brick
View the HP2133 Mini-Note here
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A whole bunch of people are submitting this, though, the explanation is not passing the sniff test. The story is that a bunch of laptop owners (mainly from Dell) are frustrated after discovering that their laptop soundcard configuration blocks the recording of audio, even though it’s possible to enable it with a few tweaks. In other words, recording has effectively been turned off by the computer manufacturers. It didn’t take long for rumors and speculation to assume that somehow the RIAA has been pressuring these computer makers to turn off sound. Of course, with the entertainment industry, sometimes it seems that no concept is too evil to believe that the industry wouldn’t endorse. However, there seems to be no evidence whatsoever that the RIAA had any part in this. On the whole, it sounds like someone just made a bad decision in terms of how to configure certain sound cards. If someone can provide any evidence that the RIAA actually had a role in this, we’ll post an update, but there’s no reason to jump to conclusions without any evidence. That’s what the RIAA does.
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It might seem like an unholy alliance but Dell has reportedly approached Apple with bags of cash to buy into its money-saving Manila Case laptop packaging. That’s the big joke going around now in the US.
According to Piper Jaffray’s industry watcher and Apple fan Gene Munster, Dell wants to cut its costs and thinks paying Apple to use their exclusive envelope packaging is the quickest way to do it - even if they have to pay £10 per envelope for the privilege. According to Munster:
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Following on from the surprise success of its cheap and wee ‘Eee’ laptop, Asus is planning to rollout some additions to the range during the year.
These will include the E-DT [a desktop PC], E-TV and E-Monitor. The E-DT PC will be sold without a monitor, run on a Celeron processor and cost somewhere between [...]
At least 7,000 jobs are set to go at computer firm Dell after it said it would cut its global workforce by about 10%.