Laptop, notbook, tech news

If Apple doesn’t introduce a tablet computer soon, we’ll all be sorely disappointed. With all the ongoing speculation about the alleged iPod-on-steroids, I feel like the device is already here.

Today’s scuttlebutt from Apple Insider has the Big Tablet arriving early next year, a prediction that matches one two months ago by Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster.

So what do we know about the tablet? Reports say it’s an iPod-like device with a 10-inch screen, a handheld slate that’s large enough for HD movies, video gaming, and Web browsing without all the window-resizing and screen-tapping calisthenics that smartphone users endure. Apple Insider says the tablet will feature 3G broadband, which seems logical. And since we’re speculating here, I’d like to request Wi-fi, Bluetooth, and GPS as well.

Name Your Price
Specs aside, what should Apple charge for the Big Tablet? Some reports say $800 is likely, but that seems high for a consumer electronics device. My prediction: $499. Here’s why:
According to a 2007 study by the Consumer Electronics Association (CEA), the average American household spends about $1200 annually on electronics products. Would the typical household blow two-thirds of its tech budget on one handheld device? Probably not.
And that CEA study was two years ago — before the current recession and consumers’ belt-tightening ways. To me, $500 seems like the sweet spot for a premium consumer gadget.
And then there’s Apple’s product lineup. Currently, there’s a big gulf between the 32GB iPod touch ($399) and the $999 MacBook. Let’s assume Apple drops the iPod touch price, as it did recently with some of its MacBooks.  The Big Tablet would fill the void nicely at $499.
Of course, for Apple to achieve its desired profit margin, that $500 price tag may include a 3G service contract with a major wireless carrier. Given the enormous success of the iPhone, it wouldn’t be surprising if AT&T, Sprint, or Verizon would be willing to subsidize the tablet’s cost to sign up new subscribers. Netbooks with wireless-style plans are becoming increasing common, so the subsidized model for consumer hardware is already in place.
And, no, I didn’t call the Big Tablet a netbook. Apple would hate that.
Contact Jeff Bertolucci via Twitter (@jbertolucci) or at jbertolucci.blogspot.com.

 

In an industry that gets off on throwing obscure benchmarks at buyers ( “pixel fill rate,” anyone?), laptop battery life is one of the easiest to understand.

It’s also long been one of the least useful, critics charge, due to the industry’s deceptive use of the dominant standard, the MobileMark benchmark created by the Business Applications Performance Corp. (BAPCo), an industry consortium whose members include Intel Corp., Dell Inc., Hewlett-Packard Co., Advanced Micro Devices Inc. and others.

“Everyone in the industry knows this benchmark is wildly optimistic and that the actual battery life you’ll get is often less than half what MobileMark suggests,” wrote analyst Rob Enderle last month. “This is because MobileMark measures battery life much like you might measure gas mileage if you started the car, put it in neutral, and coasted down a long hill.”

The latest MobileMark 2007 report measures laptop battery life under three scenarios: reading a document, watching a DVD movie, and doing a “representative” mix of productivity tasks, such as reading and composing documents, editing photos and encoding Flash videos (see page 13 of white paper).

But rather than using an average time based on all three measures, BAPCo designates its third scenario as the way most people use their laptop.

There are several problems with this, according to critics. First, doubters such as AMD say that the productivity test assumes that the notebook is idle 90% or more of the time.

Second, MobileMark’s “productivity” scenario assumes that users, when active, are using only software such as Adobe Photoshop or Microsoft Office. They don’t test usage of music or video applications such as iTunes or Windows Media Player, games or Web browsing. The test also assumes that Wi-Fi is turned off.

That seems particularly unjustified today, since netbooks are touted as on-the-go, Web-centric devices, or high-definition video-capable machines.

Finally, MobileMark 2007 allows PC vendors to set their laptop screen brightness at the lowest possible setting, provided it is no lower than 60 nits (a nit is a measure of brightness. The problem, again pointed out by AMD, is that 60 nits is quite dim, being only about one-fifth of most notebook PCs’ maximum screen brightness.

According to an informal reader poll at Neowin.net, a Windows community site, fewer than 15% of respondents run their notebooks that dim.

BAPCo defended its MobileMark benchmarks. “The content of BAPCo benchmarks are vigorously debated and cooperatively developed by BAPCo members according to a long and rigorous process,” the company said in an e-mailed statement. “As is the case with all BAPCo benchmarks, MobileMark 2007 was approved by BAPCo according to a democratic voting process similar to ones used by most industry work groups.”

Despite the criticism, many vendors are willing to tout the battery life from the Productivity test as their overall MobileMark score. See these offers from Hewlett-Packard Co., Lenovo Group Ltd., and Dell Inc.

Only Acer Inc. (download PDF here) identified its MobileMark time as a productivity score. Asus Inc., Apple Inc. and Toshiba Corp. didn’t mention MobileMark on their Web sites.

In late June, a class-action lawsuit was filed in U.S. District Court in San Jose, targeting Intel Corp. for, according to the San Jose Mercury News, “essentially rigging those tests to inflate the battery life of laptops powered by its chips.”

Intel denied the claims, and noted that the same law firm, Girard Gibbs of San Francisco, unsuccessfully filed a separate class-action lawsuit against Intel several years earlier, according to the Mercury News.

Intel also disputes the claim that the public is being misled. “Anyone who criticizes consumers’ intelligence when shopping for laptops is underestimating the consumers,” an Intel spokesman told the Mercury News.

Carol Hess-Nickels, director of marketing for business notebooks at HP, took the same line. “I’d say we are pretty pleased with the benchmarks used today,” she said in an interview last month several days before the lawsuit was filed. “I’ve not personally gotten complaints.”

HP claims business netbooks such as the Mini 2140 and the Mini 5101 can run up to eight hours, or a full business day, on an optional, extended battery.

Lenovo, which has claimed as long as 7.5 hours of battery life for its laptops on extended batteries, acknowledges there is a problem, however.

“We don’t really like the fact that something is supposed to get four hours and users routinely say, ‘We divide that number by two and that’s what we get,’” said Lenovo segment marketing manager David Critchley in an interview, also several days before the lawsuit’s filing.

Dell appears to agree with Lenovo. “Customers expect the advertised battery life to reflect the way they really use the product,” Ketan Pandya, head of AMD-based products at Dell, told Newsweek last month.

As a counterbalance, some magazine reviewers go overboard to turn off all of a laptop’s power-saving features, Critchley said, which is equally inaccurate. “We put a lot of time and effort into our power manager,” he said. “You’ll see some significant gains from the way we handle sub-components.”

AMD, which complained that MobileMark essentially discriminates against its chipsets because they are more graphically powerful than Intel’s, is all for reforming MobileMark.

In a blog entitled “There has to be a better way,” AMD suggests turning the widely used performance benchmark, 3DMark06, into “an active battery life test” that it argues would be a more accurate measure of average battery life.

Lenovo, although game, is more cautious. “If Dell, HP and Apple all said, ‘Yea, verily,’ Lenovo would be right there with them,” Critchley said.

 

Not to be outdone by competing companies in the current netbook craze, Gateway has announced a new addition to its compact notebook line: the LT2000 series. With a 10.1-inch screen, 1GB of memory, a 160GB hard drive, three USB 2.0 ports, a built-in Webcam, and the ability to connect to the Internet, the LT2000 sounds just…like…every…other…netbook.

Seriously, we’re at the point now where we need more differentiation between these miniature laptops, not more bargain-box confusion. But since the specs and a handful of images are all we have to go on, let’s get to it.
To judge from the photos, I’d say that the LT2000 looks similar to other budget netbooks.It lacks awesome design flourishes, it isn’t pink, it doesn’t look as though it might transform into an awesome robot. Though I have yet to lay a hand on a review model, this offering is definitely not the Optimus Prime (or the Gobots, for that matter) of netbooks. It does seem on a par with other budget netbooks on most key specs, though: a 1.6GHz N270 Atom CPU, 1GB RAM, and a 160GB hard drive. Less impressive is the LT2000’s three-cell battery, which (if you’re lucky) will last 3 hours according to Gateway reps. We’re talking about a $300 machine here, but rival netbooks (like the Toshiba NB205-310) that don’t cost much more can last over three times as long.

On the software side, the LT2000 netbooks come equipped with Windows XP and preinstalled software–some free stuff (such as Adobe Reader), and some trial bloatware (such as Microsoft Works with Office Home and Student 2007).
One somewhat unusual element of the LT2000 is its multigesture touchpad, which allows users to swirl and flick their way through Web pages, music, and media.But even this feature appears on other models such as the Acer Aspire AS5536.

The LT2000 series netbooks are available now, in your choice of Cherry Red or NightSky Black. Stay tuned for a full review once test units arrive at our PC World Test Center.

Not to be outdone by competing companies in the current netbook craze, Gateway has announced a new addition to its compact notebook line: the LT2000 series. With a 10.1-inch screen, 1GB of memory, a 160GB hard drive, three USB 2.0 ports, a built-in Webcam, and the ability to connect to the Internet, the LT2000 sounds just…like…every…other…netbook.

Seriously, we’re at the point now where we need more differentiation between these miniature laptops, not more bargain-box confusion. But since the specs and a handful of images are all we have to go on, let’s get to it.
To judge from the photos, I’d say that the LT2000 looks similar to other budget netbooks.It lacks awesome design flourishes, it isn’t pink, it doesn’t look as though it might transform into an awesome robot. Though I have yet to lay a hand on a review model, this offering is definitely not the Optimus Prime (or the Gobots, for that matter) of netbooks. It does seem on a par with other budget netbooks on most key specs, though: a 1.6GHz N270 Atom CPU, 1GB RAM, and a 160GB hard drive. Less impressive is the LT2000’s three-cell battery, which (if you’re lucky) will last 3 hours according to Gateway reps. We’re talking about a $300 machine here, but rival netbooks (like the Toshiba NB205-310) that don’t cost much more can last over three times as long.

On the software side, the LT2000 netbooks come equipped with Windows XP and preinstalled software–some free stuff (such as Adobe Reader), and some trial bloatware (such as Microsoft Works with Office Home and Student 2007).
One somewhat unusual element of the LT2000 is its multigesture touchpad, which allows users to swirl and flick their way through Web pages, music, and media.But even this feature appears on other models such as the Acer Aspire AS5536.

The LT2000 series netbooks are available now, in your choice of Cherry Red or NightSky Black. Stay tuned for a full review once test units arrive at our PC World Test Center.

Kevin Turner, Microsoft COO, is claiming Apple lawyers called him requesting Microsoft stop running the “laptop hunter” ads based upon outdated pricing information. Apple recently updated their laptop line and lowered some of their prices, something that was much needed as Apple’s prices were a step above the price improvements we’ve been seeing.

So, with Apple’s price drops, are the Microsoft ads inaccurate or is their premise still true, that there’s an Apple tax making Apple’s computers more expensive than those from Windows OEMs? I suspect there is still an Apple tax but I’ve not seen any updated comparisons showing if there’s a gap, and how much it might be.

Here’s a video taking apart the Laptop Hunters from a Mac advocate’s perspective. He does have a good point that if you want to be a film maker, you’re going to use Final Cut Pro on the Mac.

 

(Okay, Microsoft advocates: where’s your side of the argument?)

Either way, should Microsoft stop running the Laptop Hunter ads, or at least update them to reflect current prices? Apple’s certainly enjoyed their fun at poking Vista with a sharp stick in their ads, and it looks like Microsoft’s Laptop Hunter ads must have at least some impact or Apple wouldn’t bother asking for them to be removed.

I doubt Microsoft will drop the ads altogether, but I would at least like to see new ads reflecting current pricing from both camps. In the end, I suspect the ads aren’t making a major difference as I’m guessing buyers pretty much have decided if they are getting a Mac or a Windows PC before they enter the store.

 
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A massive upgrade to computers and networks used by government agencies in Singapore is underway and on schedule, according to the agency that oversees the program.

The S$1.3 billion (US$888.6 million) Standard ICT Operating Environment (SOEasy) project is the largest IT project yet undertaken by the tech-savvy Singapore government and is intended improve efficiency and cut costs by standardizing the computers, messaging infrastructure, and networking equipment used by government bodies in the Southeast Asian city-state.

“Key milestones of the SOEasy Programme are on track. The first batch of agencies will start enjoying the new SOEasy services from July 2009,” a spokeswoman for the Infocomm Development Agency of Singapore (IDA), which is supervising the project, wrote in an e-mail.

IDA expects the SOEasy project to save S$500 million in IT-related costs for the government, according to a previously announced estimate.

Implementation of the SOEasy project is being handled by oneMeridian, an industry consortium led by Hewlett-Packard’s EDS division that also includes Microsoft, Alcatel-Lucent, Cisco Systems, and operator Singapore Telecommunications (SingTel), among others. The group was awarded the SOEasy contract earlier this year.

The first government agencies to get the SOEasy upgrade are the Ministry of Finance, the Ministry of Information, Communications and the Arts, IDA, and National Heritage Board. These agencies will move to the SOEasy platform this month, with other government agencies to follow in the months ahead. The project rollout is scheduled to be completed by 2010.

In total, 74 government agencies with around 60,000 employees will be using the SOEasy platform when the rollout is complete. Singapore’s Ministry of Defence and the Ministry of Education are not included in the SOEasy project, as they have developed separate systems for their respective needs.

Contract manufacturer Flextronics opened a research and design center for laptop computers in Taiwan, aiming to tap into the island’s pool of engineering talent.

Located in Banciao, a suburb of Taipei, Flextronics’ newly established Computing Segment Design Center, will design laptops for brand-name hardware vendors. The laptops will then be manufactured in Flextronics’ factories and shipped to customers around the world.

The Banciao design center joins two similar centers that Flextronics has set up in Taiwan to design other computing products, including servers and desktop PCs.

Flextronics’ customers include Hewlett-Packard, Dell and Cisco Systems, among others.

While Flextronics is based in Singapore, Taiwan serves as the center of the company’s computer-related business, and it expects to employ 1,500 engineers in its design centers there within the next few years, the company said in a statement.

Taiwan is home to many of the world’s largest hardware makers, including Hon Hai Precision Industry and Quanta Computer. The island is also home to hundreds of smaller companies that design and produce components used to manufacture laptops and other computers. By setting up shop in Banciao, Flextronics’ laptop design team will also be close to these suppliers

Contract manufacturer Flextronics opened a research and design center for laptop computers in Taiwan, aiming to tap into the island’s pool of engineering talent.

Located in Banciao, a suburb of Taipei, Flextronics’ newly established Computing Segment Design Center, will design laptops for brand-name hardware vendors. The laptops will then be manufactured in Flextronics’ factories and shipped to customers around the world.

The Banciao design center joins two similar centers that Flextronics has set up in Taiwan to design other computing products, including servers and desktop PCs.

Flextronics’ customers include Hewlett-Packard, Dell and Cisco Systems, among others.

While Flextronics is based in Singapore, Taiwan serves as the center of the company’s computer-related business, and it expects to employ 1,500 engineers in its design centers there within the next few years, the company said in a statement.

Taiwan is home to many of the world’s largest hardware makers, including Hon Hai Precision Industry and Quanta Computer. The island is also home to hundreds of smaller companies that design and produce components used to manufacture laptops and other computers. By setting up shop in Banciao, Flextronics’ laptop design team will also be close to these suppliers

The world’s largest chip maker is working with Google on the Chrome operating system and has been privy to the project for some time, a spokesman for the company said Friday.

Intel’s endorsement is important for the Chrome OS project because of its standing in the personal computing world: Intel microprocessors go into around four-fifths of the world’s computers.

Google is aiming the Chrome OS at desktops, laptops and netbooks, all devices dominated by Microsoft Windows, so supporting Chrome could put Intel in an awkward position with Microsoft. The two companies have so dominated the PC industry over the past few decades that the term “Wintel” (from Windows and Intel) is used to refer to PCs running Windows on a processor based on the Intel-developed x86 architecture.

“We work with Google on a variety of projects, including elements of this one. We’ve been privy to the project for some time,” said Nick Jacobs, Asia-Pacific spokesman for Intel. He declined to elaborate on the extent of their relationship.

Intel has also been seeking more support for its drive to put microprocessors into smaller devices, led by its Atom microprocessor, the most popular netbook processor. Google said Chrome will launch first in netbooks, in the second half of next year.

But Intel had been working on its own mobile operating system for small computer devices, a Linux-based OS called Moblin. It was designed for netbooks and handheld computers Intel calls MIDs, or mobile Internet devices.

The goal for Intel is to sell more of its popular Atom microprocessors, which are used in netbooks including Acer’s Aspire One and most versions of Asustek Computer’s Eee PC. The chips are designed for longer battery life in small devices.

Ultimately, Intel hopes to put Atom processing cores inside smartphones and other mobile phone industry devices, a goal the company stated when it agreed to work more closely with Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC) on complex chips that require processing cores. For users, Atom chips inside smartphones would mean people could run software designed for personal computers on such handhelds, instead of mobile phone software. Software has to be compiled for the chip architecture it runs on, whether x86 chips from Intel, AMD or Via Technologies, or RISC (reduced instruction set computer) chips such as those designed by Arm Holdings. There is more software available worldwide for the x86 architecture than any other.

Arm processors are used by the mobile phone industry in handsets and smartphones, and the top Arm processors remain far more power-efficient than Atom.

Google made no mention of Intel in a blog posting earlier this week when it named companies already working with the Chrome OS. The list includes PC vendors HP, Acer and Lenovo and mobile phone chip makers Qualcomm, Texas Instruments and Freescale Semiconductor.

Google is developing the Linux-based operating system for heavy Internet users, the company has said.

Dell apologized Wednesday for online pricing snafus that have hit its Web sales in Taiwan over the past week, and moved to settle the issue as the island’s Fair Trade Commission launched a probe.

The world’s second-largest PC vendor has also shut down sales on its Taiwan Web site until it can clear up the issue.

Two major online pricing problems have hit Dell’s Taiwan Web site in less than a week, prompting strong responses from the island’s consumer protection watchdog and the launch of an investigation by the Fair Trade Commission.

Should the Fair Trade Commission find violations of fair trade laws in Taiwan, Dell could be subjected to a fine of up to NT$25 million (US$759,000), an official said Wednesday.

Dell was ordered last week by Taiwan’s Consumer Protection Commission to make good on sales from an online pricing error and deliver 19-inch LCD monitors to local consumers for NT$500 (US$15.26). On Sunday, the company’s Taiwan Web site ran into a new problem, offering Dell Latitude E4300 laptop PCs that normally cost NT$69,000 (US$2,101.34) for just NT$18,500 (US$563.40). In both cases, tens of thousands of orders were made by consumers.

The transactions have all been cancelled.

In a statement, Dell said the causes of the two errors were different, but did not elaborate.

“To avoid further confusion to our customers and to facilitate further investigation Dell has made the difficult decision to close our Taiwan online store,” the company said.

Dell has offered consumers who purchased a mispriced Dell Latitude E4300 a coupon worth NT$20,000 good for use on its online store when it resumes operations.

In the earlier case, Dell offered customers that had ordered LCD monitors at erroneous prices up to two NT$1,000 discount certificates good for purchases on www.dell.com.tw, and NT$3,000 coupons to people who had purchased laptop or desktop computers at misprinted prices.

“Dell is going to contact affected customers as soon as possible to inform them in detail of how the coupons should be used and to make refunds as quickly as possible,” the statement says. “It is Dell’s hope that the courtesy coupons demonstrate Dell’s respect for its customers and to apologize for any inconvenience caused.”

The company is working with the Consumer Protection Commission, Fair Trade Commission and other Taiwan government agencies to resolve this issue.

Dell is also a major customer for Taiwanese technology companies. The U.S. PC vendor spends over US$10 billion a year on Taiwanese computer parts and contract manufacturing services.