That’s the upcoming Archos 10.1″ tablet for $300 USD. It looks like a very good alternative to the Apple iPad for the following reasons.
$300 is a lot cheaper than Apple’s entry level device of $500.
Speed. Apple iPad’s killer feature is its speed. These Android devices are finally catching up. The PC and Mac OS can learn something from this. Users care about speed.
Capacitive touch.
The accelerometer looks good, especially in the game demo.
Has an adjustable kick stand, something the iPad sorely needs.
Has a USB host, HDMI port, and SDHC slot built in.
I helped acquire an HP G72-250US 17.3″ with Core i3 notebook for a friend of my mother. When I tested the SDHC card reader speed, I was shocked to find that read speeds would drop to less than 5 MB/sec after the first time read in Windows 7. Once I uninstalled the software using CCleaner, the card continued to work but it would maintain its 20 MB/sec read speeds.
While I appreciate Realtek going to the effort of writing extra software, they really need better quality control. I suppose I should be happy that at least this isn’t one of their silent data corruption bugs that I found a few years back. The other thing that really bugs me is their massively bloated wireless network driver that forces you to install a bunch of extra wireless supplicants (like Cisco) on top of the Windows wireless client. You’re forced to download a large EXE from Realtek which extracts and autoinstalls the driver without asking for permission. I had to note the extract folder path and then uninstall the Realtek drivers, and then manually install the drivers from device manager by pointing it to the uncompressed installation folder. It would be so much simpler if Realtek just provided the bare drivers.
HP needs to wise up and keep that software (and all the other crapware they install) off the system. The PC industry needs to look in the mirror and ask themselves why Apple completely owns the $1000+ notebook market.
Note: Just trying out the video review format for the first time using my Canon Kiss X4 (Rebel T2i or 550D). Maintaining focus and handling the product and talking at the same time presents its challenges, but I hope I can get used to it. The depth of field is very shallow but at least you can see everything clearly with the exception of the darkened on/off switch. I’m not sure if there’s any benefit to using 1080P for this video, but at least it makes the 360P and 480P and 720P version look very clean due to down sampling.
This is the iPazzPort bluetooth keyboard and trackpad. The name sounds funny where I can visualize a picture of a fat cat sitting on the couch with the caption “I can haz remote controlz?” But jokes about the name aside, this seems like a very viable product.
At $42 shipped from China (or $50 at buy.com), it’s the lowest price that I know of for a mini bluetooth keyboard/trackpad. Lenovo has something for $60 and Logitech has the DiNovo for $150.
The keyboard has a backlight for darker rooms and the keys offer some good tactile feedback while the trackpad and scrollbar work smoothly and accurately. It’s also a thin device with average build quality that feels pretty good in the hands overall.
BlueTooth paring was simple and you didn’t need any special drivers. Just push the button at the bottom and scan for it in the Windows BlueTooth user interface, then key in the pairing key and hit enter on the keyboard. The wireless range works well beyond 30 feet so it should work in any size living room.
The bottom part of this chassis feels slightly loose and the on/off button doesn’t glide on and off easily, but I’ve just left it in the permanent on position since the device goes to sleep on its own to conserve battery life. It has a lithium ion battery that recharges via the USB port, but I don’t know how long the charge lasts when I don’t bother turning the thing off. I’ll post an update on battery life days or weeks later when I need to recharge this thing.
Overall, this is a good form factor device that works well. If you need to control an home theater PC in the living room, I don’t think there is a more affordable option than the iPazzPort.
After selling my Canon Rebel T1i on Amazon for $565 (minus a $47 commission for Amazon), I bought a Japanese branded “Canon Kiss X4″ camera known as the Canon Rebel T2i in the US market and 550D elsewhere last week off eBay. Why would I do that? Because the Rebel T2i has been “out of stock” for the last 4 months in most places with no end in sight and the few people who do have it on Amazon or eBay are selling it for $1000+ which is $200 more than the retail list price.
Update 11:45PM – Looks like Amazon and Newegg just got the T2i body in stock for $799. I would have gone this route had I known, but I didn’t get a bad price on the Kiss X4 kit with lens for $830. The risk I take is that there is no warranty the first year.
The Kiss X4 didn’t come with a warranty (though I’ve never had a Rebel SLR fail on me yet), but the $830 I paid for it including the standard lens kit wasn’t a bad price. Of course now the seller is trying to point me towards an $80 3rd party warranty to which I am declining because my camera isn’t likely to fail in the first year. The other problem is that the camera only comes with a Japanese manual but that can be solved by downloading the English manual in PDF format.
The image quality has been unbelievably good when you force it to manual mode and ISO 400 and below, but I was stuck at ISO 200 and above. ISO 100 was simply not presented as an option and it was maddening. I emailed Canon support and they replied to me the next morning with the answer. It turned out that “Highlight Tone Priority” was enabled which requires ISO 200 and above. After disabling that feature, ISO 100 was available once again.
Note that you need sufficient light just like you do in photography, and it might be hard to use ISO 100 in a dim room because you won’t be able to achieve the minimum 1/30th of a second virtual shutter speed (physical shutter is locked open). In automatic mode, the camera will adjust the ISO up automatically but in manual mode, the scene will just get dark and under exposed. That’s actually a good thing because sometimes you want the scene to be dark. It was getting annoying and unnatural in automatic mode where the camera would literally make everything look like daylight even when you’re shooting a night scene with existing light. Manual mode also solved the erratic exposure problem which may have had something to do with the fact that I was using a third party 28-70 F2.8 lens from Tokina.
Automatic focus “works” but it is very noisy and very slow. It hunts around and the camera still jumps to a high ISO even if you’re in “manual” mode. Using manual exposure and manual focus solves all these problems and focusing is much smoother, more natural, and faster so long as you keep your eyes close to the LCD view finder so you can see the details accurately.
Here was the first short sample I shot and posted on YouTube. Note that you can bump it to 1080P mode. And yes, it’s the same little kitty all grown up.
I bought an MSI L1350 Netbook with a standard second-generation Intel N450 Atom processor for $230 last weekend which has an additional $30 rebate. The Ralink 802.11 b/g/n mini PCI-E adapter that comes with the netbook has some very buggy drivers that cause Wi-Fi to intermittently disconnect or fail to find any network. An even bigger problem is the fact that its drivers seem to cause Windows 7 to completely hang requiring a hard reboot.
I have found a solution that seems to have fixed the random Wi-Fi problems by updating to the latest Ralink drivers posted in March of 2010. The system hasn’t hanged due to Wi-Fi drivers in two weeks now. These are signed drivers so they are legitimate and you will not get a certificate warning. If you happen to own this netbook or something with a similar network adapter, I would highly recommend updating the drivers. It’s generally a good idea to update all your drivers anyways.
Another problem I’ve found is the Intel 3150 graphics driver blue screen of death when trying to launch Adobe Flash Media Live Encoder 3.1 (which is a very good free video capture and encoder software that allows you to broadcast high quality directly to sites like Ustream). This problem affects all netbooks with the N450 CPU. The only way to fix this was to update the Intel 3150 integrated graphics driver and you can obtain a copy of it here on Intel’s site.
It sucks to have to get a consumer product that crashes so badly out of the box. It’s even hard for me to handle and I can’t imagine the frustration that normal users would have. This blog post should help you a lot if you managed to land here after googling these problems.
These are simply the best USB SDHC card readers at any price because it’s the fastest reader I’ve measured, and DealExtreme sells it for $2.99 (free but slow ~3 week shipping from China). I was able to measure read speeds of 22 MB/sec and write speeds of 11 MB/sec using a cheap 16 GB class 6 SDHC card from A-Data. At these prices, I ordered a several extra just to hand them out as cheap but really cool gifts.
Image credit: DealExtreme.com I hope they don’t complain about the image usage since they’re getting free advertising here.
I also got one of these all-in-one 3.5″ media readers for $5.32 and they were terrible. Not only was it incredibly slow (we’re talking 4 MB/sec read speeds), but the drivers aren’t stable and it “disappears” from Windows Vista.
I just received this UltraFire WF-502D flashlight from DealExtreme (SKU 04314) in the mail. This flashlight battery compartment is simply too short. When you put two batteries in it, you can’t even screw the back lid on. Furthermore, the on/off switch was broken but that was the least of its problems even if the on/off switch worked.
This flashlight was $20, but it is extremely powerful. The two high capacity 3.7 volt Lithium Ion rechargeable batteries (SKU 20392) that I bought have 8.88 watt-hours of energy each. Two of these batteries almost have the same energy storage capacity of the Apple iPad which is pretty amazing.
Now it’s quite possible that these extremely high capacity batteries happen to be on the large-side because they barely fit in the charger, and the flash light might have erred on the small side. Combine these two facts and we have a situation where the flashlight can’t accommodate these batteries.
I just issued a defective item claim at Deal Extreme and I hope they send me a good one. I’ll update this post when this issue is hopefully resolved.
Updated 9PM – DealExtreme support has responded and said I can mail the item back to a US based address in Florida. They’ll cover shipping if it’s less than 30% of the defective item (which in this case it is). They’ll ship a new unit when they get old one back.
Well, at least in the San Francisco South Bay at Fry’s though they usually have these deals elsewhere at other times. There’s also an additional $10 rebate but I don’t have much faith in those. Newegg sells this 32-nm “Westmere” class CPU alone for $140 so getting the CPU plus motherboard for $110 is an awesome deal. Westmere is one generation newer than Nehalem and it comes with some new security features and AES acceleration. The Motherboard includes a G55 graphics chipset built onto the CPU die which is roughly 2-3 times faster than the older G45 Intel Graphics chipset. This would be perfect for an HTPC setup.
Also, this 11.6″ Core Solo based small notebook with 6-cell battery at $350 is a great Netbook killer.
There has been some news regarding the new Western Digital “EARS” series “Advanced Format” hard drives and the associated performance problems. While these drives can be faster than older drives because of the larger sector size, a partition formatted without the correct alignment can slow to less than a third.
Read on for brief instructions on how to fix the problem in Linux and Windows XP.
