News

Apple To Launch Touchscreen Netbook in 3Q 2009?

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Apple MacBook Air We’ll treat it as a rumor for now, but among the rumors, it’s a lot more solid than mos. DigiTimes is reporting on a Chinese-language Commercial Times publication that Wintek will be providing touch panels for a touchscreen netbook from Apple. There is a lot more going on that gives legitimacy to the idea of such a touch screen device from Apple.

The report states that shipments will begin in the third quarter of this year, which would put its availability (July/August/September) right around the end of the back-to-school buying season, with Quanta Computer being the main manufacturer of Apple’s netbooks.

At this point, I believe it’s a given that Apple will produce something with a 9-inch – 11-inch display. AT&T is about to start pushing netbooks for people who want something a little more than a smartphone, but who want mobile broadband access, and don’t want to lug a conventional-sized laptop/notebook around.

I think it’s very telling what Apple’s Tim Cook said back in January:

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All Sony VAIO P Models/Options Benchmarked (Pocketables)

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Jenn Lee over at Pocketables has assembled a comprehensive look at the 8-inch high-resolution (1600×768) Sony VAIO P Series, including faster models not yet available in the US. The models available in the US are all powered by Intel’s 1.33GHz Z520 Atom CPU (the 1.6GHz … Read more

Dell Inspiron Mini 10 Review (LAPTOP Mag)

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On Friday, LAPTOP Magazine posted their review of the new 10.1-inch Dell Inspiron Mini 10. The Inspiron Mini 10 joins the 8.9-inch Inspiron Mini 9 and Inspiron Mini 12 in Dell’s Intel Atom-powered netbook/ultraportable lineup. The Mini 10 comes with a Z530 Silverthorne CPU, still … Read more

Windows 7 – Turning Features On and Off

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Windows 7 Some interesting news coming out of Windows 7 development (which is on track for a Release Candidate – RC). The “Turn Windows Features On or Off” function has been greatly expanded. It even includes the ability to turn off Internet Explorer 8.

You can now turn of quite a few things in Windows 7 – the files are literally not loaded by the Windows 7 operating system. One of the developers sees this as a big benfit for “security-conscious customers”, but I’m thinking in terms of netbooks/ultraportables/mids/etc. where the resources are much more limited than on larger laptops/notebooks.

It is mentioned that even if you turn off a feature, that the data/binaries/software still exists on the drive. The benefit is that you don’t need a DVD to enable the feature, which is important to those with smaller devices which don’t have optical drives.

However, and it’s not quite addressed by any of the developers in the article, it doesn’t appear there is a way to remove the actual features, which might free up some space. As somebody in one of the follow-up comments mentioned, storage space is becoming less and less of an issue. Solid State Drives (SSD), where storage space is at a premium, have only been increasing in size while decreasing in cost. As I mentioned yesterday, you can easily get a netbook/ultraportable with a 16GB or 32GB SSD for under $400 USD.

Back in November, we mentioned that we were seeing Windows 7 take up 20GB in a fresh install. Chances are that the space requirements would come down by the time Windows 7 is released to manufacturing, since there was probably a lot of debug code and binaries that would be removed before RTM. By the time Windows 7 is released later this year, 32GB SSDs will probably be much cheaper and more widely available as an option in these devices.

From the MSDN blog:

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