Gateway AIO ZX2300 - One for All, and All for Acer

I'm all for all in one PC's. They look nicer and it's great just to have one cable to plug in.

Acer has announced a new all in one. I like Acer, they are cheap and cheerful machines.

Acer will launch the ZX2300 and it will be sold through Gateway. It's like the Asus Eee Top 1602, but larger and more powerful and comes with the missing DVD drive.

What's not to like? It's only available in certain countries and although it seems to have a nice flat, thin profile, it has that awesomely obnoxious side speaker that sits at the bottom.

Hope it sounds good.

iPod - Buy one, Get Carling Cup Free

Incredible how the iPod has so many uses. From music, to games, to reading books. One wonders how else it could be used.

Well, Manchester United, an English soccer team, recently won the Carling Cup. All down to the goal keeping coach who showed a few video clips to his goal keeper on how to save penalties on his iPod. It worked and the goal keeper won the match.

Now, reporters are waiting with baited breath to see if the iPod is going to save the world economy.

Kindle 2 - Rip your Books?

I wish I could get my head around people who love to read novels or lengthy books on electronic mediums.

Reading on a PDA is frivolously fun at first, but the eyestrain and tiny screen makes it tiresome.

Reading on a computer is great if you know what your looking for. But reading so you can absorb yourself into the author's world is a bit difficult when you have distractions such as your notifiers, messengers and especially your wallpaper background.

The Kindle 2 is a great idea.

Slow page turning to discourage you from skimming and skipping, allowing you to curb your temptations and absorb every word and page.

A big 'turn the page' button is great. Who wants to hunt for the turn page icon or even the page down/turn the page key/button.

A long battery life that runs for a week is great! Don't want to even think about charging.

3G service so you can buy and download books on the fly is just great. Not in this current economy, but superb if your pockets are full of lottery money.

Charging via the USB is kind of convenient, but I have a funny feeling that traditional book readers won't be swapping their paper backs any time soon.

Thin body and nice-ish is necessary because it doesn't have the cool covers to entice you back to the book.

Shame about the E-Ink which doesn't come with a completely white background. But it's a lot better than any backlit LED for getting that 'reading a book feel.'

The screen is just about the right size for a few quick reads. But a bigger screen would be better for lengthy trawls.

The text to speech is a non starter for people who are not visually challenged. The voice is the main concern.

Always like technology that motivates or entices people to read books.

Safari 4 Beta - A Pretty Browser for Girls.

Lots of eye candy and lots of fun.

Top Sites

At a glance, gorgeous preview of your favorite sites、all ranked by safari which tracks your usage.

Great feature that was useful for about 5 minutes.

But it was a really good 5 minutes.

Cover Flow

Always liked cover flow.

Genuinely useless but looks so gorgeous.

Imagine using this with the touch screen ASUS Eee Top 1602.

Full History Search in Cover Flow.

Oh wow. Something useful. It can be a minefield looking back at your history, just to remember that page you suddenly find useful.

Tabs on Top.

Genius. Utter Genius.

Nitro Engine.

Snore.

There's also over 150 features of safari.

But things like ARIA Support,Enhanced Keyboard navigation, CSS, Acid Test are just too interesting for me.

Now if they could sort out all those websites where Safari is not supported.

ASUS Eee Top 1602 - Like a Big iPhone without the Pinch.

What's not to like about this iMac like desktop? Your not going to play games with it, but for the internet and looking for jobs while facebooking,youtubing, twitterying and the odd emailing, it's perfect. You can even touch the screen to open apps and move things about. It's useless but it's fun nonetheless.

The touch screen is a 15.6-inch LCD display encased all in one. with boring specs like 1,366-by-768 resolution but who cares, the important bit is that it runs 16:9 so you can watch those widescreen movies. Oh no. Specs are important after all. Intel Atom n270 processor and integrated Intel GMA 950 will struggle with those HD movies online. And without a DVD optical drives, you can forget about widescreen DVD too.

Still, your bound to find some startrekky or geeky programs to have fun with the touch screen. It also comes with a handle too.

Help Forums - Littered with Helpful Buggers

The great thing about help forums is that there are plenty of nice people who are willing to help new users with whatever problems they have.

Veteran Linux users will tell new converts to type unrecognized jargon and ask them to compile programs with required libraries from various distros etc.

Mac users are the most helpful. Reinstall OSX being the most common solution with the odd 'fire up the terminal' and type unrecognized jargon and start messing about with apple scripts.

PC users are also helpful too. Again, reinstall Windows being the most common solution with the odd 'works for me' solutions that only works for and only for 'me'.

iPhone help forums are also littered with helpful users. They meticulously explain the solution to a problem with detailed steps and then when it doesn't work, they helpfully inform you that it needs to be jail broken.

Helpful buggers.

Aluminum Keyboard - Plain and Flat

I have come to the conclusion that the iMac flat aluminum keyboard is one of the best looking keyboard ever.

However, it is also one of the keyboards that is absolutely terrible for aspiring, brain starved, burned out writers.

The flat design makes it so uninspiring, so plain, so cold, so simplistic that the IBM clickety clickey keyboard just positively trounces it! The IBM keyboard just beats in on sheer ' I want to write a novel on this damn keyboard' feeling.

Where as on the Apple aluminum keyboard, it just squeaks in a tiny voice, " I wanna twitter".

Asus Eee PC 1000HE: 9.5 Hours!

New processor which is 0.06Ghz faster, and a increase in 134Mhz Front Side Bus Speed

Let's face it, the exciting news is that it will apparently run up 9.5 hours! That it fantastic. So if we divide the battery life in half, that's the very least we'll get if we were really cynical.

What's not to like? The 3.2 pounds of weight. Sorry, but I'm spoilt silly by netbooks that weight a lot less than that. This is heavy in my mind.

I like the way they've used the chiclet keyboard. I don't think it's better, but it looks good. Shame about the standard boring chasis. Not Asus's fault to be honest, they were the first out and other's have just trumped in design wise.

Fullscreen or not to Fullscreen. That is the...oh whatever.

Whenever I use a computer, be it a desktop, a laptop, netbook or a PDA, except on a huge 30inch screen, I always have to make it full screen.

I can concentrate better as I am not distracted by the desktop background. The mac doesn't seem to allow me to work this way. It just doesn't allow full screen on most native apps.

It's hard to compare documents if I have to manually resize each window. I appreciate the logic behind it, but it is so counterproductive. When I do work, I much prefer to use the dreaded Windows.

Now, I'm wondering if I will ever switch.

iPhone App written by a 9 Year Old

Incredible! If the economy wasn't so bad at the moment, this would be fantastic news. Images of the movie 'War Games' and old retro days of the Spectrum, Commodores, where you could literally write your own commercial games.

Unfortunately, the news is a bitter blow to anyone who has been let go in the IT community.