Just a couple of years ago Monster Cables partnered with Dr. Dre to introduce the Beats by Dr. Dre headphones and the world of music hasn’t been the same again. The now-iconic glossy and black headphones with a red “b” on the sides seem to be at parties, press and sports events, and anywhere else celebrities gather. Dr. Dre has been joined by P. Diddy and Lady Gaga in the line of audio products from Monster and now the doctor has put his name on iPod speakers called BeatBox.
Monster generally makes stylish products and that’s also true in the Beats series. The BeatBox continues the same tradition with black surfaces and red details. Although the styling is not as flashy as some other products bearing the doctor’s name, a BeatBox would be a welcome sight in almost any environment.
It’s made to sit in a corner of a room, booming its sound out to the rest of the surrounding space. On the back there’s a connector for a future wireless unit, with which you supposedly will be able to daisy chain several units together. There’s the plug for the power cord and that’s it. On the top you find the iPod dock and a volume knob. I wish there was some support behind the iPod as it’s vulnerable to be accidentally knocked over, potentially damaging the dock connector and the iPod. Overall, the BeatBox’s design is pretty muted compared to many other iPod docks but where it counts, in terms of sound, the BeatBox really delivers.
When you start pumping out sound from the BeatBox you realize why they carry the Dr. Dre name. The sound is rich, clear and with plenty of bass. I’m especially impressed with the bass and how well the speakers separate the stereo channels. Even though the speakers are obviously close together left and right come out distinctive from different listening positions.
The things to complain about are details really. I’ve mentioned the lack of support behind a docked iPod. Monster could also have made the remote control a bit more fully functional and there are no playback controls on the dock itself.
There’s no doubt that the BeatBox produces some of the best and most powerful sound I’ve ever heard coming out of iPod speakers. With no distortion that I can hear and a very intense bass response it delivers throughout the register to bring you a thrilling experience of almost any kind of music you care to listen to. It has its drawbacks and at Dhs 1,815 it’s expensive but in terms of pure audio it’s the iPod speaker everyone else has to beat right now.
Originally published in Khaleej Times.
Sony calls Vaio P a “lifestyle notebook” and it’s easy to understand why; it’s colourful, it’s sleek, it has great design and it stands out in whatever situation you will find yourself in. Clearly, if you’re in a boardroom, in a nightclub or in school, Vaio P will attract attention; it’s simply that different and good looking.
Just consider the colours the Vaio P is available in and you get the idea: Neon Green, Electric Orange, Crocodile Pink and Icy White to name but a few.
The first Vaio P was released early 2009 and Sony bumped the model with better specifications and improved styling earlier this year. It’s still very small (24x12x2cm) and light (590gr) with a very elongated design. Sony advertising shows a woman putting a Vaio P in their back jeans pocket. That’s something that may be possible but I wouldn’t advise it, as you will have a very broken Vaio if you have to sit down.
The display is also small at 8-inches but the resolution is an amazing
1,600 x 768 pixels. That’s about as much as you find on 15-inch displays or larger. The pixel-packed display on Apple’s iPhone 4 is the best comparison I can think of. Sony has cleverly placed a small mouse trackpad and mouse buttons in the thick black bezel on either side of the display. That means you can hold the computer in a whole new way. The screen also turns when you turn the computer, just like iPhone. I’m not quite sure how practical that really is though.
An Intel Atom 1.6GHz processor keeps things going at a fairly brisk pace and 2GB RAM is enough for Windows 7 Home Premium to be happy. There’s a 128GB SSD (solid state) drive for storage. In a higher model for Vaio P you can get up to 2.0GHz processor and 256GB SSD.
In this small body you wouldn’t find many ports. In fact you only have two USB 2.0 ports, 3.5mm audio jack and a Display/LAN adapter port. The included Display/LAN adapter is a small attachment, which gives you just that, a regular RGB out and an Ethernet port. To finish things off you get two memory card slots, one for SD cards, the other for MemoryStick.
There’s no doubt that Sony has gone all out with the styling of Vaio P and they have for the must part succeeded. Unfortunately that has pushed the price up to a level where it’s almost impossible to recommend a purchase because there is so much else to chose from that offer the same functionality at much lower cost. If you want the coolest-looking portable PC, the Vaio P is for you.
Originally published in Khaleej Times.
Recently I inherited an old Mac at work. I was supposed to get a brand new one but I guess I have to hold off on that for a while and make do with this one for a bit and that’s actually not too bad.
The Mac I inherited is a 15-inch MacBook Pro, one of the first ones that came out some years ago so it has an Intel Core Duo processor running at 2.0GHz. Compared to today’s Core i5 and i7 this processor is a real snail but it’s perfectly good for most tasks. Since I spend most of my time at work Web browsing, tweeting, writing and emailing I don’t think performance will be much of an issue.
It did have a number of problems though and you may face the same if you get to take over an older Mac. Specifically it needed more memory, new battery and a new charger.
First, the MacBook Pro only had 512MB of RAM, which just isn’t enough for Mac OS X, not even when doing less-demanding tasks like what I mentioned above. So right away I knew I had to get more RAM and it turns out that many stores don’t stock this memory anymore since they considered it too old. After looking around I found one store that had a 1GB stick and I ordered another one for delivery in about a week. That gives me 2GB in the MacBook Pro, which is enough.
The battery was another pressing issue as Mac OS X said “service” as status in the battery menu in Finder. It seems to hold a charge for about two hours, which is probably about right for this old Mac, but that’s still not a good sign. The Mac also seems to just shut down when it wants to when it’s closed and asleep, even though the battery doesn’t show it’s empty. That may not be the battery’s fault though but just in case I got a new battery and charger.
That was less of a challenge than the RAM actually since the first store I tried had those items. I guess there’s still a market for batteries and chargers for older Macs. After the RAM I put Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard on there as well as the other software I need, did all the software updates and now it’s all running just fine.
The lesson here is that even if a Mac is old in years that doesn’t mean it’s not usable. In fact, I’ve always found that Macs have a longer useful life than Windows PCs. Even though my MacBook Pro is about four years old, ancient in the world of high-tech, it’s still a perfectly useful computer.
Originally published in Khaleej Times.
Apple introduced their iPad in February this year and it has turned into a raging success, one that perhaps only Steve Jobs could have predicted. Apparently iPad is on track to become the best selling consumer electronics product ever.
Colin McGranahan of Bernstein Research said in an analyst’s note: “By any account, the iPad is a runaway success of unprecedented proportion.” Apparently, by end of next year iPad is set to become the fourth biggest consumer electronics category, with sales exceeding $9 billion in the US alone. That puts iPad ahead of product categories such as gaming hardware and mobile phones.
Whether we’re talking just about iPad or tablets in general I think there can be no doubt that pretty much every consumer electronics manufacturer is working on a tablet already and some have announced their iPad competitors. At Gitex Technology Week in Dubai, which starts tomorrow October 17, we’re sure to see a lot of tablets from a range of manufacturers.
But why is it now in October that we’re starting to see the competition emerging when iPad’s been out for seven months or so? I’m sure the reasons are many, ranging from technological to cultural, organisational and everything in between. Let’s take a look at some of the iPad alternatives we know of.
Samsung Galaxy Tab should arrive in the UAE this month and be available with an Etisalat mobile data connection. At 7-inches it’s slightly smaller than iPad and it runs Android 2.2 so it’ll have Adobe Flash support. Other things it’ll have that iPad doesn’t is MicroSD card slot and cameras.
Toshiba has announced their Folio 100 tablet. It’s the size of iPad and has Nvidia’s Tegra 2 inside. In other aspects it’s relatively standard with 10.1-inch display, Wi-Fi and webcam.
Lenovo’s Ideapad U1 is a very unique concept. Basically it looks like a regular notebook but the display is detachable. Once detached the display, which has it’s own processor and memory, can run as a tablet. When the Ideapad U1 will actually ship though is uncertain.
Toshiba’s Libretto W100 is also not a typical tablet and you can buy it in local stores. It basically has two 7-inch displays, one sitting where you’d normally find the keyboard. On the second display a virtual keyboard is displayed when you need to type but it can also be used as a second display or your Windows 7 desktop can stretch across both displays.
Dell Streak is another shipping tablet if we can call it that at only 5-inches big. It runs Android and also works as a mobile phone but I wonder if you want to hold it up to your ear to talk to people.
Last but not least let’s not forget RIM’s PlayBook. Unveiled just the other week it’s another 7-inch tablet with a new operating system. It’s going connect to the company’s Blackberry smartphones, no surprise there, but they’ve not put in any 3G support, at least not on early models.
As you can see, there are many companies vying for your attention if you’re in the market for a tablet. No doubt the selection will only keep growing and even though you’re an Apple fan your future tablet may not have an Apple logo on it. For right now though there’s no doubt that Apple still rules the tablet market and will keep doing so for quite some time to come.
Originally published in Khaleej Times.
As much ridicule as Apple received when they launched MacBook Air without an internal optical drive it’s hard to imagine PC manufacturers doing the same but they are. Fujitsu is one of the latest examples of this and their Lifebook PH530 is a very thin and light notebook suitable for users who are not quite happy with the typical performance of netbooks.
The PH530 is about the size of a netbook. It has perhaps a slightly larger footprint but it’s definitely thinner than most netbook models. Taking out the optical drive reduces the thickness and to be honest I rarely need an optical drive anymore anyway and the same is probably true for many of you.
The size means this portable computer can accommodate a bigger keyboard compared to typical netbooks. I found it a bit hard to get used to some details of the keyboard layout but overall the feeling it produces is pleasant, even for longer typing sessions. There’s a sticker on the PH530 next to the keyboard that says “spill resistant.” That’s not something I tested of course but it’s a very clever thing to put in a notebook.
As an ultra-portable it’s obviously important to have decent battery life and the PH530 delivered almost 5 hours of practical use on “EcoSettings” when I was working on this article. For a standard battery in a PC like this that’s impressive.
What’s perhaps surprising is that inside there’s an Intel Core i3 processor running at 1.2GHz. That may not seem like a lot of speed but I can tell you the PH530 has more than enough speed for most regular notebook tasks. There’s also plenty of storage space thanks to a 320GB hard drive.
One thing that impressed me greatly was how cool and quiet the Fujitsu remained even though it was pushed quite hard at times. I can’t even remember ever hearing a fan and I had no problem placing the PH530 directly on my lap. Clearly some brilliant engineering went into that aspect of this Fujitsu product.
The main downside with the PH530 is the reflective display, both the actual screen as well as on cover. It’s not that I mind glossy screens but in this computer it seems extra reflective and it’s just very annoying in many situations.
On the outside of the display (11.6-inches, 1366 x 768) we find shiny plastic. It looks very good as long as it’s clean. Unfortunately with the material and finish they’ve selected, it attracts a lot of marks from fingers, dust and dirt. If you just pick up the PH530 a few times you will see what I’m talking about.
In conclusion, the 3,000 Dh price tag for Fujitsu Lifebook PH530 is high compared to netbooks but you do get quite a bit for your money; the performance is excellent, it’s thin and light, has a high-resolution display, it runs very cool and has good battery life.
Originally published in Khaleej Times.
Ever since it was announced back in April, I’ve wanted to try the Nokia C5 and thanks to Nokia’s PR people in Dubai I now have.
You can get Nokia C5 in the local market for about 660 Dhs. It’s certainly not the cheapest Nokia phone but for the functionality you get it represents very good value.
It’s a candybar phone, meaning it has a display covering the upper part of the front and a physical keypad covering the rest. This is a format we’ve come to know over the years and although I really like the prevailing all-touchscreen form factor that seems so common right now, the candybar represents a true and tested model.
There’s 3G data connection but no Wi-Fi which for most users is not much of an issue. Connection speed on du has been very good as has voice call quality. In fact I’ve been able to get voice calls with the C5 in locations where my iPhone 3GS usually struggles and the quality of the calls is also generally superior on the C5.
The camera is very basic at 3.15 megapixel and fixed-focus lens. Video is also not something to brag about with 640x480 at 15 fps. Basically, photos and video are good enough in a pinch but don’t expect miracles. And don’t expect to enjoy them on the C5. The display is 2.2-inch with 320x240 pixels. Unfortunately visibility outside in the sunshine is really poor.
In terms of the typical smartphone functionality like email, web, chat, Facebook, Twitter etc. you can do all of that on the C5 and install apps for what’s not built in. Not having a full keyboard is limiting for sure but you can work with it.
Installing apps from the Ovi Store is a cinch but don’t expect to install that many on the built-on 50MB memory. For your data, thankfully there’s a MicroSD card slot, which takes up to a 16GB card. In contrast to Apple, Nokia also has music and more in their Middle Eastern stores so it’ll be easy for you to fill up your C5 with media.
The killer feature is the free Ovi Maps, which comes with more up-to-date maps than you’ll find on an iPhone and it works very smoothly even on this relatively low-powered device.
I’ve really not had any problems with the C5 so far other than secure web pages don’t seem to load (the ones with “https” first). I’m sure there’s something that I’m doing wrong there though and it’s probably not the C5’s fault.
Build quality is as you would expect. The C5 is made out of plastic and you get the usual creaking sound when you press and bend it. Worst is the flimsy aluminum back cover though, which should clearly be redesigned.
Battery life is great and has really made me appreciate the C5. I don’t think you should expect to reach Nokia’s numbers, especially not if you do connect to the Internet a lot, but you can safely assume you can do days in between charging. That’s certainly one of the main attractions of the C5 as is the small format and light weight. That you can do most of your smartphone tasks on this small device at a fraction of the cost of a typical smartphone is icing on the cake.
Originally published in Khaleej Times.
Apple introduced iPad in February this year. Does it seem longer ago to you? It does to me many times.
Since then they’ve certainly sold a lot of the tablets and recent information suggests that they’ve doubled production of iPad to two million per month and that Apple wants to crank out three million per month before the end of the year.
They’ve also opened up new markets by launching in China, Argentina, Chile, Columbia, Ecuador, and Peru on September 17. With the increased production and new markets in mind it’s all the more disappointing that we still don’t see any iPads officially in our part of the world.
But let’s not dwell on that and instead look ahead and see what the next generation of iPad may bring. Because that there will be another generation of iPad I’m sure no one doubts.
When new iPads are coming may be more uncertain but recent news seems to indicate early next year, sometime in the first three months. That would mean about one year from the initial launch, which makes sense considering Apple’s schedule with iPhone.
Remember that Apple’s been on an annual renewal cycle with iPhone since they introduced the first one in June 2007. And since iPhone has a lot of components as well as design and engineering solutions in common with iPad it’s safe to assume that Apple can stay on an annual schedule with their tablet as well.
In terms of what we’ll see in the new iPads, surely iPhone 4 and the most recent iPod touch model are good indicators of what’s coming.
That would mean a thinner design with the actual display sitting closer to the glass that covers it resulting in a more immediate user experience in terms of touch. It would also mean a higher resolution display, giving a more crisp and detailed look. That in combination with a higher contrast would make iPad an even more suitable device for reading ebooks.
Also a safe bet would be dual cameras, like the iPod touch. One front-facing for FaceTime video calling and one rear-facing mainly for video recording. If you were to bet on larger storage capacity as well, I don’t think anyone would bet against you.
With the 7-inch Samsung Galaxy Tab in the market you might think we’ll see a smaller iPad but I very much doubt that. I don’t see much of a value in let’s say a 7-inch iPad. Apple will stick to one iPad size for now at least and that’s the current 9.7-inch.
Overall I doubt iPad version two will be a revolutionary device in any way. It has large shoes to fit as the first generation really set the standard for a whole new class of computing devices. Instead we’ll see Apple incorporate recent technologies and solutions from their other products and throw in a few surprises as well.
Whatever the next generation iPad will look like and what characteristics it will have, I’m sure we’ll learn more details in the coming months.
Originally published in Khaleej Times.
Have you ever wanted a printer that is portable and that runs off a battery? If so, take a look at Canon Pixma iP100.
It’s a very compact printer with a footprint slightly smaller than an A4 page. A big battery is attached, which will give you a day of modest printing from anywhere you go. I guess I expected a portable printer that runs off a battery to not produce very good prints but I was pleasantly surprised in that regard with colors coming out bright and accurate, no smudges or smears and very crisp blacks.
It has a five-color ink system, which should be saving you some ink, especially if you print a lot of color. The resolution is up to 9600x2400 dpi which is more than enough for most business-purposes like letters and presentations.
Print speed is not the best though as one full A4 page with business graphics at the highest quality setting took about two minutes to appear. According to Canon the iP100 should print up to 20 ppm in black and up to 14 ppm in color.
In terms of connectivity the printer is also limited. You can print wirelessly with infrared IrDA but how many computers support that today? You can also connect with Bluetooth but that’s an extra piece of kit to buy. That leaves plugging in with a USB cable. A portable printer like this screams out for wireless printing and in that regard Canon disappoints.
Other complaints I have are that there is no case for it. Even buying a cheap PC notebook today you get a case but not with the printer, not even a simple sleeve.
What also puzzles me is that Canon didn’t see fit to equip the iP100 with a card reader. There’s nowhere to insert a flash memory card like SD or CF. That would require a display, which would add cost and power consumption, I guess, but it’s still something this sort of printer should have.
It’s somewhat of a consolation that you can at least connect a USB cable to a PictBridge-compatible digital camera and print from the camera.
If you’re considering buying this printer you do so for the simple reason that you can take it with you anywhere because you don’t need AC power. Print quality is very good but it’s lacking too much functionality for you to buy it if you don’t need portability. At 1,239 Dhs with battery you pay quite a bit extra for the pleasure of carrying it around but if that’s what you need, the Canon Pixma iP100 is a good choice.
Originally published in Khaleej Times.
Yes, you read it right, I mean to propose that Apple should take a long and hard look at the Android operating system for mobile devices and learn a few things.
Let’s leave aside for the moment that some manufacturers of Android smartphones, like HTC, generally makes beautiful and high quality hardware. For now, let’s also set aside other hardware-related issues like an exchangeable battery- just pop in another one if you run out of juice- and microSD card- just buy a bigger card if you’re out of space.
No doubt Apple took a major step forward with the release of iOS 4, adding things like multitasking. But my recent experience with a HTC Desire leads me to a few pointers that Apple should take from Android.
First, Apple, you should break the link with iTunes. We can already download apps and music from the iPhone so why not add a way of backing up and restoring without a computer? I understand your desire to not cut the umbilical cord, so to speak, but it’s going to have to happen anyway sooner or later. Perhaps you have some plans in this territory involving the large data center in North Carolina?
Related to the first point, let us do software updates OTA (Over The Air). I don’t particularly like the idea of having to connect my iPhone to my Mac, download an almost 300MB update file, then sit and wait for it to install and everything. Updating the Desire to Android 2.2 “Froyo” was much more pleasant. I got a notification on the phone, it downloaded the 90MB update over the air and installed it.
The next one is controversial but Apple, please let Flash at least be an option for iPhone users. Flash is now becoming available for Android users and so many will want to have it installed. Put a switch in preferences so users can turn Flash on and off at the very least. I understand your arguments about increased battery consumption etc. but by and large we still want Flash.
Finally, I have to say I love Android’s notification system. It’s all collected in one place and you don’t have to deal with pop ups like on the iPhone, numbers on icons, etc. Just drag your finger from the top of the home screen and there they are, all notifications in one place.
To be fair, let me leave this off with two things that Apple clearly is doing better than Android. First, the App Store is still miles ahead of the Android Market in selection, functionality and usability. Second, the iTunes ecosystem is still unrivaled although music, movies and TV are not available in the Middle East.
There you have a few things Apple should learn from Android. I’m sure Apple has already considered all or most of them and perhaps something is coming in future iOS versions.
Originally published in Khaleej Times.
