Wednesday, June 17, 2009

Tuesday, March 17, 2009

Netbook vs Notebook

How to backup and restore your netbook's storage Source

How to backup and restore your netbook's storage
Source
Mon, Mar 16th, 2009

Hands-on Having a small-capacity solid-state drive in your netbook may be limitation but it has one advantage: it's easy to back up. We don't mean copying a few files over to a safe place, but duplicating the entire drive, operating system and all, ready to drop it all back on if the worst comes to the worst.

PCs often come with recovery disks that you can use to place a fresh copy of the OS and pre-loaded apps back onto a freshly formatted drive. With some free, open source tools, you make one of your own, for your netbook. It'll work whether you use Linux or Windows XP, and whether your machine has a hard disk or a solid-state drive.

How to backup and restore your netbook's storage We use PING - which stands for Partition Image Not Ghost, a reference to Norton Ghost, a commercial disk duplication app - but it requires an external CD drive to boot from. So we've also included details of a second tool, which you can install on a USB Flash drive....

Saturday, March 14, 2009

Subsidies follow AT&T into netbook market

Subsidies follow AT&T into netbook market

http://arstechnica.com/telecom/news/2009/03/subsidies-follow-att-into-netbook-market.ars

AT&T plans to expand its netbook subsidies to makers beyond Acer and Dell, eating hundreds in upfront costs in exchange for two years of high monthly 3G cellular data fees.
By Glenn Fleishman | Last updated March 3, 2009 9:25 PM CT

Subsidies follow AT&T into netbook market

AT&T plans to expand an existing subsidy program that pairs a netbook with a cellular data modem and two-year contract. With fees of $60 for unmetered service and a maximum of 5 GB of data usage each month, AT&T has plenty to give to push a new market.

Netbooks are designed with minimal functionality and low-powered processors. But connectivity is the heart that beats inside this massively growing segment of portable sales. Research firms expect sales to rise from 7 percent of portables in 2008 to 12 percent in 2009, or about 35 million units.

By pairing a subsidy, a contract, and ubiquitous high-speed data access, AT&T may have found a niche in the middle of an otherwise moribund business and consumer market. Telecoms often spend hundreds of dollars in marketing to acquire new customers for voice and data services that produce a few thousand dollars in revenue over two years.

AT&T already subsidizes certain Acer and Dell netbooks to get the price down to $99, with rebates of $250 to $350.

Investor's Business Daily reports that AT&T is working on deals with other netbook makers, and would be happy to extend subsidies far outside phones to any gadget that could sport a cellular modem, such as cameras or gaming systems.

Interestingly, Clearwire and Sprint Nextel have long extolled the notion of WiMax, a competing data network standard so far rolled out in just two US cities, as allowing an ecosystem of devices to have always-on high-speed access with a bundled data plan to avoid high per-device charges. That hasn't materialized yet.

Eee PC T91 touchscreen netbook - first look

Eee PC T91 touchscreen netbook - first look



Philip Barker - 26 February 2009 - 5:43pm

Following a visit from Asus earlier today, we got the opportunity to get an exclusive look at some of its upcoming products – including the first touchscreen Eee PC Netbook – the Eee PC T91.

This tiny device is little larger than the first-generation Eee PC 701 – with an 8.9-inch screen, but you’ll now find a swivelling touchscreen panel that allows use as a Tablet PC.

The screen is one of the T91’s best features. It has the same 1024 x 600 pixel resolution as most of the other netbooks we’ve seen, but colours are brilliantly vivid, bringing photographs and movies to life. Images are also clear and sharp – which is unusual on a touchscreen panel. The glossy finish will frustrate some, however, proving reflective in brighter conditions.

The first T91 models to hit the shelves will feature Windows XP, with following products featuring Windows 7. Asus was also keen to stress that the T91 will ship with the company’s own eTouchSuite software, offering a user-friendly environment more suited to touchscreen use.

The sample we saw was a pre-production unit, and it’s too early to judge on build quality. However, there’s plenty of space for keys of a reasonable size, and we found usability to be reasonable.

Components such as the Intel Atom processor and 1024MB of memory are standard netbook fare, although more unusual options include a GPS chip for satellite navigation and a TV tuner.

On sale towards the end of April, prices start at around £420 (inc. VAT).

Android sales to outstrip iPhone by '12?

March 9, 2009 9:08 AM PDT
Android sales to outstrip iPhone by '12?
by Natasha Lomas digg_url = 'http://digg.com/gadgets/Android_Sales_to_Outstrip_iPhone_by_2012';

The iPhone's lead over smartphone upstart Android may be short-lived, according to an industry watcher's predictions.

Android smartphone sales will outstrip iPhone sales by 2012, market researcher Informa Telecoms & Media has predicted in a new report.

Last month, Telefonica Europe said that sales of the iPhone topped 1 million in the U.K. Although T-Mobile UK--the exclusive carrier of the first Android device, the G1--wouldn't say exactly how many of the devices had been sold, it did say the handset now accounts for 20 percent of its contract sales.
Photos: Hands-on with the HTC Magic Android phone

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Web behemoth Google released the first beta developers kit for its Android open OS platform in August, with the first handset--the G1 smartphone--launching the following month. A second handset, the Magic, is expected to arrive next month.

Apple's iPhone has a slightly longer heritage--with the first device arriving in the U.S. in June 2007. However, the iPhone 3G hit stores last July, giving it only a few months' head start on its Google rival.

Both Android and OS X are eating into the market share of the best-selling smartphone OS maker, Symbian. Last year, just under half of smartphones sold were based on Symbian--a drop of 16 percentage points from the year before when it had 65 percent market share. BlackBerry OS, Linux, and Windows Mobile are also gaining popularity and eating some of Symbian's share, according to Informa.

However, London-based Informa believes Symbian's switch to open source will help the Symbian Foundation maintain its leadership over Android, Linux, and Microsoft over the next few years.

Nearly 162 million smartphones were sold last year, surpassing laptop sales for the first time, according to Informa. The market researcher forecasts that smartphone penetration will reach 13.5 percent of new handsets sold this year and that the figure will reach 38 percent by 2013.

Informa also suggests smartphone sales will be immune to the global economic downturn, maintaining a prediction of "robust growth" of 35.3 percent year over year.

Total handset sales, by contrast, won't be as resilient and are set to fall 10.1 per cent year over year, Informa predicts.

Natasha Lomas of Silicon.com reported from London.