Technologizer

Nokia, which has made some PC-like devices in its day, is finally making…a PC. The company has announced the Booklet 3G, a device that it’s calling a mini-laptop. I’m calling it a netbook, but a pretty fancy one: It’s got an aluminum case, built-in 3G (with swappable SIM card) and GPS, and HDMI output. Nokia claims twelve hours of battery life–even if you apply the usual discount and assume it’ll be more like eight hours in the real world, it would be impressive. It features Nokia’s Ovi services for synchronization with the company’s phones. It weighs 2.75 pounds and is “slightly more than two centimeters thin,” which would make it a bit under .8″. Oh, and the Booklet runs Windows–and Windows 7 at that.

Judging from the photos, the Booklet’s industrial design gives us a good idea of what an Apple netbook might look like if it was a MacBook Pro, only smaller:

Here’s Nokia’s promotional video:

I’m a sucker for the concept of deluxe netbooks, so I’m glad that the Booklet is joining HP’s Mini 5101 at the high end of the market. Nokia hasn’t announced a price, but if all the stuff it’s talking about comes standard, I wouldn’t be shocked if the system cost in the neighborhood of $800 or even a bit more, assuming it’s not subsidized by a wireless carrier. (Which, for netbooks, is a pretty darn exclusive neighborhood.) It also hasn’t said anything about availability yet–and it’s not a given that this beast will be widely available in the U.S., given the company’s relatively low profile in the states. It says it’ll have more to say about the Booklet at its Nokia World conference on September 2nd.

I’ve drizzled various beverages into notebook keyboards. I’ve released laptops from my hands and watched as they’ve struck carpet, hardwood, and concrete. I’ve broken connectors with a definitive “snap.” I wish I could say it was part of some methodical lab testing, but I’ve done all of the above and more during the continuous tech stress test known as everyday living.

In my newest guest post for WePC.com, “The Ultimate Laptop Torture Test: Real Life!,” I write about some of the ways notebooks get broken, and what manufacturers can do to toughen them up against the abuse we inflict. If you check out the post, leave a comment with your horror stories about laptop damage and/or ideas for stopping it. (Here’s an incentive to contribute:  WePC is giving away dozens of Asus notebooks, netbooks, and gaming PCs–both to folks who contribute the smartest comments, and in random drawings.)

See you over there, I hope…

Apple said today that an upcoming software update will correct a problem that Apple MacBook Pro notebooks owners are experiencing with malfunctioning hard drives. I’m not entirely convinced that would fix the problem, and would like Apple to shine some light on the issue.

MacBooks equipped with 7200rpm 500GB hard drives have experienced clicking sounds that are frequently followed by stalling, and customers have been complaining about the issue for months. Apple is working on a software update in response to the complaints, but has not said when the patch will be delivered.

There could very well be a low-level problem that Apple could remedy with a patch. Its systems are very well designed, and usually have high quality drivers and firmware. It’s just hard for me to fathom that the problem is just a software issue.

Call me a cynic, but when hard drives click, it oftentimes means that the drive has bad sectors and is failing. Apple could very well be dealing with a bad batch of hard drives, and all a software update would do is to glaze over the underlying problem to make the delays less noticeable.

If Apple reduces the number of customer returns by even 10 percent, it will save itself a lot of money. I hope that it is not simply putting off dealing with the full scope of the problem. I would like to hear from customers after they install the patch.

I swear I’m not a conspiracy theorist. But if I were, I’d be suspicious about the circumstances surrounding the death of Dell’s Mini 12 netbook, which the company is discontinuing. Along with Lenovo’s IdeaPad S12, it was one of the few netbooks on the market with a 12-inch screen, so its absence will be felt.

The company says that “Larger notebooks require a little more horsepower to be really useful,” but like Mike Arrington, I’m left flummoxed by that–there’s no reason why some folks might not be happy with a low-cost, basic-specs laptop that happened to have a larger screen than most netbooks. And there’s no technical reason not to build one, which is presumably why Dell built the Mini 12 in the first place.

The system packed an Intel CPU and ran Windows XP (or Ubuntu), but both Intel and Microsoft have decidedly conflicted feelings about netbooks–especially ones with 12-inch screens. And now Dell’s lost interest in large-screen netbooks, too. Perhaps the Mini 12 just didn’t sell particularly well–although Dell didn’t say it wasn’t popular, just that it was a bad idea. That’s sort of the party line of the whole industry.

In the end, there are really no such thing as netbooks–there are just notebooks in various sizes with different specs at different price points. Maybe Dell will be able to configure a 12-inch notebook with better specs than the Mini 12 and bring it in at a price point close to the Mini (which started at $429). If not, it’s telling consumers who want a fairly roomy screen but who don’t need a lot of processing power that they can’t get both in one machine. Anymore.

Earlier this week, I was worried about RadioShack’s apparent plan to rebrand itself as THE SHACK but intrigued by its announcement of Netogether, an event that involved giant laptops in New York and Times Square broadcasting live video between each other. I headed to San Francisco’s E \mbarcadero today to check out the proceedings–and particular, to evaluate the humongous notebook computer. After the jump, everything you ever wanted to know about it–or at least as much as I could figure out–in handy FAQ form.

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It’s always dangerous to assume that anything presented in a newspaper article as a social trend is, in fact, a social trend. But I’m still a bit stressed over a Wall Street Journal story that says that there’s a growing backlash among coffee-shop proprietors over laptop users doing their computing on the premises.

A few years ago, notebook-toting workers and students were seen as an attractive clientele, which is why both national chains and neighborhood joints set up Wi-fi hotspots and installed extra power outlets near seating.  Now–at least in some restaurants in New York, according to the Journal–they’re seen as freeloaders who hog tables during busy times without buying enough to eat and drink. Laptop bans are going into effect, and some places are going so far as to padlock power outlets. (One chain with a zero-tolerance policy for computer users is, appropriately, called Café Grumpy.)

I take this all personally. Technologizer doesn’t have an office–not even in my home. I do my work wherever I have my laptop, an Internet connection, and my phone. Which, at various times, is in coffee shops, hotel lobbies, and public parks; on the subway; and in my car (not while driving). In fact, I’m writing this from the comfy corner booth of the Westlake Coffee Shop, near my house.

I try to be a good citizen. When I’m working from a coffee shop, I buy food and beverage–although I confess I’ve been known to nurse one Starbucks chai for hours, or even leave the empty cup sitting on my table in hopes that people would think I’d recently purchased it. I’m sensitive to busy times, and try to take off if a line’s forming for seating.

But I don’t want to hang out where I’m not wanted, and if a restaurant institutes a ban on laptop use–even if it’s only during certain hours–my instinct is to not do business with it, period. It’s not computer use itself that’s the problem. So why not just institute a minimum bill amount and/or a limit on the duration of visits if it’s absolutely necessary? Or charge enough for Wi-Fi that the joint makes a profit even if someone doesn’t consume any coffee?

Better yet, why not look at laptop users as an opportunity rather a threat? Maybe there’s a market for a sort of hybrid of Starbucks and Kinkos, with power at every seat, services like faxing and photocopying, and recharging stations for your BlackBerry or iPhone. And a promise that you’ll never, but never, be harassed for pulling out your computer and getting some work done.

When Toshiba announced its first netbooks last month, it said that it had waited to start selling inexpensive little notebooks in the U.S. until it felt like it could do them justice. I’ve just spent time using the Mini NB205–which Toshiba likes to call a mini-notebook rather than a netbook–and found that it’s indeed one of the most highly-evolved netbooks to appear to date. There’s nothing spectacularly new or different about its design or specs, but it’s a pleasing machine that doesn’t feel compromised 0r chintzy, and there are multiple areas in which Toshiba erred on the side of doing things right rather than doing them cheap.

The Mini NB205-N312BL I reviewed lists for $399.99 and sports the components and features you’d expect to find in a current $400 netbook: a 10.1-inch screen with 1024-by-600 resolution and LED backlighting, a 166-MHz Intel Atom N280 CPU, 1GB of RAM, a 5400rpm 160GB hard drive, 802.11G Wi-Fi, Ethernet, Bluetooth, three USB ports, an SD slot, VGA output, a Webcam, and a six-cell battery. And oh yeah, it runs Windows XP Home SP3.

The $399.99 version of the Mini is available in blue, brown, pink and white; all versions have two-tone cases and a bit of texture to the plastic on the lid. They’re among the slickest-looking netbooks at their price point. (There’s also a $349.99 version with a black case, a more basic keyboard, and no Bluetooth; I’d spring for the extra $50 for the top-of-the-line version.)

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The last major PC manufacturer who didn’t sell a netbook in the U.S. is jumping into the pool: Sony has announced that its VAIO W will arrive in August. The specs are standard stuff: a 1.6-GHz Atom processor, 1GB of RAM, a 10.1-inch screen, a 160GB hard drive, Bluetooth, Draft-N Wi-FI, Ethernet, two USB ports, a Webcam, and slots for SD and Memory Sticks. It runs Windows XP. And while the price is a tad on the high side at around $500, the screen resolution is, too: It’s a relatively roomy 1366 by 768. Oh, and the W is available in three colors: berry pink, sugar white, and cocoa brown.

I’m a netbook fan, but most models are starting to blur together, since specs, features, and industrial design are usually similar. (One exception: HP’s upcoming metal-encased, feature-rich Mini 5101.) The industry still has a weird, uneasy relationship with the form factor, but now that everyone’s making ‘em, I hope we’ll see a new generation of models with additional features and some creativity in the industrial-design department. (Sony’s VAIO P almost counts as a new approach to the netbook, even though it predates the W.)

According to DigiTimes–a Taiwanese publication that’s always interesting, if not always completely reliable–Samsung is planning to release a netbook with an 11.6-inch screen and an Intel Atom CPU. Sounds cool–it’s a popular form factor with a roomier-than-usual display. But DigiTimes also says that Intel has responded by canceling Samsung’s deal for discount pricing on Atom chips, and similarly punished Lenovo when it introduced a 12.1-inch netbook. Samsung may also run into trouble with Microsoft, whose Windows 7 licensing agreements reportedly discourage netbooks with screens that are larger than 10.1 inches.

Netbooks make Intel and Microsoft nervous, since their low prices and high popularity threaten the market for costlier laptops that preserve a more generous profit margin for processors and operating systems. If I worked for either company, I’d be nervous, too. But trying to stifle netbook growth by making it tough for PC manufacturers to release appealing new models puts the companies on a collision course with consumers.

It’s a lousy development for anyone who’d like to buy a netbook with a sizable screen. I think it’s also self-defeating for the companies playing the pricing games, since the history of the PC business shows that consumers nearly always get what they want, even when pricing pressure makes it miserable for companies that make computers, components, and software.

Bottom line: If people want big-screen netbooks–and many surely do–they’re going to happen. I’d love to see the industry admit that and embrace it. Wouldn’t it be a more efficient way to do business than trying to prevent the inevitable?

People are buying scads of the pint-sized laptops known as netbooks these days, but there’s some controversy over whether they’re happy with the machines they get. Here’s some pro-netbook fodder: My friends at PC Pitstop scan millions of Windows PCs as part of their OverDrive online diagnostic and tune-up service, and as they do they ask those PC’s owners some questions about their satisfaction with their machines. And netbooks owners report that they’re quite satisfied with their systems.

Here are new rankings of the top nine netbooks for user satisfaction, as reported in this blog post over at the Pitstop site. The Overall rating is on a scale of one to four stars. Pitstop also asks users whether their PC is slow, and whether it freezes or requires frequent reboots.

(Note: #5 and #6 are lines of netbooks; the rest are specific models.)

Overall satisfaction for most of these models is close to indistinguishable. There does seems to be a pretty close correlation between overall happiness as a netbook owner and whether you find your netbook to be acceptably fast, though–90 percent of MSI Wind U-100 owners who gave feedback didn’t think their laptops were slow, and it got the highest overall ranking. Some of the machines further down the list show more discontent over performance. Virtually half of Eee PC 900 owners say it’s sluggish, for example. But PC Pitstop’s satisfaction ratings for the top 25 notebooks of all types show that it’s common for about 20 percent of owners of a particular model to say it’s slow.

Of course, netbooks are slow compared to standard laptops with beefier CPUs and graphics and more RAM. I think Pitstop’s results show that PC users are smart about calibrating their expectations and applications to the machine they’re using. They know that a netbook isn’t going to handle video editing or 3D gaming with panache, and take that into account when they decide what to run and come to conclusions about how satisfied they are.

(Although truth to tell, I think some people underestimate netbooks’ ability to run demanding applications. I have an Eee PC1000HE that I upgraded to 2GB, and just for laughs, I installed Photoshop CS4 on it. Photoshop is more than adequately fast on it. But it has a user interface that’s too tall to work on the 1000HE’s 600 pixels of vertical resolution–there are OK buttons I can’t click because they run off the screen.)

The MSI Wind U-100, Asus Eee PC 1000HE, and Samsung NC10, by the way, are all among Pitstop’s top 10 for notebooks of all types, suggesting that users don’t see them as unsatisfactory, secondary substitutes for a “real” laptop. They judge them on their own merits, and are happy with ‘em, period.

If you’ve got a netbook, how happy are you with its speed? How happy are you overall?

The PC industry may continue to be a tad uneasy with the popularity of netbooks, but there’s no question that the little guys are selling well–and not just to folks on tight budgets. Enter HP’s latest and most lavish netbook, the Mini 5101, which the company just announced. Aimed at business types, the 5101’s pricetag starts at $449 and goes up from there–which is striking in a category where most models max out at $400 or less.

But this Mini is available with features that are anything but bare-bones. You can get it with a 7200-rpm 320GB hard drive with HP’s DriveGuard safety feature or an 80GB solid-state drive; you can it with multiple-carrier mobile broadband based on Qualcomm’s Gobi technology; you can get its 10.1-inch screen either with typical netbook resolution of 1024 by 768 or the unusually high resolution of 1366 by 768.(I’d spring for the latter option in a heartbeat if I were buying this machine–the low resolution of most netbook displays is at least as significant an obstacle to running powerful apps such as Photoshop as lack of CPU and graphics horsepower.)

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Of all the news that came out of Monday’s Apple WWDC keynote, one tidbit that didn’t get much attention is worthy of note: Apple’s refresh of its 13-inch laptop brought back the FireWire port that had been removed when the first 13-inch unibody MacBook shipped last October. In fact, Apple upgraded the connection, giving the new laptop a FireWire-800 port rather than the FireWire-400 one it had done away with last year. The return of FireWire in even beefier form is presumably a big part of why Apple was comfortable in redubbing the laptop that had been known as a mere MacBook as a MacBook Pro. Among Macs, only the MacBook Air, a computer so thin it barely has room for ports at all, lacks FireWire.

It’s a truly surprising development. Apple has historically been aggressive about erring on the side of removing technologies from its computers early, and while it often catches flack at the time, other PC manufacturers tend to fall into line eventually. When it killed FireWire on the 13-inch MacBook last year it made lots of folks very angry, but Steve Jobs himself apparently thought it was not a big deal. And so did I. In fact, I thought that other Macs would begin to lose their FireWire. I was wrong.

I can’t think of another instance in which Apple has moved to retire a technology and then changed its mind. (If there have been any, I know you’ll tell me.) It’s a little as if the second-generation iMac had brought back the floppy drive.

I’m still guessing that the company’s instinct is that FireWire is at the beginning of the end of its useful life, and that we’ll see lower-end Macs without it in the not-too-distant future. But for now, score one for FireWire fans–and for Apple, too, since it showed it was listening.

Me, I’m more excited about the fact that the company is finally shipping laptops with built-in slots for SD cards…

(Here’s another guest post by Pat Moorhead, Vice President of Advanced Marketing at AMD. Pat’s postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies, or opinions. You can find Pat at Twitter as @PatrickMoorhead.)

The current defacto standard used by PC makers to measure notebook battery life is MobileMark 2007 (MMO7). This piece takes a look at the basic facts behind the notebook brightness settings recommended by MM07, comparing that to some typical home electronics devices and the average settings some consumers are using for their notebook displays.

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Quick, you guys: Quit your jobs, team up with each other, and form a research firm specializing in Apple punditry. As a group, your predictions would likely be significantly closer to being on-target than those of a bunch of well-known analyst firms where serious moolah is made guessing what Steve Jobs and company are working on.

That, at least, is my conclusion after conducting an experiment that I called Technologizer’s WWDC Prediction Challenge. I invited Technologizer community members to take a survey involving WWDC predictions, then tallied the results and considered any prediction to be official if the majority of survey respondents made it. You didn’t get every single data point right–and failed to anticipate the major changes Apple made to its laptop lineup–but your iPhone predictions were very close to perfect (unlike those of many bloggers and analysts). Overall, I’m impressed–and I think I’ll repeat the experiment before future Apple product launches.

After the jump, a full accounting of how your guesses squared with WWDC reality.

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Toshiba has been just about the only significant PC manufacturer who hasn’t jumped on the netbook bandwagon in the U.S. market. Until today, that is–the company is announcing the Mini NB205, its first small, low-cost laptop. (Toshiba prefers to call these mini notebooks, not netbooks; I don’t know if the resolution of the netbook trademark spat will affect its choice of moniker.)

When I got an advance peek at the NB205 last week, Toshiba representatives told me that the company decided to wait to ship a netbook (er, a mini notebook) until it could do it right. And the units they showed me did look decidedly upscale–the first models I’ve seen that compete with Samsung’s for general luxe feel. For $399, you get a 2.9-pound machine in a textured, metallic-finish case (in blue, brown white, or pink). The keyboard boasts the comfy and practical through-the-case design and is  as close to full-size as you can get in a machine with a 10.1″ LED screen, and the list of specs is respectable: a 160GB hard disk with a movement sensor, a Webcam, USB that charges even when the laptop is powered off, a decent-sized touchpad with well-postioned buttons, 802.11g/b WiFi, Ethernet, and Bluetooth. For now, it runs Windows XP.

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