Technologizer

Gizmodo reviews Pine Trail netbooks.

Barnes and Noble targets iPad.

New hard drives: XP beware?

A tablet. For $92. And decent!

Google’s fancy visual RSS reader.

TSA: employee attempted PC sabotage.

Should the feds snub iPhone?

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(Here’s my latest story from FoxNews.com.)

As a technology journalist, I meet with lots of companies who want to show me their latest stuff. Not surprisingly, they tend to be in a self-congratulatory mood. But when the new item in question is a netbook–one of those low-cost, undersized laptops–something odd happens. Otherwise exuberant corporate executives start knocking their own products. Netbooks, they remind me, are cramped and underpowered. Yes, the very netbooks they sell.

Why the lack of love for this wildly popular class of computer? In part, it’s about profit — or lack thereof. Most netbooks cost between $230 and $400, so it’s hard for PC makers to make a buck selling them. But in the insanely competitive PC market, no major manufacturer is willing to ignore netbooks. They take a deep breath, grumble, and then offer them anyway.

Continue reading this story…

Spotted Wednesday evening at Digital Experience, an unofficial press event here in Las Vegas during CES week: an HP netbook with Google’s Android OS, a touchscreen, and a Qualcomm Snapdragon processor. It bears a familial resemblance to HP’s Mini netbooks, but has been rethought in multiple ways–for instance, it lacks the row of function keys that’s standard equipment on all Windows PCs and Macs.

This machine’s presence at the show isn’t nearly the big deal it might be, for one simple reason: HP says it’s just experimenting with Android. This is a concept PC, and there’s no news about its chances of turning into a shipping product you can buy. Still, you gotta figure that if HP has gone through the bother of building this prototype, there’s a real chance it’ll commercialize it in 2010. Unless, that is, it decides to scrap the Android OS and begin over again with Google’s Chrome OS…

Yet another article declaring that netbooks stink and are on their way out. Anyone want to reconcile all the distaste for netbooks in the industry with the fact that they’re the only category of laptop whose sales are growing rather than shrinking?

Last year, a Web site reported that low-end electronics manufacturer Coby was going to release a $99.95 mini-laptop. It was exciting news–and a hoax. But Cherrypal has announced something that sounds more or less like the machine that Coby didn’t. The Cherrypal Africa has a 7-inch screen, 2GB of flash memory, Ethernet, Wi-Fi, two USB ports (one of which is of the obsolete USB 1.1 flavor), and either Windows CE or Linux. And yup, it sells for $99.

The Africa isn’t going to replace your MacBook Pro. Or your netbook. Or, really, any other computing device you own–it’s profoundly basic, and as the name suggests, it may be of most interest in developing nations where there are plenty of people for whom even $99 is going to be a stretch.

Actually, the Cherrypal Web site describes the Africa with a word I’ve never, ever heard a computer manufacturer use about its own product: “slow.”

In another place, the site calls the Africa a “no-thrills laptop.” Also refreshingly honest! The company seems to be more excited about its $389 13.3″ Bing notebook. (Which, confusingly, has nothing to do with Microsoft’s search engine–Cherrypal had the name first.) In fact, it says the Bing is “the fastest and most affordable laptop on the market today.” I haven’t seen the Bing, but I kind of suspect both claims are, um, false.

I’m not going to buy a Cherrypal Africa, and neither are you–but do you think it’s a noble experiment, a goofy oddity, a desperate cry for attention–or all three?

Smartbooks are an emerging class of computing devices that, basically, are to netbooks what netbooks are to notebooks: smaller, cheaper, less powerful, and (possibly) handier. They’re an idea being promoted by chipmakers Qualcomm and Freescale, whose CPUs will be inside the machines (which won’t run Windows).

Trouble is, there’s already a smartbook. It’s a German company, and as TechCrunch’s Robin Wauters is reporting, it’s decided to protect its trademark by going after use of the term to describe these mini-netbooks.

Continue reading this story…

When you think about it, every netbook to date has been misnamed: They’ve run traditional operating systems, and worked just fine even when you didn’t have an Internet connection. But netbooks based on Google’s Chrome OS will be different: At best, they’re going to have very limited functionality when you’re not online. Whether they turn out to be wildly popular or a legendary flop, they’re something new. They’re…netbooks!

So let’s keep this T-Poll short and sweet:

On Thursday morning, Google is holding a press event that sounds like it’ll be the closest thing to an official introduction that the company’s Chrome OS for netbooks has gotten to date:

While this will be more of a technical announcement, we will be showing a few demos that will definitely be of interest to you as well as a complete overview and our launch plans for next year. We’ll also hold a Q&A session with members of the Google Chrome OS team following the presentation and demos.

I’ll be at the Googleplex for the briefing, and will blog it here just as quickly as I can. I’m still recovering from compiling my Internet Explorer 9 wish list, so I’m not going to muse on what I’d like to see in Chrome OS, or guess at what it’s likely to involve. But would any of you like to take a stab at it?

TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington is reporting that Google plans to release an early version of its Chrome OS netbook operating system next week. It’s presumably a very early version, since Google says that machines running Chrome OS won’t arrive until the second half of next year.

Google says that Chrome OS will be Linux-based, Web-centric, and designed to eliminate installation and security headaches. Other than that, though, it hasn’t had much to say about the OS. (Among the major remaining questions: Just how useful will a Chrome OS netbook be when it’s not connected to the Internet?) Consequently, it’s been hard to have much of an opinion at all about the product other than that it should be fun to see what happens as Google launches yet another salvo at Microsoft. Stay tuned for some answers, I hope…

Apple may be suing Mac clone merchant Psystar, but its policy towards individuals who install OS X on non-Apple hardware to create “Hackintoshes” seems to have been to ignore them rather than to frustrate them. That may be about to change.

According to OS X Daily, Apple’s upcoming OS X 10.6.2 update prevents Snow Leopard from running on computers that use Intel’s Atom CPU. If true, that would make it incompatible with the vast majority of netbooks in one fell swoop.

I don’t want to assume that the OS X Daily story is the real deal until it’s received independent confirmation, and even if it is true, it’s possible that there’s an explanation that has nothing to do with Apple’s attitude towards Hackintoshes. But if Apple does want to foil Hackintoshes, this would be a good way to go about it. (Of course, it’s entirely possible that Hackintosh makers will simply hack OS X 10.6.2 further to reintroduce Atom support.)

OS X Daily wonders whether Apple might move against Hackintosh netbooks because it’s getting ready to introduce a tablet. Maybe so, but the number of folks in the world who are willing to go through the effort of putting OS X on a PC must be one-tenth of one-percent of the market that Apple would like to capture with a tablet. It would be nice to think that the two platforms–if you can call Hackintoshes a platform–could quietly, unofficially coexist.

Anyhow, here’s a T-Poll:

Good news, maybe, sort of: Fudzilla is reporting that Intel will allow netbook manufacturers who use an upcoming version of its low-end Atom CPU to sell machines with 2GB of RAM rather than today’s artificial maximum of 1GB. That would allow for nicer, better-performing netbooks that don’t cost a whole lot more. Of course, it also begs the question: Why is Intel involved in deciding how much RAM a netbook can have in the first place? It’s a little as if the company that manufactured my home’s furnace wanted to be involved in deciding the capacity of my washing machine.

The PC industry–even the parts of it who are selling tons of netbooks–have an amazing track record of disparaging the darn things and explaining why consumers don’t really want them. But some of the limitations of netbooks are manufactured: Both Intel and Microsoft impose restrictions on PC manufacturers that ensure that netbooks are less appealing than they might otherwise be, and therefore less imposing competition for more traditional, full-featured, profitable notebooks–ones that typically contain costlier Intel chips and run higher-priced versions of Windows.

Almost everyone in the computer industry would rather that consumers reject netbooks and buy somewhat more expensive, powerful thin-and-light notebooks with ultra-low voltage processors. And in many cases, those machines make a lot of sense. But wouldn’t it be nice if said consumers could choose between the best possible netbook and the best possible thin-and-light?

I don’t quite understand Nokia’s thinking, but the company has made it official that its Booklet 3G, its first true netbook PC (or any type of full PC for that matter) will come to the states through AT&T and Best Buy on October 22. Entering into the increasingly crowded netbook space could be risky for Nokia.

First off, the device will run a pricey $599 unsubsidized. To me thats pretty astronomical for a netbook. Let’s take a look at those specs, and for fairness let’s for now forget about the 3G data capability.

It runs a Intel Atom 1.6GHz chip — the same used in the market leading Acer Aspire Ones — and includes Wi-Fi, a 120GB hard drive, 1GB of RAM, and a 10.1″ display. My Acer has all of that, and was $259 without any subsidy.

The only thing I could find that my netbook doesn’t have is Bluetooth, and an accelerometer (oh and Windows 7 out the box: mine runs XP). So essentially, are we paying here $300 for 3G, which we’ll also be required to sign up for a $60 per month data plan for two years? That’s pretty steep.

While no doubt this entrant has a lot to do with Nokia’s recent cozying up to Microsoft, however I’m a little confused as to “why now.” With Acer and others able to give us netbooks under $300, how many people are going to be able to justify paying that plus an extra $2,000 or so over the life of the contract just for data?

Right now I just don’t think there’s a market for it.

Engadget’s Ross Miller is attending CEATAC in Tokyo–it’s the Consumer Electronics Show of Japan, only far weirder–and among the gizmos he’s encountered is a prototype of a netbook with two screens (photo borrowed from Engadget):

My instinctive response to dual-screen laptops of all sorts (which I wrote about here) is that they take the best thing about portable computers–the fact that they’re easy to quickly and efficiently use almost anywhere–and mess it up. If you want more pixels than an ordinary netbook provides, wouldn’t it be more practical to buy a larger, higher-resolution single-screen notebook? Wouldn’t this machine intrude on your seatmate’s real estate if you tried to use it on an airplane? And I like to take laptops literally and use them on my lap…a scenario in which double-screen models seem particularly unwieldy.

Every time I look at a two-screener, including this one, it seems to say “We’re doing this because it’s technically feasible, not because real people would want to use this in the real world.”

Then again, you could argue that real people have never gotten the chance to give two-screen notebooks a yay or a nay–yery few of the dualies that have been invented have ever made it to market. Do you think it’s an idea that’ll ever catch on?

Have I mentioned lately that I’m a big fan of netbooks–but that I think treating them as a fundamentally different sort of device than a notebook is kind of silly, and that it’s a shame the computer industry doesn’t seem to like them much? A netbook is just a notebook that happens to be (1) small and light, (2) designed for relatively basic computing tasks rather than heavy-duty stuff, and (3) attractively priced. And despite ongoing attempts to pigeonhole netbooks, there’s no reason why there should be any hard-and-fast rules about what they are and aren’t.

Which is why I like Lenovo’s IdeaPad S12, a netbook with a 12.1-inch display that refuses to play by the rules. With Dell’s recent discontinuation of its 12-inch Mini, the S12 is a machine in a very small category: Big-Screen Netbooks. (Asus’s Eee PC 1101HA, and HP’s Mini 311 have 11.6-inch screens, but the rest of the netbook universe generally tops out at 10.1 inches.)

Continue reading this story…

The IDG News Service’s Dan Nystedt has a report today that Taiwanese electronics behemoth Foxconn is planning to build “smartbooks”–even cheaper netbooks, basically–built around ARM processors. Their lack of x86 CPUs means they’ll run some flavor of Linux–perhaps Moblin (backed by Intel) or, eventually, Google’s Chrome oS. We know they won’t run Windows–not unless Microsoft comes up with a really cheap, ARM-compatible version of the OS.

I don’t think that Foxconn’s machines will be aimed at most of the people reading their post–they’re for folks in emerging nations for whom even netbooks are unaffordable. But all the recent news involving netbooks and netbook-like systems running Linux and variants thereof (as well as other alternative OSes such as Symbian) inspired today’s T-Poll.

For decades now, nearly all consumer PCs have run OSes from a grand total of two companies: Microsoft and Apple. (Yes, I know about the advances that Linux has made–I’m a Ubuntu fan–but the OS has yet to gain any permanent traction in the consumer arena and its market share remains tiny.) Either all this new activity relating to other OSes is going to amount to something, or the companies involved are wasting their time.

Queue the T-Poll: