Macbook Air specs and pricing

Pricing announced on Aussie site:
$2499 for the base model and a whopping $4338! for the top model (only two models).
$1500 option for the solid state drive. Man Apple is money grabbing like usual. A $400 SSD for $1500?

Macbook Air info released

Well the rumours are over. Macbook Air is the next big thing for apple.

Ultra-light: maybe, 3 pounds aint so light to me. It's not really a UMPC either for my 2 cents. 13.3 inch screen. OK, maybe sexy for engineering types as it's amazingly thin but it's still fairly big, fairly heavy and fairly low powered. No user accessable battery either which means when it runs out find the power socket or suck it up.

Review - Sony Vaio UX50

After a few weeks using the Sony Vaio UX50 I can happily say I love it.

I have previously owned many sub-notebooks and lately had a Vaio TX27GPB and a 12 inch Powerbook. The 12 inch Powerbook weighs in at 2.1kg and is small but not an ultra portable or subnotebook. The TX is heading there but being 1.3kg is also not what I’d call a true ultra-portable. So I sort of had two full spec’d powerful laptops with DVD burners but neither met my requirements for an ultra-portable.

I decided to keep the Powerbook as my main work machine and get a very small, very light road machine that had different requirements from the main machine.

Before going back to a tried and true Vaio U101, having had a U50 and sold it as it didn’t really fit the bill, I bought the Ux50.
Now I’ve sold the TX. The UX50 does everything I need and more.

But on to the good stuff.

The screen is sharp, clear and bright. After using the UX for a while the powerbook screen looks downright blurry. It’s surprising to me just how usable it is being so small. I hardly ever use the zoom function as web pages, documenst are quite usable at the highest resolution. On the zoom; it seems a bit silly the way it works. When you zoom in the content becomes sort of like a pdf in that you can only use the mouse or stylus to scroll around the screen, but not to do any sort of input. This may be a setting I haven’t found yet but it seems silly.

The touch screen is great. For web surfing i use the keyboard to type addressess and enter fields on webpages. For quick emails I tend to use the keyboard too. It’s simple to use and I find there is plenty of feedback to let you know which keys you’ve hit. Interestingly when bluetooth is on the blue light from the LED indicator casts a rather bright blue light onto the keyboard, whcih is already backlit with blue, and I found it makes it a bit tricky to see a couple of keys. I think I’ll move to using the touch screen more now I have this on screen keyboard (U-Board - http://jkontherun.blogs.com/jkontherun/2005/04/jkontherun_revi.html). I use such a thing a bit on my smartphone and find it simple to enter text with. When you need to enter text in a hurry, for example in messenger, the handwriting recognition works really well. I am using ritepen which came with the unit and I can happily freehand write all over the screen. It pops into whatever application you are using and for quick responses in messenger it’s gold.

I have Studio 8 and Adobe creative suite 2 on it and have found both to be very useable. I run a P4 2ghz desktop and I have a gut feel that this thing boots up CS2 just as fast. I wrote a photoshop tutorial on it capturing screengrabs and in this real world test it was just as easy to do as on the desktop - but with an external screen hooked up mind you. Which is also why this is a cool little unit. The dock, a bluetooth mouse/keyboard and a 17 inch LCD screen are the only things on my desk. When home it’s docked and when i leave the little unit comes with me. I don’t have unrestricted web access in the office i’m working in at the moment so during breaks I whip over to the cafe next door which has nice comfy booths with free wireless and so I can download my email and do some web admin stuff. So cool. I feel the little screen is too small for extended photo editing or even web design but for quick fixes and small jobs it’s fine. I’m so used to a really small screen on my smartphone that this thing is big in relative terms.

I’ve played around with the cameras a little. Skype is so easy on this thing. With the speaker and mic on the front of the unit while it’s on the dock I can easily talk at normal volume and be heard and clearly hear who i’m talking with. And it’s neat to be able to do video skype calls without having to muck around with external cams. The other camera I haven’t really found much use for. I’ve showed it off but since i don’t do video or photo blogging (yet) it’s not a lot of use to me. It is simple to use. Press the capture button and shoot stills or video at will, it’s temporarily captured and you can view, email or delete in one simple interface. Sony seems ahead of the game hear setting it up for VOIP and photo blogging and so it’s a machine that will last i think. I’m keenly thinking up things i can do with the function like record a video/picture blog of my next trip OS or something.

For cool factor I used to get a lot of comments on my TR. Lot’s on my U3 and U101, less on the T and TX (actually none). But man this little Baby turns heads. People can’t believe it’s an XP computer. And they spin out at the keyboard.
One quibble, it only has one USB port, which i find a bit limiting. It has more on the dock but as i only use a bluetooth mouse at home and travel with a USB wireless mouse I found that i had to unplug the mouse to plug in my thumbdrive. That got a bit old. It really needs on more USB port i think. That said I could buy a little travel usb hub so it’s not a biggie.
I find it gets warm in the hands but never hot. Although the fan does seems to run a bit once it gets up to temp. It’s very quite though so not an annoyance. the compact flash slot is awesome as my digital SLR use CF. So i can dump down my pics while mobile stright into the computer. Then once i’m home edit them in RAW format in CS2. The MS duo slot means i can crunch video onto my Duo, transfer music, and chuck them straight into the PSP. That’s handy too.
Battery life is fine for what i’m using it for. I turn down the screen pretty low and have got a solid 2+ hours of use every time so far. I considered the extended battery but it is expensive and adds significant size and weight. If i get another battery i’m going to opt for another standard one.

So all in all after a couple of weeks I really think this thing has nailed it for ultra-portables. It’s fully featured enough and has the right balance of usable features and functions, and it’s only 520 grams!

Really hard way to work on a bus

Saw an amusing thing on the bus this morning; a girl working on her laptop, on her lap, with a mouse! A Full sized plugged in usb mouse. It was precariously balanced on the palm rest. She was using it quite a bit to. I don't know whether she hated the stick or whether she didn't know the keyboard shortcuts for the app she was using but this is a very hard way to work. I felt like shouting haven't you ever heard of a umpc or a tablet?

Notebooks business people use while travelling

In the Qantas Club (business lounge at an Australian Airport :)) I spent a couple of hours working and while taking regular trips to the snack bar I spied on the tech people were using, as I always do.

I saw lots of standard (read as boring) laptops, all PC's, a big mix, Dell's Compaq's, HP, Sony.

Only two Mac's in the whole place (Macbooks) and no Tablets!

Later in the evening a Japanese man walked past carrying a Panasonic T series (light, tough Japanese notebook, big screen and only 1KG) - awesome. He was carrying it on, in one hand and reading the screen, try doing that with a 2.5kg clunker. My wife has a Panasonic R3 and it's a great, fast 900 gram machine so I appreciated seeing a Pana in the wild as they're not available in Australia.

An hour later another Japanese man walked past with an older Subbie, a Vaio 505 and one guy had a Libretto U100, which he was using on the table with a mini USB mouse. But alas I had the only tablet in the place (P1610). After sending an email as a laptop I converted and surfed the web in tablet mode and that's when the looks started. The libretto gets a lot of "how cute, can you really work on that thing?", but the tablet actually gets looks, comments and questions because people are intrigued by the way you're working; "you can write on the screen?!"

qantas club sydney

My new tablet pc didn't arrive in time so it's the trusty p1610 for this trip. As a side note the smaller qantas club in terminal 3 at sydney has a great kids room with heaps of toys, a tv and comfy chairs for the parents. Brilliant.

Awaiting the arrival of a new tablet

Well I've taken the plunge and bought a new convertible tablet PC. The Fujitsu p1610 has been good to me (apart from the Vista nightmare). But after expericcing Vista on a great machine (the R400) I'm now missing it.

The Toshiba R400 was an amazing. awesome experience but: it was way to big for me. I laid it on top of a Tecra M7 (15 inch screen) and the damn thing was the same size. It was fairly light. but not light enough. And the battery life was woeful. I could have bought the extended battery but that added to the weight and also made it look weird.

So it's gone, sold, in a new home. Now looking at the pics you can see some of my madness, I have in the pic to the left a Panasonic R3, a Fujitsu P1610, A 12 inch Powerbook and the R400 at the back.

So the Fujitsu P1610's days may be numbered when my new machine arrives later this week. I'll run them both for a cuple of weeks (as I did for the R400) and then decide.

Commuting again

On public transport again; commuting. No where near as bad as Sydney though. Only a 15 minute bus ride. Bogging This from my phone actually. Now running a Nokia N95 which is awesome.