Its been a few months since I’ve posted anything to the solar pc blog but having just watched a BBC World program about e.Quinox and their energy kiosks I felt it was time. The program is available on YouTube and worth a watch. What struck me was that the two most talked about advantages of the energy kiosks were for providing light and mobile phone charging! I bet that low-cost, low power mobile computing will come into scope soon too. From the e.quinox website: The ‘Energy Kiosk’ is a solar […]

I’ve been sent this image of an interesting keyboard / case accessory that the Viewsonic people are an accessory manufacturer is working on and I guess feelings about this are going to be polarized. On one hand you’ll have the people that see it as a netbook and query the total price of the package. On the other you’ll have people interested in the modular and touch aspect of this setup. Certainly a netbook would be cheaper but what about one that has touch, removable keyboard and auto-rotation and a […]

I’m quite the fan of the Samsung N350. 1KG and 4 or 5 hours of dual-core productivity. That’s impressive, especially when you can double that with just 200gm or so of extended battery. What I’m waiting for though is a 3G version because as you’ll see in the video below, RAM and SSD upgrade will be easy but the PCI-Express Mini slot is just a placeholder. No connector or antenna. Looks like I’ll be waiting for a 3G version although with the Galaxy Tab giving me an estimated 8-10 hours […]

The price of the Galaxy Tab is gradually coming down but it’s clear that it will never reach the 250 Euro price of the Archos 70. It looks the same, comes with 8GB of storage, a similar processor, similar operating system and plays back video just like the Tab. So what’s the difference? Balazs of Ndevil unboxes the Archos 70 in the video below and Charbax has a text/video review up. You’ll hear them talk about some of the very important differences between this and the Galaxy Tab but lets […]

Lets put aside the issue of resistive touchscreens for the minute as I think most of you know that it’s not the best way to implement a finger-touch user interface. I’m taking a closer look at the Creative Tablets for one reason APT-X. APT-X is a 352kbps ‘CD-quality’ codec implementation that can be used over the Bluetooth A2DP profile (instead of the default SBC codec) to provide high quality audio, something that A2DP hasn’t really delivered on yet. [More information here.] Up until now, if you wanted a high-quality digital […]

Toshiba have just announced that the Folio 100, the 10 inch Tegra2-based tablet, is now being distributed in Europe. The Tablet uses Android 2.2 and is much the same hardware as the AC100 we’ve been testing (and hacking) here at Carrypad. You’ll see that Toshiba are pushing their own applications store (Google Market was clearly not authorised for this non-phone tablet) and there’s some interesting content. AceTrax is offering the video content which will be an advantage over the Galaxy Tab which doesn’t offer any video content in Europe . […]

I’ve got a set of 17 criteria that I’m developing for use when I review devices and I thought it would be an interesting exercise to put the iPad and the Galaxy Tab together to see which one wins on this set of criteria. As you can see, the Galaxy Tab is the winner. End of story. Or is it? The totally dumb thing about this result and most other static ‘ratings’ systems is that every user approaches a device from a different angle. No-one wants every feature in equal […]

Converged devices mean more functionality and, unfortunately for me, the need for much longer reviews! I’ve been working hard on the Galaxy Tab over the last few weeks and over at Carrypad I have just posted Part 2 of the full review where I cover things that some of you ‘mo-pros’ out there will be interested in. Browser details, office and PIM applications and the rest of the included Samsung software suite. It’s fair to say that Samsung have added a lot of good stuff to the user experience in […]