Absolutely useless

Engadget did a write-up on a supposed new Dell product, a 9 pound laptop with a 20.1" screen.

I'm sorry but this thing seems to be as practical as the 1989 Macintosh Portable. Those who never had the pleasure on working on one of these should consider themselves very lucky...

B&O goes wireless

Bang and Olufsen was one of the first companies out there with a media networking system: Beolink. Beolink used to be a wired solution with cabling running from room to room, allowing you to pipe music from a CD playing in your living room to speakers elsewhere in your house.

B&O's now come into the modern age with the release of the Beolink Wireless 1.



The only surprising thing is that they have chosen not to use WiFi to transfer data, prefering to use Direct Sequence Spread Spectrum in the 2.4 Ghz spectrum. Now the interesting thing is that this doesn't tell us what the transmission layer/technology is that they're using, it's just saying how they're broadcasting. Am curious about the details here and am also curious about the reasons for this choice.

Is Apple preparing a new 'Switch!' campaign?

Apples will finally run Windows. Apple has released a boot manager that allows users to load Windows XP on their Macs.

Anyone wanting to be malicious could easily guess that Apple's preparing to concentrate on industrial design for standard pc's - something that would mean ditching their OS efforts...

Integration continues

The Register's reporting on new screens from Hitachi.

While 32", 37"and 42" LCD/Plasma screens are not particularily impressive, Hitachi's pushing the envelope with integration. The systems come with 4 integrated tuners and with harddrive based video recording (PVR) as an option.

While DVD integration has remained limited to small yet bulky CRT's (or otherwise high end Bang and Olufsen hardware), I'm betting that PVR's going to find it's way into an increasing number of LCD's. Look at it this way: the marginal costs of putting a drive pased PVR into a flat panel display are pretty small (let's say, less than 5% of the selling price, if that). On top of that, I'm sure there are companies in Taiwan that will supply manufacturers with packages for easy integration into their flat screens. My take is that the chances are pretty good that within 12 months atleast a quarter of all flat panel displays will sport an integrated PVR functionality. Now my question is: what's the OS they will be using for them?

(On another note, the good people at Hitachi really need to do something about the info management on their site - as I'm writing this, it's impossible to find proper information on these new Wooo displays)