All about laptops and netbook!
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Black Macbook Air Clone Spotted In The Wild
Dec 20th
So I was touring the local mall and stumbled upon an interesting find. I spotted what looked like a black, plastic version of the Macbook Air. It was an Indigo RS130, a shanzhai laptop manufactured in Taiwan for the cellphone brand Firefly.
The specs were the boring basics: Intel Atom N280 1.6GHz with GMA950 graphics, 1GB RAM, 160GB HDD, 802.11b/g WiFi, LAN, 1.3MP Camera. What set it apart was its 13″ screen and chiclet keyboard. The design very much mimicked the Macbook Air, down to the power button at the corner.
It also had 2 USB ports, a LAN port, one jack for both mic and headphones and an HDMI out. The unit had no pre-installed OS (not even Linux) but the display model had Windows 7 on it. A big downside was that the battery was pretty small and only lasts around 2 hours. I wasn’t able to get the actual weight but it felt something like 1.2-1.3 kg.
The retail price for this is roughly $390. You won’t get much out of it except light browsing and similar tasks due to the slower CPU. If you’ve ever dreamt of a black Macbook Air or just want a budget notebook with a better screen and keyboard, this might just be the one for you.
A post from the Asus Eee PC blog.
Black Macbook Air Clone Spotted In The Wild
Foldable keyboard for your UMPC – an update
Nov 5th
For all those users without free USB ports on their smartphones, PDAs, MIDs and other devices, or those with an aversion against cables in general, there are also bluetooth versions of those full-sized foldable keyboards I mentioned already on this blog few days ago – namely I’d like to make mention here of the “Freedom Universal Keyboard²” (from a company called Freedom Input Ltd) with its own two AAA sized batteries and – most important – bluetooth! The manufacturer claims that due to support for both HID mode (used and recognized by all PCs, most PDAs, UMPCs and smartphones) and SPP mode, a bluetooth serial port emulation protocol utilized by the blackberry family of smartphones for example, this gadget enjoys comaptibility to > 200 different devices. Sure is that every device with bluetooth and either Blackberry OS 4.0 and upwards, symbian OS v9, or windows mobile 5 & 6 ( both PPC and smartphone edition), as well as Windows 2000 and WinXP is supported without need to install any drivers. No mention of linux though, and what about windows CE??
More:
Foldable keyboard for your UMPC – an update
Asus selling iMac clone with netbook core
Nov 5th
I’m sure everyone knows those design-award-winning Apple iMac computers that look like just a flat panel LCD and keyboard standing on your desk, but contain a whole macintosh… Now Asus has realized the advantages of such a design and is selling a computer-inside-an-LCD too. The “Asus eeeTop ET1602″ has about the same specs as the average eeePC 1000H netbook (making guesses about the interior of this device very easy), namely intel Atom N270 clocked to 1.6GHz, 533MHz Frontside Bus, 1GB DDR2 RAM, the rather weak Intel 945G graphics chipset, 160GB SATA-II harddisk (spinning at only 5400rpm), connectivity is provided by 802.11 b/g/n wifi, bluetooth and 1000MBit LAN, the thing has a 1.3MP webcam and built-in stereo microphone – and so far, I could just as well have read the description from the package of my eee1000H instead, without any difference…
