The 5 Smallest Laptops in The World

Everyone wants to make the smallest and the cheapest laptop (or so it would seem). It’s apparently the latest trend in technology that sells, and every hardware manufacturer under the bloody sun it jumping on the bandwagon. In this super amazing post, we’ll have a look at the top 5, and pick a winner for style, functionality, and price.

(on a side note, RE the first picture, they may be small but I wouldnt advise taking them to a beach or spa, its just a recipe for disaster really…)

First up is the one that started it all really, this was the bad boy that kicked off the trend – and everyone else is to an extent just copying it. The Asus Eee PC (£220), pictured here in use by a lady with rather nice breasts. This one is (so far) the definitive winner of the functionality category.

Then there was the Everex Cloudbook (£340), which was so unbelievably delayed and unreliably promoted that it pretty much lost all its credibilty before it even went on sale! I’m not a fan of this little one, its ugly, it doesnt do much, and its overpriced.

Then more recently there’s been the 3K Computers RazorBook400 (£200 est) which we don’t know very much about because it isnt actually in production yet, but the pictures and the proposed specs (4GB Flash memory, boot time of 8 seconds) sound pomising.

Then there’s the real market-killer, the Dell Mini-Inspiron, which really really looks promising. Its sleek, smooth, sexy and doesnt look half as plasticy as the other mini laptops. Its probably fair to assume that this luxury comes at a price though, and I wouldnt expect to find one (when its released) for under £450. A clear winner of the syle category.

And finally, there’s the ‘One Laptop Per Child‘ project (£100), who have created this monstrosity laptop to be cheap and usable by children – so that it can be distributed to less fortunate countries and aid them, etc. (They don’t have food but as long as they have wifi and broadband they’ll be just fine!) It is however, an easy winner of the price category.

The Dell is by far the most exciting if you ask me, and I am shallow and may trade in my Eee when the time comes just for the sake of looking good. Then sit back with my executive tableware, and see how quickly I can type on yet another computer where the keys are so close together that I need chopsticks to hit them individually.

Apple’s 20th Anniversary Unboxing

Today we have something a little different in store. In celebration of Apple’s 20th anniversary, some old codger has cracked out a brand new Apple desktop known as the ‘TAM’ – which was first produced 20 years ago.

The rather lengthy video below shows said codger unpacking a rather strange looking dummy from a box, followed closely by the TAM personal computer, fresh in all its boxed glory. Its actually quite interesting to see that some of Apple’s design trends set 20 years ago are still ever present today, for example the flat screen monitor with (part of ?) the computer built into it (which I didn’t even know existed in the 80’s) and the keyboard with the mouse trackpad built in, very similar in design to.. lets see.. oh thats right – every laptop in the world!

Fantastic to see such a classic product in action, and awsome to see some of the earliest Apple design elements – even the packaging of a 20 year old machine was impressive… if only Steve Jobs had decided to pack up shop and buy west sussex property in England then maybe the prices for Today’s products would be half decent!

GTA4: The Follow Up

Picked up my copy the day it came out, though naturally (as is appropriate) I went for the ultimate in geekiness and grabbed one on the stroke of midnight from an Asda over 20 miles away. Still, it was definitely worth it. Three days in and there is much to report, the textures and graphics are very smooth (I have the 360 version), though as ever draw distance is annoyingly poor.

The character feels complete and the new physics engine is absolutely superb. When you kill someone now for example, they aren’t just a static body lying on the ground, they flop about if you kick them. Similarly, people won’t always bleed now, and when they do its subjective to what caused it. Beat someone to death and there will be no blood at all, shoot them and there will be a fair amount, run over them, and you will have the red stuff splattered across your car.

It’s the details of the game that really give it the wow factor this time round, which is different – because the wow factor previously was always the size. Thats not to say that this game is small, its really not that much smaller than san andreas, but its far far more refined. You can’t walk through your own car door any more, and when you get on a motorbike, you put on a helmet. The lip animations during cutscenes are far better (as are the hands!) and the water effects are stunning.

The most fun I’ve had so far in the game is getting drunk (thats right) as the screen goes out of focus, and as your character stumbles around the street hurting himself, your camera vibrates and shakes violently making it very tricky indeed to control (like being drunk!). Don’t try driving though, the police pull you over for drink driving.

My only gripe so far is that the handling of the cars is.. well.. in a word.. terrible. I know people will argue that ‘this is more realistic’.. but there’s a fine line. I want graphics and physical elements of the game to be realistic, but I want the interactivity and the game play to just be good fun. The best part of the old GTA games was that the cars were awsomely easy to drive, and while some were old bangers, the nice ones were an absolute dream. So far with GTA4 every car handles the same, just with different levels of acceleration. None of them can break, and even spinning the car completely around with the handbreak and accelarating full throttle facing the opposite direction still causes you to take a good 100meters to slow down, and eventually stop.

Gameplay is superb, with niko having full access to email and online dating (so his mum can send him email rather than direct mail) the depth of the game is really something else.

The Shuttle KPC A Force To Be Reckoned With

Shuttle are best known for selling barebones and ‘normal’ pc’s in handy packages at reasonable prices, their latest relese (as you may have guessed) is the KPC which, in case you’re wondering, stands for ‘Korporate PC’ (see what they did there?).

The other small part of this remarkable little machine is its price tag, which comes in at a rather manageable $209 (about £100). It comes in one of the ever trendy cube cases with an Intel Celeron 1.8GHz processor, sadly only 512MB of RAM (though this can be upgraded up to 2GB), and an 80GB har drive. You may be thinking ’so what?’ in which case my answer would be to look at the price tag again! It’s not meant to be a top of the line brand spanking new movie editing producing box, its your standard home PC that does everything with its electrical components that you need it to on a day to day basis.

Linux runs best on it (what DOESNT Linux run best on?), and interestingly the boys over at computershopper stacked the KPC up against an older 3.2GHz Pentium 4 system running Vista Ultimate with 2GB of RAM and a 320GB hard drive, and the KPC came out on top for most common tasks. From opening spreadsheets to loading up Firefox the little black box came in consistently 2 seconds quicker, even with its standard spec 512MB of RAM.

As for extra’s, how’s a one year warranty and just 30watts of power consumption at idle? Thats less than half your standard PC tower AND you won’t hear it! Remember, if you’re buying it for your company then add it to the fixed asset inventory tracking database.