iPad Pre-order March 12, Launch April 3
So the original word from Apple was that the iPad, their long-rumored and finally revealed tablet (sort of), was going to be available in larch March. Announced in January, Steve Jobs said it’d be available in about 60 days. Well, they may have missed that mark by a couple of days, and certainly there’ll be a few people who jump all over that, but really, does anyone care? At this point, I can’t be the only one who wants to get his hands on one of these to see what they can really do. And now it looks like they’ll be available for pre-order in a week.
Penguin Reinventing Books Via iPad
This is something that, as a writer, has been on my mind for quite some time now. While Amazon’s Kindle is definitely a quality device, and as a book reader, very good, it does little more than actually present the equivalent of the print copy of a book. Yes, I’m well aware that you can buy books/magazines/blog content on the device, and I’m also well aware that it has a web browser on it, but let’s be honest: as cool as the Kindle is, it doesn’t have the horsepower or the display to do real multimedia content. The iPad, however, does. And Penguin, one of the big publishers, is looking to take advantage of that.
Acer Aspire One With nVidia Ion 2
It doesn’t seem like it’s been all that long since nVidia announced their Ion platform and started bringing the product to the market (and everyone let out a collective sigh because it meant there was finally a decent integrated mobile video chipset), but it’s been long enough that nVidia Ion 2 is getting set to come out soon.
Broadcom Crystal HD Video Accelerator Tested in Dell Mini
The Broadcom Crystal HD (BCM70012) is not exactly news, but we’ve not paid a whole lot of attention to it here because it’s taken so long for it to come out. Also, never mind that nVidia’s Ion solution is, well, pretty damn good. However, for those of you who have a netbook and would like to enjoy HD video on it and don’t have the good fortune of having a Ion chipset, you may be in luck because this $30 mini PCI-e card may breathe a little life back into your netbook.
Intel Atom D510 Review, Performance, Etc. Round-up
It’s been a long time since we’ve looked at what Intel is up to these days and counted the Intel Pine Trail updates among those things. So, in honor of it being almost a year since talking about what Intel has been planning for their ever expanding netbook and nettop line, let’s look at what is finally on the verge of coming out in the near future to a netbook or nettop near you.
Atom Patch for Snow Leopard 10.6.2 = Happy Netbook
Once again I find myself in the position where I’m unable to test this for myself, namely because I’ve had problems getting Snow Leopard to install on any of my netbooks, but some people are reporting success with this. Therefore, with the intention of disseminating information and possibly helping some folks out, allow me to redirect you to Insanely Mac where there’s a forum thread with a patch and some translated instructions. (Scroll down to post 7 for short and sweet instructions.)
If it works for you, let others know!
OS X 10.6.2 Is Out And Nixes Atom — Netbooks Beware
I hesitated to post anything about this when it originally came out in one of the developer seeds that OS X 10.6.2, the latest update to Snow Leopard, had removed (or intentionally sabotaged unofficial) Atom support. It looked like that was certainly the case, and then a few days later another build had Atom support restored. However, 10.6.2 is officially out today and the various sites are reporting that Atom support is in fact gone.