NerdBeach

Raon Digital introduces the Everun Note netbook

 Let's just go ahead and call 2008 the year of the netbook computer.  Raon Digital has a new entry to the netbook market, the Everun Note.  Announced in South Korea, the small notebook computer has a healthy array of features, including:

  • 7 inch 1,024 x 600 display
  • Windows XP home
  • Choice of 80GB Hard Drive or 12GB SSD
  • 1.2 Ghz AMD Turin
  • 1 GB of DDR2 TAM
  • WiFi and Bluetooth 2.0
  • 1.3 megapixel webcam
  • SD / MMC slot

The Everun is expected to last about 2.5 hours while surfing on a charge, but a price has not been released yet.  It is interesting to note that the processor is a 1.2Ghz Turin and not an Atom, but at least it gives the users a choice per taste (although my personal favorite is the 1.6Ghz Intel Atom).  The Raon Digital Everun is expected to arrive in North America next month.

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Lenovo introduces digitizer packing professional grade laptop workstation

Desktop replacement laptops definitely have a market sector, and the soon to be released Lenovo's Thinkpad W700 is an excellent example.  The W700 is an eight pound beast of a notebook that features a nice 17 inch screen.  What's more, the laptop even incorporates its own Wacom digitizer.  This should make machine a strong favorite with professional graphic designers and CAD users.

OF course, being classified as a professional workstation quality machine would mean that it needs a professional quality display to meet up to expectations, and the W700 meets that requirement,  The display is a professional grade (notice the use of the word "professional" a lot here?) WUXGA screen with 400 nit brightness and an auto color calibration sensor that allows adjustments on the fly.

 Other features in the workstation class laptop include:

  • 3.0 Ghz Extreme Quad Core Processor
  • up to 8GB DDR3 RAM
  • 1GB NVidia Quadro FX 3700M graphics
  • Dual HDD Bays supporting RAID
  • Dual Link DVI, VGA, and Display Port
  • Full number pad
  • 7 in 1 card reader
  • 5 USB ports

 

The Lenovo W700 is scheduled to be available in September.  Now, remember how that word "professional" was used a lot earlier?  The price reflects this, and the base model starts around $3000.  But by the time the machine is decked out with both drive bays full and 8GB of memory (along with other options, such as a BD-RE drive), it could be considerably more.

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 Lenovo Press Release Follows:

Lenovo Unleashes PC Beast on Mobile Workstation Market with ThinkPad W700
Delivers Industry's First Built-in Digitizer and Color Calibrator Along with Ultimate Power, Multimedia and Display Technologies

RESEARCH TRIANGLE PARK, NC – August 12, 2008: Lenovo today introduced the ThinkPad W700, a 17-inch widescreen mobile workstation engineered with game-changing technologies and innovations to exceed the demands of the most data and graphics-intensive users. Lenovo brings the industry's first built-in digitizer and color calibrator to a mobile workstation and combines these innovations with first-in-market technologies such as new NVIDIA® Quadro FX mobile graphics and supporting the upcoming Intel® mobile quad core processor. Other features such as optional dual hard drives with RAID configurations, up to 8 GB of high speed DDR3 memory, a range of wireless connectivity options and excellent multimedia capabilities including an optional Blu-ray™ DVD burner/player make the ThinkPad W700 mobile workstation the standard-bearer for power and performance in a mobile workstation.

"Lenovo has engineered a new breed of mobile workstation with the ThinkPad W700," said Peter Hortensius, senior vice president, Notebook Business Unit, Lenovo. "No other PC manufacturer has a mobile workstation that delivers the sheer power, performance and cutting-edge innovation that Lenovo has packed into the ThinkPad W700. The ThinkPad W700 mobile workstation flat out delivers the command performance our customers demand at the desk as well as in the field."

According to IDC, the compound annual growth rate for the worldwide mobile workstation market has been more than 60 percent per year since 2002.1The ThinkPad W700 mobile workstation extends Lenovo's commitment to workstation users, complementing Lenovo's W500 mobile workstation and ThinkStation S10 and D10 workstations. As workers in fields such as digital content creation, computer-aided design and manufacturing, digital photography and science fields including the oil and gas industries become increasingly mobile, they are demanding the full-featured performance of a desktop workstation in a mobile workstation.

First-in-Industry Engineered Innovation
The ThinkPad W700 mobile workstation takes customer driven innovation to a new level with an optional built-in palm rest digitizer and color calibrator. Lenovo and Intel collaborated to integrate the color calibrator and digitizer into the ThinkPad W700 mobile workstation. Designed for digital content creators and users, the mobile workstation's digitizer helps them easily configure an image, either mapping it to the entire screen or to an area defined by the user. High performance users, especially digital photographers, will benefit from models with the built-in color calibrator as color continues to play an important role in their work. The calibrator automatically adjusts the display's color in up to half the time of many external calibrators and with higher accuracy, resulting in the most accurate, true-to-life images in an integrated package. Together with the upcoming Intel® mobile quad core processor, multimedia designers and animators now have outstanding quad-core processor performance and true color replication that is critical for realistic digital creations and workflow efficiencies.

Super-Charged Performance Unleashed
Supporting the latest Intel processor technologies including the upcoming mobile quad core processor, the mobile workstation can be configured with up to 8 GB of memory with an additional 2 GB of Intel Turbo Memory. Lenovo also offers models with Intel® vPro™ technology for complete manageability. The mobile workstation can be equipped with dual internal hard drives, including solid state drive storage. The ThinkPad W700 mobile workstation offers both the NVIDIA® Quadro® FX 2700M and 3700M Open GL graphics processors with up to 1 GB of dedicated video memory for exceptional graphics performance in a 17-inch mobile workstation. The hard drives can be configured for RAID 0 to help users access and save their data faster than traditional disk-writing methods, or users can choose RAID 1 for mirrored data redundancy.

The mobile workstation includes WiFi wireless connectivity. Additionally, users can connect to other devices wirelessly using mobile workstation models featuring Bluetooth and ultra wideband technology. Models supporting WiMAX will be available later this year.

New Heights in Display Technology and Multimedia Excellence
As the company's first product with a 17-inch display, the ThinkPad W700 mobile workstation delivers an unparalleled viewing experience with a combination of leading technologies. Its optional 400-nit WUXGA display provides up to twice the brightness of earlier ThinkPad mobile workstation models, and the 72 percent wide color gamut provides more than 50 percent greater color intensity. The high resolution, extreme brightness and wide color gamut coupled with the NVIDIA Quadro FX MXM graphics solution results in a user experience unequalled in a mobile workstation today. For external connectivity, the ThinkPad W700 mobile workstation provides support for Dual Link DVI, Display Port and VGA. A 7-in-1 multicard reader, and five USB ports give users flexibility in transferring and accessing digital content. Additionally, the workstation comes with an optional compact flash reader and Blu-ray™ DVD burner/player. An optional mini-dock extends the mobile workstation's capabilities with eSATA and digital audio ports as well as convenient cabling for power, external monitors and peripherals.

Packed for extreme performance, the mobile workstation also features BIOS/port disablement and an optional fingerprint reader, a smartcard reader and hard drives with full-disk encryption. It will carry more than 20 certifications from independent software vendors.

"Our engineers use Lenovo ThinkStation workstations to help them design the next-generation Williams – Toyota FW31 race cars, aiming to make them faster and more agile, with greater performance than the competition," said Chris Taylor, IT manager, AT&T Williams. "We're
thrilled to see Lenovo deliver the workstation performance we've come to rely on – now in a mobile, portable solution."

Pricing and Availability2
The ThinkPad W700 mobile workstation will be available beginning in September with models starting at $2,978. It is available through Lenovo Business Partners and www.lenovo.com.

 

 

Pandigital Kitchen Technology Center is Dedicated Kitchen Computer

Pandigital-Kitchen-Technology-Center_062608

A dedicated kitchen information computer is something that I have thought should have been on the market a while back.  Pandigital is doing exactly that with their Kitchen Technology Center.

The center is a touchscreen device that gives you preloaded recipes, a browser for more recipes,  a music player, a HD video and TV player, and a photo display.  The part that makes it work is the touch screen, since often in a kitchen you will not have your hands free enough for a keyboard. I just hope that the unit is clean friendly, at least if you are anything like me during the construction of a recipe.

The specs on the digital kitchen aid include 1 GB of memory and 15 inch 1280×720 resolution  screen. The Pandigital Kitchen Technology Center will cost $400, and it should be available in August.

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Samsung Releases T-DMB Capable YP-P2 DMB Player

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Samsung has released its new T-DMB (Digital Terrestrial Multimedia Broadcast) capable media player, the YP-P2 DMB, to the Korea market.  The device is also equipped with Samsung's own mDNIe(mobile Digital Natural Image Engine),  which is designed to give a more vibrant display on a mobile platform.  I have heard good things about Samsung's mobile displays using the engine.

The player is only 11.9 mm thick, and sports a 3 inch 16:9 touchscreen along with Bluetooth 2.0.  The YP-P2 DMB is available in black and white.  The device comes in a choice of 4GB, 8GB and 16 GB, at a suggested retail price of 239,000 KRW ($232), 309,000 KRW ($299) and 389,000 KRW ($376), respectively.

It is doubtful if the player as is will make its way westward due to the lack of support of T-DMB transmissions. However, it does leave the door open for an ATSC or DVB/T version of the player.  The chart below, courtesy of Wikipedia, shows the different Digital Terrestrial Television standards in the world as of this writing.

Digital_broadcast_standards_062308

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