Asus eee pad Transformer

Two years ago, we panned the Disney “Netpal” netbook, but have since had to swallow our words (albeit with a fine sauce and some good bread). We thought it was overly cutesy when we used it and dismissed it out of hand. What we forgot was we weren’t the audience; our tiny relatives loved it.

The Disney NetPal turns out to be a smash hit with the little ones. If you note the “Net” part of the name you will realize it’s designed as a netbook computer, meaning smaller than a regular laptop – but just right for small hands. It has the old Windows XP operating system, which Bob still likes and is still found on about half of all desktop computers. It includes a lot of Disney apps and games, as well as Microsoft Works. Amazon sells it new for $415 new, or used for $300.

If you don’t care about the Disney stuff, the ASUS “eeePC” is a $200 netbook with Windows 7. Or consider the $400 ASUS eeePad Transformer, an iPad-like device that comes with an attachable keyboard and boasts an 18-hour battery life. It’s only available for pre-order; Best Buy and other stores are already sold out online.

We’re getting lots of news about keyboard accessories for tablet computers; they’re about to invent the laptop. An alternative to this combination is the “Ultrabook–” a super-light laptop made by several companies.

An “Ultrabook” is a Windows version of the MacBook Air – a sleek $999 computer. Ultrabooks start up almost instantly, have a long battery life (up to eight hours) use an Intel chip and have Intel’s Anti-Theft technology. Prices range from $550 to $1500. Makers include Acer, Asus, Toshiba and Lenovo. Toshiba’s “Protégé Z830” is the lightest, at 2.4 pounds. The Asus U31 is the cheapest, and we saw it at Amazon for $550.

The bad news is that Ultrabooks come with WiFi only. But you can buy an adapter to connect it to an Ethernet link when the WiFi signal is weak.  Another drawback is that Ultrabooks don’t come with a CD or DVD drive. And as long as we’re here, they use mini-USB connections instead of the standard size, so you’ll need another adapter to plug in some accessories.

The bottom line here:  The light weight and long battery life are the attraction. Our current Acer laptops are about two pounds heavier than an Ultrabook, but we don’t carry them often enough to justify buying the lighter machine.

1992 Smart Phone

A reader sent us an item from Time Magazine, which otherwise we never get around to reading. It’s a history of tech gadgets, many of which will surprise you.

Way back in 1992, IBM introduced an $899 device called “Simon.” Simon was a touchscreen mobile phone, personal digital assistant, pager and fax machine, all in one. It had a calendar app, calculator, address book and world clock. You could use your finger or a stylus on the touchscreen. For the whole list, do a Google search on “All time 100 gadgets” or click here.

Bob notes that to this day we get pitched on “new” products he saw 30 years ago at a trade show. Thirty-five years ago, the “Xerox Star” personal computer had a touch pad, a mouse and an icon display nearly identical to what was later used on the Macintosh. Xerox executives dumped the “Star” because they said there was no market for a product like that.

How bout a tablet computer with two screens? Sony is coming out with their “P” tablet later this year (possibly November) and it offers a double display. Of course, since it’s a tablet and not a laptop, the displays are smaller.

The “P” is very light and folds in half. The two touch screens are each 5.5 inches diagonally and you can play Playstation games and get new movies and music from the Sony Entertainment Network. As with other tablets, you can use the device as a universal remote control for your TV and some other electronics. The “P” has the latest Android Honeycomb operating system and can stream music, video and photos wirelessly to a TV or receiver. A couple of Playstation games will come pre-loaded.

Price has yet to be determined on this high-tech toy, but we’re guessing it will be around $800; anything less would be good news. There’s an “S” tablet available in mid-September, but it doesn’t have the two screens.

Hit the play button on the image above or go to Youtube.com to walk inside a computer 20 times larger than normal. It was set up at Boston’s Computer Museum but is no longer there. The video is from 1990, but has inspired thousands to learn about computers. Search on “How Computers Work,” then take a walk through the computer.

Buyers so far seem to love Apple’s “iPad,” feel slightly less enamored of Samsung’s “Galaxy Tab” and don’t find the “Dell Streak” worth the $200 price because of the required phone contract, a monthly cost that adds up big time. For cheaper views, we’ve been testing the “Breeze,” a $180 eight-inch tablet from AOC, a maker of tons of LCD monitors. It isn’t officially out yet, but we tried it and you can order it. There are 80 more new tablets in the works and hardly any of them are out. And no, in order to preserve our sanity, we’re not going to try them all.

The attraction of the Breeze is the price: $180 instead of Apple’s $500 for iPad. The video and sound quality are quite good. Getting videos, music and whatever is, well, a breeze. Plug it into a computer with the included USB cable and drag files from one window to another. To browse for ebooks, tap the “Shelves” icon on the home screen. There are links to all the good freebie sites, such as manybooks.net. Tap the Android marketplace icon to add apps, about half of which are free. We added “Poynt,” which has local restaurant and movie reviews. The app tried to find our location using GPS, but it took so long we just typed it in.

The Breeze has the Android “Eclair” operating system, not Google’s latest “Honeycomb” version, or even its two predecessors, “Gingerbread” and “FroYo.” clair is not as fast, and you can’t spread your fingers to enlarge the screen, scroll through pages with a finger, or use other advanced features. Often when you tap to turn a page on an e-book, you get the message: “It is opening.” (Like: No kidding.) Email works fine, but the Breeze has a silly auto-fill feature to “help” you type. It’s worse than bad. We typed the word “with,” for example, hit the space bar and it filled in “Witherell.” Sounds like someone’s name; someone we don’t know. Other “helpful” fills were just gibberish. So we turned off auto-fill. Meanwhile, back at the ranch rumors are rife about a coming drop in iPad prices. But the Breeze is a decent option if you can’t wait. More info at AOC.com.

Now oddly enough, those old computers happen to be the ones we use most often. We have two new ones, lots of computing power and memory and all that stuff. But the old computers have the programs we turn to on a regular basis and are tuned to use those programs in the best ways. And after adding memory to our old desktops, they’re just as fast as the new.

There is tremendous advertising pressure to have the latest equipment and to make us feel that if we don’t, we must be creatures from the Stone Age. We have a friend who buys a new computer when her older one gets clogged up and starts to run slowly. She figures it’s just too old, and that’s the problem. We think this kind of attitude is very common and probably accounts for a goodly percentage of the sales of new computers. The new one she gets will run fine for a couple years, until it gets clogged up and grinds down.

In fact, there is usually nothing wrong with most old computers. The repeated warnings from ad banners about our hard drives crashing because they’re so old, and the software we can buy to tell us when that dire moment is nigh, turn out to be fear-mongering. We have never had a hard drive crash and this goes back over a period of more than 30 years. We know a few people have had drive crashes; we’re just saying that in more 30 years, we never have.

We found out how old our machines were, by the way, from running “Emergency Undelete,” a $20 program we’re testing from Diskeeper.com. Joy typed in “*dee” and retrieved all the letters she’d written to her Aunt Dee and deleted over the last nine years.

This new gizmo is from Motorola and they call it a laptop dock, though it doesn’t dock laptops, it docks the Motorola “Atrix” cell phone from AT&T. Once you plug the Atrix phone into it however, you see everything on the big screen and you have a standard keyboard and touchpad. The dock has stereo speakers, eight hours of battery life and weighs 2.4 pounds. Hopefully it will soon work with other phones, because without the Atrix, this thing is pretty much a doorstop. Expect to see it, expanded or not, around March. No price yet.

The 10.1-inch Motorola Xoom (which will be out February 17 and cost $700 – $800) is one of these and got the most attention at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas this January because of its fast dual-core processor. It’s compatible with the fastest 4G cellular network, has front and back facing cameras for video chatting, and an HDMI-out port for connecting the tablet to a big-screen TV. Four tablets from Asus also got a lot of attention. We like the look of the Asus Slider, with its slide-out keyboard and the Transformer, with its docking station. Tablet prices will be all over the map, some similar to the iPad, some half as much, most using the Google Android operating system.

There are a lot of interesting new cameras announced for release in the next few months. Polaroid will offer sunglasses with a built-in camera. Other makers have video cameras built into goggles. We like the looks of the Casio Tryx. It has a handle that can double as a tripod or a hanger, so it can stand upright or be suspended from a nearby hook or tree. It has a 21-milimeter wide-angle lens and a 12.1 megapixel sensor; it captures still or video.