Apple drops to No. 5 in laptop sales

According to research firm IDC, Apple has dropped from the No. 4 purveyor of laptops in the U.S. last year to No. 5 this spring. The firm estimates that Apple has shipped 12.5 percent fewer laptops than the same time last year, even as it maintained its 7.6 percent market share. Leapfrogging Apple to take the No. 4 spot is Toshiba, now estimated to be shipping 7.7 percent of all laptops in the U.S., thanks to system such as the Mini NB205 Netbook. IDG estimates that Dell remains No. 1, with 26.3 percent of the market, closely followed by HP, with Acer showing strong year-over-year growth to hit 12.6 percent of the American market. Full Story : Cnet.com….

Study: Consumers still confused about netbooks

According to a new report from leading market research company, The NPD Group, many consumers believe the two have the same functionalities. NPD’s Netbooks II: A Closer Look report, found that 60 percent of consumers who purchased a netbook instead of a notebook thought their netbooks would have the same functionality as notebooks. That confusion about functionality is leading to some dissatisfaction. Only 58 percent of consumers who bought a netbook instead of a notebook said they were very satisfied with their purchase, compared to 70 percent of consumers who planned on buying a netbook from the start. Full Story : TechieDiva.com….

MiFi Will Change Everything You Know

MiFi is an interesting new invention that gives you a personal modem that will work just about anywhere. That’s right. Your own signal. Novatel MiFi 2200 is available from Verizon or Sprint ($100 with two-year contract, after rebate). It’s a little wisp of a thing, like a triple-thick credit card. It has one power button, one status light and a swappable battery that looks like the one in a cellphone. When you turn on your MiFi and wait 30 seconds, it provides a personal, portable, powerful, password-protected wireless hot spot. The MiFi gets its Internet signal the same way those cellular modems do — in this case, from Verizon’s excellent 3G (high-speed) cellular data network. Full Story : Manolith.com…..

The First Solar Powered Netbook

Spanish company iUnika is set to launch next month an uber-cheap (and uber wimpy) netbook that runs on solar power. Coming in at about $200, Gyy weighs only 700 grams, runs on Linux (hence the small price) and is made of biodegradable materials. The solar panel charges the Gyy’s internal battery and you can check the state of the battery via the small LCD display on the lower left corner of the netbook. Initially, the Gyy will be available only in Europe in June. Full Story : PCWorld.com……

MacBook Pro with 60% extended battery life

A new battery technology is revealed by Apple today, which Apple claims would improve 17″ MacBook Pro’s battery life by 60%. The new battery can last up to 8 hours on a charge. Apple uses a chip inside the battery that communicates with each cell to make adjustments to the current for each cell. The battery last three times longer than the industry standard. Apple also makes the recycling of the batteries easier by the take-back program.

Imagine A World Without Wires

The power is everywhere, like god. You wouldn’t know where the power is coming from. You don’t need cords or batteries for your gadgets and computers. The laptop could be recharged when the machine gets within several feet of a transmit resonator. This reasoner could be embedded in tables, work surfaces, and even behind walls. This is one of the Intel’s technology which relies on an idea called magnetic induction. A principle similar to the way a trained singer can shatter a glass using the voice (frequency). Power can be put into magnetic fields at a transmitting resonator at the wall socket. The receiving resonator is tuned to absorb energy from the magnetic field.

In this research, Intel has built a sample light bulb to make a 60-watt glow from an energy source 3 feet away. This was achieved with high efficiency and only a quarter of the energy has been lost. Researchers admitted the technology will be on market in at least five year.

Image Credit: www.boisepubliclibrary.org

Dell to fix the Faulty Laptop Keyboards

  A limited number of Dell Vostro 1310 and 1510 laptops with the wrong keyboard layout were shipped in Europe in the middle of April. The flaw was noticed by a Dell customer in UK. In  Dell Vostro 1310 the bottom row of letters on the keyboard was shifted to the right. That’s because the left Shift key is over sized and a new key, \, is placed between the Shift and Z keys, moving the entire row so that it doesn’t comply with a traditional keyboard layout. Dell will replace the keyboards for customers who have received the laptops with faulty keyboards. The laptops haven’t shipped in other parts of the world, so other regions aren’t affected by the glitch.

Cotribute to One laptop per child project

The One Laptop per Child association (OLPC) is a non-profit organization, set up to oversee The Children’s Machine project and the construction of the XO-1 “$100 laptop”. Both the project and the organization were announced at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland in January 2005. The goal of the foundation is to provide children around the world with new opportunities to explore, experiment, and express themselves. To that end, OLPC is designing a laptop, educational software, manufacturing base, and distribution system to provide children outside of the first-world with otherwise unavailable technological learning opportunities. Contributions can be made either by donations or by volunteering to create activities for the laptop.

Laptop wipes all data if stolen

BackStopp a hosted service created by a U.K company,can automatically wipe hard disk data on machines taken from authorized locations. If a laptop is reported missing– or even just moved from a designated spot- the system can reach out and execute a file deletion process that clears the laptop of all important data. There is also a feature to take picture of the thieves and send it back to analysis. The price for the service starts with $19/month.