Todays & Tomorrows Technology

It doesn’t take much to differentiate your netbook, what with most sharing the same hardware, so Pegatron have managed to surprise and delight by slapping Yahoo!, Google, MSN and Skype keys on their Vivid prototype. To be honest, though, they didn’t need to bother: all they needed to highlight was the fact that this is one of the rare machines with NVIDIA’s Tegra chipset.


Spotted at Computex a few weeks back, the Vivid also has a matte-finish display and an integrated battery. The speakers are squeezed into a metal-mesh cylinder in the hinge, and there’s the usual array of audio in/out and USB ports.

The Vivid also runs a full version of FireFox and can play YouTube video. As well as having the long runtime promised by Tegra, it can also output 1080p through the HDMI port. Still no word on when we can see the Pegatron Vivid on shelves; we’re also hoping it’ll come in a few different colors.

ASUS have been showing off their Eee Keyboard since CES back in January, but until now it’s always been demonstrated running Windows XP. Now the Eee Keyboard – which has a 5-inch touchscreen and is intended to function as a media PC – has been given a shot of Moblin, Intel’s Linux-based OS.

The model you can see is only a prototype at present, but there’s no reason that ASUS couldn’t deliver a Moblin version alongside the Windows XP Eee Keyboard. Hardware in this case looks to be unchanged, so we’d still expect the same Intel Atom CPU, 1GB of RAM and either 16GB or 32GB of SSD storage. Wireless HDMI is believed to be an option.

What the video doesn’t show is any media functionality, so it remains to be seen what advantages there Moblin may bring over the Microsoft OS. ASUS have repeatedly assured us that the Eee Keyboard will launch this month, priced at around $400.

Are you fully prepared to live in one company's most likely inaccurate and yet still totally awesome vision of the future? If not, check out the video after the break. ASUS tossed together its ideas into a "Seamless Experience" showing at its Computex 2009 booth. Apparently the future involves a lot of interactive countertops -- a sort of pervasive Surface-lite, which presents interactive, relevant info for objects placed on it. The tech also facilitates interaction between devices placed near each other, and can even capture data from a plain ol' piece of paper and integrate it into the system. Sure, it's been shown before, but we're sure once enough companies come up with this idea independently they'll be able to form two warring factions and fend off consumer adoption with a format war for years to come.

Computex 2009 may have finished last week, but the final few glossy surprises are just now emerging. One of the last new netbooks we’re seeing from the show is, strangely, one of the most attractive; the J&W Minix 811 is tipped as the thinnest netbook there, despite packing an internal 3G modem.

The dimensions are aided by the fact that the Minix 811 is made from aluminum alloy, rather than plastic. That’s on the plus side; the negative part is that J&W could only find space for a tiny little 3-cell 2,200mAh battery pack. No official word on battery life, but estimates suggest around 2.5hrs of runtime; there’s also talk of a 6-cell pack, though that wasn’t at the show.

Inside there’s a 10-inch 1024 x 600 resolution display with non-glossy finish, and OS is to be a choice of Linux, Windows XP or Windows 7. The keyboard is rated highly, but we’re not sure what processor lurks inside; an Atom N-series seems likely, either the N270 or N280. No word on pricing or specific availability.

Storage may not be as glossy or as exciting as a new netbook, MID or Smartbook, and as such we didn’t see as much hard-drive coverage from Computex as we did mobile devices; still, that doesn’t mean there wasn’t some deuced impressive hardware lurking at the show. OCZ brought along their Colossus, a 3.5-inch SSD-based drive which boasts 1TB of capacity and sustained read/write speeds of 265MB/s.

It does that by using a RAID-0 setup inside, managed by a JMicron RAID controller and a pair of Indilinx controllers which each control the flash memory. Unlike 2.5-inch drives, the Colossus isn’t going to be much use for notebooks and small-form-factor PCs, but for performance computers it offers the speed of a solid-state drive with the capacity you’d typically rely on a traditional platter-based HDD for.

As ever, there’s a catch, and that’s unsurprisingly the price tag. We’re not entirely sure when the OCZ Colossus 1TB SSD will reach the market, but the company expect it to be priced between $2,500 and $3,000. A cheaper (relatively speaking) 500GB version will also be offered.

Acer subsidiary Gateway have been showing off their all-in-one touchscreen PC, and with a multitouch-capable 23-inch Full HD display it’s certainly no slouch. Unlike touchscreen nettops, the Gateway ZX6800 packs an Intel Core 2 Duo processor and DDR3 memory, and runs Windows 7.
Storage is courtesy of a 3.5-inch SATA-II hard-drive, with capacities varying according to model, plus there’s a discrete graphics card (unspecified), hybrid TV tuner and integrated speakers. Connectivity includes WiFi a/b/g/n, gigabit ethernet and what looks to be an ExpressCard slot.

No word on where we’ll be seeing the Gateway ZX6800 released, though it’s likely to be a European product. Pricing, too, is unconfirmed, but we wouldn’t expect it to come cheaply.