They have quite a cool setup nowadays though. They now take your computer, and plug in an ethernet cable and netboot the machine. I am unsure at this point if the netboot server is local to each Apple Store or perhaps it is calling to the mother ship. I am going to research this further and see what I can find out.

Once booting, it asks “Do you have the customer’s permission to run this?” and you hit yes, a few OS 9 looking progress bars go by, and it automatically runs through a complete systems diagnostics and gives you a summary read out of all the system’s components.

Here is a quick photo I took of the laptop after it finished running the diagnostics.

You can see that the summary is saying the battery is indeed bad. It also has a warning on the hard drive, this is due to the hard drive not being the stock hard drive but an upgrade.

I would love to have this tool at work running on a server for troubleshooting systems. Hell, I would love to have this at home for troubleshooting!

Going to do more research on this for sure. If you know anything about this setup, please comment below!

January 29, 2008. Apple announced the MacBook Air. It was nothing short of amazing! Thin, light, and beautiful. I got one shortly after release and loved it for about 2 weeks. The machine was absolutely perfect until you tried to do any real work on it. Because of its size, it had to sacrifice on power.

Jump ahead through 2009 and into 2010 where there were a few spec bumps and model changes, such as adding an 11″ model. You now had a 13″ and 11″ model with new unibody styling. When you hit July 21, 2011 we saw the launch of the newest versions of the MacBook Air. On that date, it became time to consider an Air again because the game had changed!

This new MacBook Air is better than the first generation in every way. It is thinner, lighter, and the power of the machine has grown to abnormal heights considering its size. As you can see from the specs below of the machine I bought, you would be hard pressed to say this machine wasn’t a 17″ tank of a “mobile desktop” notebook. However, this machine is anything but! It is a super sleek ultra portable that has more horsepower than the 2 year old, 15″, top of the line MacBook Pro that it replaced.

With the dual-core i7 (giving you 4 threads), the 256GB SSD, and 4GB of memory, this thing absolutely screams!

If you have been thinking about an Air since the beginning, or even if you bought one of the early models and felt burned, trust me when I say, it’s time to take a second look. This thing will out perform your expectations in every way.

The mind blowing specs of my new machine
Screen size: 11.6″, 1366 × 768 (16:9)
Weight: 2.38 lb.
Processor: 1.8 GHz (i7-2677M) dual-core Intel Core i7 with 4 MB shared L3 cache.
Graphics: Intel HD Graphics 3000 processor with 384MB of DDR3 SDRAM.
RAM: 4 GB of 1333 MHz DDR3 SDRAM.
Hard Drive: 256GB Solid State Drive.
Dimensions: 11.8 in wide × 7.56 in deep × 0.11 in to 0.68 in high.
Ports: 2× USB 2.0 Port | 1× 3.5 mm headphone jack | 1x Thunderbolt Port

Retail Price: $1,649 +tax

(Of course this review is based solely on the specific configuration I purchased; this in no way means every model in the line is equal to my glowing review)

Well, I went to see it in person, and after trying very hard to keep my expectations very low, I was still somehow disappointed. It pains me to say it; I want WebOS to survive in the worst way, but sadly this launch (if you can even call it a launch) did nothing but further weigh WebOS down from getting off the ground.

Hardware:
Since I mentioned weight I guess that is a good place to start with describing the new tablet from HP: heavy! The Touchpad feels like a massive brick compared to other tablets on the market. The hardware in general seems very poor in both quality and design. It feels as though very little time was put into hardware design. The speaker holes feel rough, sharp, and unfinished. The “home” button feels extremely awkward and poorly designed for being the only interface button on the device. Design wise, it is basically a giant iPhone 3G, which came out in 2008.

If it weren’t for the spec sheet saying it had a dual core processor, you would thing it was running a single core around 1.0GHz or less. For being a dual core 1.2GHz, it felt sluggish.

The screen left a lot to be desired as well. It felt very dull as far as color reproduction went and not very clear.

Software:
WebOS is still a solid and well designed OS. This new 3.0 version is great, but doesn’t feel as snappy and fluid as it should. My only concern is that you don’t immediately have access to the entire WebOS catalog of apps, since all apps must be re-written to work on 3.0.

As the title states, if HP would have sold this device at a loss to get people amped up and excited for WebOS, that would have been huge. Hell, even at $199 it would be a no brainer for everyone to get one, if for no other reason than just to try it out. If you don’t put WebOS in people’s hands, no one is going to just discover it on their own, sadly.

One last note about this “launch”. I say launch in quotes because HP continues to half ass the release of these new devices. When the Veer came out, no one knew it was out. The stores that were selling it, barely knew it even launched. This was no different: you heard nothing about it, and saw nothing either. You might have just happened to see the display for it sitting in between its competitors, the iPad 2 and Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1; both of which are far more polished and the same exact price point.

At this point I am definitely saying do not buy the Touchpad, and WebOS is officially on the back burner (apparently HP feels the same way).

I am back to Verizon now. I now have more bars than I know what to do with! It was easy to leave the carrier, but leaving the Nexus S was going to be hard since there were no phones that could match it, until I caught wind of the Samsung Charge. Slated to arrive on April 28th, it was of course delayed, for whatever reason, until May 14th. Today is May 14th. I have the Samsung Charge now.

Overall the specs are basically identical to the Nexus S. The Charge has a larger Super AMOLED Plus screen, and the addition of hardware buttons below the screen. I quickly installed Launcher Pro as the Samsung UI wasn’t doing it for me. The phone feels snappy and looks pretty good, having similar styling to the Nexus S.

Once I get it rooted (so I can remove the preinstalled crapware) it will be a great Verizon alternative to the Nexus S for me. (until the next awesome Verizon Android phone comes out!) ;)

Side note to Verizon: Concerning this “droid” campaign you have going on right now, CUT IT THE F*** OUT!!! IT IS TERRIBLE!! NO ONE WANTS A PHONE THAT LOOKS LIKE IT IS GOING TO KILL THEM!! It is loud, obnoxious, and damages the android brand HEAVILY. Please stop. Stop it. Do not do it anymore.

*UPDATE* I have returned the Samsung Charge to the Verizon store. Fortunately within 14 days, since it seems the return period is 14 days, not 30. This phone was the victim of Verizon branding and Samsung’s terrible interface makeover. The Charge was a great phone hardware-wise, but was completely ruined by the software tampering. Samsung’s Touchwiz interface is nothing short of terrible! Had this phone been running the “Google Experience” version of android it would have been much better off. The other major factor in the return was the HORRIFIC battery life. I was having the phone die on me before hitting noon. Completely unacceptable. On a side note, when I was returning the phone the Verizon rep flat out told me that the 4G was the reason the battery life was so incredibly terrible. Back the phone went. On to the next. My next phone may surprise many of you. :)

The size and feel of the device was very solid, but after getting past that, it kind of fell apart. We found the UI to not be very intuitive or discoverable. After figuring it out, however, the UI did offer some nice visuals.

After that, it was time to find out what kind of applications this thing had to offer. This was a source of disappointment. It seemed like every time I launched an app, Twitter, Facebook, and so on, it was simply just launching the browser and taking me to the website of those services.. I would assume there are third party applications in their catalog that are native code, this demo unit just wasn’t loaded with any.

Finally the price. At $499, $599, and $699, I am not really sure you are getting your moneys worth. If you are a die hard blackberry user and this thing integrates with that experience for you well, then great, otherwise I would say hold off.

The Hardware
I picked up a super cheap Acer Aspire One over at Fry’s.
Model:  D255E
Processor: 1.66GHz dual core Atom
Memory: 1GB (upgraded to 2GB for $23 from amazon)

All together the hardware came in at just under $200.

The OS
I downloaded the latest build of hexxeh’s Chromium OS called Flow from http://chromeos.hexxeh.net.

I then installed in on a 4GB thumb drive so I could verify that all the hardware was compatible, and it was!!

Instructions for installing the OS on a thumb drive can be found on the main page  http://chromeos.hexxeh.net (Linux, Windows, and Mac)

After all the hardware was verified working, it was time to install the OS on the internal drive!

1. Press Ctrl+Alt+T to switch to the command prompt
2. Type “shell” to go into the shell.
3. Type  ”/usr/sbin/chromeos-install”  and press Enter.
4. Enter the Root password “facepunch”
5. Follow any prompts
6. Unplug the thumb drive and reboot!

That’s it, it will now reboot into ChromeOS (and damn quickly)!

How is everything going a couple days later?
Everything is going great! At this point the only thing that doesn’t seem to work is binding the Caps Lock key to be the ChromeOS “Search” key, but that is not a huge deal.
I would like to swap out the standard 7200rpm HDD that I have in there with a much smaller and faster SSD. Since ChromeOS doesn’t need much space, there is no need for a 100GB spinning hard drive. This thing already boots in like 30 seconds, but why not make it a little faster :)

*UPDATE* I swapped out the 100GB 7200RPM HDD for a 16GB SSD! Amazing! Boot times have gone from 26 seconds down to 16 seconds!!!

1) Unlock the bootloader.

To unlock the bootloader, you reboot your phone into fastboot mode. you can do this by holding down the power and volume up key. At this point you connect your phone to your computer and fire up the terminal.

./fastboot oem unlock

2) Install Clockwork Recovery Mod

./fastboot flash recovery recovery-clockwork-3005-crespo.img

3) Flash CyanogenMod 7 RC2

boot into clockwork recovery and install the CyanogenMod 7 RC2
(I had to wipe my phone and clear the cache before the install would work)

4) Install google apps

install the google apps that are not included (for legal reasons i believe)

After this, I signed into my google account and my phone began pulling all of my apps settings back down from google’s servers.

FILES
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/123007/fastboot-mac.zip
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/123007/googleapps-20110120-signed.zip
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/123007/recovery-clockwork-3005-crespo.img
http://download.cyanogenmod.com/get/update-cm-7.0.0-RC1-NS-signed.zip

http://download.cyanogenmod.com/get/update-cm-7.0.0-RC2-NS-signed.zip

**This of course can explode your phone, so be careful and don’t do it if you are unsure.** KABLOOM!!!!!

Being that it is designed to be a gaming mouse, you will not see a lot of the buttons you would see on other mice, such as web browsing controls, or application launchers. This is actually a bonus for me because I never use those anyway. There are however 2 things about the scroll wheel I miss from many of the Logitech mice. The ability to set the wheel to a free-spin style of scrolling and the tilt back and forward. Not the end of the world, but took a while to get used to them not being there.

Overall, I am very pleased with the quality of the mouse. Solid construction and has enough weight to it to not feel cheap and flimsy. I am not a “hardcore gamer” so I don’t need my mouse to have user adjustable weights or any of that.

If you need a new mouse and maybe do a little gaming on the side, this is definitely one to check out. If not this one, check out Razer’s entire line, they seem to have a model for everyone.

I have a pretty new Unibody 15″ Apple MacBook Pro. It came with 2GB of RAM and a 2.8GHz Core 2 Duo processor. This is by no means a weak machine, but there is always room for improvement! The first upgrade I did was upgrading the RAM, since I always found myself being maxed out on RAM usage. I opted to skip the 4GB upgrade and jump directly to the max of 8GB. This upgrade was fantastic, and helped quite a bit with things slowing down during times of maxed out RAM. After this upgrade I still found things to be a bit sluggish during certain tasks. The only feasible upgrade left was, or course, the hard drive. The laptop came with a 500GB 5400rpm drive. This drive is not a performance drive by any means. There are a couple of choices when it comes to upgrading the drive. I could have gone with another 500GB drive that was running at 7200rpm instead of 5400rpm. This would boost performance by a small amount most likely for around $100. Not the ideal solution; what other options are there? Of course the ideal situation would be to get a Solid State Drive (SSD). The problem with this is price. Solid state drives are VERY VERY expensive and tend to run on the small size (storage capacity wise)!

What if there was a way to get the best of both worlds? Large capacity plus the speed of an SSD. Good news, there is!! The Seagate Momentus XT Hybrid Drive. This little beauty is a 500GB rotating HDD running at 7200rpm. Plus, and this is a BIG PLUS, this drive has 4GB of solid state storage to augment the drives storage.

After installing this drive into my laptop, it was like a whole new world! My system boots much much faster, applications launch in just a second or two. Overall, all aspects of my computer are much more speedy now. Would a pure SSD be faster? Probably. Would it be $1,370 faster? NO WAY!

If all you are doing is email and some light web browsing, then I can’t say it’s worth the extra $70 over a standard 500GB @7200rpm. But if you are running pretty much anything more resource intensive than that, it is ABSOLUTELY worth it!!

“Adaptive Memory technology intelligently monitors your frequently used applications and data files, then places them into the solid state portion of the drive so they can be quickly recalled.” -Seagate.com

The drive seems to get faster and faster, the more I use it. It feels too good to be true.

Key Specifications

500GB hard drive capacity

4GB SLC NAND solid state memory

7200-RPM spindle speed

32MB of drive-level cache

SATA 3Gb/s with Native Command Queuing

Hard Drive Pricing

500GB @5400rpm – OEM Stock

500GB @7200rpm – $60

512GB SSD – $1,500

500GB @7200rpm +4GB SSD – $130

Hard Drive Pricing. $/GB

500GB @7200rpm – $0.12

512GB SSD – $2.92

500GB @7200rpm +4GB SSD – $0.26

It has been a rough year for me in the cell phone area. Throughout this year I was on three or four different platforms across six or so handsets. It was definitely a year of swapping. I started out the year with a Motorola Droid that replaced my iPhone in October of 2009. From there I migrated to the Palm WebOS platform with a Palm Pre Plus handset. After that phone was dropped and left with a cracked screen, I moved to a Palm Pixi Plus, still on WebOS.The Pixi Plus was a super awesome little phone with a hardware keyboard that was a dream to use. When Microsoft Windows Phone 7 was announced I was (surprising) intrigued with what I saw. The phone that caught my attention was the HTC HD7. I went to see the phone in person and 30 minutes later walked out of the store with one in hand. Everything with the HD7 was going along nicely until December 16th came along. The release of the Google Nexus S. I looked at it online. I saw it in person. I ordered it online via express shipping! Why did I drop Windows Phone 7 so soon? Simple answer; google services. I use a ton of Google services everyday and the simple fact is that Windows Phone 7 does not integrate with Google services well at all (surprise!).

After a week of use, I am honestly completely blown away with this device / OS. The Nexus S is absolutely fantastic in the hardware and software departments. The Nexus is running the latest version of Android, 2.3 Gingerbread. A big plus to the Nexus S is that it runs a build of Android that is completely untouched by carriers or manufactures, just pure Google. When it comes to hardware, it feels like what I have been wanting in a phone for a very long time. Solid quality, great look, and not a lot of extra unnecessary crap.

Don’t get me wrong, I am still a huge fan of Palm/HP WebOS! The problem is that I personally can’t sit around and wait for things to shake out in the Palm/HP universe. And to be honest the drama that was pouring out of the community lately was starting to really bug me. I would love for WebOS 2.x to come out and make me switch right back. I am totally rooting for them, excellent group of people over there at Palm!

Windows Phone 7 is most definitely going to be a major contender as we head into 2011. Other players in this market are going to have to take notice quickly if they haven’t already. Unfortunately, as much as I like the OS, it will most likely never been what I need as long as I use a mac and a ton of Google services. I am however, VERY happy that there is a new contender in the phone OS war. Competition is what we need to move ahead!

As always this could change at any second, but I am calling the Nexus S the bar that all new phones must at least reach in order for me to even acknowledge. It is official, the Nexus S is the best phone I have ever used as of December 26th, 2010.

PROS:

• Beautiful screen
• Great build quality
• Comfortable to hold and talk on
• Doesn’t get hot when talking on the phone
• Gingerbread (Android 2.3) is brilliant
• “Anti-fingerprint screen coating” seems to actually be real!
• The power button is in the correct place (not on top)

CONS:

• No notification light / indicator
• No dedicated camera shutter button
• Very slippery

SIDENOTES:

• Haven’t been able to try the front facing camera on a video call yet
• Haven’t had the opportunity to try the NFC (Near Field Communication) anywhere

Contest Rules & Regulations

1. One drive per person.
2. USA only.
3. Shipping costs are covered by you. $9 for flat rate shipping.

PATA (IDE) Hard Drives

• Toshiba 40GB
• Fujitsu 60GB

SATA Hard Drives

• Fujitsu 250GB @5400rpm
• Hitachi 100GB @7200rpm
• Toshiba 60GB

Check out this link if you are unsure what the difference between the PATA and SATA connectors look like.

(Side Rant: Almost every time you see a picture of a Windows Phone, it is of the phone I have placed to the left here. Problem with this is, THIS PHONE DOES NOT EXIST! I love the design of this phone and this is the phone I wanted to buy. I can’t imagine how it makes any sense to anyone to market your product to consumers with a device that does not exist??)

Moving on.

Since the phone I really wanted was fake, I decided on what I thought to be the best phone in the first round of WP7 phones, the HTC HD7. The phone is quite beautiful, not perfect, but quite nice. I really like it. That is about all I am going to say about the hardware, since afterall, the hardware really doesn’t matter. The OS is what is important here, that is the part that is going to stick around, phone to phone, and (hopefully) grow with you.

From the very first use of the OS, I really thought they did it right. The design and user interafec are very beautiful and easy to use. I find the interface to be quite intuitive. (Somewhat hardware related) the OS is VERY snappy and responsive as well. The phone came with a pretty solid base of applications and services.

I really feel that if Microsoft stays on top of this platform and updates regularly, adding features, this platform is going to do very well and bring them back from the dead in the area of smartphones. Windows Mobile 6.5 was a complete disaster, which means they have an uphill battle trying to convince people that WP7 IS actually something different, not just a rev of that pile of garbage. I am really hoping they do not drop the ball on this one, because with enough effort, they will dominate the competition that has gotten far too comfortable in the mobile OS space.

Windows Phone 7 is definitely something to go check out in person.

Issues I am having:

• If you use Google calendar, and have multiple calendars, it only seems to sync the main one.
• I have had a couple apps crash, but a reboot fixed it. To be expected from a 1.0
• Unlike other mobile platforms that give you a choice of search engines and so forth, this does not. So far WP7 means you have to use all Microsoft properties. Bing, Bing maps, Internet Explorer, etc. I have to think this will evolve to more choices in the future if they want to compete and gain users.

Features that are still needed

• Taking screenshots (really?)
• Custom ringtones (really?)
• Copy & paste (really?)
• Folders

Applications that are still needed

• Pandora
• Evernote
• Toodledo sync
• Google Maps
• Dropbox
• More twitter apps (of course)
• Navigation Apps (that don’t cost $9.99/month)
• Official Google Voice
• More photo editing apps

If you have a WP7 phone and have more suggestions/hints/tips please feel free to leave them in the comments. If you don’t have a WP7 phone, feel free to ask anything in the comments also!

HTC HD7

Downloaded items like Operating System updates, Game patches, and movie downloads are generally very large and need to be downloaded for more than one computer in your house. Why download the same 800mb patch several different times, or worse at the same time?

Hardware wise, it would look much like your current wireless / wired router that you have at home. It would be almost identical to that kind of device, with the addition of either an internal hard drive or firewire/USB ports to allow for external storage. The device at it’s most basic level, would see that you are downloading an 800mb file called “OSupdate2010.dmg”, give it a unique hash that would include file origination data and store this file on the local hard drive. When your second computer tried to reach out to get this same file two days later, the device would intercept and serve it to you from the local hard drive rather than going back out to the internet to get it.

Of course, this device could either be used out of the box in “user mode” or set to a highly configurable “admin mode” with rules for how to handle data and file serving. Rules such as:

• If a file has not been accessed in X days, delete it.
• Only cache files larger than X mb.
• Only cache files for the following computers.
• Show warnings to user if the file is not currently cached and will use bandwidth.

Let me know what you think in the comments!

(@alcedine helped me (did most of the work) with this little mockup!) :)