Hasta La Gadget!

The Toshiba U400 is a very sleek and professional looking laptop that barely tips the 2kg scales – so its a sure fire hit in the portability department. It has some really nice touches – but there are some glaring problems as well.

Usability

This keys on the keyboard press down nicely and they feel light to the touch. The keys are raised, but not to much and enable quick typing without your fingers getting caught on any of the other keys. The touch pad is seamless with the rest of the casing and feels smooth to the touch – the only problem with this is that you sometimes don’t notice that your finger has slipped off the side of the touch pad and end up wondering why your mouse isn’t moving. The touch pad is nicely lit up at night by a little LED bar light that glows above the touch pad.

There are the usual controls on the top of the keyboard, back light on/off, launch windows media player, play stop and directional controls which also all glow a crisp white should you choose to use them. All the quick navigation keys are used by gliding your finger over them and no pressing is required. The same goes for the lighting which can be turned off when not needed to preserve battery power.

It comes loaded with a built in web camera which boasts a maximum resolution of 1280×1024 in picture and video mode which comes in handy for keeping in touch with your loved ones who are miles away. The built in microphone is located right next to it so it picks up audio very decently. It also boasts a DVD-RW drive making it a powerful, yet small, notebook. It also has a built in card-reader (SD/MD etc.), which enables easy sharing from your camera.

All the Software

The laptop comes loaded with a host of software apart from Windows Vista Home Premium including Google Desktop Search, Picassa software, McAfee Security Centre, Desktop SMS, Google Earth and many more all of which make it slow to boot up and i can almost guarantee that most of them will be removed within the first couple of days use. In terms of power, this notebook isn’t meant to be a power house and doesn’t boast a very impressive windows vista rating, coming in at an expected 2.4 with the graphics card being the lowest denominator.

Pros

• Small and light – less than 2Kgs
• Bright screen – Thanks to TruBrite technology
• Large 250 Gig HDD

Cons

• Graphics, could have packed some more punch.
• Doesnt have Wireless-N

Conclusion

Its a great little notebook that fits neatly into the market place and looks great compared to its competitors. It will do well for those who use laptops while travelling and don’t require all the power that you get from the larger more powerful notebooks.

Pricing and Availability

The Toshiba U400 can be purchased from Jump Shopping and retails for around R7400

Full Specs

• Dimensions: 314×229×27.5mm
• Weight: 1900g
• Operating system: Windows Vista Home Premium
• Processor: Intel Core 2 Duo T5550 1.83GHz
• RAM: 3GB
• Storage: 250GB
• Graphics card: Intel 965
• Screen size: 13.3in
• Screen resolution: 1280×800px
• Optical drive: DVD Multi
• Wi-Fi: Yes
• Firewire: Yes
• DVI: No
• Bluetooth: Yes
• HDMI: No
• USB: 4
• Digital TV card: No

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The Motorokr sports a superb set of features beyond that of a simple speakerphone, also integrating Bluetooth music devices with car stereos.

Have a spare set of undies handy

There is hype and then there is a full-length feature film created and sold as a stand-alone product for the sole purpose of promoting the game it is based on. Yes, you read correctly and that’s not all in this game’s hype arsenal, it also packs an excellent (and bandwidth heavy) set of website experiences second to none and I have fallen for it hook, line and sinker. All I can hope for now is that the game lives up to all of this.

The story

My first introduction to Dead Space, the soon-to-be released horror shooter from EA, was a voiced-over comic strip created to tell the game’s back-story. Utilizing the skills of veteran graphic novelist Anthony Johnston, the comic is made up of a series of roughly drawn stills and there are currently five episodes. The story begins on a far-flung colony in a backwater solar system owned by the Concordance Extraction Corporation, a massive mining company that goes around establishing huge colonies on vacant planets then “cracking” those planets and extracting all of the mineral wealth to be had there before moving on. Without giving too much away, the comic series follows several characters which, by all accounts, aren’t actually going to be featuring in the game (‘cos they all die in the sh*t-storm that is the 5th episode, oops did I say that?). The trouble starts when a huge monolith is found on the planet and it immediately seen as a “marker” by some religious folk who subscribe to the faith called “unitology”- this religion is far more popular than it appears and, well, lets just say that people in high places see the marker as something special too.

The Game

The actual game will take place almost exclusively in board the Ishimura, a massive corporation ship that arrived in orbit around the planet to pick-up the marker. You play Isaac Clarke, an engineer sent to investigate why contact was suddenly lost with the ship once the marker had been loaded. You can guess what he finds…and its not friendly. The crew has been killed and mutated into devilish and vile zombie-like creatures with the express intent on extinguishing all things living. Another horror-zombie game I hear you say? Not quite.

For one thing, if the full length feature animation, the website experiences and the comic are anything to go by, the story-line is highly involved. Certainly this is not a first for a zombie-shooter (the Silent Hill series comes to mind here) but Silent Hill only got a movie after all of the games came out- not before.

The weapons and tactics used to kill these mutated denizens are also unique as the developers chose to focus on incorporating strategic dismemberment into the very fabric of the game. In short, instead of aiming for the biggest chunk of the zombie-creature and firing at it with your biggest gun, you have to tear the nasties limb from limb to kill them. On top of this, each type of zombie has to be killed differently as, if you tear off the wrong limb, it may still overwhelm you.

The weapons themselves are purported to be varied and fully-customizable. From industrial machinery to standard-issue security weaponry, nearly all of the weapons can be modded for more punching power, range or just for the hell of it.

I have pre-booked my copy! Watch this space for a review soon.

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Although you don’t get a price break by buying the package instead of the individual devices, we still consider this one of the best mouse and keyboard packages on the market. It combines an even better version of our favorite mouse and an equally adept keyboard at a very reasonable price.

The 2009 Dodge Challenger is truly a muscle car for the 21st century, with the power and the technology to back it up; we only wish the interior matched the price tag.