Hasta La Gadget!

To be honest, netbooks scare me, but nettops scare me even more. Why do I need a neutered PC that isn’t portable? Well, at least the platform doesn’t need much power—even with a monitor.

The Wind Top AE1900 is an Atom 230-based system, supporting a max of 2GB of RAM on top of a 160GB hard drive, DVD burner, wireless n, card reader and webcam. But what makes it all exciting is the system’s 18.5-inch WSXGA 16:9 touch screen LCD, complete with a quick 5ms response time. You see, even with this much screen space, the computer needs only 45W to operate. And yes, that factoid is totally worth regurgitating my headline to reinforce that 45W is less than many light bulbs need.

As Rob at bbGadgets points out, “Now, I’m almost certain I had an Apple monitor that looked just like this about 7 years ago…” We’re pretty sure, too. The crazy thing is that this whole computer will cost thousand(s) less than that Apple Studio Display when it comes out to an undisclosed market at an undisclosed time. [MSI via bbGadgets]

We kind of have to post this fake picture of the next-generation iPhone. That we’ll see new iPhone hardware in the summer is almost certain — the last two years have set a pattern for summer unveilings. But the shape of that phone is less certain: How can Apple change the layout of something already so simple? I mean, it’s little more than a frickin screen.

That will not, of course, stop Apple-heads firing up the Photoshop and designing their own. This unattributed shot shows the first of these speculative efforts, a rather slimline iPhone which reintroduces the metal back of the original and puts a rather clunky looking speaker grill between the bezel and the screen.

There is one hint of authenticity, though. The bezel has grown. This follows the larger-looking, prominent black bezels of the newest unibody MacBooks.

One question is raised by this fakery: What will the new iPhone be called? The nomenclature is already confused — the second generation iPhone is called the 3G. IPhone 4G has a rather ridiculous and meaningless ring, reminiscent of the MP4 players available in all junk-vendors around the world. Our guess? A return to the simple “iPhone", just like the iPod of old, and leaving the way open for the inevitable iPhone Nano.

Is This The Next iPhone Photo? [Dotdosh via BBG]

(Credit: Sony)

No April Foolery here: Sony has announced that it’s dropping the price of the PlayStation 2 from $129 to $100 as of April 1. The move confirms rumors that had surfaced in recent days.

Originally introduced in 2000, the current iteration of the PS2 is a superslim …

Skype has, at last, come to the iPhone. Everyone’s favorite VoIP application is Wi-Fi-only — of course — but what is there works great. The best news, though, is for iPod Touch owners. Because Skype is Wi-Fi-only, if you have a 2G Touch and headphones with a microphone, you get the same functionality as the iPhone.

Let me make that clearer. This official, Apple-sanctioned application turns an iPod into a telephone. And it’s free. I took it for a very quick spin to see how it worked.

Skype is a very solid and polished application for a first release — it’s good to see that some developers resisted the urge to release crap in the App Store’s first week. After installing the 2.7MB app, you enter your username and password. You then see your contacts list. You can either see all contacts and narrow them down by typing into the search field, or opt to see only online contacts. It looks just as you would expect:

Touch a contact and you get the usual Skype choices: call or chat. Chatting works just like IM, with you and your chat partner’s pictures showing up next to speech bubbles containing the text. Neat and easy. You can also switch between chats and the app keeps your old chats so you can pick up where you left off.

But you really want to know about the phone part, right? In short, it works fine. Or, more accurately, it works as well as Skype on the desktop which means mixed quality and reliability. That’s a network issue, though — Skype for iPhone as software is probably even better than the desktop version.

I hooked up my Apple-made iPod headphones with remote and microphone. A test call to the Lady (after I woke her up) worked fine: Although the sound was very low on my end, she could hear me very clearly. There is, of course, no video. Here are a couple of shots:

As you can see, all the usual phone features are there, arranged in a very iPhone-like way. If you have a Skype account which includes Skype Out or you have a Skype number, you can use those to make and receive calls from regular phones. Dial just as you would with an iPhone:

The address book icon at the bottom calls up the standard iPhone/iPod Touch address book and will paste in numbers therefrom. I couldn’t try this part as I no longer use Skype Out since my parents entered the 21st century and came off dialup.

The conclusion? If you are a Skype user, you should have this application. It’s free, it is easy to use and just works. Being limited to Wi-Fi means it won’t change the face of telephony — yet. But for Skype the move to mobile devices is an inevitable step, and when the iPhone OS 3.0 surfaces, we should get call and chat notifications showing on the home screen and maybe even a plugin mic for the iPod Touch, making it a proper VoIP handset.

Product page [iTunes]

Hot on the heels of AT&T’s half-dozen new texting phones, Sprint and Kyocera Sanyo today announced a $29.99 (with contract and mail-in rebate) keyboarded  phone called the SCP-2700. (Kyocera bought Sanyo’s mobile phone division last year, so now they’re Kyocera Sanyo.)