Hasta La Gadget!

The device is currently available for order on Amazon, but users will need to wait until mid-July for the device to ship.

Originally posted at The Digital Home

Sony’s Vaio Z comes with the world’s biggest dongle

While it is deemed acceptable to connect a subwoofer to your stereo, and external battery or speaker to your phone or a giant external monitor to your laptop, putting normally essential — and internal — laptop components in external boxes is kind of taboo.

It harks back to the dark days of the 90s, when carrying a laptop meant carrying a black nylon bag containing a heavy Dell notebook, an external DVD burner, a few spare batteries and a power-brick the size of a modern netbook. The whole lot weighed as much as a fair-sized toddler, and was just as annoying.

But now Sony is re-treading that historic route, thanks to the wonders of Thunderbolt (which Sony still calls Light Peak). The new Vaio Z packs the usual high-end internals — 8GB RAM, a 256GB SSD, a 1600 x 900 13-inch screen and Intel’s HD Graphics 3000 — but for those who need a little graphics push, there is the Power Media Dock with a AMD Radeon 6650M GPU graphics card (1GB RAM). The box is also home to an optical drive and an array of extra ports (USB, USB 3.0, VGA, HDMI).

I tease about the external box, but it actually seems like a great idea. You get a slim (16.65mm) and light (1.2kg) notebook with a seven-hour battery life to carry with you, but when you get to your desk you need only to plug in the power and Light Peak cables and you have instantly expanded it into a fast desktop system.

This kind of setup could replace desktop PCs for most people.

The Vaio Z is available in various configurations, depending on things like CPU and Blu-Ray players, and starts at £2,700 ($4,310) in the UK Sony Store.

Ultimate performance and design: ultra-mobile new VAIO Z Series from Sony weighs under 1.2kg [Press Release Sony Europe]

See Also:

• How Thunderbolt Could Hook Up Notebooks With Powerful Peripherals …
• Light Peak

Apple releases Thunderbolt cable and accompanying FirmWare update, along with new Thunderbolt-equipped external RAID array.

Yes, this is another concept bicycle project, but this time there’s a difference. The designer, Vojtěch Sojka, has actually made a working prototype, and it looks pretty sweet.

Working at the University of Technology in Brno, Czech Republic, Sojka developed the electric bike with Czech bike company Superior. From a distance, it looks like a cross between the Specialized Stumpjumper and a BMX. Step a little closer and you see the usual additions beloved of concept-bike designers.

The brakes are disk brakes, the handlebars and stem are annoyingly melded into one hard-to-replace unit and the battery is hidden away inside the seat tube. But there are also some rather practical design decisions.

While the fork gets some internal suspension, the rear relies on fat tires for rider-comfort. Unless you have some pressing reason for long-travel suspension, fat tires and sprung saddles are probably the best (and most maintenance-free) way to go. Next up is the position of the electric motor. It’s inside the bottom bracket, keeping the weight in the center of the bike. Finally, the Shimano Alfine hub on the rear wheel keeps the lines clean and the gearing simple.

The most interesting part of the bike, though, is the omission of seat-stays. This was done to make it easy to fit the carbon belt drive. As carbon belts can’t be broken and relinked by chains, you usually need an opening section in the seat stay to fit the things. Sojka’s design obviates that need. It also means the entire weight over the rear wheel is borne by the chainstay/bottom bracket joint, which worries me.

Why not use removable, bolt-on seat-stays like you find on many old Dutch Bikes?

Still, Sojka’s bike is one of the better concepts we have seen, and gains extra marks for actually existing in a real, rideable state. I’d totally take it for a spin.

City Electric Bicycle by Vojtěch Sojka [Bicycle Design]

See Also:

• Even The Laziest Rider Could Use this Electric Commuter Bike …
• Zaaf's Concept Bike As Fragile As the Granny That Would Ride it …
• Rael Concept Bike With Rear-View Camera
• Cannondale Concept Cross-Breeds Bike and Shopping-Cart
• City Concept Commuter Bike for Non-Cyclists
• Scary-Looking Concept Bike is All Corners

Sure, you could have fired up Fring to make four-way video calls from your iPad 2 this whole time, but you’d have saddled with an iPhone-sized interface on your 9.7-inch IPS screen. And, as we say around the Engadget compound — tablet optimized or get the frack out. OK, we don’t really say that, but everything is better when it’s designed for the screen you intend to use it on. So, we’re very pleased to tell you that Fring has been updated with proper iPad support (cue cheers). Basically there’s no reason to use Facetime now, with its lame single-caller and WiFi only limitations. Hit up the source link if you’re in the group video chatting mood.

Fring optimizes its four-way video calling app for smiley iPad 2 owners originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 28 Jun 2011 06:57:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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