There are laptops and then there are laptops. The Envy 15 has fallen into that second category ever since we got our hands-on: it’s the first PC we’ve seen that really equals the MacBook Pro’s unibody design and it packs a scorching-fast Intel Core i7 processor, ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4850 graphics and Beats speakers. On paper, this is easily the hottest laptop we’ve seen in some time, but has HP really managed to deliver on that promise? We spent a few days with this $1,800 monster, so read on to see if it lives up to the hype.
We’ve spent some time on Wacom‘s first-ever hybrid tablet — the Bamboo Pen & Touch which, surprise, surprise, features independent stylus and multitouch finger inputs. Multitouch-equipped computer users may not be as stoked, but let’s not forget those aspiring artists who are stuck with an old-school trackpad or a desktop sans touchscreen. Compared to previous pen-only models the $99 Pen & Touch should make life easier for tablet newbies, especially by eliminating the hassle of constantly switching between the stylus and the mouse. No, really: using the stylus as a mouse is just plain torture as the tablet’s drawing area is mapped with the screen, which equates to extra hard work when you try to point your stylus at tiny buttons (you can switch to “Mouse mode” in preferences, but that’s still extra donkey work). Do read on for some hands-on thoughts.
We hope you like pink. Cloud Engines’ new iteration of Pogoplug just landed on our doorstep, oddly enough packed with an unopened pack of microwavable popcorn (something tells us we’re missing a joke here). We’re still in the plugging-in-and-testing phase, but no point in depriving you of the unboxing fun while we do that, right? Right. Enjoy the gallery below.
This article was written on July 31, 2007 by CyberNet.
Time Saving Tuesday
I’ve been doing a lot of talking about pie menus lately, and several people have contacted us wondering what they actually are. Most of the time I mention them when referring to Windows 7, which is the codename of Vista’s successor. With the possibility of Windows 7 receiving an interface overhaul, it wouldn’t surprise me in the least to see pie menus being used.
I’ve mentioned pie menus because I believe that they are the future replacement of the current right-click menu. How so? They put all of the needed commands in a circular ring around your mouse, instead of in a long menu. This gives you faster access to the commands that you need the most (copy, paste, etc…) and, if designed correctly, would put your most-used commands at the root of the pie menu.
You’re probably still a little confused about how the whole thing works, so I searched for a good 2-hours trying to find a decent example of a pie menu that everyone can play with. Finally I came across a Windows app called Orbit that is completely free, and if you download one of the nightly builds you won’t even have to install it. You’ll probably find that it has some pitfalls, so watch my demonstration below before you go and try it out.
The brief video that I put together first walks you through the various settings that Orbit has, and then I demonstrate how the pie menu actually works. This one has a unique feature that I had never seen in a pie menu before, and it is something that I believe could make me much more productive. So checkout the video and then I’ll explain a few things afterwards:
As you can see, the pie menu is capable of putting a lot of useful tasks immediately around the cursor, meaning you have to move your mouse a minimal distance to get to what you’re looking for.
The feature I found to be unique to this pie menu is the list of running applications. Not only was it able to show which apps I had running, but it also showed a screenshot of what they looked like. I have to admit that I was thoroughly impressed with Orbit considering that this version had not been updated in well over a year.
So how is this actually useful? Imagine that your cursor is at the top of the screen, and you want to switch applications. Right now you have to move your mouse all the way to the Taskbar on bottom of the screen just to do the switch (unless you use keyboard shortcuts). Having a pie menu available lets you perform the switch in much less time than navigating all the way down to the Taskbar.
Now imagine a pie menu that not only contains your running applications, but also holds shortcuts to your favorite programs and your most used commands. A pie menu that adapts to my needs would surely be worth its weight in gold.
To my surprise, there is a lacking of applications that implement useful pie menus, but if I had to give a gold star to any of them it would be Orbit. It has a nice interface and a lot of features, but you can’t really control the programs that show up. The bad news is that development on the Orbit application also appears to have stopped early last year.
So where are all of the cool programs? I don’t know, you tell me. Microsoft gave a demonstration back in 2005 for where they thought Windows would be in 2010, and it used pie menus for a majority of the tasks. I’m not saying that it’s a sure thing for Windows 7, but I think we should be getting used to the idea of working with pie menus.
I do have another cool thing that I found regarding pie menus, but I’ll save that for tomorrow’s edition of CyberNotes!
This article was written on April 17, 2007 by CyberNet.
Mozilla has hit another huge milestone, this time with their email management software called Thunderbird. The newest Thunderbird 2 contains a whole list of new features that I normally just point out really quick. This time I wanted to go a different route and visually walk you through Thunderbird 2 so that you can better determine if it is right for you before installing it.
Before I get into my review, I wanted to first point out that the release notes page for Thunderbird 2 is up but still refers to the last release candidate. Mozilla hasn’t officially announced the release of Thunderbird 2, but they have already begun prepping their FTP mirrors for the big release.
To download Mozilla Thunderbird 2 straight from one of Mozilla’s mirrors, just select your language below and choose the appropriate operating system:
Alright, let’s go ahead and jump into everything that makes Thunderbird 2 so great!
Account Setup
As soon as you start Thunderbird 2 you’ll be prompted to setup email accounts or RSS feeds. The wizard is pretty self explanatory and walks you through everything you will need to do.
Reading Emails & New Mail Notifier
Mozilla has redesigned the user interface to not only make it more pleasant on the eyes, but also more usable. The notifier (as seen in the first screenshot below) has been revamped to give the user much of the information they need to recognize whether the email needs to be viewed immediately. The only thing that I have found it lacks is a way to pin the notifier so that it does not automatically retract itself.
Tagging Emails
Tagging is becoming a more important way for users to keep photos, files, and emails more organized. Thunderbird 2 is the first version of Mozilla’s email client to offer a tagging feature.
Find as you Type
Finding a specific email can be pretty tricky when you get hundreds a day. Luckily Thunderbird 2 offers a great new feature to instantly search for emails as you type in the Search Box.
Options
Like always, we enjoy being able to customize an application to our every whim. This is actually one of the most important features for me when trying to find just the right application for the job. That is why I made sure to capture nearly all of the different options you can change in the screenshots below. Oh yeah, and the options page received a nice facelift as well!
Account Settings
There are a lot of settings (as always) when it comes to managing your email accounts as well. You can do everything from attaching a signature, to configuring which account Thunderbird uses to send your emails by default.
Other
There were a few last things that I wanted to throw in screenshots in for, and pictured left to right you’ll see the Composition Window, adding a contact, the Address Book, and the About Page for Thunderbird.
I know that Mozilla put a lot of time and care into this release, so I wanted to make sure I did Thunderbird 2 justice by providing as many screenshots as I could. This email client is among the best out there, and if you haven’t tried it out for yourself then you haven’t experienced the simplicity and power that Thunderbird has to offer.
Lala’s business model of selling and hosting digital music was a complete abhorrence to an innovative music startup — named Lala. When the site launched, it was a CD trading service that held up the integrity of the album and the virtues of physical content ownership in an online music market of single-track downloads and subscription-based music rentals. To its trade-by-mail CD service, Lala added CD sales, playlist creation, and for a short time even owned a former broadcast radio station. It had to ultimately scale back, though, on what would have been its most audacious move, giving away full streaming of the major labels’ catalog — all in the name of driving song purchases.
Lala’s shifting strategies through the years may have led many to think that its recent acquisition by Apple would represent radical changes to Apple’s music approach. Lala lives on a Web page, streams from the cloud, and gives users, including Google search users, one full free play of any song in its library. But Lala’s business model was always, at its core, more like iTunes’ than any number of streaming music companies — from the custom radio of Pandora to the subscription downloads of Rhapsody. Those services, however, have long been better at Apple at fostering music exploration when compared with iTunes’ 30-second samples.
There are plenty of ways to be green these days, but without some sort of feedback it’s hard to know just what shade you are. Enter Google’s PowerMeter, a service that tells you how much current you’re responsible for consuming. Why, it even shades its bar graphs in green, getting more pale the greedier you become. Google has partnerships with some utility companies in the US, Canada, and India, meaning a select few of you can do this sort of tracking by default. The rest of us were left out — until now. Two devices on the market let you track your usage in PowerMeter regardless of just how backwards your utility company is: The Energy Detective’s TED 5000 and the AlertMe Energy. We’ve been experimenting with these two for about a month now, finding that they serve the same purpose in very different ways and at very different costs. Click on through to see which one can best help you get greener.
What if you took an original Adamo, shaved a couple pounds off the weight and a grand off the price? You’d end up with something pretty close to the new Dell Vostro V13. We just got a quick look at the machine, and while some of the cheaper materials Dell is using here certainly came through, the total package is still quite impressive — and the price unimpeachable. The anodized aluminum exterior is smooth to the touch and gives the frame of the entire laptop a great amount of stiffness; none of that bendy nonsense that can be found in some of the $500ish thin-and-light competition. We were also pleasantly surprised to find a antigloss (not quite matte) display under the hood. Unfortunately, the compromises begin with the keyboard, which is a bit bendy and “clacky” (the bad version of “clicky”), and the 6 volt battery gets 4.75 hours as quoted, so probably around three in real life. We’re also a little disappointed that the $450 base price rips out the SD card and ExpressCard slots, and that you can’t get a Windows 7 version for under $600 — even though the Ubuntu default is mighty tempting. So, there are compromises, just like in life, but for the most part this is one of the least timid computers we’ve seen from Dell in a while: not afraid to step on the toes of its brandmates and make a name for itself. Check out a quick video hands-on after the break, and stand by for our review that should hopefully arrive later this month.
Update: We got some bad info, and it turns out that the ExpressCard and SD card slots do come standard with the laptop — the mockup we saw didn’t have them, but all shipping models will. Phew!
When we first caught wind of Barnes & Noble’s Nook — a device clearly positioned to give the Amazon Kindle and Sony’s options a run for their money — we were understandably interested. As voracious readers and lovers of fresh gadgetry, a new contender on the e-reader scene is more than welcome. When we discovered that Barnes & Noble’s offering would not only feature a full color touchscreen component, but would run Google’s Android OS as well… let’s just say we were pretty much in gadget-hog-heaven. We weren’t without our reservations, mind you; the appearance of this device made for some pretty heated conversations amongst the staff over whether or not we were seeing the dawn of a truly commercially viable e-reader. Of course, for us the proof is always in the pudding, and since B&N is about to launch a full assault against the current offerings, it’s our duty to turn over a report. Is the Nook the answer to our e-reader prayers, or just a stepping stone to greener pastures? We’ve taken a long, hard look at the device — so read on for the official Engadget review.
Previous reviews haven’t been all smiles, but we’re finally able to pick up Nikon’s Coolpix S70 and see for ourselves. On form factor alone, it’s a pretty alluring build — even the faux leather front is tastefully done. While the tap-to-focus feature is a nice addition, we’re less enthused about the OLED screen’s viewing angles when outside — and seeing as we’ve go no other way to see the memories we’re framing, that’s pretty disappointing. We’re still putting it through its paces before we dole out full impressions, but in the meantime, enjoy our unboxing and hands-on photos.
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I’ve been doing a lot of talking about pie menus lately, and several people have contacted us wondering what they actually are. Most of the time 
