Hasta La Gadget!

Don’t tell us you’ve forgotten about Lenovo’s pair of new Edge machines! Sure, they’ve taken a while to get to market, perhaps having been inconvenienced by a little hiccup with Intel’s Core 2011 chipsets, but the first of them is now well and truly on sale and the other is looking eager and ready to go too. The 14-inch E420s is up on Lenovo’s web store, starting at $699 with a 2.1GHz Core i3-2310M CPU, while its 12.5-inch sibling, the E220s, is expected on the 8th of April, judging by the roadmap doc we’ve uncovered below. The E420s touts what Lenovo calls an Infinity Glass display, meaning simply edge-to-edge glass, alongside a fingerprint reader, a fetching new matte black lid, a HD webcam, 4GB of RAM and 250GB of HDD storage at a minimum, and a 48.8Wh battery. A 1366 x 768 resolution is your only option, unfortunately, though you can spruce up performance by quite a bit if you opt for the i5-2410M, which does 2.3GHz at default speeds or 2.9GHz when only one of its two cores is pushed to the limit … or should that be to the Edge?

[Thanks, Chris and Abdu]

Continue reading ThinkPad Edge E420s now shipping for $699, E220s coming in April

ThinkPad Edge E420s now shipping for $699, E220s coming in April originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 28 Mar 2011 04:35:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Not to say Staples’ release schedule is the be-all-end-all resource when it comes to US availability, but we’ll take any guidance we can get when it comes to the two mystery products tucked beside Dell’s Streak and Apple’s iPad 2. According to this tablet lineup, Acer’s Iconia Tab will be hitting shelves for an undisclosed rate at the end of April, while the still unnamed Toshiba tablet gets loosed in mid-June. We’ll feel a lot better about the wait once these things are priced, but for now, you’ve got two more reasons to rush the rest of winter away — assuming you’re north of the Mason-Dixon, of course.

Staples leak reveals April / June ship dates for Acer Iconia Tab, Toshiba tablet originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 22 Mar 2011 13:32:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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We know you’ve got questions, and if you’re brave enough to ask the world for answers, here’s the outlet to do so. This week’s Ask Engadget question is coming to us from Sheikh Adnan Abdullah, who seems to need a MacBook Air not made by Apple (or a KIRF counterpart). If you’re looking to send in an inquiry of your own, drop us a line at ask [at] engadget [dawt] com.

“I currently own a Macbook Air, but I’m not a big fan of Mac OS. I’m planning to transition back to Windows. Can you recommend me a 13- to 14-inch Windows PC that is as light as a MacBook Air and provides the same amount of battery life? Thanks!”

We just have to believe that this fellow isn’t in this boat alone, and while the obvious answer is to just install a fresh copy of Windows 7 onto the MBA through Parallels or Boot Camp, it’s quite possible that he’s trying to shake the entire Apple design. So, outside of MSI’s X-Slim series, is there anything on the Wintel side quite like Apple’s thinnest laptop ever?

Ask Engadget: best PC alternative to 13-inch MacBook Air? originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 18 Mar 2011 23:38:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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This article was written on March 10, 2011 by CyberNet.

Windows only
Last year we wrote about a useful program called WizMouse that would let you scroll windows that were in the background (i.e. a window not in focus).  I use this kind of functionality all the time when writing articles, but it also carries over into other situations. For example, the other day I had two spreadsheets open and was comparing values between them. Normally in Windows I’d have to constantly switch focus between the two spreadsheets if I wanted to scroll each of them. With an app like WizMouse that’s not the case because I can simply hover my mouse over any window, and then use my scroll wheel to navigate through the content. This kind of behavior is built-in to Mac OS X, but not Windows.

I’m not here to talk about WizMouse though. When we wrote the article Amber left a comment with an alternative app called KatMouse. It has some settings that set it apart such as the ability to push in the middle mouse button to have it send the foreground window to the background. You can also specify custom scroll settings on a per-application basis, which is definitely helpful for those programs that seem to scroll at different rates. Plus you can always click on the cat icon in the System Tray to quickly disable/enable the functionality.

How do some of these features work? Here’s a slightly abbreviated version of the KatMouse usage as described by the developer:

• Scroll most windows page wise by holding the wheel button over the window and clicking the left (up) or right (down) mouse button. If you hold the left or right mouse button, you’ll get continuous, accelerating pagewise scrolling.
• To push a window to the stack bottom, just click with the wheel button on the window (double click on ‘always on top’ windows). This works even while dragging something with the mouse (i.e. copying files from one explorer to another). To raise that window again, click and hold the wheel button on it for some time.
• Choose individual wheel scroll settings for applications and windows. In the Applications tab, choose the applications executable file in the file dialog and set the desired scroll width by double clicking on the new entry in the list.
• In the Classes tab you can select the kind of window (its class) to customize by draggin the crosshair to the window. If the chosen window does not behave correctly you can disable the ‘Window has wheel scrolling support’ checkbox in its settings dialog. This will force KatMouse to use a different, possibly less efficient approach to scrolling the window.

The good news is that KatMouse is just as efficient as WizMouse in terms of memory usage. I found it consuming a mere 1.1MB on my system, and I’m definitely willing to give it those resources for the functionality I get in return.

KatMouse Homepage (Windows only; Freeware)

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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Mouse Wheel Scrolling in Background WindowsMake Better Use of Your Mouse’s Scroll WheelFirefox 2.0 Gets Undo Close Tab & Scrolling TabsCreate Custom Hotkeys for WindowsMake the XP Taskbar Transparent

It sure took ’em long enough, but ViewSonic’s dual-booting ViewPad 10 has finally, really, actually made it to America. A few days after the iPad 2 most likely sucked any remaining wind out of its sails, mind you, but it’s quite possible that the target market for an Android 1.6 + Windows 7 tablet couldn’t care less about a similar one from Apple. If you’ll recall, this one’s rocking a 10.1-inch touchpanel (1024 x 600), 1.66GHz Atom CPU, 2GB of RAM, Bluetooth 2.1, 802.11b/g/n WiFi, a 1.3 megapixel front-facing camera and a version of Android we forgot about in 1994. You’ll also find a microSD slot and a copy of Windows Home 7 Premium (with a 16GB SSD) or Windows 7 Professional (with a 32GB SSD). Still interested? Just wait until we tell you all about the $599 and $679 price tags, respectively.

P.S. – Yeah, that’s OS X shown running on the ViewPad 10 above. No, it won’t actually do that in real life.

Continue reading ViewSonic’s dual-booting Android / Windows 7 ViewPad 10 tablet now shipping

ViewSonic’s dual-booting Android / Windows 7 ViewPad 10 tablet now shipping originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 08 Mar 2011 11:24:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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