Selasa, 27 September 2011
Sabtu, 24 September 2011
GETAX GX-500 - You Can't Kill This Laptop
Traditionally, rugged laptops have required a military-grade surplus of tradeoffs. Typically this has meant lower-speed, older CPUs, tiny hard drives, a dearth of ports and even prior-generation operating systems installed.
Whether the manufacturers were reluctant to change configurations regularly or buyers simply didn’t care about performance is a mystery. Either way, you got a bulky and durable machine, but one that crawled along at the most basic of tasks.
That changes with Getac’s X500: A rugged laptop that, finally, has the tech chops to back up its MIL-SPEC cred. Certified for MIL-STD-810G and IP65 (your standard shock, water and fungus resistance) and “ready” for MIL-STD-461F (which covers electromagnetic interference), the Getac X500 is a handle-equipped, 12.4-pound slab of magnesium alloy and rubber with plenty of power under the hood.
Internally, the X500 is powered by a 2.67GHz Core i7 CPU, 4GB of RAM and a 160GB solid state hard drive. Integrated graphics, you say? No: The X500 springs for an impressive Nvidia GeForce GT 330M. The 15.6-inch LCD only provides 1366×768-pixel resolution, but it’s designed for outdoor viewing, giving it a blinding level of brightness. (In fact, it’s quantitatively the brightest display I’ve ever tested.) The display also features a (resistive) touchscreen: It works with your fingertip, but the included stylus is a better bet for accuracy.
Performance is off-the-charts stellar. The X500 turned in near-record marks on both general productivity apps and, shockingly, gaming framerates. That’s excellent news for our military readers: The X500 is just as good for killing actual insurgents as it is for virtual ones.
I also tested the X500’s rugged chops by dropping it several times, dousing it with water and even parking a Subaru Forester on it. Damage was never worse than surface scuffs and cosmetics: The pavement scraped up the underside of the laptop and shredded the rubber feet, but those appear to be easily replaceable and designed to take some punishment. The photos above were all shot after I rained abuse upon it, and as you can see, it doesn’t look battered or frayed.
Gripes, aside from the beastly size, are moderate. The fan is so loud and powerful that it blew papers off my desk from a distance of 18 inches. The touchpad is dismally unresponsive, making it one of the few times I actually preferred to use a laptop’s touchscreen to the traditional pointer.
Whether you’re out there in the field or find yourself playing the role of Chairborne Ranger, Getac’s latest has guts enough for the toughest of tasks. Of course, if the weight doesn’t give you a hernia, the price might. But since it’s likely being bought on Uncle Sam’s dime, well, what do you care?
WIRED Amazingly tough. Doesn’t skimp on performance. LCD viewable in everything short of direct sunlight. All ports protected under secure, but easy to use, snap closures.
TIRED Puny battery life — barely two hours — will not outlast forced march to Kandahar. No USB 3.0. Two serial ports but no parallel port? Come on, Getac! Hulk-inspired looks won’t exactly help you out with the ladies at Starbucks.
Whether the manufacturers were reluctant to change configurations regularly or buyers simply didn’t care about performance is a mystery. Either way, you got a bulky and durable machine, but one that crawled along at the most basic of tasks.
That changes with Getac’s X500: A rugged laptop that, finally, has the tech chops to back up its MIL-SPEC cred. Certified for MIL-STD-810G and IP65 (your standard shock, water and fungus resistance) and “ready” for MIL-STD-461F (which covers electromagnetic interference), the Getac X500 is a handle-equipped, 12.4-pound slab of magnesium alloy and rubber with plenty of power under the hood.
Internally, the X500 is powered by a 2.67GHz Core i7 CPU, 4GB of RAM and a 160GB solid state hard drive. Integrated graphics, you say? No: The X500 springs for an impressive Nvidia GeForce GT 330M. The 15.6-inch LCD only provides 1366×768-pixel resolution, but it’s designed for outdoor viewing, giving it a blinding level of brightness. (In fact, it’s quantitatively the brightest display I’ve ever tested.) The display also features a (resistive) touchscreen: It works with your fingertip, but the included stylus is a better bet for accuracy.
Performance is off-the-charts stellar. The X500 turned in near-record marks on both general productivity apps and, shockingly, gaming framerates. That’s excellent news for our military readers: The X500 is just as good for killing actual insurgents as it is for virtual ones.
I also tested the X500’s rugged chops by dropping it several times, dousing it with water and even parking a Subaru Forester on it. Damage was never worse than surface scuffs and cosmetics: The pavement scraped up the underside of the laptop and shredded the rubber feet, but those appear to be easily replaceable and designed to take some punishment. The photos above were all shot after I rained abuse upon it, and as you can see, it doesn’t look battered or frayed.
Gripes, aside from the beastly size, are moderate. The fan is so loud and powerful that it blew papers off my desk from a distance of 18 inches. The touchpad is dismally unresponsive, making it one of the few times I actually preferred to use a laptop’s touchscreen to the traditional pointer.
Whether you’re out there in the field or find yourself playing the role of Chairborne Ranger, Getac’s latest has guts enough for the toughest of tasks. Of course, if the weight doesn’t give you a hernia, the price might. But since it’s likely being bought on Uncle Sam’s dime, well, what do you care?
WIRED Amazingly tough. Doesn’t skimp on performance. LCD viewable in everything short of direct sunlight. All ports protected under secure, but easy to use, snap closures.
TIRED Puny battery life — barely two hours — will not outlast forced march to Kandahar. No USB 3.0. Two serial ports but no parallel port? Come on, Getac! Hulk-inspired looks won’t exactly help you out with the ladies at Starbucks.
Toshiba Satellite P755 - Earth To Toshiba, Come In Toshiba
It’s kind of amazing what $880 will get you these days: 15.6 inches of laptop, with a Core i5 CPU, 6GB of RAM, a 750 GB hard drive and high-end Nvidia GeForce GT 540M graphics. Laptop buyers looking for all the basics and beyond couldn’t go wrong with specs like this, and Toshiba aims to give it to them with the new Satellite P755.
Performance is decidedly mixed. While you may spend years filling that monstrous hard drive, the P755 is on the sluggish side when it comes to general application capabilities. It’s good enough for its price class but it pales in comparison to other machines that come equipped with this round of Intel Core CPUs. The exception, however, lies in the P755’s graphics capabilities. While some of its gaming scores were just average (Far Cry 2, Call of Juarez), on one older game (Doom 3) it turned in the all-time highest framerates we’ve seen to date.
Those high-end components and gaming performance, alas, come at a troubling price. Not one of coinage but of quality. Plastic from top to bottom, to call the P755 flimsy would be charitable. The rickety chassis feels like it would shatter into oblivion were it to fall off the desk, a worry uncountered by the iffy fit and finish of things like the power socket, within which the AC adapter’s plug wobbles around like straw in a Coke bottle. The keyboard is also mushy and cheap. Typing on it is about as pleasurable as punching in your PIN at the ATM.
Other hardware issues cropped up in my testing, too. While I love all the lights on the device — the bar of backlight above the trackpad and in the array of touch-sensitive buttons along the top of the keyboard — it’s unclear why the keyboard isn’t backlit as well. Those buttons themselves are a little muddy, too. There’s no indication whether the audio is muted or the Wi-Fi is on; the buttons are always lit up in the same color either way.
Finally there’s a larger complaint to consider. The battery life of 1 hour, 44 minutes is paltry. But when it died, the P755 indicated it had over an hour of running time left. That adds up to a lot of troubling stuff to think about when it comes time to decide whether to invest in this laptop. My hunch is that its issues won’t extend to every Satellite, which means that $880 amounts to a big roll of the dice.
WIRED Big hard-drive. Some amazing gaming performance for a relative budget machine. The price is certainly right.
TIRED Cheap build, with lots of unfinished elements. Horrible keyboard. Extremely dim screen. Major concerns about battery capacity and reliability.
MSI GX660 - Gaming Notebook Nose-Dives off Ugly Tree, Hits Every Branch on Way Down
The only explanation I can guess at for why the MSI GX660 looks the way it does is that someone made a bet with an MSI engineer, challenging him to design the most horrendously ugly computer possible.
This engineer has succeeded admirably. Not since the original Dell Inspiron XPS has a computer this fugly been unleashed upon America.
It is a throwback to an era that has never actually existed except in the minds of ’70s sci-fi enthusiasts, with harsh angles, weird textures, and a combination of automotive inspirations and goofy octagonal designs attempting to live together.
It’s like someone saw a Battlestar Galactica highlight reel and just didn’t get it. Even the Windows desktop wallpaper is hideous.
And MSI, known for its dirt-cheap yet capable machines, wants to convince you to fork over $1,750 for this monstrosity.
Pushing past the design aesthetic, here’s what MSI is giving you for your investment: a high-res, 1920 x 1080-pixel, 15.6-inch LCD; a 1.73-GHz Core i7 Q740 CPU; two 320-GB hard drives in a RAID 0 configuration; 6 GB of RAM; and an ATI Radeon HD 5870 graphics card. Hey, looks pretty good.
Designed as a gaming laptop (complete with arrows on the WASD keys), the GX660 is powerful, but hardly a record-setter. Benchmarks were on target for a high-end machine, but we’ve gotten better numbers on both general apps and games out of a ThinkPad.
Props to MSI for at least putting a real battery in the system. With 1 hour, 51 minutes of battery life, the MSI is genuinely portable in ways that few gaming rigs are. Its mere 7.6-pound weight is positively gossamer for this category, too.
We also liked the MSI’s touch-sensitive control panel along the top of the base. These seem to be all the rage, but most barely work. The MSI’s icons are actually easy to comprehend, and they perform as expected.
We were less thrilled with the much-touted Dynaudio speaker setup, which puts very visible, oversized speakers on both corners of the base. They’re nothing to write home about. In fact, it would have been nice if they’d been even louder, so as to drown out the jet-engine–class fan that’s installed to cool the dang thing.
WIRED Quite affordable for a gaming notebook — it’s just too bad the performance isn’t top-notch, too. Dual USB 3.0 ports. Light and long-lived, considering the category.
TIRED So ugly you’ll keep it in a paper bag. Weak keyboard, with boneheaded numeric keypad layout.
Apple MacBook Air
At first, it seemed like Steve Jobs was just showing his team’s design mettle, subliminally singing showtunes to the other titans of Silicon Valley — “Anything you can build, we can build thinner!” But when compared to Apple’s more practically designed MacBooks and higher-end MacBook Pros, the usability and muscle of the first Air came up short.
2010’s MacBook Air revamp was a considerable step in the product’s evolution toward the mainstream. And the latest revision, which went on sale last week, raises the bar to a level where we can safely say the first true “ultrabook” has hit the market. It’s a laptop that combines usability, form factor and performance in a heretofore-unseen package of awesome. Apple’s new MacBook Air, after months of speculation and premature adulation, is real — and it’s spectacular.
First off, for all the noteworthy additions and upgrades to this year’s refresh, there’s much about the MacBook Air that hasn’t changed. It comes in the same two sizes, 11.6-inch and 13.3 inch, and it has the same all-flash storage options: 128 GB or 256 GB, plus a 64 GB option for the 11-incher.
Most welcoming among the upgrades is the introduction of Intel iCore chips optimized with Intel’s new Sandy Bridge architecture, which reach clocking speeds of up to 1.8 GHz and more than doubles performance over last year’s line.
Price ranges from $1,000 to $1,600, and there’s still no integrated optical drive, which Apple seems set on writing the obituary for, even if it’s not quite ready to be published. Each model still only measures 0.68 inches in height, and their respective weights are also identical as last year’s: 2.96 pounds for the 13-inch, 2.38 pounds for the 11-inch. And the 13-inch model still comes with a handy SD card slot on the right side.What makes this year’s refresh particularly noteworthy is that Apple, as it is long famous for doing, has taken a solid product and rounded the rough edges, so to speak, to make it even better and more appealing to a wider audience. Apple may have killed the MacBook line in introducing these new Airs, but they may have also sounded the death knell for the MacBook Pro, which no longer holds such a commanding lead when it comes down to internal specs and exterior features.
Most welcoming among the upgrades is the introduction of Intel iCore chips optimized with Intel’s new Sandy Bridge architecture, which reach clocking speeds of up to 1.8 GHz and more than doubles performance over last year’s line.
Most memory-sucking multitasking was a breeze in our tests: Converting/exporting iMovie files to iTunes couldn’t have been smoother, Spotify continuously played in the background with no skips and transferring HD content off a TiVo Premiere has never been faster. The only blip came once the 128 GB of internal storage had been nearly maxed out. At that point, Time Machine backups often slowed down the entire operation, the Pinwheel of Death necessitating a timely Force Quit or two.
On the outside, there’s still a FaceTime cam built in, two USB 2.0 ports (one on each side), and a standard headphone jack on the left, but there are two noteworthy changes.
One is that the MiniDisplay Port on the right side has been removed in favor of Apple’s new Thunderbolt, which is capable of transfer speeds 20 times faster than traditional USB 2.0. The other is the reintroduction of the backlit keyboard, which was shockingly absent from last year’s MacBook Air refresh. Whether or not Thunderbolt, which is (for the moment) limited to high-end cinema display connections, evolves into this generation’s FireWire remains to be seen. But the backlit keyboard is the MacBook Air’s killer re-feature. Why Apple scrubbed it from the 2010 MBA is a mystery wrapped within an enigma inside Steve Jobs’ melon, but I’m happy as clams it’s finally back.
Battery life has also been improved, and the 13-inch model boasts some seven hours of juice, about 40 percent more than its 11-inch counterpart. Also, if you’re looking to boost your internal storage, recent teardowns have confirmed that the flash chips aren’t soldered down to the logic board. (The RAM? Not so much.)
However, this svelte design doesn’t come without a price. The MBA is so light that (unless you’re really deft of hand) when you raise the lid up to open it, the bottom half actually comes off the desk, as if it were some scale-model see-saw on your desk. With the heavier 13.3-inch model, which weighs just under three pounds, this happens with almost every open-up. Sure, it might seem like a small gripe, but why should anyone ever have to use two hands to open up their laptop again? How Apple eventually decides to beat simple physics on this one is anyone’s guess, but as components continue to get smaller and lighter, perhaps a couple of well-placed front-end weights internally bookending the trackpad might help offset some of this inconvenience.
And while it’s been a staple of MacBook Airs since their 2008 debut, the continued absence of any built-in optical drive still means all your media comes via download or external USB storage. Lion’s recent download-only launch only further cements Apple’s anti-disc position.
As far as I can tell, the lack of any integrated slot drive still only affects a small subsection of users: those whose livelihood depends on the manufacturing of said drives, consumers who just love to rip their DVDs for instant watchability on the go, and anyone involved in the collectible movie soundtrack industry. Even though 99 percent of consumers fall outside of these categories, if being without your trusted SuperDrive gives you the shakes, you can always plunk down 79 bucks for an external unit that plugs in through USB.
Still, these shouldn’t be construed as dealbreakers. They’re minor inconveniences. The greatest asset the new MacBook Air has going for it is its seemingly chameleonic nature, adaptable to so many professions and environments. As a journalist and a writer, I’ve long been searching for a laptop with the performance of a high-end MacBook Pro-type with the innate convenience of a netbook. After years of hoping and searching, I’ve finally found laptop nirvana.
Indeed, the new MacBook Air provides an unbearable lightness of being that seamlessly marries brute computing muscle with unprecedented portability. There’s little reason to doubt that it may ultimately change our perception of what can be accomplished, technologically speaking, in small packages.
WIRED Thunderbolt port, Sandy Bridge CPU provide unprecedented zip. Backlit keyboard a welcome re-addition. Unsoldered Flash chips make storage upgrade easy.
TIRED Optical drive RIP. No SD card slot on 11-inch model. Extreme lightness causes frequent tip-backs when opening closed lid. You’ll have to be careful you don’t accidentally throw yours out with the recycling.
Brompton Reveals Mysterious ‘Project X’: The eBrompton
Brompton Reveals Mysterious ‘Project X’: The eBrompton
A pair of non-electric Bromptons, packed for a flight. Photo Todd Fahrner/Flickr
Oh, man. First Bob Dylan went electric, and now Brompton. The London-based folding bike maker has at last revealed the truth behind its long (and somewhat tedious) “Project X” teaser campaign: An eBrompton.
The information is still just dribbling from the company, though. Little more has been revealed than that the bike will have a small electric motor, and that this motor won’t interfere with the legendary “fold,” which makes the Brompton one of the smallest bikes around when packed down. The new e-bike will go on sale in the UK and Germany next year, and the rest of the world will follow in 2013.
One thing is pretty certain, though: a motor will add weight. When riding a Brompton, it’s 9-12.5kg (20-28 pound) weight is light enough, but when you have to carry the folded package up five flights of stairs (as I do most days) it starts to feel a little heavy. Then again, I guess anyone frail enough to be buying an electric bike probably lives in a building with an elevator.
Weight issues aside, I’m excited to find out how the eBrompton will work. The now classic status of the original often hides the innovation of its design. I hope the electric version is similarly clever.
