Tech Peek Base

Dell’s Latitude On quick-boot OS has been available on some of the company’s laptops for a little while now, but it looks like Dell has now found a new way to make those laptops boot fast but be more affordable. That comes in the form of Latitude On Flash, which an actual flash module that snaps into a mini-card slot in the laptop and makes use of the laptop’s own x86 processor to speed up the boot process instead of a separate ARM chip like current Latitude On systems. While that switch will still give you a boot time of eight to ten seconds, it apparently comes at some expense to battery life — although we’re guessing the lower cost (a $50 upgrade, as opposed to a $199 one) will make that trade-off more than acceptable to most users. Look for the upgrade right now on Dell’s Latitude E4200, E4300 and Z laptops — which, incidentally, also come with an updated Gen 2 interface for the Latitude On OS.

There were two minor video plug-in related updates last night. First Adobe released a new beta of their Flash Player 10.1 beta 2 (this on the heels of a set of security patches for the stable release version last week). Flash 10.1 is introducing a host of new features, but is primarily aimed at the mobile market. Among the biggest new features in 10.1 will be the ability for developers to create multi-touch aware Flash content for a wide range of devices. Looks like Adobe is still hoping to prove Flash worthy for Apple for use on the iPhone.

Along with this beta release Adobe has reminded us that they are abandoning the G3 processor after this upcoming version of Flash. In the release notes [PDF] and in last week’s security announcement, Adobe says:

You do realize that all those Atom-based netbooks on sale for the holidays will be abandoned entirely in January right? Go ahead and pull the trigger for that “new” ViewSonic netbook if you must, just realized that you’ll be running last-gen hardware in less than a month if rumor, innuendo, and leaks all converge with the release of Pineview netbooks as expected. More details have appeared today at retailers listing specifications and pics for the unannounced ASUS EeePC model 1005P and 1005PE. Sporting the Eee PC Seashell design, we’re looking at a pair of 10-inch LED backlit displays with a 1,024 x 600 pixel resolution, Intel Atom N450 proc, 1GB DDR2-RAM, and a Windows 7 Starter Edition preload riding GMA 3150 graphics — a slightly faster version of Intel’s G31 based GMA 3100, though still too weak for gaming or 1080p Flash videos. The PE model sports a bigger 250GB hard disk and higher capacity 6-cell battery for a reported 12.5 hours of go-go juice thanks, presumably, to the more efficient N450 CPU. Expect to see these Eees get official with price and launch date any day now.

Mobile ad network Greystripe recently partnered with ad placement service Tribal Fusion to allow online ads to run on iPhones, diminishing the need for mobile specific ad formats. The partnership allows online ads to run on iPhones, eliminating additional mobile campaign creative production and dealing with an additional mobile advertising vendor. And of course, online ad budgets tend to be higher than mobile ad budgets, so Greystripe says this saves companies money.

Greystripe, which extended the ads to over five hundred online to mobile campaigns, says that advertisers are seeing 10-20 percent higher performance with the mobile-online ad compared to the same online campaigns with average click through rates above one percent.

Most of the tech world now considers it a given that Google will be selling its own unlocked phone, called the Nexus One, to customers directly early in 2010. A few stragglers are still debating the finer points of the difference between Google working with handset manufacturers and carriers on a good Android experience v. them dictating the hardware specs and selling it directly to users. While they work that out for themselves we’re off to the next story – the Google Chrome OS Netbook (although we think Google has a few surprises left around the Nexus One, too).

Google has said from the beginning that they plan on working with select manufacturers to ensure a good Chrome OS experience for users when devices first hit the market next year. From an early FAQ: “The Google Chrome OS team is currently working with a number of technology companies to design and build devices that deliver an extraordinary end user experience. Among others, these companies include Acer, Adobe, ASUS, Freescale, Hewlett-Packard, Lenovo, Qualcomm, Texas Instruments, and Toshiba.”

Wow. What a roller coaster ride! First, Fake Steve Jobs ordered Operation Chokehold. Then AT&T struck back. That’s right around the time when a group of rebels joined the battle with Operation Cuckoo. Now, the original mastermind is telling everyone to stand down:

“I really don’t want to cause any actual harm to my fellow AT&T users. Quite the opposite – I feel as if we’re all caught in the same horrible prison, suffering alongside one another. The point is, I’m not sure we can stop this thing.”

If the University of Tokyo has its way, we could be seeing an onslaught of flexible computing devices sooner than you think! Earlier this year the school made some noise with its stretchable OLED prototype and now a research group led by Takeo Someya and Tsuyoshi Sekitani has developed a non-volatile, flexible organic flash memory that may someday be used for large-area sensors, electronic paper devices, and non-volatile memory. Using a polyethylene naphthalate (PEN) resin sheet arrayed with memory cells, the memory can be bent until its curvature radius reaches 6mm without causing mechanical or electrical degradation. As it stands now, the device has a memory retention time of one day — but the team maintains that this can be “drastically improved by reducing the size of the element and employing an SAM with a long molecular length.” Piece of cake, right?

There’s no denying that the two newest multicard readers from Addonics can connect to one’s PC via eSATA as well as the conventional USB 2.0 method, but frankly, we’ve our doubts about the honest-to-goodness speed benefits of linking through the former. The outfit claims that when its (external) Pocket eSATA / USB DigiDrive is hooked up with an eSATA cable, any flash media you insert can be used as a bootable device with read / write speeds of up to 150MB/sec, but of course you’ll want to slap the quickest SDHC or CompactFlash card you can find in there to fully take advantage of the extra bandwidth. There’s also an internal version for those tired of looking at the gaping hole where your floppy drive used to be, and considering that both retail for $59.99, you’ll probably spend the next four or five hours just choosing which you really need.

If you’re looking at a netbook whose motto is “small, slow, sufficient,” you pretty much know what to expect. CherryPal’s latest, named Africa (in honor of the nation of Ghana or something), has everything you’d want in a $99 computer: a 7-inch display, 400MHz processor, 256GB memory, 2GB flash storage, and either Linux or Windows CE under the hood. According to the company, you can expect about four hours use on the included Lithium battery. If that weren’t enough, the company has introduced its online store — no longer do you have to pick up your CherryPal PCs on the streets, like we did when we were your age. Hit the source link to get started — but not before you check out the PR after the break. It’s a real page-turner.

Continue reading CherryPal debuts $99 netbook, names it Africa

Book publishers are increasingly embracing digital books, and not just on Amazon’s Kindle.