Toshiba to Boost Apple's Air and Lenovo's X300? - New 5400 RPM 1.8" HDDs could make up (a bit) for Air's lacking features

Working peopleinterested in upgrading to a new top-notch laptop have two options these days, one of which sounds great, in terms of functionality, while the other boasts more style and grace than features. However, both Apple's MacBook Air and Lenovo's ThinkPad X300 might be getting a boost, making them even more attractive.The boost comes from Toshiba, who is planning on introducing

a new 1.8" HDD model, which not only does it meet market standards as far as its size goes, but offers either 80GB or 120GB at 5400 RPMs. MK1216GSG (120GB) and MK8016GSG (80GB) meet the new SATA 2.6 specification incorporating a micro-SATA connector. The 5400 RPM was once reserved for earlier 2.5" HDDs (in the mobile sector).Currently, Apple's MacBook air comes in two forms: the 80GB HDD (hard disk drive) enabled model, which starts at $1799, and the 64GB SSD (solid state drive) SKU (also adds a couple more features), which Apple sells for 3,100 bucks. The latter is of course more efficient in terms of reading and writing speed, but some may argue that the extra thousand bucks isn't worth it. Needless to say, while NAND flash memory price is dropping more than ever, Apple still charges a lot for the high end Air, which makes it not so attractive anymore.
That's where Lenovo's ThinkPad X300 comes in. With a $3,000 price tag, this laptop offers everything that Air can't, and then some: optical drive, ethernet port, three USB 2.0 ports (while the Air only offers one) and, of course, the much beloved removable battery. It's not very thick or heavy either. On top of it all, Lenovo has dispensed the HDD altogether and only offers SSD X300s.Now that Toshiba's 1.8 incher is due out soon, Lenovo might just want to tweak up the X300's original configuration, as well as its entry price, which would make it a great choice for computing on the go. Then of course, the Air may very well receive the upgrade which would also make Apple's laptop more attractive.

Google Jumps from Fifth to First Top-Ranked Brand

Not surprisingly, the massive slew of Google services have brought it popularity and rocketed it to the first position in the United Kingdom’s top-ranked brands. That’s nothing to take lightly,

considering that one year ago the same study showed that it was only the fifth, behind leader BBC, Microsoft, British Airways and BT ahead of it.The rankings are generated from feedback from a council of senior business leaders in the UK and a survey of 1,500 professionals, according to Web User. The companies are rated for their reputation for quality, reliability and distinction within their market sector. It’s no wonder Google won top honors, it’s basically trashing its competitors wherever it can, except in China, where Baidu rules supreme. Then again, it’s not the Asian country we’re talking about.Last year’s runner up stood put on its position, and Microsoft can’t be very happy about it. The remainders of the top ten are British companies, those mentioned above among them, and also some brands that have strong UK ties, such as Rolls – Royce or GlaxoSmithKline, the same source mentions."British business opts for what it knows and trusts and as we head towards economic slowdown this is only going to become more important. The next year will put even the strongest brands to the test as they defend their organisations from the challenges that await," said Stephen Cheliotis, Chairman of the Superbrands Council.Surprisingly, Yahoo! wasn’t mentioned at all, although it owns one of the most popular email services in the world, and its homepage is very visited from the United Kingdom, as some statistics published a while ago showed. ‘ello, wass this all ‘bout? Google came first? Aye, it deserves it, but will it be ‘ere next year too?’ That question could be problematic, seeing as the Mountain View based company rose to the top spot in just a year from the fifth, but something tells me that once up there it won’t be easy to drag it down.

Google Players Better Than Yahoo's and Microsoft’s

The first ever SMX Search Bowl took place last night and had teams from Google, Yahoo!, Ask.com, Live Search and the SEM All Star Team line up at the starting line. A fierce battle they fought, dodging trick questions prepared by Search Engine Land, but in the end the cup was all the teams wanted and everything else was just insignificant. Sort of.Like the title says, Google won, and did that

by a landslide. At the other end of the dais was the SEM All Star Team that at one point had a negative score. 50 questions were asked, and all were more or less difficult (mostly more), and the first team that buzzed had a chance to answer. In case they got it right, points were awarded, else they were subtracted from the total.Google's team consisted of Matt Cutts and Paul Haahr, Senior Staff Software Engineer. Microsoft's team was made up of Nathan Buggia, Lead Program Manager, and Natala Menezes, Product Manager at adCenter. Ask.com had Peter Linsley, Senior Product Mgr, Search Technology, and Gary Price, Director of Online Resources. The SEM team had Todd Friesen and Ian Lurie.Here are a couple of questions, as were posted on Search Engine Land:The Sunday Times sent a legal request for which news search engine to stop crawling its content:a) Excite NewsTracker b) News Index – the right answerc) Wired Newsbot Which search engine first sold sponsored links?a) GoTo b) Open Text – the right answerc) Excite Don’t be fooled that they have b) as a correct answer, it wasn’t that easy. Too bad the final results weren’t posted, I really would have enjoyed seeing the exact difference, as the search engines sent their best qualified people at the event. I guess it was a measure of the employees’ levels of knowledge about their own companies as well as the others’. Glad to see Google coming first, else they couldn’t really justify their dominant position on the market.

iNdependence Now Works with iPhone 1.1.4

Those eager to jailbreak their iPhones (which, needless to say, do it at their own risk) can now use a tool called iNdependence 1.4 beta 5, since the update to Ziphone is playing hard to get. The Cocoa-based application for Mac OS X provides support for jailbreak, activation, SSH installation and ringtone/wallpaper/application installation."iNdependence is a Cocoa-based application for Mac OS X which

provides an easy-to-use interface for jailbreak, activation, SSH installation, and ringtone/wallpaper/application installation on your iPhone," its complete description goes.The latest version of the tool has been built to work and is compatible with the iPhone 1.1.4 firmware. The most distinguishing feature of the latest (beta) version of iNdependence is, of course, the SIM unlocking via "gunlock." So, here's what v1.4 beta 5 brings:- Added SIM unlocking on firmware 1.1.4 (using gunlock)- Changed the SIM unlock warning to reflect new information with regard to IPSF-based unlocking- Made it so that iNdependence automatically removes old versions of the RAM disks it creates- Changed the credits for the RAM disk jailbreak method- Updated the documentation for the new SSH removal dialogThe developer says that "documentation is now available from the Help menu within the application itself," advising users to read all of it before they post an issue or send an email in. "I can guarantee that 99% of the problems you will encounter are answered there. The rest are likely well documented already in the FAQ or in the issues section. Please also check for duplicate issues there before posting a new one. I just don't have the time to go through the multitude of issues there (many of which are duplicates or simply usage questions and not real issues)," the developer says.As mentioned above, if you go forth with hacking/jailbreaking your phone, you will do it at your own risk.

Introducing WorldWide Telescope

It turns out that the secret Microsoft project aimed at changing the world will actually manage to point you toward the stars. From Microsoft Research, and courtesy of the work being done by Curtis Wong and Jonathan Fay, comes WorldWide Telescope, with the promise of permitting you to explore the universe from your desktop. Not accessible just yet, WorldWide Telescope falls under the same category of products such as the open source Stellarium and Google Sky, introduced in August 2007 via Google Earth. However, due to

the new navigation technology enabled by the user interfaces, developed by Microsoft Research (think of Photosynth), exploring will be much more than just panning and zooming in and zooming out. "The WorldWide Telescope (WWT) is a rich visualization environment that functions as a virtual telescope, bringing together imagery from the best ground and space telescopes in the world for a seamless, guided exploration of the universe. WorldWide Telescope, created with Microsoft's high-performance Visual Experience Engine, enables seamless panning and zooming across the night sky blending terabytes of images, data, and stories from multiple sources over the Internet into a media-rich, immersive experience," reads the description of the upcoming service. For the time being, the service was made available only as a private alpha, and the promise from Microsoft is that WorldWide Telescope will be "coming in spring 2008." According to the Redmond company, the Visual Experience Engine technology is designed to deliver a seamless navigation user experience while exploring the WorldWide Telescope content. Microsoft has blended together not only terabytes of images of the night sky, but also additional data about the universe. The service will be made available for free to all users. "WorldWide Telescope is an observatory on your desktop, allowing you to see the sky in a way you have never seen before; individual exploration, multi-wavelength views, stars and planets within context to each other, zoom in/out, and a capability for anyone to create and share a tour of the universe. The Visual Experience Engine delivers seamless panning zooming around the night sky. WWT delivers seamless integration of science:-relevant information including multi-wavelength, multiple telescope distributed image and data sets, and one-click contextual access to distributed Web information and data sources," Microsoft added.

Intel's Diamnondville to Draw Only 4 Watts of Power

If 10 watts of power were appealing enough for the mobile market, then picture this: Intel will release a new breed of energy-efficient CPUs in the Diamondville family. Ten watts will no longer power

the processor alone, but instead a whole computing system.Intel has been aiming at high-performance computing for quite some time now, but it ultimately figured it out that the future on the market belongs to low-cost, low-performance systems, so it geared up to take over the low-cost chip market. The most recent roadmap from Intel mentions the company's newest ultra-low cost, ultra-low voltage platform codenamed Diamondville. Diamondville is not only a codename for low-power and low-performance CPUs, but instead it refers to a complete mobile platform. It could not be otherwise, given the fact that the new processors will be directly soldered onto the motherboard. The processors in the Diamondville family are built from the ground up, and will come in both desktop and mobile flavors. The first Diamondville processors will arrive on the market somewhere in the second half of the year, where the desktop single-core Diamondville-SC 230 processor will kick in. It will be accompanied by its mobile counterpart, the Diamondville-SC: 270. The two processors share similar technical specifications, such as 512 KB of L2 cache and the 1600 MHz default core clock frequency.The latest information from Intel shows that the first Diamondville CPUs with dual-core architecture will be launched as Celeron 3xx stock keeping units (SKUs). The dual-core parts will not have a mobile version and will arrive in the third quarter of the year.The chips will take up from 4 to 8 watts of power and will be designed to work with no additional cooling. The products will power ultra-mobile PCs similar to the popular Eee PC from Asustek. The Eee has proven that low-cost notebooks sell extremely well both in the emerging markets and in the European Union or in the United States. The Diamondville architecture will give the UMPC market a boost and will add growth to the low cost PC sector.