The iPad has finally arrived and Steve Jobs claims that it’s “more intimate than a laptop, and it’s so much more capable than a smartphone.” Comparing it with Apple’s own smartphone, the iPhone, and what do we see, a larger screen hence an interface to support larger screen. thanks to the larger screen, we now have a large keyboard, a larger screen enables better use of productivity software – kind of like an iPod avatar in a larger body.

Apple iPad

Sure, the faster processor means it is more capable technically. the Nexus One itself features a 1GHz processor, and doesn’t come with the shackles surrounding the iPhone OS store. When comparing it with the iPhone you come to realize that the iPad is just an over sized iPhone which can’t make calls.

Steve Jobs discards netbooks as cheap laptops, yet the iPad is still to show any multitasking capabilities. Better than a netbook, really? The iPad fails to be better than an iPhone. So, here are 10 reasons why we think the iPad may not be so hot:

1. No Multitasking. Remember, it’s meant to be better than a netbook.
2. No Flash Support. “The best web experience”; indeed.
3. Screen isn’t Widescreen. Well, innovation sometimes takes us a few steps backwards.
4. No HD Output. Who watches HD these days anyway?
5. No Camera. So much for video chat.
6. No USB Port. Don’t want to be too much like a netbook now, do we?
7. No SD Card Slot. Because 64GB ought to be enough for anybody.
8. Essential Peripheral Sold Extra: Keyboard, USB, SD Card dongle, each sold for $30!!
9. Another iPhone like Operating System: We have a larger iPhone here, remember?
10. You need to pay $10 per application for the iWork productivity application suite.

Even so, the iPad has a chance for success, and for many of the same reasons that the iPhone is a success. It is a beautiful product, with a dedicated developer community which just won’t give up despite the constant abuse.

It has hundreds of thousands of applications which give it an edge over new platforms which have lesser applications. The iPhone continues to be favorite of many because it is a pleasure to use despite its many flaws. Apple may not have done anything new here, but just given a more of the good old stuff that they already know works.

Google Voice

Google Voice, the invitation only service launched by Google a while ago has now been ported to Android and Blackberry. The service basically lets you have one “Google Voice” number which is connected to your other numbers such as your Office, Home and Mobile Number. You can choose which of the phones you want ringing when someone calls.

One of the features it boasts is caller groups, with restricted access to certain phones. For instance, friends can have access to all three numbers while your pesky neighbor can be allowed to bug you only when you are at home.

The best part is that people only have to remember a single number. The number stays with you for life, so even if you change your other numbers it doesn’t make a difference. Simply update the new numbers with the service. Google Voice also gives you other services such as voice mail and automated transcripts of the same.

With the newly released Google Voice Mobile Application for Blackberry and Android, placing outgoing calls from a Google Voice number has become easier, said a blog post from Google. The app is fully integrated with contacts on the phone. For the thousands of people who don’t have an Android or Blackberry device, Google has a mobile web version which can be accessed by typing m.google.com/voice into your mobile phone’s browser. The blog post also says that “Currently, Google Voice is only available in the U.S.” Let’s hope it comes to our stores soon.

Are you still using a regular phone line? Embrace the future and get Voip Internet Phone. Technology always moves forward, and in the case of phones, it gets better, too. And that’s not the only benefit.

Your Residential Phone Service will have all the bells and whistles you are used to, but with a much more competitive price. Those rates don’t just apply to local calls. They also stretch to your long-distance calls, and even some of your international calls.

You don’t have to pay those expensive phone company rates any more. Choose your package service level and get your Internet Phone Service for one low, easy monthly rate. Imagine being able to make unlimited phone calls to over 30 foreign nations. How much extra would that cost you with a regular phone line? That kind of service is included in one of the packages…and that package still costs less than regular phone company rates.

Voip Your Life is one of the premier Voip Phone Provider companies out there today. Ranked highly in customer service and satisfaction, you get a wide range of services from them. Interested in free hardware, shipping, and no activation charge? Voip Your Life has it. Some of the other great features waiting for you are: Voicemail, caller ID, call waiting, and call forwarding…all included!

When you look at the features, the service packages, and then the price, it’s a no-brainer. It can’t get any easier. And when you take that ease and stick such a great price tag on it, you’ve got a winner.

If you’re worried about the quality of Internet Phone Calls, don’t be. Voip phone service sounds just as good as your regular phone or your mobile. Give it a try. You won’t be disappointed. Current customers rave about the quality of the phone service and the customer service of Voip Your Life.

If you haven’t made the switch to using an Internet phone setup, why are you waiting? The quality of the phone calls will be great, you can call to a whole list of foreign countries without any extra fees, and you can do all of this for one low monthly rate. What more could you ask for in a phone service?

In the age of 3-Way SLI and overclocked quad-core processors, its easy to get carried away with buying a super highend power supply even when you PC doesn’t really need something that hefty to power it. Enter the CoolerMaster Real Power M700 – a 700 watt moduler power supply. This unit is built around ATX 12V version 2.3 specifications.

CoolerMaster Real Power M700

The build quality of the unit itself is a mixed bag – cable and connector quality is top notch, butthe guage of sheet used on the body is light. A single 120mm fan provides the basis of cooling.

This power supply supports two PCIe power slots, and two each of the six and eight pin connects have been provided, which means SLI and CrossFire are supported, even for the latest generation of cards like the ATI Radeon HD4870 and NVIDIA GeForce GTX 280. We loaded up an Intel Core 2 Quad Extreme QX9650, 4GB of RAM, with two WD Raptor 10,000 rpm drives and a GeForce GTX 280 Graphics Card. There were no issue with reboots, false starts or freeze-ups even while stressing the CPU and GPUs with synthetic and real-world benchmarks.

For those who are looking for something basic to power a home PC, this is too mach of a power supply for you. For those looking at 3-Way CroddFire and GeForce GTX 280 SLI look elsewhere too, as the M700 may not be able to support adequate juice to the setup and a power supply in the range of 1KW may be required. If you are looking for something for a fast gaming rig thats not too heavy on power the M700 is worth a glance. At $195, this PSU is overpriced, especially considering the excellent Corsair HX620, which offers nearly the same power output is priced at $155 only.

Specifications:
1. Total Power : 700 Watts
2. Basic Cooling : One 120mm FAN
3. Output Connectors : 4x12V Rails, 8 SATA Power Connectors, 4 Four Pin Connectors, 2 Six Pin PCIe Connectors.

Microsoft has announced that October 21st 2008, is Global Anti-Piracy Day and will proceed with a simultaneous launch of education initiatives and enforcement actions in 48 countries on five continents to combat the sophisticated, illegal trade of pirated and counterfeit software.

On their Global Anti-Piracy Virtual Pressroom a statement read: “Microsoft is taking these steps as part of its commitment to working with communities, national governments and local law enforcement agencies around the world to protect its customers and partners and promote the value of intellectual property as a driver of innovation.”

Microsoft Antipiracy Day

Click on the map to go to the Microsoft site for the interactive aspects of the map.

Microsoft plans to install solar panels on the roof of its new data center in San Antonio, and will use photovoltaic power to supplement the 50 megawatts of capacity it has provisioned from local utility CPS Energy. The solar panels are just one example of the many steps Microsoft is taking to incorporate green technologies into its new data centers. While providing a visible illustration of the company’s commitment to environmentally-friendly technology, the solar panels may not make much of a dent in the energy bills for the $550 million San Antonio data center.

Solar energy hasn’t been widely used in data centers because of the large amounts of energy required to power the servers and cooling equipment in modern mission-critical facilities. It requires a very large installation of photovoltaic (PV) solar panels to produce even a fraction of the energy required by most data centers.

UPDATE: While Microsoft discussed plans to install solar panels at the San Antonio data center during Monday’s media event, the system won’t be operational in the near future. “While it is indeed sunny quite a bit of the time in San Antonio, the economics for solar are not yet a good fit for this facility,” said Mike Manos, general manager of Global Foundation Services for Microsoft. ”As solar technology advances, we anticipate that solar may become a more viable option within a few years. As a result, we have enabled our building to accept the technology and weight of solar panels when the technology matures.”

The only data center currently powered entirely by PV solar power is AISO (Affordable Internet Services Online), which operates a 1,500 square foot facility in Romoland, California. AISO powers its data center with 120 solar panels that generate DC power, which is then run through an inverter and stored in batteries.

The disparity between PV solar energy output and the power needs of data centers is best illustrated by existing solar power projects installed by Microsoft and Google in Silicon Valley. In April 2006 Microsoft built a solar panel array at its Silicon Valley Campus in Mountain View, Calif. consisting of 2,288 tiles with a peak capacity of 480 kilowatts. Four months later Google unveiled an even larger solar project on the rooftops of the Googleplex up the road in Mountain View. Google’s system featured 9,212 solar panels with a peak generating capacity of 1.6 megawatts.

By some estimates it takes up to 100,000 square feet of solar panels to generate 1 megawatt of power. Microsoft’s San Antonio data center is 477,000 square feet, which means that if the company covers a substantial section of the rooftop with solar panels it could ultimately generate several megawatts of power. That’s still a fraction of the 50 megawatts of utility power allocated for the massive facility.

Scalability isn’t the only issue hindering the use of PV solar power in data centers. In a recent presentation on renewable energy, Google energy guru Bill Weihl said PV solar is far more expensive than every other renewable energy alternative, costing 25 cents a kilowatt hour and more.

That doesn’t mean solar power has no future for data centers. Google has made several investments in solar thermal power, which used the sun’s heat – rather than its light – to generate energy. Solar thermal is cheaper to generate than PV solar (although still more expensive than coal) and has been used in “utility scale” installations in the Mojave Desert with capacity of up to 500 megawatts
Source

Belkin N1 Vision

Belkin has entered the Indian market with one of the first products-the N1 Vision router. It might be a utility, but belkinhas managed to make it look like a lifestyle product. the design is very good and stands out amongst all the routers you might come across today. Unilink most routers, the N1 stands vertically, but the stand is stable and has rubber padding at the base the stop it from sliding around. There is a small screen on the front, which show data speeds of all the users connected to the router, both wired and wirelessly. There are buttons that can be used to navigate through the interface and the display can also used as a clock as well.

When it’s come to performance, it works pretty well on the wired ports. We recorded speeds of 7.36 Mbps for a single large file. For random files, the speeds were around 6.92 Mbps. The wireless tests revealed the weakness of the N1 Vision. The wireless performance was pretty appalling-2Mbps is the best it could do over a distance of some 10 feet. The software interface has all the features that a router firmware should have-Internet connectivity configuration, VPN, security, etc. The interface is more user-friendly then those on most well known routers. One thing you notice is the long waiting period for the router to restart every time you change a setting.
The price for the Belkin N1 Vision-Rs 11,699-is much higher then mainstream home routers. Although this router will look nice in your living room, it’s definitely not something you can rely on for performance.

The Canon PowerShot A720 IS is an upgrade to the A710 IS, which was a very good point-and-shoot camera-one of the best that we saw during our comparison test lest year. The most prominent change in the A720 IS, is it’s resolution. It is now an 8 Megapixel camera as posed to the 7.1 MP A710. The picture quality has stayed pretty much the some too. The ISO level on this camera goes up to 1600. The A710 IS had a maximum of 800. The amount of grain beyond 800 is pretty bad and should be avoided as fer as possible. The zoom lens is decent and theres no serious degradation of quality at maximum zoom.

The colors- as with all other Canons-are vary neutral and not exaggerated. The images aren’t too high on contrast so there’s a smooth balance between the dark and the bright areas. This makes for some good portrait photography. The flash is pretty powerful too and the slow sync mode works rather well in illuminating the background in shots with the flash on Macro shots are fairly easy to shoot and it’s possible to get extremely close to the object. The A720 IS now has a face detection feature , which works well and tracks people through darker areas as well.
The movie quality is decent and actually usable in low light situations . there are no sudden jumps in exposure while moving from bright areas to dark ones. Image stabilization evens out the bumps and the zoom works well, although a little aggressively, in the movie shooting mode. The A720 IS, is incrementally superior to the A710 IS. The problem with the A720 IS, is not so much to do with the camera itself, but with the other cameras even from canon itself in the same price bracket. The SX100 is more or available for the same price in the market and comes with a 10X optical zoom. If any, the A720 IS’s only advantage is that of being a little more compact then the SX100 IS.

With touchscreen devices getting cheaper and making their way into every possible gadget, cameras aren’t being left out. Now, it’s Kodak’s turn. The EasyShare V1073 is an 11MP camera with a 3x optical zoom. It is thin enough to fit into a shirt pocket easily, but that also make it a little difficult to hold with a single hand. The touchscreen also makes it difficult to use the camera with just one hand. The power and shoot buttons are positioned close to each other. The 3-inch screen doesn’t have great quality-it is pretty difficult to use outdoors even with the brightness turned up high.

The quality of photos isn’t too different from its predecessors. The colours in the photos are pretty natural but the sharpness will likely be a little too much for most people,s liking. There is image stabilization, but images still end up a little blurry in well-lit scenarios. There is vary little control given to the user, so there is not a lot you can experiment with. One of the key features is the HD 720p video recording resolution. A typical 25 second clip is 43 MB in size. The quality of the video clips is pretty impressive. The touch screen makes a few other features easily accessible. For example, you can actually type in a tag for every single photo that you shoot using an on-screen keyboard. The high definition video recording is a feature that will interest many.
The price of $300 is a fairly attractive price for a camera with these unique features.

The Geforce 9 had really short stay and NVIDIA has released the GTX 280, around the same time that ATI launched there first card. Zotac was the first to send us their over-clocked version of the GTX 280 that they proudly call the GTX 280 AMP! These new cards are crossing uncharted territories. the Zotac Gtx 280 AMP! runs at a core speed of 700 MHz instead of the default 602 MHz. Most numbers on the new card have been doubled from what was on the last 9800GTX. The memory bandwidth has been increased to 512 bit and there is 1 GB of memory on the card. An 8pin abd 6-pin power connector is required to power the GTX 280 AMP!
It’s just not all about the numbers. The GTX 280 absolutely destroys all previous records held by single cards. To give you an idea. the Zotac GTX 280 AMP! is about 50 to 75 per cent faster than the colossal 8800 Ultra in most benchmarks. For example, in one of our tests, the 8800 Ultra scores around 100 fps in prey at 1920 x 1200 with maximum detail and 4x anti-aliasing and 8x antistrophic filtering turned on. The GTX 280 AMP! beat it with a score of 173 fps. Even Unreal Tournament 3 with all the settings turned up gave scores of 119 fps on the Shangrila map at 1920 x 1200. 3DMark 2005 and 2006 scores increased as well, but not to the extent of the real world gaming benchmarks.

The card, in comparison, runs cooler then the 8800 GTXs, more so when compared to the 8800 Ultras. The cooling solution on the Zotac card is stock NVIDIA Design. The card is a little less compact then the 9800GX2. It is lighter, but consumes over 300 W when on load. In idle, it drops to as little or lower then a 9800GTX card. A power supply of at least 600 W is highly recommended to any future owners.
The Zotac GTX 280 AMP! is a great card and we’re sure some of the non over-clocked versions are rally good as well. It would be terribly wrong to say that the GTX280 is not a good card. There’s significant improvement in performance. There’s one major problem right now , other then the high power demands-the price. The current price for the Zotac GTX280 AMP! is a whopping $1200, which makes it way over the top in terms of pricing.
As things stand today, the prices are exorbitant and with ATI releasing cards of their own priced at much lower prices offering better value for money, it’s only a matter of time before the prices for the GTX 280 drop. GTX260s as expected to hit the markets soon, so a little caution at the moment is recommended to look out for some extreme price drops.