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This past fall, when the 15-inch Macbook underwent its stunning unibody redesign that added an edge-to-edge LED-backlit display, a multitouch-enabled touchpad, and dual graphics cards, we heaped plenty of praise upon it; but lamented its lack of a memory card reader, and its hefty price tag. Apple has seemingly taken our gripes to heart, and has re-introduced the 15-inch MacBook with a number of noteworthy changes, including a lower starting price ($1,699 vs. $1,999), an SD Card reader, and a long-lasting lithium-polymer battery that delivers more than 8 hours on a charge. We wish there were more USB ports on board, but you won’t find a more powerful 15-inch notebook that’s this easy to carry.

Design

Measuring 14.4 x 9.8 x 1.0 inches and weighing 5.4 pounds, the revamped 15-inch MacBook Pro is spacious enough for long, comfortable computing sessions, yet won’t weigh you down when it’s time to go mobile. It sports the same carved-from-a-single-chunk-of-metal unibody design as its MacBook Pro brethren, retaining the sturdy aluminum chassis and rounded edges. The overall look is classy and modern.

Keyboard and Touchpad

Similar to other MacBook Pros, this unit features a shallow keyboard with black, isolated keys that provide adequate feedback when quickly typing URLs and crafting e-mails. It also has an ambient light sensor that backlights the keys when typing in low-light situations (such as a darkened plane cabin). While typing in a dark room, the soft glow enabled us to see the keys clearly.

A very large touchpad made navigating the desktop a snap, and its built-in multitouch functionality will have iPhone and iPod touch users feeling right at home as they swipe through photos and pinch and zoom Web pages. Falling in step with other MacBook Pro models, the 15-inch lacks dedicated mouse buttons; the entire pad doubles as one.

Display and Audio

Once again, Apple wows with a gorgeous edge-to-edge, glass 15.4-inch LED display (with a 1440 x 900-pixel resolution). The panel offers a 60 percent greater color gamut than its predecessor, and it really brought out skin tones and made other details pop while watching episodes of 30 Rock on Hulu or when we popped a DVD of There Will be Blood into the optical drive. Our only gripe with the display is that it kicks back too much reflection, especially when viewing content that has a dark background, or if you’re anywhere but directly in front of it. Its attractive black bezel border easily picks up fingerprints and smudges, but that’s nothing a cloth can’t remedy.

Flanking the keyboard are a pair of speakers that deliver solid (if unspectacular) sound. When we streamed Lyn Collins’ “Think” from Slacker, we enjoyed loud and clear audio, although funk classic lacked a robust bottom end.
Ports and Webcam

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Apple’s New Magic Mouse

Apple’s signature touchpad is now available on both their MacBook and MacBook Pro laptops. Now, let’s say you love the features that the touchpad provides you, but you just prefer to control the movement of your cursor with a mouse instead of a touchpad. Unfortunately, you had to choose one or the other — until now. Apple has found a solution for those of you with mouse-separation anxiety: the new Magic Mouse.

Upon first glance, the Magic Mouse is truly an odd-looking creature. It doesn’t seem like something this simple could do anything besides move a cursor. It has no buttons or wheels on it whatsoever. But–and here is where your eyes deceive you–the top of the Magic Mouse has a multi-touch area, and the entire mouse functions as a large button. So, all of the features available on the trackpad are now available to laptop users who prefer a mouse–even iMac users. These features include standard clicking, right clicking, scrolling, zooming, and a few others. Finally, if things get a little too complicated and you would prefer to disable some features, you can easily go into the settings and do as you please.

Apple has also added a few other upgrades, such as Bluetooth wireless connectivity and a more sensitive laser-tracking engine, giving you more control. Also, the technology outfitted in the Magic Mouse can easily differentiate between zooming, swiping, scrolling, and every other action you can perform. So, don’t worry about the mouse not being able to perform exactly as you wish. Priced at $69, this is definitely an accessory that Mac users and even those considering purchasing a Mac, should check out.

Laptop News

Apple’s New MacBook

Last week was a big one for Microsoft, with the Windows 7 launch, but it looks like Apple wants to steal away some of the spotlight with their new Mac Book. It could be a necessary update, random chance, or an actual direct competitor to sway the potential Windows 7 users. Whichever it is, the new Mac Book has many upgrades, making it that much more like its bigger brother, the Mac Book Pro, ding incentive for those looking to buy a cheaper Apple laptop.

First of all, there were some minor changes to the internal specs of the Mac Book. These include a processor upgrade to 2.26 GHz (up from 2.13 GHz), a hard drive capacity of 250 GB (up from 160GB), and new DDR3 memory (upgraded from DDR2). Aside from those tweaks, there weren’t any major changes to the internal components of the Mac Book.

Now on to the more serious business: the external changes. Most of the features include implementing the Mac Book Pro technology into the Mac Books. The multi touch track pad, allowing users to perform zoom, scroll, and more is now possible just by using a couple of quick finger swipes. The screen now has LED back lighting, giving the display a brighter, more eye-catching feel. And finally, Apple’s very valuable feature, the built-in battery; though you won’t be able to remove or replace the battery, you get a much better battery life, and less degradation over time.

Sub-notebooks or Ultra Mobile PCs (UMPCs) have been around for quite a while now. They have a smaller, lighter footprint than standard notebooks, thanks to their lesser screens and because some features (like the optical drive) having being in use off.

Most of the sub-notebooks that were in the market till 2006, however, belonged in the premium segment, making people think twice before investing in one of theses. Then in 2007, Asus indistinct all that by giving the world the Eee PC. Considered as an derivative of the OLPC idea, the Eee PC has made portable computing come within the reach of a large segment of the general public who couldn’t afford it thus far. We’re sure you’ll want to know what it’s like, and what we think of it, having spent a as using and taxing it. The bundle consists of the Eee PC, the series charger, a soft case, and a driver CD. I liked the one-piece adapter (it’s not of the typical bulky kind laptops use) — it’s only slightly larger than your average cell phone charger, as you can see.

Design

When I saw the Eee PC in print ads, I imagined the device to be bigger; I realized how small it really is only after I got my hands on it. The Eee PC 4G is available in black as well as white. The white model looks like a shrunk Apple MacBook, and the black one (which we received) has that “business-professional” appeal So you can see how small the thing is, here are a few pictures of it alongside my 15.4-inch HP Pavilion notebook. They look quite the father-and-son pair The Eee is a small more than half as large as my HP laptop

The small 7-inch display has a good resolution of 800 x 480; it’s pretty bright. Above the screen is the webcam; though it’s not as high-res as the 2MP sensors on standard laptops, the quality is decent. In low lighting, I got around 10 fps, and a respectable 30 fps in good lighting conditions. The cam can record videos in the OGG format — pretty usable all in all.

The screen is covered on both sides by two strips of speaker grilles. The speakers deliver decent output, though a bit lower on quality as compared to those on a regular laptop. Below the screen is the “solid” sort of keyboard; in order to fit a full QWERTY piano into the shorter-width frame, the bulk of the person keys has been conciliation upon. The first time I used the keyboard, I was skeptical about it. I was steadily able to get used to it; I can now type decently fast, although there is the occasional typo. People with large hands might have a problem at what time they try typing on it for the first time, but let not that first impression be the last — you can get used to it, even if it’s got to be called “cramped” in the end.

The touchpad is smaller than usual, and there’s only a vertical scroll line on this one. Space restraints probably dictated that a horizontal scroll line couldn’t be incorporated. I had one problem with the touchpad from time to time: although the pointer navigation was all right, it did not respond to tapping fine sufficient I sometimes had to use the buttons. The Eee PC is built of traditional stiff plastic materials like the ones used in typical notebooks. The build quality is good; it doesn’t feel cheap at all, even though it is, price-wise. Even the screen hinge is pretty strong.

Performance

Since this is a Linux-based notebook, we couldn’t run our standard benchmarks to gauge performance. But my overall experience was that it runs pretty fast. Most of the time, multitasking doesn’t make the OS drag. Videos were played back pretty smoothly, and data transfer rates were pretty decent, too.

Battery

My first battery test consisted of the Eee PC being put in full brightness mode and connected to the Internet via Wi-Fi. I surfed wirelessly, played music off a memory card or the Internet, watched YouTube videos, and used the word processor from time to time. With all this, the battery lasted two hours and forty minutes. In the second test, I played a DivX video off a memory card. Here, the laptop’s battery stayed alive for almost two and a half hours. That means good battery life; under power-saving conditions, the laptop should definitely be able to give you more than three hours.

With respect to heating, my experience suggested that the Eee PC heats up about the same as measure up to to standard laptops, if not more (when used for longer periods of time). It is definitely not a chilled-out machine, but you can’t consider this factor a deal-breaker. Finally, when it comes to in payment noise, there is almost none. That’s mainly due to the absence of a rotating hard drive and an optical drive which also reason vibrations along with noise. The only little din that is emitted is from the system fan, but it’s hardly obvious. This one’s pretty much a silent worker.

The Asus Eee PC is available for a retail price of Rs 18,000, and that’s well-priced for sure. That much cash will fetch you an upper-mid segment smart phone; the Eee PC can do a lot more. It’s easier and more contented to type on its keyboard than on QWERTY-pad cell phones. The target audience would include beautiful much anyone — right from school-kids to business specialized. The Eee PC definitely can’t be considered a primary PC; it just is not predestined to be one. It can very well be a just right friend to your home PC. I’ll sign off with this: this laptop is a worthy speculation. I do think it has ushered in a new era of portable calculate, and other manufacturers are come up with alike aid.