News

NMU Provides Lenovo R400’s and WiMAX to Students

Imagine this. You're (back) in college, settling down in "your" booth of at the local coffeeshop with your decked out Lenovo R400 and you realize that all the research for your midterm essay is located on the History Department's shared network drive. If you're a student at almost any school other then Northern Michigan University (NMU) you'd have to abandon your already warmed up booth, guzzle your double hazelnut latte and trek back to campus to download the research to your hard drive, but students at NMU don't even have to depend on the coffeeshop's flaky wifi connection thanks to the roll-out of WiMAX at NMU and in the college town of Marquette.

OSX 10.6 “Snow Leopard” Ships on August 28th

Normally when the Apple store goes offline its return is met with cheers of Joy for new Apple products but the brief outage this morning didn't bring the chorus of cheers that the actual release of Snow Leopard would. Thankfully Apple did announce the new features of OSX 10.6 that Snow Leopard will ship on August 28th.
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Nokia Expected to Enter Netbook Market

The India Times reports that mobile phone manufacturer Nokia is actively monitoring the netbook market and that it may enter the mobile computing space in the future. Speaking with the Times, Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo, the Global CEO of Nokia said, "...the PC and the mobile will continue to come closer and merge. A lot of opportunity can be seen in this converged area." While Nokia has made news recently for it's N97 and N97 mini phones (which the company calls mobile computers, Nokia isn't a well known computer manufacturer.
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Digital Summer Party in SF

Last night I went to the Digital Summer party at Temple, a nightspot in San Francisco. It was a celebration of technology mixed with a fashion show. Liana Burts...
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HP Pavilion dv6t w/ATI Graphics Demo: Call of Duty World at War (video)

Here's a demo of what it's like to play a video game on a Pavilion dv6t with the best graphics card that HP offers on this notebook. I found that gameplay is incredibly smooth. This isn't a gaming notebook per se, but it can definitely hold its own with Call of Duty: World at War, a very popular first person shooter that follows a World War II story line.

Dell Inspiron 11z now available for $399

It seems like just last week Dell dropped the Dell Mini 12 but Dell is already offering the Inspiron 11z to fill the ~12" notebook market. The Inspiron 11z starts at $399 and made a favorable impression on the PC World staff when they had hands on time last week.

Lenovo adds 14″ IdeaPad U450p to its notebook lineup

As part of a new rollout of products, including a new media server and products aimed at the home theater market, Lenovo added a new notebook to the IdeaPad lineup. The IdeaPad U450p builds on the popularity of Lenovo's slim 13" IdeaPad U350 adding an optical drive and better ability to handle graphically intense applications such as HD video thanks to a discrete graphics card.

Airline In-Flight WiFi Offerings Compared

Even though I'm no road warrior, I am a connection junkie. That's why I've been following the inclusion of in-flight WiFi on more and more airlines over the last year pretty closely. Thanks in large part to a push by Virgin, eight airlines now offer in-flight WiFi on at least some of their planes which means it's easier than ever to find a flight that will hook you up to your twitter page at 30,000 feet. While there are eight airlines offering WiFi, there are actually 3 different companies that provide the rather expensive service to airlines and their speeds and abilities vary greatly which prompted dvice to assemble a handy comparison chart for in Flight WiFi.
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Next iPod Touch Will Have Camera? (video)

There's a lot of rumors flying around about what Apple will release next. The company is holding apparently holding a press conference in September to announce a new product. The iPod Touch is one Apple product that's ready to be refreshed and today someone claiming to have a prototype of the next-generation iPod Touch posted several pictures and a video of the device.
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Help Choose MIDStories Giveaway Winners

We received several compelling stories from current MID users and people who think a tiny computer would improve their digital lives. Students, pilots, a doctor...

Dell Inspiron Z Series Coming Soon

Gizmodo's posted a photo gallery of Dell's upcoming Inspiron Z series of notebooks, which will most likely be announced just before Windows 7 becomes available in October. Dell's Inspiron Z series will There aren't a whole lot of details available quite yet, but these notebooks will be thinner and lighter than Dell's existing Inspiron lineup.

Tip: Develop a Solid Backup Strategy for Your Notebooks Before It’s Too Late

Backing up notebooks is easier and more affordable than ever. At the minimum, you should have two copies of every photo, video and document that really matters to them. Ideally, you should have several copies of your files stored locally and offsite. How aggressive you are about backing up your data depends can depend on your budget, amount of data and how much time you have to put into it all.