ULTRAVIAS - Notebook, Laptop and mobile device reviews

Athlon-powered large-profile netbook: The line between netbooks and laptops continues to blur, with screen sizes from 9-inch up to 15-inch in the mix and performance specifications with a similarly wide range. Packard Bell sees its dot s and dot…

first netbook from leading media player company: For a company that tries hard to set the pace in its chosen field - media players - Archos’s decision to launch a netbook now seems like an odd one. The market’s pretty defined, the big…

spooky and surreal adventure game: It’s not advisable to ingest any magic mushrooms or anything even slightly hallucinatory before loading up Outcry, as this has to be one of the trippiest games ever to find its way on to the adventure…

First the Nook (pictured), now the MediaBook?

(Credit:
Barnes & Noble)

The question is, who isn’t getting in on the e-book reader action these days? Less than two weeks after we met Barnes & Nobles’ Nook and just a few days after hearing of tire maker Bridgestone’s plans for a …

Too busy cobbling together your Balloon Boy Halloween costume to keep up with Crave this week? Fear not! The weekly roundup has arrived.

• Nintendo supersized its gaming handheld. Here, all your DSi LL questions answered.

We admit it, we're scared.

(Credit:
Trossen Robotics)

• We deconstructed the Droid.
…

As the sixth generation MacBook Pro, the 13.3” version is a slimmer, faster, less costly laptop from Apple than its predessors. Upgrades include better graphics with the NVIDIA 9400M integrated graphics, which offers a great gaming experience. Although most Intel integrated graphics options have greatly reduced performance compared to dedicated options, NVIDIA has broken that trend with the 9400M. The MacBook Pro also handles 720P movie decoding with ease, perfect for a home theatre hub with a miniDisplay Port to HDMI adapter. The MacBook Pro also offers a headphone jack and a new SD-card slot. Physically, the laptop back cover has been replaced with a seamless, smooth aluminum cover with no sign of battery. The battery has actually been built inside and offers up to 8 hours of battery life.

Another cool feature is the handy battery gauge mounted on the side of the laptop. Pressing the button lights up a number of eight LED’s showing the current level of the battery - thus preventing you from dashing out with an uncharged laptop. In general, the 6th generation MacBook Pro comes with a lot of attractive upgrades that would interest consumers. 

Features:

• 2.26GHz or 2.53GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor with 3MB on-chip shared L2 cache
• 13.3-inch (diagonal) LED-backlit glossy widescreen display
• 160GB or 250GB 5400-rpm Serial ATA hard drive
• 160GB or 250GB 5400-rpm Serial ATA hard drive
• Built-in iSight camera
• Built-in Bluetooth 2.1 + EDR (Enhanced Data Rate)
• Mac OS X v10.6 Snow Leopard
• One FireWire 800 port (up to 800 Mbps), two USB 2.0 ports (up to 480 Mbps), SD card slot

(Credit:
Bridgestone)

When not making tires, Bridgestone is working on e-book readers so flexible they’d probably survive being driven over. They’ve even got a prototype ready for testing, but no plans to commercialize the slender and bendy device at this point.

The reader (press release in Japanese) is …

(Credit:
Audio-Technica)

Last year, we reviewed the Audio-Technica QuietPoint ATH-ANC7 noise-canceling headphones, and editor Jasmine France thought they were a good value, offering decent, but not great, sound for the money. Well, when we heard that Audio-Technica was releasing a new, improved version of these headphones with a “b” tacked …