It’s been a long time between blogs for me, however, this news item really got my attention. I wrote some time ago about how I wished the iPad was a dock for the iphone rather than a standalone product, and now, it looks like my wish is coming true (albeit not from Apple) in the form of the KT Spider.
Lets face it, the current generation of smart phones have dual core processors, solid state hard drives and plenty of ram for most computing tasks. The only things they are missing are bigger screens, keyboards and the port connectivity that desktop computers traditionally offered. The KT Spider offers a simple docking system to turn it’s Android based smart phone into a laptop, gaming console or tablet.
Think about it, no more syncing between this and that device, no more forgotten files left on home or work computers. And the kicker for me – only one wireless broadband package required. Maybe I am out of the norm with this one, but currently I have a separate wireless data plan for my phone, iPad and laptop. Amalgamating those 3 packages would not only save money, but simplify life in general
It is not hard to see how in the next ten years your phone be all these devices combined:
HD Video Camera – smart phone image sensors are improving fast and will soon rival dedicated units.
DSLR mirrorless still camera 16+ Megapixel with detachable lenses and geo-tagging. See Sony NEX-series cameras
PVR – Personal video recorder – many phones in Asia can already receive free to air digital TV.
GPS – Navigator – already here really.
Gaming Console – this market is really just beginning with market leaders like Sony releasing their recent Xperia smart gaming phone.
Movie Projector – Low Power LED projectors are currently just beginning to find their way to market
Desktop – a smart phone could easily plug into the back of a large iMac style display and communicate with mouse/keyboard via bluetooth.
Minority report style interface – With an LED projector and inbuilt front facing camera using Microsoft’s Kinect (Project Natal) technology it is already possible to interact with a PC through a virtual interface.
I am sure you can think of more.
The Green Benefit:
The convergence of all this technology has a distinct green benefit as the number of electronic devices per person takes a considerable drop. Not to mention the lower power usage of smart phone processors and components all designed to maximise battery life.
About the only downside of this convergence is that Harvey Norman, JB Hifi etc will have to find new ways of filling up all that unused floor space!
I have been harping on for a while now about how mobile phones will eventually become mobile PC’s. Most new smart phones now feature processors with 1Ghz or faster processors, sophisticated operating systems and a multitude of software available. The only gap has been the ability to connect them to keyboards and screens in an efficient way.
Well, the guys over at Gizmag have spotted a device that takes us another step closer.
Personally, I reckon it would be perfect if the iphone screen could be output to a 24 inch monitor at full resolution. I would rarely need a PC anymore it that were the case!
The holy grail of modern computing: Instant On, Instant Off.
I have been reading about it for years. Various solutions have promised to come to market prior to 2010, but none havemade thus far due to manufacturing difficulties or production costs. The first instant computing cab off the rank in 2011 is the North Carolina University.
A team of scientist’s there claim to have a prototype of a “Unified Memory Module” which can both store memory without power (like a USB flash drive) , but also perform high speed memory operations like conventional DRAM.
It’s called a “Double floating-gate field effect transistor (FET)“. You can read more of the technical details here.
I for one really hope they can make this technology work a sit will have a profound effect on the future of computing.
In terms of power savings alone this technology could save billions per year not to mention the environmental benefits.
Why? Just think of all the millions of servers out there supporting the likes of Google, Ebay etc. A considerable number of those servers spend most of their time sitting idle as there is always a need for redundancy. Without redundancy, the internet would slow every time a big news story broke, or online phenomenon launched. With instant on memory the servers need only draw power when required.
The other reason power is saved is that the hard drive and ram are physically combined into one component therefore lowering the power demand of the overall system.
The same benefits will flow on to mobile devices such as laptops, mobile phones etc where this technology will yield significantly longer battery life.
The other major benefit for the end user is greater speed and time savings. Not only will overall system importance improve due to the removal of the conventioanl HDD bottleneck, but think how much time and power is wasted for computers to boot up to a usable state.
I for one cannot wait….maybe we should all send North Carolina University some cash!
If someone had suggested 10 years ago that a fully working computer with up to 1GHz of processing power would fit on a board the size of a SODIMM memory module (67mm x 32mm), some lighthearted mockery may have followed.
However, hardware specialist Toradex is about to do just that with its new Tegra T20, a tiny pc module based on NVIDIA’s latest Cortex A9 processor that offers full high definition video support, 256MB of on board memory and 1GB of Flash storage. Originally designed for thsmart phone market this technology is now spreading across to the world of mainstream computing.
With only 1GB of storage you won’t see Win7 installed any time soon. However, it does support Windows CE and a variety of Linux Distributions.
So what does this mean to you the consumer? Well it signals the beginning of modular computing. Imagine your Desktop PC is starting to get a bit old, or you need more power to edit video etc.
Right now you might look at extra ram or a new CPU. Wouldn’t it be great if you could slot in one or more extra low cost computers into your motherboard for little more than a ram upgrade today. Theoretically you could have 20-30 fully integrated PCs inside one desktop computer housing of today.
It is not often these days that a piece of software makes me go “Wow” but yesterday was one of those days.
I had recently been considering a Photoshop upgrade from my trusty old CS2 version for a number of reasons, but had held off mostly because of the lack of new worthwhile features.
However, after having downloaded Photoshop CS5 and spent some time with it I am happy to part with my hard earned!
Watch the video below to see Adobe Photoshop’s new WOW feature in action: Content Aware Fill
Now that you have watched this movie ask yourself “How did they design a piece of software which can almost perfectly analyse any picture and fill in the gap perfectly?” I cannot begin to imagine! All I know is that this feature will save me many hours of work.
You could also call this feature “Remove unwanted Ex”
One of the first new markets I can imagine for this feature is for those with large photo collections containing ex-wives, husbands etc. I can just imagine thousands of jilted lovers around the world actively removing deleting ex-partners from their favourite photo collections more quickly and easily than ever before!
If interested in looking at a copy of Adobe Photoshop CS5 you may be interested to know that you can now purchase the Design Premium bundle via subscription ($119/month). Still pricey, but a better option if you can’t afford to buy it out right.
Slow hard drive – Conventional laptop hard drives are really slow. Slow to load Windows, slow to run applications…just slow!!
But with a new SSD (Solid State Hard Drive) your laptop will load information faster than the most expensive Enterprise grade server hard drives. Windows will boot faster and applications will load faster – Hooray! And, as an added bonus your hard drive will be less likely to fail. Solid state drives have no moving parts and thus, are much tougher than conventional notebook drives.
Not enough Memory – Most notebooks today come with at least 4GB of memory which is an ideal amount for the vast majority of notebook users. However, if your notebook is more than a couple of years old it most likely came with 2Gb or less. If you are trying to run Windows Vista withless than 2Gb of ram you will spend more time waiting than working!
Sluggish Operating System – Anyone out there running Vista will know what I mean! Even the comparatively speedy XP tends to slow fairly dramatically after a couple of years of use. It’s time to upgrade to Windows 7. Unlike XP or Vista, Windows 7 supports SSD hard drives natively ensuring the best performance possible. Windows 7 is also easier on system resources than Vista giving laptops with a max mmemory of 2GB a fighting chance!
If you are like most people your laptop is not running to it’s full potential – and you may not even know it.
Case Study: 2007 model HP Pavilion DV6000 laptop.
This particular machine is owned by my bookeeper. In terms of installed software it was extremely lean with just MS Office 2007, MYOB and Microsoft Security Essentials. The machine is used each day to process various businesses financial information, browse the internet and create documents in MS Office.
Specification: 1.8Ghz Intel Core 2 Duo pressor, 1Gb DDR2667 memory and Windows Vista Home Premium.
Time to boot:2 minutes 43 seconds (time taken until it was possible to start using the machine. Does not iclude bios screen time) Usability: In a word – terrible! I have no idea how she persisted for 3 years with this machine. MYOB took at least 32 seconds to start and was incredibly unresponsive in use. MS Word/Excel took approximately 18 seconds to open. Having both MS Office and MYOB open was virtually impossible as the machine would constantly freeze up whilst paging to the hard drive.
Step 1: Memory Boost:
The very first thing we did was give the machine a memory boost from 1Gb to 2GB – it’s maximum.
New Boot Time: 2 minutes 10 seconds (32 seconds faster) Usability: So much better! It is now possible to have MYOB, Office and Interent Explorer open at the same time. MYOB still took 30 seconds but was reasonably responsive in use. MS Word/Excel took 14 seconds to open and ran well during use.
In this step we replaced the old 120Gb Sata drive with a 60GB OCZ Vertex 2 high performace SSD drive and installed a fresh copy of Windows 7 Home Premium 32 bit. Once the installation was complete we reinstalled MS Office, MYOB and MS security Essentials.
New Boot Time: 32 seconds! (2 mintues and 10 seconds faster than it’s original state) Usability: Now everything is fast. The machine boots in no time, MYOB & MS Word/Excel all start in 3 t o 5 seconds and everthing feels snappy. Although we did not measure it previously the laptop seems to sleep/resume almost instantly.
Overall my book keeper could not be happier. She reckons she gets twice as much done in half the time. A claim I can easily believe based on it’s original specification.
It’s been a long time between blogs for me, however, this news item really got my attention. I wrote some time ago about how I wished the iPad was a dock for the iphone rather than a standalone product, and now, it looks like my wish is coming true (albeit not from Apple) in the form of the KT Spider.
The holy grail of modern computing: Instant On, Instant Off.
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