Foreign Perspectives

Not so long ago just about every company manufacturing portable computers seemed to offer a whole raft of options with the basic model so you could have one or two batteries, or you could have a CD drive (’twas pre-DVD then) instead of one of the batteries or you could have…. well, loads of different things that probably served to seriously complicate the buying decision for most people.

However, these days the portable is very much a standard issue device with not a whole lot of uniqueness to really distinguish the products from different manufacturers. There still remains some specialism of course but mainly that’s severely limited so, for example, Sony tend to specialise in expensive multimedia models and, as always, Apple plough their own furrow in the marketplace. A year ago I’d have added that for a mini portable it was Asus but that marketplace is now totally swamped by offerings from the other manufacturers.

What’s missing from that sameness are the little things. For instance, I’m looking for a portable right now and would like to have an AV socket on it yet there doesn’t seem to be such a beastie these days and instead some have HDMI connections which are handy but it would have been nice to have been able to connect camcorders and whatnot that are only a few years old and don’t have HDMI. Likewise, I’d have liked to have been able to continue to use some PCMCIA devices but everyone seems to have moved on to ExpressCard slots now.

On the software front it’s nice to see that several flavours of Unix are on offer these days, notably on the netbooks of course in that it would seem pretty ridiculous to be spending far more to buy the wordprocessing software than it did to buy the computer.

Popularity: unranked [?]

Although they’ve one of the most frequently used pieces of technology around for a long time, most people don’t buy a new TV terribly often.

However, it always seems to be close to the worst time to buy one no matter when you’re looking for one, doesn’t it? For a long time it was safe enough buying TVs: from the 1970s when colour came out in the UK it was OK to pick up a 405 line set for getting on for 20 years until the 405 line broadcasts were turned off. Even within that period it was fine for quite some time if you bought a 625 line model as they were fine well into the 1990s.

These days it’s a whole different story though. Not only have we moved from the simple 625 line broadcasts in their 4:3 aspect ratio to the more common widescreen version but we’re also getting into the digital transmission era, moving to flatscreen technology and high definition all at the same time.

Aside from the flatscreens being a whole lot lighter than their predecessors, there isn’t really a whole lot going for them right now in that the colour on the old style CRT versions is generally better and you don’t get those annoying little coloured spots that are found on flatscreen versions. Most flatscreens come with digital tuners as standard though which is something of a plus in that the analogue signals are gradually being turned off.

What about HD though? Well, that comes in two versions: the real thing and “HD ready” which means that it’s not really HD at all. Going for true HD seriously bumps up the cost though and since there aren’t really a whole lot of HD broadcasts around at the moment, it seems to make more sense to go for an HD ready TV now with a view to replacing it in four or five years time when the price of true HD will have dropped and the number of HD programmes should have gone up a lot.

Of course, by then chances are the first of the 3D TVs will be starting to drop to relatively sensible prices….

Popularity: 2% [?]

When I was a whole lot younger, one of the things that I used to do was to leaf through a fantastic magazine called Exchange & Mart which listed just about every possible thing that you could buy at the time from the sensible to the just plain weird.

Of course, these days such magazines have long since been replaced by online sales places which come with weekly sale and even daily sales pages which are just as fascinating to browse. The big plus point is that, these days, the listings come with colour photos and lengthy descriptions and, of course, the ubiquitous “buy now” button. That’s not forgetting that were you to print out the entire “magazine” it would be a whole lot larger than the printed version ever was.

One of my fav buys of late has been a little netbook computer. If you’ve not looked closely at these babies you might think that they’re just for browsing the Internet and that certainly was the original intention when they were first introduced. However, as well as the weedy 4GB disk (yes, disk, not memory) of those early versions you can also get those with 120GB and more space which is more than enough space for most people I suspect. Not only that but you get the option of Linux software on most of them and that makes quite a radical difference in the useability of them: buy a $329 model with Windows and you could easily double that price to load up enough software to make it a fully useable computer; buy the exact same computer but with Linux and it’s $279 and comes with software that’s fully compatible with and just as useable as the MS Office equivalent. That’s not trial software either: it’s the full package.

In practical terms that “netbook” computer that I bought is, for me, just a smaller version of the rather more substantial computer that I’d normally write on. The keyboard is smaller for sure but just as useable and the only real drawback is that you need to scroll the screen a little more. In fact, were the disk just a little larger I’d be quite tempted to use it as my only computer. For those with bigger fingers and worse eyesight don’t forget that you can easily plug in a full-size keyboard and screen and still end up paying less overall than you would for a full-size computer but with that priceless added advantage that you can take the computer with you.

The current 1GB, 160GB provides more than enough space for most people. You might think that the processor is a little underpowered but it’s more than fast enough to play DVDs (you need to buy a DVD player separately) and generally flies through everything that I’ve thrown at it (some folk even use it for CAD work!).

Popularity: 3% [?]