René Rebe

With 12h battery life and lighter with 1.25 (or so) kg, 2cm thickness and 10″ display. Including partially Aluminum enclosure. Makes the Wind U210 look not so cool anymore. Too bad it certainly will be powered by some 64bit and VT lacking Intel Atom. Yuck.

Update: 12h battery life as specifically tuned by factory settings, 9h when run with more common, performing settings.

If it just would pack a little newer AMD Neo X2 L325 or L625. (instead of the non-X2 [non dual core] MV-40), a 3G modem and be a little smaller (10″, to fit in my every day bag), and lighter. A longer battery life would also not hurt.

Update: On some high-res pictures it actually looks like it has a SIM slot, let’s hope it also has a modem behind it despite not being listed in some press material.

Cost’ them nothing, just shuffled a few more units. Well, given some super-computers build out of massive amounts of PS3’s probably quite some units. Though maybe the unit shuffling was the problem: sold below the manufacturing costs to people not buying games to subsidize it, …

Maybe they just wanted to boost the sales numbers initially to look better against the Xbox 360 and Wii, which where sold ahead of the PS3 lunch. Or it was a special deal with IBM to promote the Cell SPUs by getting them into the hands of developers cheaply?

For some time I’m now looking for a usable N.tB..k (ok, Intel brought the former trademark from Psion, I could probably start using the word unmangled …). Some kind of ultra-portable notebook I can take with me, everywhere. My expectations are not really high (e.g. I do not need excessive Phenom (Core 2 Duo, or i7) power on the road. An Via Nano certainly has enough processing power for some minimal Linux to do some text editing and photo upload. However, there are some basic thing I need for the device to be functional:

• Intel VT, AMD SVM, to start some virtual machine when a customer calls
• x86-64 (AMD64, Intel EM64T), gives a little extra performance due to more registers for the register constraint x86 legacy, most of my “Pro” software certainly depends on it, today, …
• digital video out (HDMI, Display Port, whatever) to connect a display when I’m at some desk to do some more work abroad (customer on-site, presentation, meeting, speech, etc.)
• some integrated 3G (UMTS) modem would also be nice to save to carry some additional plastic tube
• ok, it should not look like the cheapest “crap-ware”

To bad most of the “all too similar” standard NetBooks already fail to just meet the first 3 points above, no VT extension, no 64bit and a digital video out mostly missing anyway.

Anyway, I looked at some of the latest arrivals in the sore and collected some data: Toshiba NB200, Samsung N310, Packard Bell DOTM and Asus EeePC 1003HAG.

I find it most irritating that most cheap PC manufactures do not have any unique selling point whatsoever or add higher end features, and merrily compete with exactly same SPECs in a price race to the bottom.

Manufactures: Please, may you please adapt some more decent silicon like the AMD Neo or Via Nano (64bit and VT/SVM aware!) in some products? And manufacture products that suck-less(tm)? Some less thick plastic bezel around the screen (less wasted screen real estate and space in the bag) would also be a welcome design goal. And while we’re at it: less than 600 vertical pixel really don’t cut it anymore. Not in this millennium, ever. Thanks.

PS: Maybe I should just get an “some years old” 12″ Apple PowerBook from eBay … :-(

So, iTunes 8.2.1 comes with:

iTunes 8.2.1 provides a number of important bug fixes and addresses an issue with verification of Apple devices

such as not “accidently” syncing to a Palm’s Pre. Palm’s former Apple engineers might have implemented the Apple file “upload” protocol in all fine details (as can be derived from open source iPod access libraries anyway), but there is one simple show-stopper that Apple probably added in this update that Palm can not circumvent easily:

if (idVendor != 0×05ac) return false; // (Apple Inc.)

Palm can not just change their USB Vendor (and/or Product ID), …

Interesting: So up to, and including Via Nano CPU stepping 2 the VT (VMX) was not finalized and does not really work (at least not in all details or unreliable, whatever). The Via Nano CPU must be at least stepping 3 for functional VT and should usually be disabled by the BIOS for earlier silicon, like stepping 2 and before (but sometimes isn’t like on Via’s own reference board VB8001 I had my hands on earlier this year).

Taking some pictures and making some notes definitely is challenging when you actually also have some other stuff on the agenda. So for day 1 I actually took less pictures than I hoped to do.

It appears we’ll finally see a family of Via Nano based devices on the market quite soon, as there where multiple shown in the Via/S3 showroom. Even an Lenovo Ideapad:

There also appears to be a storm of cheap e-ink e-book readers on the horizon. However, I wonder about the acceptance given the 0 media partnership and the Amazon-like partnership that brings the daily newspaper to their Kindle:

And in the Via showroom I also found a hot candidate for the “ugliest” (or at least outdated) case design award (actually the picture makes it look better than in real, where the simple steal case does not really shine - and is pretty heavy too [metallic prototype?]):

Oh, last but not least (I nearly forgot): Art Studios has a booth showcasting EFIX in action.

… more in the gallery.

PS: I know, I urgently need to fix my blog gallery plugin to auto-rotate based on the EXIF tags, … I guess some prominent frontpage posts are a god reason to finally do so :-)

Flashrom 0.9 is out, and already in T2. Flashrom is a universal, Linux, BSD, Solaris, etc. - you name it - BIOS flash utility. Now that might have saved me most of the other weekend where I had to update the BIOS of a Sony Vaio laptop, …

A First Look at the Larrabee and C++ Larrabee Prototype Library just arrived via the Intel software dispatch in my INBOX. Enjoy!

So I wasted most of my weekend messing with old PC hardware. Initially I just wanted to check some KVM/VT detail and needed a test system. I was under the impression some lingering Sony VGN-SZ laptop would fulfill the need. However, it turned out, that Sony disabled VT in the BIOS, at that time, locking the MSR bits. While some NVRAM tweaking should enable it, this procedure required some newer BIOS to be flashed for a determinstic, known offset to tweak.

First of all the Sony BIOS flash thing required Windows, which obviously was not installed on the machine. So I grabbed the XP copy shipped with the device and some hours later I had to find out that the Sony BIOS flash tool requires a bunch of Sony “support-DLLs” (to determine the machine model). So some more disc jockey-ing later, I finally had to find out that the latest Sony BIOS updates even require Vista!

All my time spent on just getting XP on the machine where thus wasted - and obviously I had no Vista around. I grabed the latest Windows 7 public beta and thanks god some hours later the Sony BIOS flasher was not so picky to complain about Windows 7 vs. Vista, but that the BIOS update would not be suitable for this machine!

It was only some more hours later that I accidentally found on Google, that the US version of the BIOS (PHBSYS-01041232-US.EXE) would not flash on this particular VGN-SZ2M, but the Japense (or Asia or whatever) version (PHBSYS-01041232-UN.EXE) would! I really wonder what the PC manufacturers think creating such a madness. Specifically with 40++ model variants you can go hunt the matching BISO for (not to mention the initial insane move to disable a hardware feature, such as Intel VT).

But now with the BIOS update finally done the biggest suprise is still to come: The T2300 CPU does not even feature VT!!! And this, while I even checked on the Intel website that it should. Turned out the cpuid identifier T2300 is no real T2300 but a T2300E. Yes, and extra E, indicating no VT. And I really wonder how such a huge, market leading company, as Intel can afford shipping CPUs not correctly identifying uniquely thru the cpuid, …