Asus Eee PC 701 Becomes Cheaper

Asus Eee PC 701 become cheaper. The netbook market is certainly one of the most dynamic segments of the IT industry. As a direct consequence of that, each day brings more details about freshly released netbooks and other netbook-related products. We, as regular consumers, can only attempt to stay up to date with the advances in the field by keeping an eye out for everything new that comes along.

Currently, netbook fans can choose from several such devices coming from a significant number of manufacturers. ASUS is probably one of the most successful vendors on the market, thanks to its vast Eee PC lineup, which currently counts no less than 12 models. Furthermore, users can get their Eee PC netbooks in various form factors, ranging from 7-inch to 10-inch. However, the 7-inch model can pride itself with being the very first of its kind, having been released back in the days when most users didn't even know of Intel's Atom.


Currently, the Eee PC 701 is the cheapest Eee PC you can find on the market. Although it doesn't come with the same technical specifications as its 9-inch and 10-inch counterparts, this ultra-portable computer system can certainly provide you with the basics in computing technology. For a price tag of approximately $280 (for the 4GB version running on Linux), you will be able to surf the Internet, listen to music, check your emails, and more. This offer is available over at Expansys so, if you are interested in it, you should turn to its website for shipping details, as well as to order it.


In other news, from now on, MSI's U100 Wind netbook will be available with a bigger hard drive, providing users with an impressive 120GB of storage space. Just as a reminder, the Wind U100 is the company's first netbook system, and it sports a 10-inch display. The U90 model will continue to ship with the 80GB hard drive.


However, if MSI's 10-inch Wind is not the thing for you, then maybe you’d be interested in Medion’s offer, which brings you the Akoya netbook, also sporting a 10-inch display. Good news is, it’s now shipping in the UK. Unlike the Wind netbook, the Akoya will only provide its users with a maximum 80GB of storage space. Aside from that, the netbook's tech specs are similar to the ones on the Wind netbook.

Read More......

Web Browser Google Chrome

Google has presented, during a media event lasting nearly an hour, its latest, highly acclaimed product. Probably anyone on the planet with an Internet connection is already familiar with Google Chrome, the first open source web browser.


During the conference, Google officials presented the capabilities of the product that has already generated a lot of stir, along with some behind-the-scenes development stories. The main “lecturer” was Sundar Pichai, Google product management vice president, who started by saying that the team working on Chrome tried to emulate the technologies and the user experience from behind Google's most successful product, the search engine used by nearly two thirds of the planet.

Pichai underscored that the main aspect that differentiated the browser from its competitors was that it didn’t stand out, and was as unobtrusive as possible. “The motto in the whole team was how do we minimize Chrome. We used to call it “content, not Chrome” [...]. Our view is that the browser is just an application, is just a tool for people to interact with the sites and applications they care about. So browsers should not be self important.”


“In Chrome, we do not interrupt users at all. There are no dialogs which pop-up in front of you and ask you to do something. So our goal is that the user should enjoy surfing the web and the browser should stay out of the way.” added the Google official.


The Google rep highlighted the three significant features that actually distinguished Chrome from anything else on the market – the rendering engine, the multiprocess technology and V8, a JavaScript engine that developers have built from scratch. Rendering is based on the same engine that powers Safari, which enables at least some of the web developers to easily adapt their webpages to fit the browser. Multiprocessing has the main function of increasing the speed of the browser, but also of avoiding the crashing of the entire browser when a tab malfunctions. The V8 JavaScript engine speeds up even more the reactions of Chrome, whenever users employ it to do something in particular.


While Sundar Pichai held a speech focused mostly on technical facts, Larry Page, one of Google's co-founders, joked about the fact that he usually ruled over his team with an iron fist, but that the people who worked on Chrome did a really good job. “I've been using Chrome for quite a while actually and I've really enjoyed using it. I used it on a slow, old computer on purpose to really force them to make it fast without a lot of memory and on slower computer.” said Page.

Meanwhile, Software Engineer at the company Amanda Walker announced that the Mac and Linux versions were under development, although no one could estimate the exact date of release. Pichai also tackled this topic for the journalists gathered at the official release event, saying that the internal need for the two versions of the browser (since many Googlers - the company staff - also use Linux and Mac OS X platforms) should make development pick up the pace.

Read More......

Google Browser Chrome

On September 2, 2008 Google released its own breed of open source browser, a marriage between Apple's Safari and Mozilla's Firefox, dubbed Google Chrome. Of course, Google Chrome is first and foremost a new competitor for Internet Explorer on the browser market. But in Google's own perspective, it is so much more than a potential IE killer. It is actually a Windows killer. Google has in fact not been shy about positioning Chrome against both Internet Explorer and Windows, as items of prey.

"What we really needed was not just a browser, but also a modern platform for web pages and applications, and that's what we set out to build," revealed Sundar Pichai, VP Product Management, and Linus Upson engineering director, on the occasion of the first official announcement of Google Chrome.


With the exception of the platform reference from Pichai and Upson, Google was careful to avoid the subject. Of course, not all of the Mountain View-based search giant representatives followed suit. Google co-founder Sergey Brin in fact indicated that Chrome was gunning down for Windows, not only Internet Explorer.


"I think operating systems are kind of an old way to think of the world," Brin stated according to Yahoo Finance. "They have become kind of bulky, they have to do lots and lots of different legacy things. Web users want a very lightweight, fast engine for running applications. The kind of things you want to have running standalone on a computer are shrinking."


Since Google's portfolio of services is situated completely into the cloud, the Mountain View-company needs only a browser to let end users access its products. In this context, the only actual piece of software anchored on the desktop that Google needs to control is the browser. The operating system in general, and Windows in particular, although it is currently one of the main intermediaries controlling access to Google along with IE, can be circumvented completely. In this context a future where the Google Chrome browser would boot straight on top of the hardware, perhaps with a minimalist hypervisor layer at the basis, but no Windows, or any operating system in sight, is a threat that Microsoft can not afford to ignore.


"We believe that open source works not only because it allows people to join us and improve our products, but also (and more importantly) because it means other projects are able to use the code we've developed. Where we've developed innovative new technology, we hope that other projects can use it to make their products better, just as we've been able to adopt code from other open source projects to make our product better," revealed Ben Goodger, Google software engineer.

Read More......