The Lenovo ThinkPad X300 - The slim and beautiful Ultraportable

The ThinkPad X300 is the most recent addition to the Lenovo line of notebooks. The ultraportable segment of laptops is hot these days and the X300 is another machine on the block. It is Lenovo’s answer to competitors like the Macbook Air and Asus Eee pc. It is lightweight at just over 3lbs and 1.1 inch thick when closed. The ThinkPad x300 has a 13.3-inch WXGA screen, which is bright and of excellent quality and is LED backlighted. The viewing angles are good, but are narrower than the Macbooks and a maximum resolution of 1280×800 is supported. It has a great design and solid build and is designed to withstand accidental drops and abuse. The full-sized keyboard is very comfortable. A decent sized touchpad with scrolling areas is also present on this little beauty.

Lenovo ThinkPad X300

The standard configuration consists of an Intel Core 2 Duo SL7100 with 1.2 GHz speed, 64GB SSD [solid state drive] which really improves the durability and performance of the laptop and can have 1-4 GB DDR2 SDRAM memory depending on your configuration. The X300 has Intel X3100 integrated graphics on board. It has a microphone, stereo speakers, integrated web cam and fingerprint reader. Further options are there for wireless USB or mobile broadband. It is a high-end laptop and costs around $3,300 at this time. Compared to MacBook Air, it has better features, but performance in certain tasks is below par. The cost is also higher.The MacBook Air is thinner, but as it has fewer ports, no removable battery and no optical drive - the X300 beats it on practicality. This notebook lags behind a little in the area of connectivity. It has only Ethernet, 3 USB ports MIC/Headphone and VGA. It also has an inbuilt genuine GPS system. The things which are absent include a modem, PC/ExpressCard slot, memory card reader as well as a FireWire port. The connectivity and wireless options include Wi-Fi, UWB and bluetooth among others.

It gives options, which the MacBook Air doesn’t, such as wireless USB and mobile broadband. You can replace the hard drive and battery, in case of future upgrades. As mentioned earlier, the SSD increases its performance a lot. Performance is mixed, while it is quite enough for common tasks like Internet browsing, word processing or e-mail. It can multi-task easily plus easily run all your standard business applications, but it is not a gaming machine, as the X300’s integrated graphics aren’t great for playing 3D video games on, especially compared to some other laptops. The solid-state drive speeds up boot up times and things like running virus scans or loading programs. When it comes to processor-intensive work however, the MacBook Air’s faster processor makes it speedier than the X300. The X300 is also slower compared to somewhat larger laptops like Sony VAIO VGN-SZ780. The sound is very good on the X300. There is a choice of 3-cell Lithium-Polymer battery [4.3 hours quoted battery life] or a 6-cell one [6.5 hours quoted life]. Battery life is decent, and under normal usage conditions, it runs up to 3 1/2 hours on the 6 cell battery, which is good among notebooks of its class. Overheating is not a problem, thanks to the special low powered processor. Limited storage space is a problem and only about 40-45 GB is available on the solid-state drive 64GB after system essentials are taken into account. This space is quickly filled if you are like the average user. The Macbook Air has a similar issue.

The ThinkPad is a good choice if you are a windows user and want a new light thin and sleek ultraportable laptop. It’s meant to be the ultimate laptop for the business traveler, thanks to being so slim and ultraportable. It is feature rich with excellent wireless options, great keyboard and screen and not to forget the inbuilt optical drive. It is more practical compared to the Macbook Air. But the Lenovo X300 is neither the best performer, thanks to its underpowered processor nor the cheapest. It is a great ultraportable notebook with a superb design, excellent for business tasks but not for 3D intensive activities like Gaming. Due to its price it falls out of the reach of the average person, but is a great choice for a businessperson on the move.

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Adobe Acrobat 9 – Bigger, better and now with Flash

Adobe Systems recently announced Adobe Acrobat 9, which incorporates Flash technology into the widely used PDF documents.

Because of Flash Integration, Acrobat users can now include videos and also application files compatible with flash player in PDF documents. Document recipients can utilize Adobe Acrobat Reader to view and use this content. Adobe says that Acrobat 9 turns static documents into dynamic communications. Users can also insert H.264 or FLV video for direct playback in both Adobe Reader and Adobe Acrobat. A variety of video formats may also be converted to FLV for playback in PDF.

Acrobat 9 also features a concept known as PDF Portfolios, that enables the unification of content in a single document, which will let users to put multiple media file types such as videos, documents and 3D objects in a compressed .pdf file format.

Live collaboration within PDF documents is also supported as well, through a group of services collectively called Acrobat.com and available in the form of a public beta release. It will have many applications. Utilizing this, a businessman may use Acrobat 9 and send contracts to his client, for example. Groups of people could work on a document in real- time via Acrobat.com. Integration of Acrobat 9 with acrobat.com also enables storage & sharing of PDF files. Adobe mentioned that it was all about extending Acrobat so that people could work better with documents. Featured at Acrobat.com are Adobe Buzzword, a web-based word processor, and ConnectNow, which can be used for online web-conferencing and desktop-sharing.

Other features include the ability to create PDF maps through import of geospatial files which retain metadata and coordinates and also the ability to Personalize a PDF Portfolio with customizable templates for branding & navigation. Another useful feature is that it is possible to compare and then highlight the differences between 2 different versions of a PDF file/document. PDF files can also be created using document scanning to PDF and automatically recognize text with optical character recognition (OCR).

Using AutoCAD, convert cad drawings to PDF with Acrobat PDFMaker button, preserving the document layers in AutoCAD. 2D and 3D CAD designs can also be converted to PDF for project collaboration without expensive CAD or viewer software.

Acrobat 9, comes in Standard, Mac OS X, Pro and Pro Extended editions, will be available in July. The Standard Edition contains basic forms capabilities only. The Pro version has many extra’s like a powerful forms designer. Acrobat 9 Extended edition includes Adobe LiveCycle Designer ES and Adobe Presenter. It provides capabilities like video conversion and 3D functionality. Moreover, PowerPoint documents may be converted into Flash & also be wrapped in a PDF.

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A look at the VUDU Set-Top Box

The VUDU Box is labelled a TV’s new best friend and delivers thousands of movies and hot TV shows instantly, without the need for a computer directly to your television. This Gageet provides instant access to about 5000 movies and TV shows from any television. Movies and shows can be bought or rented.

It comes with high-def video, with video output of up to 1080i/1080p24 and looks very good on an HDTV. As for connections, it’s got HDMI, digital optical audio and other common options. It comes with a 250 GB hard drive to store movies. For connectivity, it has Ethernet and 2 USB ports for future storage options.

It also comes with various equipment and a quick start guide to get you watching movies on the VUDU quick and easy. VUDU requires a High-speed broadband Internet connection with a minimum bandwidth of 2 Mbps (3.0 advertised by ISP’s) for instant viewing of movies or less if you only want delayed viewing. You can check if your connection is good enough at http://speedtest.vudu.com/cdn1/.

It should be noted that VUDU are always adding new movies and TV shows to the available selection. The VUDU box is priced competitively at $295 which has been reduced since it’s 400$ release. It is a Gadget worth considering for the movie and TV show lover who wants to watch them instantly at good quality.

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The DELL XPS M1530 – An Excellent Laptop

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This laptop is a bigger and better version of Dell’s popular XPS M1330. It is thin and light and has a 15.4″ high definition widescreen. It is also a well designed, attractive and extremely functional Gageet.

It has a starting weight of 5.8 lb and a starting price of 999$. The screen lacks LED backlighting unlike the M1330. It has reasonable 3 hour + battery life and well-designed and responsive keyboard, touchpad and media buttons. The colour options available are Midnight Blue, Alpine White, Tuxedo Black and Crimson Red.

These laptops use an Intel Core2 Duo processor, which goes up to a 2.60GHz Intel T7800 processor. It can have 1-4 GB of RAM and a hard disk drive of up to 320 GB. You have the option of a 256MB Nvidia Geforce 8600M GT or a 128MB Nvidia Geforce 8400M GS for the graphics card. The former option uses high-performance GDDR3 memory. The M1530 includes a Biometric Finger Print Reader and has a built-in Web cam. For connectivity, it has Hyperband Multi-Antenna technology, Wi-Fi, and internal Mobile Broadband options.

Its limitations are the fact that it only has three USB ports. It also has noise issues with Slot-loading drive and the hard drive. Nevertheless it’s an excellent laptop and has great style and performance. It can definitely be considered an improvement over Dell’s M1330 in many areas.

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Free Web version of Adobe Photoshop Express Launched

Adobe Systems Inc. on Thursday launched Photoshop Express, a free online version of the photo-editing software Photoshop. Users are able to edit, store and share photos online for free.

Photoshop Express is completely Web-based and can be used with any type of computer, operating system and browser. Once registered, users can share photos using the online image editor or with social networking sites like Facebook.

Photoshop Express is easier to learn and changes to images can be made quickly with the web application. With one click, red eyes or blemishes can be fixed. The program also has the ability to selectively change colors and resize, tint, distort the image by dragging the cursor over the image and clicking. The image editor creates slide shows and embeds photos in Web pages.

Photoshop Express is available for free with 2 gigabytes of storage at http://www.adobe.com/products/photoshopexpress/?promoid=CBTVM

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