LAS VEGAS–At Lenovo’s press dinner the other night there was an unidentified handheld on display, sitting casually next to the three new consumer-friendly IdeaPad laptops the company had come to Las Vegas to push.

(Credit: Lenovo)

(Credit: Lenovo)

No one–not even the PR people for Lenovo–could give me specific details. All they could say was that it is only available in China, the company’s home market. This video gives a bit more detail, including that it runs Linux and uses a new 45-nanometer chip from Intel.

From what I saw, it had a lot of nice features, even if it was a bit hefty: GPS, music, Web browsing, a camera, plus several-layer-deep menus I didn’t have time to delve into.

No word on whether it’s something planned for the North American market any time soon.

Tags: LINUX/UNIX, MICROSOFT, COMPUTER, DESIGN

Want to network your home office or business? Wireless is definitely an option; and if you have the courage, you can crawl under the floor and drag wires from room to room, or pull a cable through the ceiling.

There’s a third alternative: Use your electrical wiring. With HomePlug AV, you use power lines to move anything you’d transfer through a regular network–data, movies, TV signals, and so on. Learn more about it at the HomePlug Powerline Alliance site.

The advantage over Ethernet cabling is, of course, that HomePlug AV is easier to install, and at 200 megabits per second is faster than Ethernet’s 100 mbps. And with HomePlug AV you avoid Wi-Fi dead zones and range issues.

I recently tried HomePlug AV hardware from Actiontec, and I’ll tell you about it this week. But first, a public service announcement…

News Flash: Seagate May Owe You Ten Bucks
I just heard that Seagate has settled a class-action lawsuit claiming they mislead the public about the capacity of their hard drives.

The suit involves the long-standing confusion concerning the number of bytes in a gigabyte. According to the lawsuit, Seagate stated its customers would receive more storage capacity than they did. Seagate used the decimal definition of the term gigabyte (1 billion bytes) and that mislead consumers because operating systems report hard drive capacity using the binary definition (1,073,741,824 bytes)–a size difference of about 7 percent. Read more »

Downloads mp3 players can use have become more than just music.

Downloads mp3  can use have become more than just melody. With the  in equipment, people now have the selection of farsighted boob tube , observing the news, and presentation various materials on their transferable mp3 players. With  advances one must wonder where they can go to get the best data at the well price.

Some websites offer free gen and  expect one software, but with a piddling exploration, a soul can find the fit information with a few  of the , and two of the best  on the net to find the knowledge is Audible and Audiofeast. Read more »

Tags: HARDWARE, LINUX/UNIX, DESIGN, GOOGLE