And of course there’s the expected price drop: 8GB for $199, 16GB for $229, 32GB for $299, and the brand new 64GB for $399. Plus, the 64GB is “50% faster” — although we know what that means when Apple says it. It does now support OpenGL|ES, which should improve game performance even further. Now, if only it had a D-pad…

I don’t know if I trust Ubisoft to really make something great out of Assassin’s Creed, since that game relied so much on the rich world you inhabited. But hey, it looks pretty awesome for what it is: a sort of simplified 2-D version of the game. Here are a couple screens:

Then you’ve got Riddim Ribbon, which looks like Audiosurf, and Nova, a first person shooter where, in a shocking twist, you play a space marine! And Madden for iPhone, which I won’t dignify with a screenshot.

Here are a couple hands-on shots of the 64GB.

We’re all pretty surprised at the lack of a camera. It would have been a lot of fun, but maybe they just couldn’t find the space? After all, the iPod touch does have a different circuit layout than the iPhone and it may have been too difficult to incorporate the hardware changes they already were planning as well as a camera.

Reviewing a NAS is probably not at the top of my list of things to do, but the Iomega ix2 is a dead simple network storage solution that works well. The model I reviewed is the 2TB variety and I finally caved and started backing up my files. Even though I set it up RAID 1 style, 1TB was ample enough to handle all of my content with plenty of room to spare. I wouldn’t recommend this to the more veteran folk, but it’s ideal for novices looking for a simple to use network drive solution.

Setup is a breeze. Pop in the CD that comes with the network drive and follow the on-screen prompts for a couple minutes and then you’re up and running. The UI is easy to navigate and this is where you can tweak the drive the way you like.

The all-black enclosure houses two 1TB drives, but these can’t be accessed or swapped out. Kind of lame, which is why I wouldn’t recommend this to the more veteran folk, but this particular NAS does support Bluetooth via USB. I don’t typically use Bluetooth for anything, but it’s there and I’m not sure many, if any, NAS servers support BT. You can also expand the storage capacity by hooking up two external USB drives. The ix2 supports both FAT32 and NTFS formats. Score!

During a demo of this device prior to my review, the folks from Iomega hooked up an Axis network camera and I had to have one for this review as well. The CG office isn’t that exciting, so I didn’t capture any perps snooping around my cube, but I’m sure the more adventurous can think of ways to use the network camera to record their kids, babysitter, or whatever else you can think of. You can even access the live feed on your iPhone or iPod Touch. I may have to break into John’s house and set this up in his kitchen so I can monitor his eating habits, but don’t tell him!

I wasn’t anal enough to benchmark read and write speeds for the ix2 in either RAID 1 or JBOD, but it was neither lightning fast nor was it turtle-like.

My only gripe with the Iomega StorCenter ix2 is that you can’t swap the hard drives out and with a one-year warranty, it might not make the long haul. But I’d still recommend this for home use as it’s simple to use and features like Bluetooth support and expandibility are quite nice.

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Axis 207W Wireless Network Camera

Guest review: John Ha

I recently bought a Macbook to replace my aging Windows XP laptop. I figured that, like any new computer migration, I would load the applications I needed and then copy the data from my old laptop to the new one. I have a large USB thumb drive and a couple external hard drives, so no sweat – just use them to migrate everything.

So when my brother told me he would lend me his Targus File Transfer Cable for Mac, I scoffed. Who needs this unnecessary cable when I can just as easily use my external drive to copy data from one laptop to another. Plus, I was skeptical of the software. It would probably be crappy and limiting, when I just want file-level access to my data.

So when my Macbook arrived, I used my 8GB thumb drive to start transferring some files over to it. I soon learned that that would take forever, the thumb drive was just too slow at writing and reading. So, I grabbed the Targus cable and plugged the fat business end of it into my Windows machine. I heard the familiar add-device sound that Windows makes and as it recognized and installed the drivers. Hmm, I thought – I don’t have to go find special drivers? That’s a good sign. But I was still skeptical. It created a new drive in My Computer, so I clicked on it.

Then I plugged the other end into the Macbook, and a little EasySuite CD icon showed up on the desktop. I double-clicked the CD to see a folder with three icons, including one appropriately named EasyMacCopy. So I clicked on that to reveal a very nice application with an intuitive split screen layout.

The top half, it was obvious, contained all of the files on my Windows machine, and the bottom half contained all of the local files (Macbook). Nice.

I happily spent the next few minutes selecting and copying files from my Windows machine over to the Macbook. The interface was extremely user-friendly and the transfer speeds were very fast. In the end, I was pleasantly surprised that the little cable was able to copy multiple gigabytes of data without a single hiccup or complaint. The little blue light on the fat end would pulse nicely when idle, and blink when actively copying or reading data.

Satisfied that it worked, I then tried reversing the connection, by plugging the fat end into the Macbook and the skinny end into the Windows machine. Same result. Remote host is in the upper half of the screen, and the local host is below. A couple nice icons at the top indicating the USB version of the local and/or remote machines, USB 2.0 in my case. I didn’t try with an older machine, but I would assume it would say 1.1 with a connection to a USB 1.1 port.

The software in Windows is analogous to the Mac software, with the exception of one menu item called Synchronize. Under this menu, there are three options for Mail, Folder Synchronize, and EasyMover. I wasn’t able to try these features though because their submenus were greyed out. I suppose there may be some functionality (or a plan for future functionality) for two machines to synchronize certain folders or email, but I wasn’t able to test this.

Physically, the unit is compact and comes with a handy hook-and-loop enclosure to keep the long cable tidy. The grey wire itself is nice with a grippy finish.

These days, gadgets rarely meet my expectations, and I am happy to report that this little gizmo easily exceeded them both in terms of easy of use and performance. With a MSRP of $49.99 and street pricing around $39, I would highly recommend this device for people wanting to quickly and easily transfer files between two computers.

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Short version: A pre-built Windows Home Server box that offers a bit more than standard NAS’s.

Specs:

• 1TB 
• Gigabyte Ethernet
• AMD 1.8GHz 64-Bit Sempron CPU
• One eSATA and four USB 2.0 ports
• Four SATA HDD bays
• Micro-tower case

HP has a winner on its hands with the MediaSmart, which combines the Windows Home Server OS with additional HP proprietary software in a great looking and functional package. The whole system works well and the HP software compliments Microsoft’s offering nicely. The price isn’t too bad and if you don’t want to assemble a WHS yourself, this could be a welcome addition to any home network. 

Microsoft’s Windows Home Server powers this HP MediaSmart, but throw out all the preconceived Microsoft-hate’n notions — WHS is great. Seriously. I have been running a Windows Home Server machine in my house for just under a year and I can tell you that the software is rock-solid. It might not be a UNIX box, but by golly, it works very well on my predominantly Mac network.

Windows Home Server provides all sorts of true server-centric functions through a simple control panel. The server software is designed to run on a monitor-free box — the HP MediaSmart doesn’t have any video outputs — rather opting for control through custom connection software or Windows Remote Connect. HP adds some user-friendly walkthroughs that step first time users through the backup, remote connect, and media server setup; not necessarily important for geeks like you or me, but your dad might appreciate the help.

The HP software adds some extra functions to the rather stark Windows Home Server software suite. The iTunes server consolidates users’ music collections in one spot and checks for new music automatically. The Photo Share App easily and quickly creates a photo sharing site hosted by the server. These types of apps are what makes this HP-made box worth buying. The OEM Windows home server doesn’t offer these types of functions.

It seems that HP spent a good amount of time on the server case, as it simply rocks. It isn’t overwhelming, offers tool-less hard drive removal, and sports some killer LED action. I just wish the power button wasn’t on the back. Even though the server was designed to stay on all the time, it would be nice to have the button on the front rather than fumbling around on the back panel trying to find it. Also, the fans are a little on the loud side. You can definitely tell when this thing is on and I would rather see a fan-less case if reliability wasn’t compromised.

Let’s say you wanna add a hard drive, or two – or even three – to the existing storage. The WHS server and the tool-less case makes the task do-able in less than a few minutes. Word to the wise though, WHS’s storage scheme involves a mandatory format in order to add the drive to the RAID cluster. The software also allows for external HDD additions through USB, but the same formatting rule still applies. 

Overall, this is one killer piece of hardware backed by a great software suite. Truth be told though, you can build a WHS server and it doesn’t require new hardware to run well. Mine consists of a 7-year old AMD Athlon XP 1900 and five PATA hard drives that I run uTorrent on along with media server software 24/7.

That doesn’t mean the HP MediaSmart isn’t great, though. It provides a more user-friendly environment and extra software that isn’t available on a home-built WHS computer. If you’re looking for a server that provides more than just backup functions, this is a great solution that almost anyone can use. 

Oh, and HP is allowing us to give away this server. Yup, you have a chance to win this 1 TB Windows Home Server. How, you ask? Just comment below with a statement on why you need a 1TB server. A random commenter will be picked in 72 hours, but give us a little more insight than a one word answer that starts with a ‘P’ and ends with ‘orn.’ M’kay?

If you have multiple batteries for your (post-1997) Apple laptop and prefer not to tote around multiple power adapters then Fastmac may have a solution for you. The U-Charge is a lightweight, cost effective, and compact charger for iBooks, PowerBooks, MacBooks and MacBook Pros, with a nice little bonus feature: it can charge a battery without the help of a laptop. No more swapping batteries just to keep them all juiced up!

The U-Charge connects directly to your MacBook battery’s terminals and thus needs to be put on a level surface to ensure proper contact. It’s only a 45W, so those with MBPs will have to wait a few hours to power up your secondary battery. I ran into some unwanted downtime when I chose not to bring my power brick. LEDs on the U-Charge mimic the battery level indicators on the Apple batteries themselves, so you can gauge how far along the battery is at any time.

While the U-Charge is a great addition to any MacBook owner, I have my issues with the device. The connecting terminal is really fragile (not material-wise) and you have to have the battery and U-Charge on a level surface so the contacts are properly aligned. They cannot make a connection at a 90-degree angle because it will reverse polarities rendering both your battery and U-Charge useless. Be sure that you read the instructions or inform whomever you purchase this for to do so. But it’s something you live with and get used to. I have at least.

Fastmac’s U-Charge is worth the $80 price tag, which I don’t really think is all that high considering its usefulness. It’s a great alternative to carrying the heavy MB adapters if you don’t mind waiting or if you have an extra battery. There are 10.8V and 14.4V models, so make sure you get the right one.

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A few months ago I won (via CrunchGear) a nice piece of hardware that now replaces the veteran hdd divx player I bought from Hong Kong about the same time last year. The enclosure was much more reliable than the other “made in china” (sic) stuff I bought back then, but somehow its remote died this summer and it’s not that fun to pause/play/stop using the built-in buttons. It works, but one has to leave the couch in order to do it :-)

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Say you needed a small PC with low power requirements to install inside a car or even inside a PCs drive bay. Well, friend, you should consider $300 VIA’s Artigo Pico-ITX. This tiny thing out-minis the Mac Mini and can run fast enough to put some of your older PCs to shame.


The Pico is an ultra-lightweight compact PC marketed to hobbyists and PC enthusiasts alike. It’s about half the size of a DVD-Drive and will even fit in a spare 5.25” drive slot – it even has the necessary mounting holes). Exact measurements are 5.9 x 4.3 x 1.8 inches (15 x 11 x 4.5 cm) and it weighs around one pound.

Suffice it to say, the unit is tiny for a functional PC. The Pico-ITX has 4 USB ports, a power button (with proper click action), power & HDD indicators, audio jacks, a standard VGA connector and standard Ethernet port; all within a vented high luster black case. There are also a slew of cables to connect up any other things you may need like a ps2 keyboard or DVD-Drive. The overall construction feels solid.

Our review unit came with a hard drive, RAM and embedded OS, but you will need to supply those separately for the retail units. There’s just the right amount of space for a standard 2.5” IDE hard drive and one memory module (uses SO-DIMM DDR2 533 MHz module). The maximum supported memory is 1GB – not much by today’s standards, but enough to run most applications.

Once connected, the system booted up into Windows CE Embedded 6.0 in around 15 seconds – not bad. Sadly, Windows CE 6.0 just doesn’t cut it unless you need a super light weight OS. Getting XP installed was a pain, but it can be done without a CD. Linux is also supported. VIA’s support website mentions that Vista is unsupported at this time – but considering the overall spec for this, performance would be abysmal. Noise levels were negligible.

Built around a VIA Esther (C7) CPU clocked at 1 GHz the Pico can accomplish many smaller tasks just fine. Geekbench rating for this kit was 384. Note: I wouldn’t use this to recode video, but it’s perfect as a mini media center for a car or for a home web server. One of the most attractive features is the low power consumption. With power consumption around 13 Watts (20W loaded) the Pico will cost less than $25 to run non-stop for a year.

Bottom Line
While this is not going to break any compute records, it is a solid platform to build upon.

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When HP first introduced its TouchSmart PC line of desktop computers in 2007, it was a novel idea, but it also had enough flaws to keep many away from buying it. The TouchSmart was primarily meant for the kitchen, mainly because of the interactivity behind it, but also because it’s probably where the family interacts most in the home.
This new iteration of HP’s TouchSmart series (the IQ 504 & IQ 506) is better out of the box, not because it has more power and 64-bit processing, but also because HP has streamlined things a little with its own software interface. I tried out the IQ 506 ($1,399) and noticed a couple of significant changes. For one, the hardware itself is less obtrusive by taking up less room, despite the screen being bigger.

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Guest Writer Ted Kritsonis is a writer at DemystifyingDigital.com. For more product news and reviews, visit DemystifyingDigital.com.

For those of you looking for a reason NOT to buy the MSI Wind, I can’t really give you a good one. It’s a great little machine. Go ahead and buy one if you’ve been waiting. For everyone else, read on for the pros and cons of this aggressively-priced, yet impressively-performing netbook.

Overview

The MSI Wind is an ultraportable notebook that weighs about two and a half pounds, features Intel’s new Atom chipset (1.6GHz), and runs Windows XP Home Edition. There’s also a Linux version that’s coming out in a couple of weeks, but the configuration I tested included XP and the larger six-cell battery (the three-cell version is available now, the six-cell will be available within a couple weeks).

There’s a 10-inch LED screen with a 1024×600 resolution, 1GB of RAM, 80GB SATA hard drive, built-in 1.3-megapixel webcam, three USB ports, built-in memory card reader, and Wi-Fi, Ethernet, and Bluetooth connectivity.

I ran a bunch of tests on the review unit I had, check them all out here.

Price versus Performance

I’d say that the overwhelmingly positive aspect of the MSI Wind is found in the price versus performance department. It doesn’t feel like a cheap $500 notebook, it doesn’t perform like a cheap $500 notebook, and it doesn’t look like a cheap $500 notebook. About five years ago, I purchased a wonderful and tiny Sharp Actius MP30 notebook for well over $1,500. The Wind reminds me of that computer, except the Wind is even smaller and more powerful – it would work perfectly for anybody looking for an inexpensive laptop, not just people looking for a tiny one.

Battery Life

The good performance exists thanks to Intel’s new Atom chip, which is quite impressive on its own, but really shines when it comes to battery life. MSI claims a maximum five and a half hours of battery life out of the six-cell battery and I was able to easily squeeze more than five hours out of the Wind while doing some simple web surfing. If you needed to go somewhere for a weekend and wanted to be able to access the internet and your e-mail sporadically, you could confidently leave the AC adapter at home.

Form Factor

The form factor is great, too, provided you’ve prepared yourself for a small machine. The keyboard is 80% full size, which is a fair tradeoff. You won’t, however, enjoy typing on the Wind for extended periods of time. If you’re planning to purchase the Wind as your primary computer, you’ll want to have a full-sized keyboard around for when you really want to hammer out some text. As a world-famous professional blogger, I wouldn’t, unfortunately, be able to take the Wind to a convention or to cover an event for more than a day or so. The keyboard’s just too small.

That being said, what you trade in keyboard size comes back to you full circle in chassis size and weight. The Wind weighs 2.6 pounds with the six-cell battery and can easily be toted around anywhere. I took it on vacation with me for over a week and was able to slide it into a large camera bag, if that gives you any indication of its size.

Screen

When Windows booted up for the first time, I was really impressed with the screen quality. Even though it’s only 10 inches and 1024×600 resolution, the screen is vibrant, clear, and easy to read — no complaints there. If you’re someone who needs a large screen, you’ll want to pass on the Wind, but if you’ve been using a laptop with a 12- or 13.3-inch screen, you’ll feel at home on the Wind’s 10-inch screen. It’s a little bit narrower and shorter than the standard 1280×800 screens found on most notebooks but for basic web surfing, games, and that kind of stuff, it’s just fine.

Other Features

The Wind features some nice little touches, like a 1.3-megapixel webcam, Bluetooth connection, and a variable CPU speed setting that conserves battery life when the computer’s unplugged or kicks it up to full speed when plugged back in. The 80GB hard drive, too, is a welcome feature as compared to much smaller flash-based hard drives on similar netbooks.

Even though the Wind has a conventional hard drive, the computer itself is dead quiet. Eerily quiet – like, as in you have to hold the thing up against your ear to hear that the fan is even running. And it doesn’t get uncomfortably hot on your lap, either, which was a common concern for some people when the Wind was first announced.

Cons

One downside to the Wind, in my opinion, would be that the extra girth added by the six-cell battery makes the computer a little bit wobbly if you’re trying to balance it on your lap or when you first pick it up. I’d trade that awkwardness for the excellent battery life, though. The other downside (for me, at least) is that it’s not quite powerful enough to use as my main computer — I don’t require much beyond word processing and light image editing but I need something that I can use to edit video – that, and the keyboard wouldn’t work out for me, as I need to have a full size keyboard due to the nature of my work. I could get by with using it to patiently edit video — the keyboard is pretty much the only thing keeping me from buying one of these for myself, though. It’s not a bad keyboard, technically, it’s just the size issue. Finally, I’d want to upgrade the RAM to 2GB, but there’s no easy way to do that. You’d have to take the thing apart first.

Conclusion

I can (and will) safely recommend the MSI Wind to just about anybody who’s not a hardcore computer user or who needs to type all day long. The price is right, the performance is right, and the portability is so right that it’s somehow wrong (in a right kind of way). I’m really impressed with this machine — MSI has a winner on its hands.

MSI Wind [Product Page]

It’s either feast or famine when it comes to laptops. If you need something small and light, you’re stuck without an optical drive and poor performance. If you need something for gaming or high end apps, you’re stuck with something that you need a truck to lift. That’s why I’m pleased with the VYE S41 from Kohjinsha, a Japan-only — but available at Dynamism.com import convertible that is small enough to get lost in a man purse.

This laptop has a 7-inch swivel touchscreen and an 800 MHz Intel A100 processor. The model I tested included a 120GB hard drive with 1GB of RAM and, amazingly, a DVD Super Multi drive. The laptop weighs 3 pounds and is 1-inch thick and 8-inches long. It is about as big as a hardback book.

The laptop came with Windows Vista Premium along with some special touchscreen software. The keyboard is quite cramped and is almost unusable until you get used to it. The screen was amazingly readable and sharp and the build quality was excellent, overall.

In our tests the laptop hit 531 in GeekBench and lasted one hour and 45 minutes on one charge while playing a DVD video.

Sadly, I suspect the tiny keyboard to be the biggest problem when looking at this laptop. While it does have a touchscreen, these tiny Japanese ultraportables are often too delicate for our rich, meaty American man-hands. However if you’re looking for a cool laptop that no one has, take a gander at the S41.