13 Hacks That Make Your Life A Whole Lot Easier

Simple Hacks That Will Make Your Life A Whole Lot Easier

Introducing the Apple iPad 2

As expected, Apple debuted the new iPad 2 Wednesday. Steve Jobs (mock turtlenecked and belted, for the Apple fashion watchers) helmed the product roll-out wagon of Apple execs to show off the revamped tablet and take a few jabs at the competition.

Enough with the chit-chat, here’s the deets on the iPad 2:

Top 5 Desktop Replacement Laptops

Desktop replacements are one of the largest growing segments in the portable market. These system pack in the features and functions that make them competitive with full sized computers. There are even a lot of specialized multimedia and gaming models. Based on my research and experience, here are the top desktop replacement laptops.

1. Dell XPS M1730

For those looking for a high performance system for gaming, Dell's XPS offers the XPS M1730 laptop. The system is highly customizable to fit to a wide variety of budgets but does offer some superb 3D graphics performance thanks to its ability to run a mobile SLI setup with NVIDIA GeForce mobile graphics processors. They even offer the Core 2 Extreme mobile processor for some of the best processing power available. Of course, the top of the line performance will cost a lot. Dell even makes a specially skinned version for those who play World of Warcraft.

2. Gateway P-173XL FX

If gaming is one of your primary reasons for getting a desktop replacement but you don't want to spend the huge sums for a gaming oriented laptop configuration, check out Gateway's FX series of laptops. The 17-inch P-173XL FX offers a very well balanced system configuration with a very strong GeForce 8800M GTS graphics processor that is even capable of playing 3D games up to the 17-inch screens 1920x1200 resolution. The RAID drive setup helps boost performance and storage space and the wide variety of peripheral connectors lets you hook up just about anything. The only real drawbacks to it are its fairly large size and battery pack that extends out from the case.

HTC has recently announced a touch screen plus a slide out QWERTY keypad, with navigating tricky Windows Mobile menus and tapping out e-mails. It is just like the Diamond.

Touch pro and diamonds are just the latest in Taiwan. Both are identical to their respective specs. Both phones can access speedy HSDPA data networks, do Wi-Fi and Bluetooth and they each pack in Opera HTML Web browsers (if phone is turned sideways it switches pages to landscape view. Also GPS and 3.2MP digital cameras. For video conferencing the Touch Pro adds a front-facing VGA camera.) The Touch Pro has 512MB of internal memory, compared to 4GB of diamond. Both handsets come with slots for micro SD memory expansion.
Both the phones have a screen of 2.8 inch, VGA touch-enabled display with HTC’s snazzy TouchFlo UI, an animated 3D interface allowing you to access your contact, event, music, pictures, phone widget, and calling features with swipes of your finger tips.
Both Diamond and Touch Pro run the professional edition of Windows Mobile 6.1 a powerful and highly configurable mobile OS.
The Touch Pro’s slide-out, five-row QWERTY keypad is handy while tapping out messages or editing mobile Office documents.
The Touch Pro’s slide out QWERTY keypad is 4 by 2 by 0.7 inch thick. It is bulky and it weighs 5.8 ounces.
Though the Touch Pro is worthy competitor to Sony Ericsson’s upcoming Xperia X1, with Window Mobile 6.1, a handset with slide out keypad, with its innovative, panel-based touch interface.
Expected price for Touch Pro is about $900.
HTC promises that North American version of the Touch Pro will come by year end. And Europe, Asia and the Middle East will get the phone by late summer.