Samsung releases a Q2 portable media player

If you are looking for a media player that will last you a whole (long) weekend, look no more. Samsung has recently anounced this amazing little PMP gadget that has up to 50 hours of audio playback on only a single charge. Great for a very long trip or if you are just too lazy to constantly plug your choice media player in for a recharge. With a QVGA 2.4" display, microphone, FM radio, 8 or 16 GB of flash storage and a few other small features, this new PMP is bound to be your new take-it-everywhere gadget. However, for those internet aficianados, I'm sorry to burst your bubble and tell you that it lacks WiFi and Bluetooth. As for the pricing, there is no word out yet, however it is expected to come out for a pretty decent and affordable price due to it's lack of wireless features. Hopefully, Samsung will add a pricetag to it's newcomer PMP soon so we can get an idea if it is worth it or not.

Kepler leaves in search of other Earth-like planets

The Kepler spaceship left our planet on Friday, March 6th from Cape Canaveral, Florida for its three and a half year long trip to find other planets in our region of the Milky Way that resemble our own. In one of its reports NASA said that the main objectives of this spacecraft are to:

• Determine the percentage of terrestrial and larger planets there are in or near the habitable zone of a wide variety of stars;
• Determine the distribution of sizes and shapes of the orbits of these planets;
• Estimate how many planets there are in multiple-star systems;
• Determine the variety of orbit sizes and planet reflectivities, sizes, masses and densities of short-period giant planets;
• Identify additional members of each discovered planetary system using other techniques; and
• Determine the properties of those stars that harbor planetary systems.

For those of you out there that are keen on astrology and love to see rockets and satellites get blown into orbit, here's a video showing the launch of the 2200lbs of fuel per second burning Kepler spaceship.

Terminator 4 Trailer

Even though I am not a big fan of the whole Terminator franchise I have to admit: Terminator Salvation otherwise known as Terminator 4 looks like the series' saviour. The repeating plot and theme in all three of the first movies had most people and critics somewhat skeptical about this new installment. However, this new Terminator seems to take a different approach. Finally, after his numerous battles with the robotic assasins from the future, John Connor(Christian Bale) comes back in this movie to finally lead the human resistance against Skynet and its army of robots. The trailer is trully breathaking and to be honest, it's got me really worked up. May 21st seems quite far away but I guess I'll just have to wait it out. Nevertheless, Terminator Salvation has a very high chance of being one of 2009's best movie releases

New Music Player Added To The Side

Well I figured sometimes it is just too boring to look through other people's blog entries or read a whole 2 page review on something so I was thinking about a way to spice it all up a bit so I said to myself: how about some music. Thankfully, the guys at grooveshark.com had just the thing. They let me customize my own music player and even let me add the music I wanted to a playlist which then you, my faithful visitors can use to select whichever song you want to hear. I hope you will all enjoy it and will come back later for more reviews and news. Thanks and leave a comment with your opinion on this new addon.

Asus's new Eee Keyboard Scheduled to hit the market this summer

We've all heard about the Eee PC craze a while back and some of us were interested enough to try them out. Nothing too crazy about them except for their rather small size and cost. After all they were netbooks which serve the purpose of mainly surfing the webs and doing some other low profile jobs such as word processing and instant messaging. After having died down, Asus is trying to re-initiate the Eee craze with its new Keyboard PC. Yes! You heard right! It is a netbook stuffed into a keyboard. The specs are quite okay as well. With a 1.6GHz Atom processor, 1GB of RAM, a choice between an 8GB or a 16GB solid state drive for your files and storage, Bluetooth, WiFi as well as a 5" touchscreen display where the number pad once resided, the Ee Keyboard PC already has a ton of fans. On top of the aforementioned specs, this new form of PC will have VGA and HDMI support so if the little touchscreen doesn't really do it, you can still hook it up to your big monitor. Like all that isn't enough, you have the option of connecting your screen wirelessly through the HDMI port. As for prices, this new PC will come in two flavours. The wired model will come out for about $400 while the wireless one will cost about $600. Make sure you check back on this product closer to its release date in either May or June of this year as prices might slightly change.

Moron smokes a bong with his cat inside

Ok so this is what happens when you frantically surf the webs in search of news and stuff to review: you stumble across idiotic things like this. The news of Acea Schomaker, an unemployed man living in Nebraska who put his cat in a bong as many as 3 times and smoked marijuana out of it has been madly circulating the internet. After being questioned as to why he did it, the 20 year old man answered by saying that the cat had been really hyper and scratched both him and his girlfriend and he only did what he did to calm down the cat. Police removed the cat from his custody and charged the man $400 but that is not it. He also faces a list of drug and misdemeanor animal cruelty charges. For those animal lovers out there, I am pleased to tell you that the cat was not hurt physically, however I cannot comment on the damage done to its mental abilities. One of the cops also reports that the cat did not move an inch while in the passenger seat of his squad car on its way to the humane society. After being thoroughly lectured by animal specialists, Acea told officials that he learned from his mistake and apologized for his conduct.

The release of office 14 now delayed until 2010

As you could probably guess from the title, Office 14, whose release date was hinted a while back to be sometime near the end of 2009 when Windows 7 is expected to be released, has now been delayed further to 2010. After an interview with a couple of Wall Street analysts, Steven Ballmer bluntly told them that “Office 14 will not be this year”. His quote coupled with the rumors that a Release Candidate version of the new Office is not planned to hit the web before this summer, all hopes of having a final version of the suite have been shut down. This might not seem as much of a problem since at the moment we have Office 12 otherwise known as Office 2007 that we can rely on. However, if we take into consideration the fact that in the past Microsoft has released most of its Office suites either at the same time they released a new OS or within a week or two of that particular OS's release, it is probable that Windows 7's date will also be pushed back in order to be put out on the market simultaneously with Office. Lets hope that this time Microsoft will act out differently and will release the new Windows before the end of the year as promised.

Windows 7 : A look at the Beta

After having fiddled with Microsoft’s new OS for a while this week I have finally reached an overal conclusion. It is one kickass operating system and the much needed improvement over its predecessor, Windows Vista. Not only does it address Vista’s performance glitches and hiccups but also brings to the table a new visual experience with its new taskbar and the ribbon interface integration that we have seen with Office 07 for Paint and WordPad. Some of its aspects are still quite similar to Vista which leaves me in doubt as to why Microsoft decided to go with a new name for this OS as opposed to just calling it Vista SE as it has done in the past with some previous operating systems. My guess is that Microsoft just wanted to start a clean sheet and leave behind the disaster that Vista brought during its period of existence. After all, most of us get a stomach ache just when we think of Vista therefore trying out a "Vista SE" would undeniably be out of the question. Nonetheless I think that Microsoft has gone a long way since Vista and even though this new installment in their OS line may have a few glitches here and there, we should keep in mind that it is only a beta version and that Microsoft will most likely address them before the final version is put on the market.

One of the things that struck me the most when I first tried this product was its great performance which, contrary to previous OS experiences was not short lived. Even when I started loading the system up with lots of software and games, performance hogs were quite minimal if existent at all. The time to boot the OS up was quite consistent and windows as well as applications would still open up as fast as they did when Windows was freshly installed. As for CPU and memory usage, a minimal amount of around 500mB was drawn and much to my surprise it stayed around that same mark all throughout the time I used it.

A rather big turndown however was the lack of implementing anything different in the user interface (UI) other than the ribbon interface for WordPad and Paint which was probably done with the intention of bringing them up-to-date with the new OS and the taskbar which isindeed quite different than any other operating system put out by Microsoft. Almost double the size, the new taskbar includes a ton of new features such as jump lists which with only a right click show for each window grouping stuff like browser's history and recent documents for Office. The new taskbar is also less cluttered as now the text is gone (don't worry you can stsill turn it on) and similar windows will be grouped together under the main software icon and can be previewed and switched by simply hovering over the icon with your mouse. This is great for people who have lots of windows open at one time and makes navigation much easier. One other aspect that is really worth noticing with this new Windows is that the sidebar is gone. Yes! That’s right! That awful, resource eating nuisance is finally gone. However, for the ones out there that liked it in Vista, you can still turn it on through Control Panel under the Appearance and Personalization link.

As for new features that come with Windows 7, there are quite a few that are worth mentioning . First of all, we have the “new and redesigned” Internet Explorer 8 or IE8. After working my butt off to find anything good about it, I decided to just leave it alone and focus my attention towards other things. Relatively faster than its predecessor, it was quite incompatible with some websites and forums that I could not get to work no matter what I tried and also, overall it just lacked any noticeable improvements and things that would just wow me. I guess the major cause of that is because this beta of IE8 is mostly for developers and designers and not end users like myself. Nevertheless, for the time being it’s a good idea to just stay away from IE8 and stick with Firefox or whatever other browser you might prefer. The second thing that Microsoft needs to be congratulated for is the implementing of Aero Shake. We all have tons of windows open at one time on our screen and sometimes it can be tiring for the eyes or just plain annoying. With AeroShake, just give your window a gentle shake and voila! All other opened windows magically get minimized in the taskbar faster than you can say Aero. If you happen to want them back, just give your window another gentle shake and they will all come back to life from the taskbar. How’s that for intuitive! Also for those people out there that shop a lot online and want to compare two products, browse two pages simultaneously or look at two Explorer windows at the same time, Microsoft makes it even easier for them to do that. By snapping one window to the left side of the screen and the other to the right side, Windows automatically stitches them side by side and halves their sizes so that they both fit on the screen equally. A feature that will most likely get lots of people very psyched. PC maintenance is also amongst the issues addressed in Windows 7 and as a result, Microsoft came up with Action Center, a feature that houses many useful options and actions that users utilize frequently. Security options, the UAC (User Acount Control) , performance info, updates, backups and many others are stored under this great new Windows 7 feature. Also one last thing that I think is great in this new OS is the ability to somewhatt customize your UAC settings. In Vista, you could either turn it off or have it always notify you whenever a change was made and for people that have used Vista at some point know how frustrating that can become. Now, with Windows 7 you still have the option to turn it off or have it notify you at all times, but there are two more options in between. These options allow you to choose whether to not be notified when you make Windows changes which is the default option with the OS install or have the rather irritating screen blackout removed. Even though Microsoft does give users a bit more flexibility with the UAC in Windows 7 personally, I hope that in the near future the User Acount Control will become fully customizable to allow the user to dictate it exactly whenever they want to be notified and when they do not.

Conclusion:

While this is still a beta and we do not know what to expect in the near future, it is quite apparent that Windows 7 will far outweigh its predecessor, Windows Vista. Microsoft left a bitter taste in our mouths after the rather unpleasant release of Vista but they seem to be getting back on track. Now it is just a matter of time until the final release of the OS will be put on the market but needless to say it’s got everyone quite intrigued to see what Microsoft will come up with in the end. Tempers are cooling and resentment towards Microsoft seems to be gradually going away as more and more people are filled with content towards this new OS. Hopefully Microsoft will not let us all down and keep up the excellent work in the months to come and if they do this right, it could truly increase their rank and stature.