VoodooPC’s “Envy 133″ is now a contender in the worlds thinnest laptop market! It has just began shipping. This laptop can run Vista with ease, its an incredibly durable and super light machine that boasts a carbon-fiber frame. Basically its nearly the size of the MacBook Air but has a lot more features put into it. It also comes with its own pre-installed Linux based operating system that can boot up within a second!. Although it may cost much more than most laptops that can execute similar tasks it does it all in almost half the size! This laptop is not made for a gamers but it can still handle your “average” PC game with no trouble.

In the words of the voodoo CEO Rahul Sood “This laptop is not a gaming product.” It’s not going to play Crysis at all, though it might achieve other, lesser games with the settings dialed down. You can tell it’s not a gaming laptop because of the fact that Vista gives it a 3.1 rating out of 5 due to its integrated graphics and shared video memory; that PCMark gave it 2100 (the world’s hottest machines top 15000); 3D Mark won’t run because Envy’s nice 13.3″..

Envy’s carbon fiber casing lets heat dissipate easily, though it still comes with a noisy fan.. However there will be no sudden burning feelings on your lap while you use it! The Envy’s speakers sound great for being so small. They are better than the MacBook Air’s crappy “Mono Speaker” and even the MacBook Pro’s Stereo speakers.

Unfortunately there are some downsides to the Envy. The battery life is not too great. It can play a DVD Movie for about one hour before it completely turns itself off. So no watching movies on long trips with this laptop.. The envy also is quite pricey a fairly basic config with an 80GB 4200rpm hard drive starts at $2,450, and the 64GB SSD versions don’t even kick in till $2,900. The most simple unit available is $2,100.

You can read more about the Envy on Voodoos Website. Or you can watch Rahul Sood introducing the Laptop in Germany to the market. Here:

Motorola are coming out with their version of the iPhone. However I do not think there would be much competition between the two. A lot of people are saying that this particular Motorola has a crappy touchscreen and firmware that is full of bugs, the only thing it has is good looks. Perhaps in this case it will be the same story, the phone will be just a cheaper not-as-cool version of the iPhone. Or will it be different?

Your first reaction to the touchscreen, or touch cover, on the Motorola Krave, Motorola’s first iPhone-like touchscreen phone, is likely to be somewhere along the lines of “How’d they do that?” That’s right, the Krave, a Verizon EV-DO powered model with Verizon’s V CAST TV, actually has two touchscreens – the iPhone/Samsung Instinct/LG Voyager/HTC Touch-like 2.8-inch touchscreen, and a clear protective touch-sensitive “touch cover.” Touch this clear flip screen and the Krave’s main LCD screen underneath reacts.

Also implanted in the touch cover is the Krave’s earpiece. When you flip up the touch cover you hear the caller’s voice even though there is no visible wire connecting the speaker to the phoness main body. All of this is pretty clever. I’m sure this phone will have all the features of the latest 3G phones. But would you buy one considering what else is on the phone market these days?

Its only a concept at the moment, but I think there is a real market for wooden phones! Not just for looks, this Nokia wooden phone concept actually works. That’s right, “Nokia’s own eco-team designed and created the object of desire that you see above: an 8-megapixel ‘handset’ that appears to function just fine. Pretty cool, I think! And by the looks of it, it seems to have a touch screen as well.

Imagine if all the phones in the not too distant future were made of wood. That would be something to seriously think about as metals and plastics will eventually run out. We would only be able to construct things that have been provided by nature! This idea could pose many advantages and also many disadvantages. Still eco-friendly gadgets are the way of the future! very cool indeed. However a company in Sweden actually put Wooden monitors on the market but they never caught on.. at least not yet anyway. You can see them Here. Maybe one day! What do you think?

The Hanging Laptop Hard Drive enclosure “lets you hang the 2.5-inch companion off the back of your LCD screen.” No word yet on if this concept will go into production. As tiny 1.8″ hard drives continue to get larger in capacity and smaller in size, this design concept for hanging one from the back of your laptop display seems like the way to go—it’s using a 2.5″ drive, but a 1.8″ would really be better.

This also would be pretty useful for clearing a bit more space to fit other components into the laptop as there could be no internal hard drive. However in some ways this might not be a very smart concept as someone could just “grab” the hard drive and run off with all your important/private files.

There has been much hype surrounding Google’s phone launch. Google are worth some 140 billion USD, however it would seem this is not enough. Meet the G1:

It’s the first mobile phone to use Google’s new interface known as “Android” and its going head to head in a highly competitive market with the likes of the BlackBerry and the Apple iPhone. But this mobile phone is being marketed to be the first to offer the same access to the internet as your home computer. The new phone will have access to hundreds of applications, from maps to new games which anyone can create and download. In other words its offering that little bit more that the iPhone. This G1 will cost around the same as its rivals. A full list of features:

General:

2G Network: GSM 850 / 900 / 1800 / 1900
3G Network:     HSDPA 2100 / HSDPA 2100 / 1700 - American version
Announced: 2008, September
Status: Coming soon. Exp. release 2008, October
Size: Dimensions     117 x 55.7 x 17.1 mm
Weight: 158 g (Quite heavy for your standard Cellphone)
Display: Type     TFT touchscreen, 65K colors (Not very good at all)
Size: 320 x 480 pixels, 3.2 inches (Big)
- Full QWERTY keyboard (They couldn’t utilize the touch screen as a keyboard. The iPhone can)
- Trackball (Interesting, different)
- Accelerometer sensor for auto-rotate
- Handwriting recognition

Ringtones:

Type: Polyphonic (40 channels), MP3, WAV, WMA
Customization: Download
Vibration: Yes

Memory:

Phonebook: Practically unlimited entries and fields, Photocall
Call records: Practically unlimited
Card slot: microSD (TransFlash)
- 192 MB RAM, 256 MB ROM
- Qualcomm MSM7201A 528 Mhz processor

Data:

GPRS: Class 10 (4+1/3+2 slots), 32 - 48 kbps
HSCSD: No
EDGE: Class 10, 236.8 kbps
3G: HSDPA, 7.2 Mbps (very quick)
WLAN: Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g
Bluetooth: Yes, v2.0, headset support only (No A2DP, not good.)
Infrared port: No
USB: Yes, miniUSB (Standard)

Features:

OS: Android OS (Google’s own)
Messaging: SMS, MMS, Email, Instant Messaging
Browser: HTML
Games: Yes
Colours: White, Black, Brown (Brown? lol)
Camera: 3.15 MP, 2048×1536 pixels, autofocus (Seems fairly decent)
- Built-in GPS receiver (cool)
- Digital compass
- Document viewer
- Java MIDP 2.0
- Voice memo
- MP3 player and Built-in handsfree.

Battery:

Standard battery: Li-Ion 1150 mAh
Stand-by: Up to 406 h (Very good)
Talk time: Up to 5 h 20 min (Also very good)

Heres a video of what Google’s “Lead Product Manager” has to say:

The video is a bit cheesy and it makes google look like they’re trying too hard… Anyway, I think if I had the money to buy one of those next generation cellphones I’d probably still go with the iPhone. However thats just my opinion. If you have anything to say, please, your comments are welcome!

After Apple’s successful launch of iPod Touch and iPhone Touch, our stevie might be planning to build a new Macbook Touch.

Lately we have gone through a lot of rumors on the web saying that Apple is soon going to launch a Tablet computer which we all love to see. Lets not forget that fact the steve has been successful in almost all of their releases. Combine it with the rumors that we are soon to expect a new version of the Macbook and the result is a Macbook Touch.

Some sources claim that Apple is planning to launch its new Macbook Touch on an event that is to be held on October 14. There is no official word on it and it could be anything.

The Macbook Touch has been an anticipation all long after the iPhone, especially since a Mac Fan-boy published some mockups of the Macbook Touch at SlashGear earlier this year.

Google has released its new Google Translate for iPhone. Google Translate not only allows you to translate single words across 24 different languages, but it also allows you to translate arbitrary phrases.

Google Translate for the iPhone has been specially optimized for speed so you don’t have to wait a long time on uncertain wireless connectivity in front of the waiter who speaks nothing else but German. In addition to the speed Google Translate also supports all existing language pairs that are supported on the web based version of the translator.

The web app is cleanly laid out just as the new chrome browser, with selector menus for the source and target languages, a field for entering your phrase, and an arrow that lets you toggle which direction the translation goes. Best of all, the Google Translate web app stores your recent queries, so you can load it up with a few handy phrases and not worry about erasing the earlier ones when you add more.

You can try Google Translate for iPhone, by point your iPhone web browser to translate.google.com.

References:

http://iphone.blogvasion.com/2008/08/google-translate-for-iphone.html

Some of the new iPhone 3G’s have come with an unexpected glitch, people call it “iPhone Cubism”, there’s a glitch in the iPhone’s camera that will occasionally cause it to slice up pictures like this one:

Of course, it’s a glitch in the iPhones camera, not a feature. Since people are reporting this as a problem after firmware 2.0 was released, people are guessing it’s a software issue, perhaps a problem with syncing the little light sensor chip in the iPhone’s camera. Apple will probably get this fixed soon. I think it looks like the iPhone is creating art :D