Lenovo Unleashes Monster Notebook for Photographers

Delivers Industry’s First Built-in Digitizer and Color Calibrator Along with Ultimate Power, Multimedia and Display Technologies Lenovo today introduced a monster notebook aimed at photographers. This 17-inch beast includes an Intel Core2 Extreme processor, up to 8GB DDR3 RAM, a 400 nit WUXGA (1920x1200) monitor that displays 72% color gamut, has a built-in color calibrator by X-rite (embedded Huey Pro), Nvidia Quadro graphics (up to 1GB), RAID 0/1, Blu-Ray burner, and built-in Wacom tablet. A 7-in-1 card reader is included and you can add a CF card reader as well. The notebook supports 802.11 BANG, Bluetooth, ultra wideband, and will add Wi-Max support later this year. Pricing starts at $2,978 USD. With everything mentioned above, the price is over $5,000 USD. At first glance the W700 certainly contains all of the desired buzzwords: high res/high gamut monitor, color calibration, Wacom tablet, card readers, Quadro graphics, oodles of RAM, built-in RAID, Blu-ray burner, all of the 802.11's, WiMax, Ultra-wideband (does anyone use this yet?)... The list goes on and on. All this in an 8.3 pound package. Ouch. Be ready to hire an additional sherpa for lugging this baby. Still, photographers have been longing for a mobile workstation that meets their needs and this one appears to fit the bill. I am currently trying to get one in for review and I will let you know how usable this beast is. You can read the full press release here.

Dropbox: Practical Web 2.0

Web 2.0 is the buzzword for the next generation of web applications that interact directly with users at the system level. The term has been bandied about for the last couple of years but no one has really developed anything that crystallizes the idea. Until now. The folks at Dropbox have come up with a novel way to solve an age-old Internet problem: secure file sharing with yourself, your friends and family. By combining web services, Amazon's S3 storage clusters and some clever programming, Dropbox plugs into Windows Explorer and Mac Finder to create a drag-and-drop interface for easy file sharing. Create shared folders between yourself and your friends/family, drop files in and a Mac-like sync occurs between all parties involved. Have to collaborate with a group of people? Add names to the share folder and when you drop the file in there, all participants get a copy.

Best of all, Dropbox is free. Currently in beta, you can surf over to the Dropbox website and apply. If you know someone already on it, they get 10 beta invitations. The free accounts are limited to 2GB of data so don't get any wild ideas about using it to create the next Napster. Also there are plans for a Linux client as well. The current client does not support proxies, but that is in the cards before the final release. There is a forum where you can find a list of upcoming features.

HD Format Wars are over, but who won?

The war over which high-definition disc format to choose is now over. Toshiba yesterday announced that it would be withdrawing it's HD-DVD players from the market and retiring the format. With Warner Brothers deciding to release it's content on Blu-Ray Toshiba seems to have gotten the message. So, Sony is the winner, right? Maybe.

Certainly it will be simpler in the future to select HD content discs: all of them will be Blu-Ray. However, unless Sony cuts the prices of BD discs right now, the consumer community may simply bypass BD and opt for downloaded HD content from sources like Netflix and AppleTV. 

It's not only the price of the discs, but the licensing fees, royalty payments, and the cost of the actual blue lasers themselves that have to be reduced. This may not happen quickly enough for the consumer and if Sony wants to really cash in on this format war victory, it may have to take a bath in the short term, selling the pricier components below cost in order to have market penetration. Technological development is always moving forward and the cost of those components will inevitably drop providing Sony with profitability but what they need now is to restore consumer confidence.

What about those of us who bought HD-DVD movies? Are we "screwed, blu-rayed, and tattooed"? Not really. HD-DVD players will be going for dirt-cheap and you may want to invest in a multi-format player like the one from LG so you can play your "legacy" HD-DVD discs.

Also, since no new content will be produced, there won't be any need for the software updates to make the players compatible. Software updates? Yep, both of the HD formats use an interactive layer that is essentially computer software. In the case of BD, it's a version of Java called BDJava. As content providers upgrade the Java versions used in the creation of the BD discs, players need to be updated to support these features. Internet aware BD players like the Playstation3 can update themselves automatically as do PC based BD drives.

Speaking computers, maybe this is the sign that Steve Jobs was waiting for to announce formal Blu-Ray support on the Mac? Considering that he has a seat on the Blu-Ray Committee one wonders why he hasn't jumped up and supported the format since day one.