Product Central
Dispatches from the Reviews Editor's desk
Wednesday 13 December 2006, 2:22 PM
Camel sacrificed by airline workers
Generally speaking, camels are safe over here in Blighty, confined as they are to zoos, safari parks and the odd circus. Not the life your average member of the Camelidae might have chosen, perhaps, but better than falling into the hands of predatory Turkish Airlines workers at Istanbul's international airport.
As the Beeb reports, an unfortunate beast — whether Dromedary (one hump) or Bactrian (two humps) was not specified — was recently slaughtered and consumed by maintenance workers to celebrate the final delivery in a 100-plane order. The authorities, however, took a dim view of such extreme staff canteen arrangements, and have suspended the boss of the workers involved.
Which gets me thinking: what's the oddest animal you've ever eaten? I've managed nothing more exotic than fried insects in Japan, washed down with fish tea. However, my brother, when on VSO in Sarawak many years ago, was disconcerted to find that the tasty meat being fed to him by friendly longhouse-dwelling tribesmen in the rainforest was the distinctly endangered Sun Bear.
Wednesday 6 December 2006, 1:33 PM
UMPC: better, but the jury's still out
We've just reviewed our second Ultra Mobile PC (UMPC), the R2H from ASUS. In case you'd forgotten, the UMPC caused something of a stir back in February/March when Microsoft ran a teaser campaign for Origami (Redmond's codename for what turned out to be the UMPC) — a small slate-style Tablet PC running Windows XP.
Optimists hoped that Origami/UMPC systems would be go-anywhere, do-anything wonder-gadgets, but the bubble of anticipation soon burst when Samsung unveiled the Q1 at CeBIT in Hannover. The Q1, although a neat enough piece of kit, was short on features, processing power and battery life, and long on price (£799 inc. VAT).
It's taken until now to get our hands on a second UMPC, and the ASUS R2H is a big improvement. It still costs £799 (inc. VAT), which will get you a very decent traditional notebook, but (in the UK at least) you get a great set of extras and add-ons, including a digital TV tuner, folding keyboard, external DVD rewriter and a mouse. That's on top of built-in features such as Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, GPS and a 1.3-megapixel digital camera. We certainly enjoyed setting up this little critter on the desk and keeping an eye on the TV news.
But that's the problem really: unless you have an absolute need for a small Tablet PC, a machine like this is only ever going to be an accessory. Few business people are going to want an R2H for their primary computer — especially with its pedestrian 900MHz Celeron M processor.
So until I or my employer have got a spare £800 lying around, I'm going to have to pass on the UMPC for the moment.
Thursday 30 November 2006, 11:01 AM
It's Microsoft Day
Today's the day when the tech media's guns point towards Redmond and fire a triple salvo at Vista, Office 2007 and Exchange Server 2007. ZDNet UK, of course, is weighing in -- as I write this, the Office 2007 Special Report is live, and the Vista and Exchange ones are imminent.
In the interests of balance, we'll also be taking a close look at how you can avoid going anywhere near Microsoft's products to get your work done. Our fearless Technology Editor, Rupert Goodwins, has been using Ubuntu Linux, OpenOffice and a bunch of other open-source stuff on our office LAN for some time, and will be reporting just as soon as he returns from a press trip to Hong Kong. Which is why, for once, you won't see Rupert's visage all over the televisual media on a big Microsoft Day. Then again, we wouldn't put it past him to find a TV crew to pontificate to out in HK...
