What’s with SONY and waterproofing their gadgets? I’m not exactly sure where they’re headed with this, but I like it! SONY has been actively churning out waterproof gadgets across the board — from their tablets to projector-handycams and smartphones. Say hello to their newest releast, the SONY XPERIA ZR, a NFC-enabled Android phone that can survive swimming pool depths.
So here I am at my favorite third wave coffee place in the south, working on an ASUS VivoTab (thanks ASUS Philippines for lending this little number). ASUS has been keen on the whole hybrid scene as they debuted devices like the Transformer and the PadFone. So it’s no surprise that ASUS continues to bring about such wonderment with the ViVoTab — a Windows 8 book w/ a detachable screen. It is important to note that the movement towards this kind of device is prevalent in many brands but the VivoTab definitely excels in finding the golden mean between price and features. For one, the TF810 comes with two sets of batteries — one for the actual tablet and the other built into the keyboard, which, therefore, doubles as a charging dock. That means if for some reason you really want to travel light, you can ditch the keyboard into your car and come back for it afterwards.
So what exactly will a PHP 30,000 notebook get you? For one, it is powered by a breakthrough processor called ‘S Quad Core’ and will have 128GB SSD storage. Not bad. Not bad at all. For something that hails the ‘9’ series of Samsung devices and costs a fraction of the price, definitely not bad at all.
We got hold of this information from an earlier briefing during the SideSync unveil and if you look at the foreign press releases, the material only references the processor to be a ‘Quad Core processor’ but upon further inspection it seems like a partnership with AMD. Will Samsung be able to break away and manufacture their own processors in the future?
Back when I was building my own PC’s, one of the biggest reasons why I chose to do configure my own hardware and install a fresh non-OEM copy of Windows was that if I bought a branded PC, there was sure to be bloatware installed. Bloatware: the software that came with a branded PC adding custom UI’s and other features that were redundant to Windows. It was a way for manufacturers to differentiate themselves from the rest but the irony was everyone had their own version of bloat and this significantly slowed down Windows. Which is one of the reasons why in this new Windows 8 era, Microsoft had decided to release its own Surface hardware.
A couple of days ago I sent a Tweet out asking friends how the heck am I supposed to review a hard drive. To be honest, at least for the regular consumer, panning the Internet for a gold review of a hard drive is the last thing they’ll ever want to do. Storage is really something we take for granted in this day and age where the number 1 criteria for selecting hard drive would be how much space it can store at the cheapest cost. Other features such as the security lock, automated backup and whether the drive is USB 2.0 or USB 3.0 compatible are secondary. Of course, if you’re a geek, like me, these things matter.