Snow Leopard is the latest operating system from Apple and comes with several under-the-hood technologies that bring better performance and greater stability. This is the predecessor of the Leopard, Mac OS X 10.5.

Although, Leopard and Snow Leopard may seem similar, several changes have been made under the hood, keeping in mind hardware advances in the future.

Pricing and System Requirements

Apple has reduced the pricing for the upgrade from the usual $129 to $29, but for customers upgrading from Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger, it will be $169. For users who have more than one Mac, a five-pack upgrade is made available at $49. Read the rest of this entry »

Everybody loves a big TV, a big car and a huge house, so why not a big monitor. Monitors have always been small and the biggest that was around was only 24 inches, but now they have been upgraded and are as big as TVs.

High definition displays are becoming highly popular, and the bigger the LCD panel the higher the resolution.

In spite of the price going down when compared to earlier, they are still on the expensive side, but for those that are willing to pay for quality, there are quite a few good 30-inch LCD monitors in the market.

Gateway XHD3000 – Around $1000

This one is the best general purpose monitor that gives the feel of a television, as the video is sharp, thanks to the special built-in chip, the Silicon Optix Realta HQV upscaler. This works by upscaling video content.

This monitor has a resolution of 2560×1600 with a decent 6ms response time, and a contrast ratio of 1000:1. It supports everything from DVI-D, VGA, component, composite and S-Video. The Nintendo 64 can be hooked up, and with HDMI support, Xbox 360 or PS3 can be connected too. It comes with a 6 port USB 2.0 hub.

With the stunning image quality that is perfect for both play and work, the XHD3000 is a great monitor and one of the best in the market. It stands out for its connectivity and QUAD HD-display with built-in processor. Read the rest of this entry »

“Don’t work so hard, you don’t own that company,” was the message glaring from

my computer screen. It was from my sister who always felt I deserved much more.

My boss walked in behind me at that moment. I was caught unawares and didn’t have time to close the window. He read it (I’m sure), talked about something else and left the room with a weird expression on his face.

I’m sure all of you must have faced similar embarrassing situations, either at home or at work.

Luckily for us, now there are systems that can block sensitive content on a computer screen. When a document is displayed, only the user of that computer can see the text. All others will see content that is convincingly made to look like real but is not.

This miraculous system is “Chameleon,” developed by Oculis Lab, a U.S. based company. According to Bill Anderson, president of Oculis Labs, “For example, a line of text that reads “the cat ran across the road” may appear to a snooper to say “the turtle had a nice lunch.”

For now, this system is designed specifically for military use. Read the rest of this entry »

Ultraportability combined with features is what the mobile professional looks for.  These notebooks stand out among others for being lightweight and offering good features.

Lenovo ThinkPad X200 – $1,542

This is one of the best full-featured ultraportable laptops that offer a wonderful performance and an unbelievable battery life. It is equipped with the new Centrino 2 processor and is far more powerful than its predecessor, the ThinkPad X61, although the screen is only 12.1 inches.  But that doesn’t make this 2.95 pound beauty any less superior.

The screen is bright and easy to read with a resolution of 1280 x 800 pixels and it also has a built-in Webcam, which makes it perfect for execs to work on the move.  The keyboard is much bigger and is spill resistant.

It comes with 2GB of RAM, 2.4 GHz Core 2 Duo P8600 and a 160 GB hard drive. Lenovo has also expanded the battery line and offers three choices, with the most powerful nine-cell model giving almost nine hours.

For people looking for the “best” travel laptop, nothing can beat this Lenovo model. Read the rest of this entry »

Apple never ceases to improvise and innovate, always ready to up the ante and create new benchmarks, whenever competition is seen hotting up.

In the recent past, there has been a great deal of talk and rumors about there being a consistent decline in the ringtone craze off late, and this is mainly attributed to the fact that users are now adept at creating their own ringtones easily from song downloads.

There are sites such as makeownringtone.com that allow users to create ringtones for free. Users just need to upload songs in various formats, such as MP3 and WMA, and then select the part of the song they want to use as a ringtone, remix their selection and upload the final result to their phones. As simple as that!

CNET sources recently created a base for rumors by reporting that Apple has come up with an excellent innovative idea, that of offering ready-made ringtones for the iPhone.

Apple has concentrated a lot on the iPhone in the past and continues to do so. iPhone users have enjoyed the option of creating their own custom-made ringtones for their devices ever since 2007. Users had to look for the bell icon next to the song that indicates the song can be converted into a ringtone, and double click on the bell for the ringtone editor to open. Once the portion of the song for the ringtone is selected, the user has to click buy, for the ringtone to be created and the user charged for the purchase. It will then show up in a ringtone play list to be synced to the iPhone. The whole process takes the least amount of time and one doesn’t have to be tech savvy either to figure out how it is done. Even a child can do it with ease.

However, Apple is bent on pampering and making iPhone users lazier than ever. It is said to have struck a deal with the music industry and obtained rights for offering ready-made ringtones. Read the rest of this entry »

Even as people await the release of the much-speculated tablet from Apple, Freescale has come out with the Smartbook that could be a competition for the low-cost mini laptops.

Smartbook is a combined effort of Freescale Semiconductor and Arm Holdings.  The company is marketing the smartbook as a new category of computing devices that can be squeezed somewhere between the smartphone and the PC-like notebook or netbook.

Freescale Semiconductor is a leading manufacturer of embedded semiconductors for the consumer, industrial, automotive and networking markets. The company is based in Texas and has several research and development, design, manufacturing and sales outlets spread all over the world.

Rich Beyer, Freescale CEO said, “Netbooks based on Intel’s Atom processor and Microsoft Windows simply replicate the PC experience, they are just notebooks in a smaller format.  The Smartbook is a different experience, something between a small screen phone and a PC.” Read the rest of this entry »

The battlefield is all set and warming up for a war that promises to be quite exciting!

Not very long ago, technology giant Microsoft challenged the might of Google, with the launch of a new search engine, Bing.  Not stopping at that, it went ahead and announced Office 10, which will include free online versions of its four popular software programs – a shot at Google’s web-based office applications.  Google, not one to be left behind, surprised everyone with a talk about its new operating system, clearly hoping to overturn the dominance of Microsoft’s ubiquitous Windows.

This announcement by Google threw the tech world into a tizzy; some going to the extent of saying that Google’s new offering would finally mark the end of Windows’ rule and others shaking their heads at what they perceive to be a great mistake by Google.

It is certainly going to be quite a ride!  Microsoft powers almost 90 percent of the world’s computers and this gives Microsoft an inherent advantage, where operating systems are concerned.

Google’s new operating system, called the Google Chrome Operating System, is initially expected to target net books. It may be released to the world in the second half of 2010. Read the rest of this entry »

Credit: Bert Kommerij (via Flickr)

When I look back into my son’s childhood, there are specific images that flash in my mind – images of his tiny frame playing in his room, his first day at school, him walking into my office with blood all over from a bike accident and smilingly calling it tomato ketchup.

Some sad, some happy, but they are all precious.  But then I regret not remembering every single day of his growing up years. If only I could….

We do remember some things from our past but definitely not every single detail.  This is where Gordon Bell is trying to ring a bell.  He is part of Microsoft’s research team, a principal researcher and is working towards making sure we can remember all the special moments of our lives.  He has worked as a chief engineer and vice president of research and development at Digital Equipment Corp. for 23 long years and later founded the Computer History Museum.

Bell himself wants to capture all the moments of his life and store them on his Dell laptop. He wants to be able to pull up every single picture, every conversation, every email whenever he wants. Read the rest of this entry »

What was meant to be an entertainment center that helps iPhone users download applications is proving to be something Apple did not expect.

Apple is facing unexpected problems with its iPhone application store, which contains more than 50,000 applications and is one of the most popular entertainment and information tools for mobile phones.

BeautyMeter is one of the applications at the iPhone app store.  This photo sharing application is meant for 17 and over, where users have the ability to upload images and rate them on the basis of “hotness.”  The application has a built-in safety mechanism as it requires users to enter their iPhone IDs.  Apple kept this check to ensure no illegal material is uploaded and for ease of tracking if anyone posts anything untoward.

However, in spite of this check, the problem started when kids started uploading images of themselves in the nude and there have been potentially objectionable materials showing up in the past few weeks.  The  latest example that caught the public eye, is that of a 15-year-old girl who uploaded her own nude photo, which stayed up for long enough for 5000 users to rate it.  It was only then brought to Apple’s notice and pulled down.

This was not the sole incident of its kind.  About a week earlier, there was another mobile phone application called “Hottest Girl,” that also showed a photo of a topless woman and was removed from the iPhone app store.

Apple is attracting unnecessary attention due to these happenings.  This has raised several questions about Apple’s ability to control iPhone content and keep its app store clean, which prompted Apple to remove BeautyMeter app from its store. Read the rest of this entry »

Microsoft’s intention to respond to all those that offer online productivity software free for personal use is on the verge of becoming a reality.  It is all set to provide all of its Office software online, just like Google, Zobo, Adobe and others are doing.

This move will benefit both corporate and smaller customers.  While corporate customers will be able to get in on the paid subscriptions and tap into the online services, others can sign up for a service, where their online files will be stored and get help with data backup and security.

The best thing about this is that, everyone will be allowed to use the online versions of different applications, such as Word and PowerPoint without it being necessary to buy the desktop versions.  All they need to do is sign up for the free Windows Live account.

The technical preview engineering milestone for Office 2010 has been announced, and this allows thousands of people, mostly software engineering partners, to test drive the software by downloading it.  The beta version of the software is expected to be released by the year-end and the final version may be shipped in the first half of 2010.

Results of several technical previews reveal that improvements have been made to the office suite, such as the Ribbon being the default interface OneNote, Outlook and all other Office applications.  Not only is Ribbon made default but it has also been tweaked a bit. Read the rest of this entry »