Headworx

O rigami buzz has been with us for the entire week, as thousands of geeks wait for the confirmation of their expectations on Thursday, March the 2nd. There have been several leaks during last couple of days, notably Engadget reported the story with pictures. So it really looks like we will get something like a Tablet PC, may be a little smaller. It will be interesting to see if this is really the reincarnation of a concept device announced by National Semiconductor back in 2001, to promote their x86 "Geode" platform, presently owned by AMD. By the way NSM's device was named "Origami™ Mobile Communicator"... a coincidence? In the meantime, assuming Origami really is a new toy from Redmond, let's ask Microsoft guys a couple of questions. 1. Is it based on Windows XP? So is it going to boot for 45 seconds, run for two hours on batteries and require constant security updates? Do we really need that massive scale operating system just to browse the web, take c...

D o you want to double your money this year? Do you like to gamble? If yes, then keep on reading, I have an interesting call for you. We live in a world full of gadgets. Smartphones, iPods, laptops, game consoles, PDAs... what do they have in common? They are portable. What does that mean? Well... at least they have to run on batteries. And what do we want from them? More features of course. Remember the original iPod? Black and white screen and 5 hours battery live. Look at the current iPod: color screen and 20 hours battery live. And it plays videos. That means it's processor must be more powerful... so more power - hungry of course. The trend seems to defy the laws of physics - we keep on getting more features and more computing power with less power consumption. At least this is what we want the trend to be. But doing that is not easy. And if somebody finds a breakthrough way to continue that trend, they are going to be rewarded. L ook at the first iPod again. Once it was relea...

C an you imagine Apple in 2001? The company with shrinking market share and nowhere to go? Computers were their world about to be taken over by Windows. Yet in 2001 they introduced an iPod, a product that had been known before as an MP3 player. But Apple engineered iPod to perfection and took the market by storm. There were several smart design decisions differentiating iPod from the rest of the market. iPod has always been slim and elegant. It had a breakthrough navigation wheel, making it extremely easy to operate and a couple of other nice features like a single cable for charging and downloading. Since 2001 everybody started chasing Apple for the MP3 crown, but so far the distance seems to be growing, not shrinking. Even in 2005 we had two trend-setting models (the unbelievable thin Nano and the so-called Video iPod). So what will 2006 bring to the table? B irds are already singing there is a true Video iPod in the works. True Video you ask? Yes... have you noticed the latest iPod ...

M ost of today's new mobile phones have the ability to browse The Web. This feature sounds great, but the final user's experience is not that great at all. There is one general reason for that. The Web has become too heavy. The pages are very rich, with lots of graphics that take ages to download over GPRS and take ages to format and display by the tiny processors powering our mobiles. And most of the pages are formatted to 1024x768 fixed screen size, so viewing them on a phone is really not an easy task. P hone designers try to catch with the trend by using more powerful processors and higher resolution screens (my Sp5m has graphic resolution equal to the CGA card in my first IBM PC and a processor that is 20 times faster). But still trying to view a typical web page results in something far from what is usually expected by users. Even web pages with clean design, like http://www.google.com/ have to be scrolled left and right. X HTML is a Web standard targeted at small device...