IdeaPads and videocams supplied to athletes to blog during Olympics

Worldwide Olympics partner Lenovo is certainly making its presence felt at the upcoming Beijing games. Besides designing the Olympic torch and providing most of the computing equipment used for running the operations at the Olympics, the company has also put up special-edition Lenovo 3000 V200 notebooks for charity auctions. Most recently, the PC maker officially opened six Internet lounges (called i.lounges) with up to 260 PC terminals at the Olympic Villages for athletes and officials.

And for the first time, athletes from over 25 countries across 29 sports disciplines have been invited to blog about their experiences before and during the games. They will be supplied with Lenovo IdeaPads for blogging. According to the PC maker, the objective is "to bring a real insider's perspective on what is happening during the Games to fans at home around the world". The blogs are compiled and presented at www.lenovo.com/voicesofthegames. Video cameras are also provided to the athletes as part of the program to capture their experiences.

Toshiba's first gaming laptop, the Qosmio X300

Notebooks these days are well-equipped to render the complex 3D graphics in the latest gaming titles. Yet, oddly, not many PC vendors in Asia are jumping on the bandwagon to offer laptops aimed at gamers. In fact, there are only a handful of brands with gaming notebooks in our region, including ASUS and Dell.

So it's great to see a Japanese PC maker (in this case, Toshiba) stepping up to the plate to unveil its first gaming laptop, the Qosmio X300, to the Singapore and Indonesia press recently. To appeal to gamers, Toshiba has adopted a rather typical approach with the X300's design, choosing to go with a fiery red theme which extends from cover to touchpad and speakers.

As with most gaming machines, the X300 comes packed with premium specifications, from the latest 2.53GHz Centrino 2 processor and 4GB DDR3 RAM to dual 250GB hard drives and a 17-inch WXGA TFT display. It also features an onboard 512MB Nvidia GeForce 9700M GTS GPU which should handle most new games smoothly, though there is no mention on whether it will support Nvidia's PhysX technology.

Other noteworthy features include four Harmon Kardon stereo speakers and a subwoofer with bass reflex technology, REGZA Link (HDMI-CEC), an FM tuner and built-in DVD drive. To complete the gaming experience, Toshiba will be bundling for Asia a Razer Krait Mouse, Goliathus soft mat and Bagman Backpack in the X300 package as well. The X300 is expected to retail at S$4,099 (US$2,921.80) from end August.

Bigger screen or higher specs?

A recent NEC launch turned out to be a head scratcher. No, it's not because the Japanese maker has so many products as to confound our minds (there were a total of two products showcased). Nor was the underlying technology so far ahead into the future that only Isaac Asimov could understand.











What really made our heads spin was that while the NEC Versa S5600 has a 12.1-inch display and the Versa S3500 sports a 13.3-inch one, both have exactly the same chassis, weight and starting price.

Though the press release stated that the former targets business professionals and the latter goes for mainstream road warriors (NEC's words, not ours), we doubted anyone in their right minds would intentionally select the smaller display. After much questioning it turned out that:

The press release had the wrong information, and that the 13.3-inch S3500 weighs 100g more than the 12.1-inch model.

The stated battery life is the same for both models, but in reality, NEC admitted that the S3500's uptime is a little shorter.

Though both have the same starting price, the Versa S5600 will be configured with more powerful components to hit the top-end market, while the S3500 will seek the value crowd with low- to midrange hardware.

Lesson to be learned: The press release tells only part of the story, the other part still requires a lot of diligence seeking out the real facts.

Bid for a notebook and do your bit for charity this Olympics

As we approach the opening of the Games on August 8, Lenovo's global Olympic philanthropic online campaign is also into its last leg of a six-month campaign. A total of 11 Lenovo 3000 V200 "Cloud of Promise"-themed notebooks autographed by athlete ambassadors, including Gail Emms (2004 Olympic silver medalist for badminton from the UK), Libby Lenton (2004 Olympic gold and bronze medalist for swimming from Australia) and Liu Xiang (2004 Olympic gold medalist for track and field from China), are up for grabs.

Bid prices start at US$500 and all proceeds will go to selected philanthropies through the Lenovo Hope Fund. Bidders will be taken to a country-specific site and they would need to pre-qualify by having a valid shipping address in that country before they can bid.

Facebook's portal for the masses

This week, Facebook took a number of strategic steps toward its goal of giving people the "power to share and make the world more open and connected". That's how founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg described the mission statement for Facebook.

With that mission statement, similar to Google's mission to "organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful", Facebook is highlighting its noble aspirations, but underneath the "make the world a better place" is the fact that both Facebook and Google, as well as Yahoo, Microsoft, MySpace, and others want to be the portal for the masses.

By portal, I mean more than just a place to share content with friends, search or wire up a social graph. If the Web is becoming social at its core, Facebook (90 million and growing at hundreds of thousands per day) and its competitors want to be the center of their members' lives in the same way that MyYahoo became a personalized home base for millions of users over the last decade.
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