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|  | Mobility 2.0 lifestyle
Friday, May 25, 2007
VIA issued a Press Release recently (May 15 2007) about an alliance between Chunghwa Telecom, Taiwan's largest telecommunications provider, Gigabyte and VIA. The news pre-empted the availability of Gigabte's first UMPC, the U60. Internet connectivity is crucial to realizing the full potential of any UMPC and the U60 is to be connected to 3.5G services as a result of the partnership. This, the VIA Press Release stated, enables a "rich "Mobility 2.0" lifestyle". Aha! Another catch phrase! But what does it refer to? And have I already experienced it? Read on... |   |
| | Feel good
Thursday, May 24, 2007
Every now and then somebody does something in this industry that I just have to mention and give kudos for. Blizzard entertainment assisted the Make-A-Wish Foundation to make a kid's dream come true. Ezra Chatterton will now be entered into the books as a WoW legend. Blizzard allowed the ten year old boy to create and take control of a super powerful beast, giving him the power to singe handedly clear the latest 25 player dungeon launched this week. Blizzard also included a small quest line within the game to celebrate children's week, which runs from 22 - 29 May.
In the quests you get to escort an orphan character to places they would like to see and things that they would like to do, in-game. The quest brings attention to children's week. Most players would look up information about new quests and quest rewards and it's there that they would find out about the Make-A-Wish effort. It's great to see any company putting the effort in to not only assist children but to bring attention to their cause. After all there are 8 million+ players of WoW, so that's pretty big publicity. Great job Blizzard. | |
| UMPCs and "hotspot"
Thursday, May 24, 2007
ElecDesign.com talks about the hardware considerations of UMPCs: "ARM and its licensees made quite a bit of money taking advantage of low-power 32-bit architectures. But x86 architectures, which are popular in PC-style applications, are hitting low-power targets as well. AMD's Geode and VIA Technologies' C7-M can be found in many of the UMPC platforms. Samsung almost doubled the battery life with its switch to the C7M for its Q1B UMPC (Fig. 2). Hardware acceleration to support services such as multimedia codecs are critical to delivering content as well as reducing power consumption." | |
| | Reputation
Wednesday, May 23, 2007
As VIA Arena is an official VIA site I am always a bit wary about linking to news items that editorialize rumor, gossip and hearsay about VIA's future, patents and other potentially sticky and unclear points. Digitimes.com reported that an unknown source said that VIA was thinking of restructuring but another unknown source said this wasn't true. A blog on Wired.com picked up the story and commented "VIA Technologies makes all sorts of cool novelties, like the smallest consumer motherboards, the other UMPC chip, and chipset drivers that actually work." And that last point is why I'm posting this - what a nice comment! Good to read that we have that positive reputation. | |
| Mini-pup project
Wednesday, May 23, 2007
"Following the addition of PXE network booting to the ultra-lightweight Puppy Linux distribution, a group of enthusiasts offering Puppy customization and support services has revealed plans for a version of Puppy tuned to the needs of diskless mini-PCs. The "Minipup" project is aimed at diskless hardware such as sub-$100 PCs." LinuxDevices.com goes on to report that the "hardware setup was an eWay Co TK mini-PC, based on an 800MHz Via processor. The mini-PC loaded Puppy Linux 2.16's "initrd-humongous" kernel via PXE, then used tftp to fetch a compressed filesystem, it appears. The complete boot can be accomplished in 53 seconds..." | |
| Version 3.0 of VIA StrongBox software released
Wednesday, May 23, 2007
Viruses, worms, hacking and identity theft have become an everyday part of computing, with the result that the security of our personal and confidential business information is emerging as the single biggest issue in computing today. Notebook PCs and UMPCs are especially vulnerable, with their easy portability creating a much higher risk of theft and loss. So VIA provides a free software utility so that as much as 40 gigabytes of files in up to ten virtual ‘strongbox’ drives can be stored. You can read over a virtual tour of StrongBox, including how to install and use the software, in this article. The latest version, version 3.0, supports Windows 2000/XP/Vista (English/German/Traditional Chinese/Simplified Chinese). Download it here. | |
| OQO - WOW!
Wednesday, May 23, 2007
No that's not WoW the game but WOW! Denis from GottaBeMobile.com says "OQO Model 02 - My biggest "Wow" in a while!" He has put together a list of all the things he loves about the OQO model 02. "I am in the somewhat enviable position of getting to use a LOT of cool toys like this, but this one was special. As you can see I loved it, and I do not make statements that strong very often. If it was up to me, OQO would be having a hard time getting this one back." | |
| OQO unit survives a harsh fall
Wednesday, May 23, 2007
"So, I fired up the OQO and the provided Sprint service and placed it securely in the passenger seat, nestled on my computer bag like I have done with many other systems. Mistake #1. I was moving right along on US-301 South, the weather was great, traffic was light, the tunes were on and life was good. It was one of those beautiful mornings when you are really glad to be alive. Little did I know how true this would become." Read on at GottaBeMobile.com. | |
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