Intel: New Windows 8 Intel Notebooks to Cost As Little as $200

The PC industry is in a sharp decline as consumers gravitate more towards smartphones and tablets. Intel hopes to change that trend, largely blamed on Windows 8 itself, by introducing its new Bay Trail processors that will enable low cost Windows 8 machines. How cheap? Budget-friendly enough that notebooks will be able to compete with sub-$200 priced tablets from Amazon, Samsung, Google and other manufacturers.

“If you look at touch-enabled Intel-based notebooks that are ultrathin using [the new] processors, those prices are going to be down to as low as $200,” Intel CEO Paul Otellini said, according to a recent article from CNET. It might be easy enough for Otellini to promise those prices, especially as he plans his exit from Intel next month, so we’re going to remain skeptical until we hear manufacturers say that they can deliver on those promises.

After all, touchscreen displays themselves can cost more than $200, add in memory, a hard drive, a graphics chip and other components and you’re looking at a rather expensive device. Look at the smartphone industry, for example, where it’s common to find an off-contract flagship smartphone for $650. Still, we do know that it’s possible to create low-cost devices if you’re willing to take a hit at the point of sale. Amazon says it breaks even on its Kindle Fire devices but makes money once consumers enter its ecosystem and begin to buy eBooks, music, videos and applications.

[Source: TechnoBuffalo]

Are apps organising your kid’s lives?

Apparently, whatever we need in life, there’s an app for it.  And with the meteoric rise of the android smartphone, portable tablet and light and compact notebook showing no sign of slowing down, this probably won’t come as much surprise to you.  

With the sheer volume of handy apps available, the majority of us are beginning to wonder how we ever survived without having a tool to regularly check the weather in the Outer Hebrides or track our daily bowl movements (yes, this is a real app) We’re using apps increasingly to organise both our business and social lives and reaping the benefits in both.

However, the demographic most reliant on electronic devices to organise their lives are students, who have turned to technology for every day tasks such as checking grades, ticking items off their things to do list and organising their homework schedule.  

Our kids have grown up using this ever-improving technology and are becoming increasingly reliant on apps to determine their every move.  Long gone are the days of having to stock up on dictionaries, calculators and note-books, new terms now are all about getting the right apps on the right device. 

Within an increasing number of schools, rather than being punished for having a phone at school, teachers are beginning to embrace the technology and alternative learning opportunities apps offer them.   Teachers are regularly using apps such as Socrative and Skitch to engage students with educational exercises and interactive activities that the whole class can share.   

Aside from the educational benefits, students are benefitting from apps such as Stylebook to organise their wardrobe and make outfit decisions based on the clothes they have available.

It’s not just the teens who are incorporating digital technology and apps into their everyday lives; schools, pre-schools and even nurseries are using apps to help them educate, inspire and organise children - playing interactive learning games to help children with their letter formation and word pronunciation, and flashcard apps to help with revision and study.  [Advertorial]

Evernote partners with Moleskine to offer ‘smart notebooks’ that are browsable from within the app

Today, at its Evernote Trunk Conference in San Francisco, Evernote announced a partnership with expensive high-quality notebook maker Moleskine. The surprising partnership yielded a new offering called “Evernote Smart Notebook”. Since many people still take notes with pen and paper, it is a partnership that makes sense.

The Evernote Smart Notebook allows people to take notes by hand and then make the notes available online, TechCrunch first noted. To upload the notes, a photo of a page from the notebook is taken with the Evernote app. The notes are then saved to a user’s Evernote account where they can be browsed, searched and organized. Special stickers are provided to tell Evernote which virtual notebook to organize the note into.

[Source: 9to5Mac]

Tests Find OS X Mountain Lion May Significantly Degrade Notebook Battery Life

Ars Technica has been doing some testing after reports emerged that some Mountain Lion early adopters were experiencing degraded battery life after upgrading to OS X 10.8. A 46-page thread with nearly 700 replies has been growing over the past several weeks on the Apple Support Forums.

Ars writer Chris Foresman, after extended testing, discovered that the battery life of his Retina MacBook Pro review unit dropped 38% from its previous 8-hours. He was unable to narrow down blame for the battery loss to any particular bit of software or system process.

Our own testing revealed similar (and significant) drops in battery runtime after installing Mountain Lion. In previous tests, we were able to regularly achieve just over 8 hours of use by relying solely on our Retina MacBook Pro's integrated Intel HD4000 GPU. Performing the same "real-world" test using the same software applications and usage pattern, we never got the Retina MacBook Pro to run for more than a few minutes past 5 hours after a full charge.

Typically, the quad-core processor wasn't taxed beyond 5 percent capacity, except for occasional 10-20 percent spikes when loading webpages, reading or writing files, or other activities. Unexpected file system or network access, or less efficient use of the GPU, could cause additional power drain without showing significant CPU use.

One poster on Apple's support forums claims a company support representative told him that "an update will be issued via the [Mac App Store] as soon as they can work a fix."

[Source: MacRumors]