Do you know what your laptop’s doing right now? Chances are high that it’s right where you left it, but in some cases that can be left behind on a train, in an airport, or just within reach of someone with distinctly sticky fingers.

There’s two real problems with a lost or stolen laptop. Firstly, there’s the issue of the hardware itself. Insurance may cover it depending on the circumstances, but there’s still going to be a gap between losing the laptop and having it replaced, not to mention the cost and inconvenience. More troublesome is the data issue. For individuals that can be photos, documents and lots of private data depending on what you store on your laptop. For businesses that can be confidential information — some of it potentially not your own. There are ways to protect data on laptops with encrypted partitions and specifically locked down software, but a good rule of thumb is that if somebody’s got physical access to your  hardware, they’ve got access to your data.

There are solutions at hand that deal with both the loss of laptop and loss of data issues.As an example, one of the features of Intel’s new Ultrabook lines — thin and light laptops with portability in mind — is security hardware built in at the silicon level. Once activated, it’ll periodically check in with Intel’s servers; if you realise the laptop’s gone you can send it a “poison pill” that locks the hardware down completely. Whoever’s got the laptop can’t reformat it, reflash the BIOS or do anything but stare at a user-defined message. If you’re then lucky enough to recover the laptop it’s possible to unlock it, but if you’ve pinched it, it’s no good to you at all. Intel’s solution is a paid service; Dick Smith will be the first retailer to offer the subscription service, which will at first be a free offering, but shortly $49.95 for a two year subscription thereafter.

Intel’s solution isn’t the only security game in town, and is primarily aimed at locking down data rather than laptop recovery. Many software services will track your laptop based on IP address and record data about the usage pattern of the machine, but it’s a fine line to tread. Recently in the United States a woman who innocently bought a laptop not realising it was stolen was rather mortified when some rather private (and intimate) chats she had on the laptop with her boyfriend were recorded by security software. Most software shouldn’t do that kind of thing — and it’s worth noting that the woman involved was successful in her suit against the software company.

With more of us using (and often only using) laptops every day, it’s not only worth keeping in mind where your laptop is, but also what you’d do if it was to go missing.

In other words, that’s a whole lot of tablets, and where there’s that kind of market momentum, there are going to be plenty of firms lining up to grab some of that market for themselves. To date there have been a number of Android tablets, but few that could entirely match the iPad experience, whether that was down to the plain nature of the Android OS supplied or a variety of hardware quirks.

Blackberry maker Research In Motion (RIM) has its “PlayBook” tablet in the marketplace now, and for the past couple of weeks I’ve had the chance to give it a longer than usual test. As a disclaimer, this is because RIM supplied me with a long term review unit.

The PlayBook is a 7” tablet, putting it in company with Samsung’s original Galaxy Tab, the very cheap tablets that Telstra and Optus offered late last year, Viewsonic’s ViewPad 7 and Huawei’s upcoming MediaPad. 7” tablets may have been dismissed by Apple’s Steve Jobs as not worthwhile, but that’s just his opinion; there’s undoubtedly some appeal in a smaller, more portable tablet option.

The best thing about the PlayBook? The hardware. This is easily the best 7” tablet on the market right now, from the build quality to the use of the entire screen, even the bezel sides, to perform tablet functions. The core operating system that runs it all is slick and fast and very easy to learn, even if you’ve not used a tablet before.

The currently available $579 PlayBook is WiFi only, and works best in concert with an existing Blackberry smartphone. That’s quite a deliberate decision on RIM’s part, as the mail and calendar clients on the PlayBook rely on having a nearby Blackberry to draw data from via Bluetooth connectivity. The idea is that if you lose your PlayBook, your most sensitive data doesn’t go with it, while at the same time tying you closely into the Blackberry ecosystem. With a Blackberry this does work well enough, although Bluetooth isn’t the fastest transmission protocol, and without it you’re limited to web-based email clients only.

Applications are the lifeblood of any tablet, and here the Playbook has some catching up to do. The number of available applications and their variety is somewhat dwarfed by the iOS and Android marketplaces, although there’s a curious feature of the PlayBook that could equalise that difference rather quickly. Aside from natively developed applications, RIM’s promising in a future update that the PlayBook will be able to run Android applications from the Android marketplace. They’ll have to be slightly re-optimised for the PlayBook, but making it easier to develop for in any way makes for a better future.

As it stands, the PlayBook is a great bit of physical hardware, and one of the best challengers to Apple’s near dominance of the tablet market on hardware terms alone. It’s not without its flaws, though, and unless you’re already a Blackberry user it’s limited in its overall utility thanks to the reliance on a Blackberry for vital email and calendar functions.

Smartphones are getting smarter, and they’re also becoming quite ubiquitous. There are many models that start under $200 (some even cheaper, although at the sub-$100 price point you quickly outstrip the phone cost with the cost of your ongoing bills, making their limited utility a not-entirely-smart choice.). If you’re carrying one around with you, the temptation to check email or get other work (or personal) chores done is quite high. I know I’ve been guilty of that on more than one occasion. As they’re ramping up in power, with new models sporting dual core processors, dedicated graphics chips and expandable memory, the concept of carrying a single, small device to do all your on-the-go work is becoming more and more realistic.

I’ve also been testing out an interesting concept from Motorola that plays with this concept of the smartphone as the centre of your working world. The company’s new Atrix mobile looks very much like a plain smartphone. It’s an Android smartphone with a specific trick up its sleeve. Dock it into the $449 lapdock (an optional extra) and it’ll power up the lapdock to act as a regular notebook style computer.

It’s not a full Windows PC or anything like that; you’re still running the Android applications on the phone plus a small selection of applications that run on the desktop itself; most notably the Firefox browser. Within that combination, however, it’s entirely possible to get a lot of work done via online services such as Google docs, as long as the data quota on your phone is robust enough, or you’ve got access to a WiFi network to sidestep that issue. As an example — and for something of a test run — this entire article’s been typed out on the lapdock using the online Evernote service to synchronise it automatically back to my main work PC. Writing this way is certainly a lot faster than trying to type the same amount of content on a small smartphone touchscreen.

So does it work? Sort of. There’s a point where spending $449 on what is basically a headless notebook (on top of the phone’s asking price) starts to strain anybody’s budget; at sales you could score a full notebook (or pretty easily a netbook) for the same kind of money. The lapdock charges the phone when docked, which is very nice indeed, and there is utility in being able to switch from very small screen phone apps to their full-screen equivalent for some work types. But still, if you’re carrying the lapdock around, you may as well carry an actual notebook. It would make a great desk-based dock for your phone, but again, you could have a desktop or notebook in the same location. Given it’s not bundled with the phone I suspect Motorola won’t sell too many lapdocks, but it does point to where computing is heading in the not too distant future.

Not so much in terms of processing power, although that can be quite handy, but definitely in terms of actual juice to run your computer or smartphone. Despite years of incremental advancements in battery technology, and the promise that fuel cells are “just around the corner” for longer than anybody wants to admit, most systems struggle to get through a full day without wanting to be connected to the mains. It gets worse the older any system gets, as batteries gracefully (and sometimes not so gracefully) degrade, giving you less and less time to get your computing tasks done.

There’s not that much you can do about battery degradation aside from purchasing new batteries when they go from “functional” to “able to hold less than a minute’s charge”, but there’s plenty of things you can do to make the battery you’ve got now last longer in actual usage. Here’s some quick tips:

1) Dim the screen

Brighter screens are easier to see, especially in bright sunlight, but they’re also a real power hog. If you’re able to use your system with a slightly less ambient display, you’ll be able to use it a whole lot longer.

2) Turn off unnecessary networks

For laptops, this means not having WiFi actually on if you’re not connected to the internet; even searching for nearby networks (most of which are likely to be locked down anyway) will kill your battery quite quickly. It’s even more true for smartphone users; drop Bluetooth if you’re not using it all, WiFi likewise, and if you really want to eke out a little bit more power before you reach a wall socket, drop your phone down from 3G to GSM. You’ll sacrifice network availability this way, but it’s the simplest way to get a smartphone that might only last half a day to last two or more.

3) Remove optical discs from drives

It shouldn’t be a surprise to note that mechanical moving parts use power, and optical drives can be a particular nuisance here. If you’ve got a CD, DVD or Blu-Ray disc in your notebook drive, it’ll spin up every time the operating system thinks there’s a chance you’ll need it, in order to maximise the speed at which you can use it. This, naturally enough, uses power, but it’s also not particularly good for the disc, which is going to bounce around in your notebook while you move around.

4) Don’t forget the power saving utilities!

These vary from vendor to vendor, but most of them will offer a power-saving profile on top of Windows’ inbuilt power saving utilities. The inbuilt Windows Power utility is good, but if your notebook vendor offers a specific utility, why wouldn’t you use it? It’s more likely to be specifically fine-tuned to the hardware you’ve got in your system. Many of the fixes they implement will be tips such as screen dimming, but it’s a simple way to set up power saving, and perhaps tweak settings like hard drive spin down time to your best advantage.

5) Switch off when practical

This tip is a touch more variable depending on your needs. Most notebooks will hibernate if you close the lid, only drawing a trickle of power. This is great when your meeting finishes and you just want to get going, because you don’t have to sit through lengthy shutdown processes, and when you next need it, operating system permitting, it should boot up in seconds. Still, a trickle of power is still a trickle of power, and if you’ve got more time than power, switching off will use exactly no power at all.

2011 will see some of these models come to market. I recently attended the launch of Viewsonic’s range of tablets, called (not that inventively), Viewpads. Viewsonic will launch with two models; the Viewpad 7 and Viewpad 10. The 7 inch Viewpad 7 isn’t that dissimilar to the Galaxy Tab; it’s a 7″ Android based tablet running on Android 2.2, and at an RRP of $699, it’s also a fair chunk cheaper. That’s at least partly because it’s a lower specification tablet, with a slower processor, lower resolution screen and less internal storage. My brief initial hands-on suggests it’s a decent enough machine, although the units I tested with were early production samples, and it did show. I suspect there’s a solid enough market for lower-priced Tablets, although it’s still more than the comparable Telstra T-Touch Tab or Optus MyTab, both of which sell for less than three hundred dollars.

The Viewpad 10 is a slightly different critter. At $799, it’s not that much more expensive, and it pops the screen size up to an iPad-competitive ten inches. It’s also dual-boot capable between Android and Windows 7 Home Premium, which at least sounds interesting. To accommodate both operating systems, though, Viewsonic’s limited itself to Android 1.6, which limits the applications that’ll run on the Android side. On the Windows side, while Windows 7 is touch capable, that’s a different thing to being touch optimised. Windows software will run, but not always as you’d expect it to, and often in a way that’s less than ideal, as you struggle with onscreen keyboards and software that just assumes you’ve got a real mouse and keyboard. From my brief hands-on with the ViewPad 10, it also didn’t appear as though you could easily swap data from one boot partition to the other, although again this was an early unit and that might change.

Research In Motion, makers of the Blackberry line of smartphones, also have an upcoming tablet product that should be made available here in the first half of 2011. The Playbook’s a WiFi-only tablet, which in itself is an interesting gamble. The idea is that RIM will sell it primarily to existing Blackberry owners, and most Blackberry owners enjoy unlimited Web access via their Blackberry smartphones. Tether a Blackberry to a Playbook, and what need do you have of inbuilt 3G? Other than the lack of 3G, the Playbook certainly sounds like it’s decked out with impressive hardware, including a dual-core processor, two HD cameras and inbuilt Adobe Flash support. Whether the larger, non-Blackberry using market will get all that excited about the PlayBook remains to be seen, especially as the device pricing remains a mystery.

Speaking of mysteries, there’s Apple. The company is famous for not saying anything about upcoming products, but the rumour mills are churning right now with speculation that an iPad 2 (for want of a better name) announcement is likely in early January. It’s taken most of 2010 for competitor tablets to catch up to Apple’s first iPad release. Whether Apple will reinvent the category again, or merely tweak around the edges with a new release will be very interesting to see indeed.

It’s worth knowing what a Tablet can and can’t do before you plunk down your hard earned cash. They’re not exactly notebook replacements, generally being less powerful than the kind of notebook you can get for the same money. At the same time, the touch-specific interfaces they sport can be great for quick work and especially media consumption on the go or comfortably around the home. That being said, let’s take a look at the field of contenders.

Apple iPad

Price: $629-$1049 (depending on memory and 3G capability)

Why you’d want one:

Apple’s Tablet still leads the market in terms of available touch-specific applications, and if you’re already an iPhone owner, your applications can be shifted across at no charge — although some will look rather pixellated if they’ve not been iPad optimised. The 10″ screen is clear and works much better for content creation than the smaller Samsung and Telstra tablets.

Why you wouldn’t:

Apple controls all things “i” branded with an iron fist, and this means certain application categories get knocked back. There’s no direct file system access without specific hacking, and the Windows iTunes client isn’t always the most stable. Unlike the Telstra or Samsung tablets, there’s no inbuilt camera or phone functionality.

Samsung Galaxy Tab

Price: $999 or on contract

Why you’d want one:

Samsung’s Galaxy Tab is smaller than the iPad with a 7″ display screen. It runs Android 2.2, giving it a wealth of applications, has internal cameras and phone capability. The Australian released model will come with Navigon’s GPS software built in, as well as e-reader capabilities and a dedicated application for the Australian newspaper.

Why you wouldn’t:

The outright price is comparatively very high, considering you could buy the 10″ iPad in almost every configuration for the cost of the Galaxy Tab. There should shortly be contract options for the Tab from most carriers, taking some of the sting out of pricing.

Telstra T-Touch Tab

Price: $299

Why you’d want one:

Telstra’s entry level tablet is priced to go, and the price is the key appeal. It’s an Android 2.1 tablet with plenty of Telstra specific applications, inbuilt camera and an excellent inbuilt mobile Foxtel client, although that will cost you extra to access. If you just want a consumption device, it’s adequate.

Why you wouldn’t:

The T-Touch Tab uses a resistive screen that’s much harder to use than the capacitive screens found on the Galaxy Tab or iPad. Any application that requires a lot of touch will bring with it a lot of frustration, marking this out as best used for passive consumption activities, and certainly one we’d suggest you try before you buy. Some users simply cannot get on with resistive screens without the use of a stylus.  Battery life is less than a quarter of the competing pads, and it’s comparatively a little heavy.

Amazon’s Kindle is available in two varieties. There’s the smaller screen US$259 6″ (15cm) Kindle, and the larger US$489 9.7″ (25cm) Kindle DX. Both have the same feature set, so the US$230 price difference just buys you more screen real estate. I’ve listed the prices there in US dollars because that’s what Amazon will charge you for them even though you’re shipping them to Australia. As such, depending on how the currency conversion goes, the price of the Kindle may fluctuate on a daily basis.

The local iPad prices have finally been set in stone. Pricing for the WiFi-only models starts at $629 (16GB), $759 (32GB) or $879 (64GB), while the 3G and GPS equipped version costs $799 (16GB), $928 (32GB) or $1,049 (64GB). As yet, unlike the iPhone, no carrier has said they’ll sell the iPad on a phone-style contract basis, but data plans have popped up starting at $20 for a 30 day expiry period. That’ll get you 1GB of usage from Telstra and 2GB from Optus. At the time of writing, Vodafone had yet to commit pricing, but it’s not a great stretch to suggest they’ll fall somewhere in line with Telstra and Optus anyway.

In the Kindle’s favour, the cost of the device includes lifetime wireless data access for browsing and buying books from Amazon’s Kindle bookstore. Pick a title, and pretty much anywhere in Australia it’ll be sent to your Kindle for quick and easy reading. In the US, the Kindle also offers limited web browsing, and will shortly offer Twitter and Facebook compatibility, but the “International” model doesn’t offer web browsing, so it seems unlikely we’ll get Twitter or Facebook either. The Kindle uses an e-ink solution that mimics the look of real paper — to a certain extent — and uses very little power. Charge your Kindle up, and it’ll last a number of weeks.

The iPad, on the other hand, uses a more traditional LCD display, as you’d find in a notebook or netbook. This has the downside that power consumption is much higher, but it’s readable by itself without any external light source. It’s also a much more capable device, somewhat akin to — but not quite like — a notebook or netbook. It doesn’t come with free lifetime data, but then what you can do with that data is far more wide reaching.

The iPad is somewhat akin to an iPod Touch with a touch of Frankenstein to it, and as such most iPod Touch/iPhone Apps will run on it, save those that need phone or camera functionality. It’s a more complete device in that it’ll handle a lot of simple computing tasks, but only one at a time. Like the iPod Touch/iPhone, there’s no multi-tasking capability out of the box, although the promised 4.0 iPhone software update due later this year may deal with some of those woes.

The iPad’s likely to be more expensive than the Kindle for the foreseeable future, although the difference between the Kindle DX and iPad 16GB isn’t that great after currency conversion and GST are taken into consideration. The Kindle hits the eBook market quite hard and with focus, and if all you’re after is an eBook reader, it’s the one to beat in single use terms. There are plenty of competitors in the wings. The iPad’s an eBook reader, but also quite a bit more, and it’s priced somewhat accordingly.

Geeks2U is proud to announce the launch of GeekVault, a secure, affordable, set and forget online data backup service. GeekVault came about after Geeks2U technicians became increasingly distressed with being called out to thousands of jobs a year where their valued customers had lost crucial personal and business data and it was either irretrievable or the cost of recovery was uneconomical. Our Geeks demanded a better way to do things and so we developed GeekVault.

Why GeekVault?

1. LOCAL: We backup your data to a leading Australian data centre so it’s never far away.
2. SECURE: Data is encrypted using 256 bit AES “bank grade” encryption before it even leaves your computer and is then sent via a secure 128 bit encrypted SSL link.
3. FAIL-SAFE: All backups are securely replicated across our network of data centres spanning the globe. All of these data centres are “bank-grade” with only the best security, uninterrupted power sources, dedicated internet connections and climate control.
4. LIVE: LiveProtect™ offers constant and continuous protection – whenever a file is changed, it’s backed up.
5. LIGHT: Minimal bandwidth usage – only the incremental change to a file is backed up, not the whole file, minimising your internet usage.
6. SAFE: Safest form of backup – unlike a local backup, your data is not susceptible to fire, theft or the many other risks of storing your backups locally.
7. SET IT. FORGET IT: Gone are the days of having to remember to regularly perform that backup which you know is so important but seldom bother to do. Once setup, GeekVault simply charges your credit card once a month for as long as you wish to use the service (there is no minimum contract) all the while fiercely protecting your data. Every photo, every email, every document, all safe with GeekVault.
8. ONLINE: Access files anytime, anywhere – all you need is an internet connection. Enjoy one click file & folder sharing. Share your files with anyone with an email address.
9. SHARE: Utilise your plan’s data allowance across as many PCs as you like rather than having to sign up each computer to a separate account.
10. ROLL-BACK: GeekVault keeps an unlimited version history of every one of your files allowing you to roll-back to any past version at any time. Best of all, we keep these for you for free without using any of your data allowance.

Sign up now for as little as $9.95 a month and never have to worry about your data again. It’s a tiny price to pay for huge peace of mind!

Find out more

The Chatroulette web site is fairly new and can only be described as social networking with a new twist or ‘spin’ (pun intended). Chatroulette.com is a video chat web site where users enter the web site to chat with others. People visit the web site from all over the world and are randomly paired in a video chat with another user. This probably all sounds simple enough, until you add people. The users of this web site have given the web site its own momentum and have taken it in a direction that the developer probably never imagined.

Once you enter into a chat with someone on Chatroulette, you can talk freely. However no information is given to you about the other person. Therefore the things you learn about them will only come from the conversation you manage to have. What makes things interesting is that the conversation can be terminated at any time by either of the users. Users simply click the ‘next’ button to be moved on to a new conversation with a completely different random user. A conversation can end for any number of reasons. In many ways, this feature alone puts the pressure on to keep things interesting.

Surprisingly, Chatroulette was developed by a seventeen year old boy from Russia. He came up with the idea and he actually programmed the web site himself. The web site is developed in a very simple way and it is also run very simply. Although there are warnings on the web site about keeping things decent, no rules are actually enforced. This means that many inappropriate things take place on the site. Users have complained that on average one in every ten chats contain content that is not appropriate for children. Therefore it is definitely not a web site for children to play around on.

As for the future of Chatroulette, it is currently very low on features. However the owner is said to have received proposals from investors that want to plump it up and expand on the idea it is also spawning the resurgence of web video conferencing. Watch this space…

Although Intel is known historically for developing microchips, they now offer a variety of products for computer manufacturers:

• Graphic Chips
• Motherboard chipsets
• Flash memory
• Network Interface Controllers and Integrated Circuits
• Embedded Processors

The latest product offering by Intel is creating somewhat of a stir. It is the new Intel i7 and it is their most recent processor. The Intel i7 expands on what they have already done in the area of computer processors and it is said to be extremely fast. I have been hearing a lot about this product but wanted to get the facts for myself, so I decided to do a bit of investigation. When I first heard that Intel had a new processor, my questions were along the lines of how quick would it be? What would it offer the user that is new in comparison to what we have seen before and what features have been improved upon since their last release?

What I have discovered is that the i7 processor makes the most of all of Intel’s breakthrough technologies and then combines them together for maximum power:

• Intel Turbo Boost technology
• Intel Hyper-Threading technology
• Intel Virtualization technology
• Enhanced Intel SpeedStep technology
• Execute disable bit
• Intel 64 architecture

Excitingly, the Intel i7 is described as “adrenaline on a chip”! It appears that Intel went all out when it came to packing the processor with all of its most successful technologies. The i7 uses multi-core technology. This is a feature that helps the processor to direct and send power to the places that your computer needs it most at any particular moment in time. The i7 has the ability to perform 8-way multi-tasking and has increased cache size. All of this works together to make things much easier for computer users that multi-task in a serious way. They can now open several applications at the same time without worrying about their computer getting sluggish or freezing. Multimedia users will also be happy about how smoothly their PCs run even with their heaviest applications open.

Two powerful technologies that Intel have included with this processor are Turbo Boost technology and Hyperthreading. Both of these have worked well for Intel in the past. They contribute to increased processor speeds and better multitasking capabilities.

Keep your eye out in the media you will be sure to hear about this amazing advancement in computing