The first thing to catch my eye was the WePad from German manufacturer Neofonie.  The specifications call out to me – 11.6″ 1366×768 display, SDHC card support, USB ports, Android operating system, and a 1.66GHz Atom processor all pretty much crap on the iPad from a very great height, with the sole exception being the mere 6 hour battery life to the iPad’s 10 – and it looks shiny enough, but sadly it’s not yet available to buy.

Okay, so Android – if not rooted – is still a locked-down platform, but compared to the iPhone OS – as found on the iPod Touch, the iPhone (obviously) and the iPad – it’s as free as a kilt and no knickers.  Neofonie has even promised that, despite the fact they’re aiming the WePad as a platform for its WeMagazine digital publishing platform, full access to the Android Market will be granted – meaning third-party applications can be installed without restriction.

I’m still undecided as to the relative merits of the slate form factor, but the WePad has certainly got my attention – and not just because it sounds like a euphemism for Tena Lady.

Although Intel had previously promised that Larrabee-based products would be launching in the first quarter of 2010, the company has chosen to make a rather late announcement that it wasn’t being exactly honest with that launch date. As reported by PC Magazine, company spokesman Nick Knupffer admits that “Larrabee silicon and software development are behind where we had hoped to be at this point in the project,” and states that “as a result, our first Larrabee product will not be launched as a standalone discrete graphics product, but rather be used as a software development platform for internal and external use.”

While Larrabee’s innovative architecture promised a different way of looking at the process of rendering graphics – described by Intel chief executive officer Paul Otellini back in 2007 as “a highly parallel, many core product comprised of an array of Intel architecture cores” promising” “teraflops of performance” – the truth of where the product was came out at IDF back in September, almost two years after Larrabee’s original announcement, when a demonstration by senior research scientist Bill Mark used a Larrabee prototype to run the real-time ray-traced Enemy Territory: Quake Wars demonstration incredibly slowly. Interestingly, despite the embarrassing demonstration, Intel was still claiming at that time that the first Larrabee product would be “discrete performance graphics” boards – not an SDK.

While the news that 2010 will only be seeing an software development platform for Larrabee will be a blow for Intel, the company hasn’t completely given up on the idea of launching its own discrete graphics processor to compete with rival AMD and Nvidia – but it’s likely to be 2011 at the earliest.

The specs are reasonable, although I could have lived without Vista.  It’s taken me almost a full week to beat the thing into submission – it’s amazing how irritating Vista is when you’ve used a grown-up operating system like Ubuntu for a while.  Actually, that’s the next step – dual-boot the thing, with Vista for games (and Blu-ray playback) and Ubuntu for actually getting things done.

One thing I’ve noticed about the specifications, actually: it’s fitted with an ATI Radeon Mobility 3470 chipset, but CPU/Z shows it as a 3450.  I’m assuming this is an artifact related to the fact that I removed the crippled drivers provided by Acer and replaced them with hacked desktop drivers based around the latest Catalyst version.  The new drivers work fine – and with the performance of a 3470 – but display as a 3450.  Strange.

All complaints – and between Vista and some of the stupid things Acer has done, there’ve been a few – aside, it’s a reasonable new laptop, and it only set me back £470.

Oh, and in honour of its status in the house it’s been christened TOYBOX – after the debris recovery vessel from Planetes.

Accordingly, I’ve put a page on this ‘ere site called – surprisingly – For Sale, which contains – again, surprisingly – a list of all the items I’ve catalogued.  The page will be updated just as frequently as I can bring myself to, with the easier-to-catalogue stuff getting added first – which means that the C64 with its two large boxes filled with games will likely be last.

If you’re interested in any of the items you see, make me an offer either via e-mail or through the comment link on the page.

Just think – for under £3,000 you can get an ‘ultimate games machine’ with a Pentium 200MHz CPU, 32MB of RAM, and a whole 3GB of hard-drive space!

Let’s compare to my mobile phone shall we?  ARM 266MHz, 16GB of usable space, 64MB of RAM…

I wouldn’t mind, but this was only 1996…

That’s with almost minimum brightness, playing music and browsing the ‘net. It’s not the greatest battery life ever, but pretty impressive for the size.

To be fair, I shut the system down when the battery light started to flash. The version of Unbuntu I have installed doesn’t read the battery life properly – despite reporting 28%, there was probably only about 10% left. I know that //last// time I left it running, expecting auto-shutdown, it ran out of juice and crashed hard.