Are you looking for an inexpensive notebook for a child? This may be the perfect answer: a G4 iBook running at 1.33GHz for just $300. After you find that deal, you may want a congratulatory bit of gruesomeness while at the same time saving a few bucks. We suggest “Zombie Cannon Carnage,” just one of

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Boston is one of the first US cities — along with Pittsburgh and San Jose — to let angry citizens file complaints about potholes, graffitti and missed trash pick-ups via iPhone. Boston’s Citizens Connect, which city officials say has been downloaded 5,000 times since it’s October 2009 debut, won’t be the only way people can let

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Thoughts is a desktop notebook app for Mac OS X, designed to look and behave like a real world paper notebook or journal. When you open the app you see a shelf where all your notebooks are stored. Notebooks open in a separate window and come complete with a turning-page visual effect. The basic layout of every

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Poor AT&T: They take a licking and keep on ticking. But if a new report is to be believed, the telco giant has actually made some dramatic improvements to their 3G network in the last year. If you were to go by the television commercials alone, AT&T’s wireless division provides both “a better 3G experience” as well as “the nation’s fastest 3G network.” Based upon PC World’s latest 3G wireless performance study, both claims appear to be true, according to TUAW . PC World teamed up with wireless analysis firm Novarum for the study, comparing all four major U.S. wireless carriers in 13 cities across the country from December, 2009 through January, 2010. The study encompassed 51,000 separate tests, 850 square miles and 7 million wireless subscribers. Out of the four carriers — that’s AT&T, Verizon Wireless, Sprint and T-Mobile — AT&T showed dramatic improvements when compared to a similar study conducted in March and April, 2009. AT&T hands-down had the fastest download speed in 11 of the 13 cities on notebook computers using either built-in or external 3G cards, and the fastest upload speed in all 13. On the smartphone front, AT&T had the fastest download speeds in nine of the 13 cities, but again took the crown for fastest upload in all of them. And despite the vocal complaints of iPhone users, the pairing of the device with AT&T provided the fastest download and upload speeds of any device — with the exception of reliability, where it only slightly trailed the pairing of T-Mobile with the G1, which posted the highest score in that category

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Google’s first smartphone tries to give the iPhone a run for its money.   Hot on the heels of the Motorola Droid release, Google entered the mobile-phone market full-bore with its HTC-built Nexus One. Sporting the Android 2.1 OS, the first official Google phone has been deemed magical enough to be sold exclusively by the search giant and can only be purchased directly from the big G’s online store–with or without a calling plan. The Nexus One has a pleasing heft (4.6 ounces with removable battery) and fits nicely in our hands. The phone is constructed with a volume rocker button on the side and a Sleep/Wake button at the top of the device, but no hard Mute button. Beneath the capacitive touchscreen, there’s a Blackberry-style trackball. We had high hopes for the trackball, but in fact its only redeeming quality was its ability to emit a warm glow announcing the occasional notification–navigating via the trackball felt cumbersome and imprecise. Nexus One also has the four buttons we’ve become accustomed to on the Android phones–Back, Menu, Home, and Search. Unfortunately they aren’t terribly touch-sensitive, and we frequently found ourselves mashing them more than once to get the phone to execute commands. They’re also quite close to the bottom of the touchscreen, and we often hit them instead of the spacebar while typing. Still, the Nexus One’s OLED screen is 800×480 pixels of gorgeous blazing color.

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If you made a Venn diagram (you know, with the overlapping circles) of people who love point-and-click adventures, people intrigued by Leonardo da Vinci, and people who don’t get carsick, everyone in the overlapping area absolutely needs to play The Secrets of Da Vinci. But anyone else might find this game’s flaws too much to take. Our biggest problem was the camera, which is frustrating because the game’s 3D environments–a faithful re-creation of the Clos Lucé, Leonardo’s final residence, as it looked in 1522–are so beautiful. They’re full of rich color and detail, right down to Leonardo’s paintings and drawings hanging from the walls. And while the simple controls let you move the camera by moving the mouse, we found ourselves getting queasy after an hour or so of playtime on even the slowest setting. Unlocking da Vinci’s celestial globe only reveals more mysteries. If that doesn’t make you flee, you’ll play as Valdo, searching Leonardo’s estate for a missing notebook on behalf of a mysterious patron. But your quest keeps you bouncing between the same handful of locations again and again to collect items needed to solve puzzles, making the gameplay feel like a slog. The puzzles, based on da Vinci’s inventions and artwork, are engaging and can usually be solved without too much frustration as long as you have the required items in your inventory–and you can find them. The inventory system is a mess; items are added to its five pages in the order you collect them, but as you use them, their empty slots are filled with the next item you pick up. Virtually every time we wanted something, we had to page through the entire inventory, mousing over each item’s icon to read its name. As you grapple with that while searching for Leonardo’s notebook, you get information from your own notes, papers you find that belonged to Leonardo, and conversations with the other two characters, Madam Babou and the caretaker Saturnin. The choices you have are affected by your morality score–if you try to deceive Babou, your “diabolic meter” rises, for example, while feeding milk to a cat raises your “angelic meter.” But you can also spend points earned by completing the puzzles to rebalance your morality, making the whole system pretty pointless

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Filed under: Apple T minus a little over a month and a half until retail liftoff of the Apple iPad and, similar to the launch of the iPhone 3 years ago, the device is not without its share of criticism — be it the lack of support for multitasking or the missing front facing camera (or any camera, for that matter). However, it’s unlikely that anything short of a sub-$1,000 multitouch cancer-curing device could have lived up to expectations, for the hype coming into the keynote was of epic proportions. Expectations aside, however, the iPad’s price point and feature set put Apple in a position to disrupt the low-end notebook computer market, while also providing it a foot in the door in the eBook market as well as traditional print media. Continue reading iPad’s multifunction appeal and sub-$500 price point a formula for disruptive technology iPad’s multifunction appeal and sub-$500 price point a formula for disruptive technology originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Mon, 01 Feb 2010 07:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds . iPad’s multifunction appeal and sub-$500 price point a formula for disruptive technology originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Mon, 01 Feb 2010 07:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds . Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments

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Filed under: Hardware , Apple , Macbook Pro I’ve always been jealous of the folks who get free laptops from their work or school (back when I was in school, I used a paper notebook and a pen and liked it!), but I’m especially jealous of the folks from the University of Oregon’s Center for Student Athletes, who not only get some sweet MacBook Pros to use courtesy of Apple and Nike , but have each one laser engraved with the school’s symbolic O. The engraving isn’t just aesthetic; it’s useful, too. In addition to the school branding, each laptop has a specific number engraved on the bottom of it, which helps prevent theft and helps the school track down wayward laptops. Cult of Mac has a great little interview with the engraver , with some fun insider info about how this is all done (he’s even engraved fingernails, which sounds a little gross). We’ve seen some cool engraving projects before, but I like this one; functional and good-looking. University of Oregon shows off engraved MacBook Pros originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Sat, 23 Jan 2010 03:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds . University of Oregon shows off engraved MacBook Pros originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Sat, 23 Jan 2010 03:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds

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An archeologically stratal cross-section of the port placement of Apple’s metal-skinned professional line of notebooks over the course of the last decade, courtesy of photographer and Mac enthusiast Robert Donovan. Fireflies dance in the background. From top to bottom, the notebooks pictured are: • The 13-inch Unibody MacBook Pro (2.53GHz Intel Core 2 Duo) • The 15-inch Titanium

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I like electronic notebooks, and I’ve spent a lot of time over the years trying out all the different ones on offer. The latest newcomer is myRichTexts and from what I’ve seen of it so far, I’m quite impressed. The concept is simple enough: it’s a rich text editor that autosaves everything to a database. You

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