Ed's Tech Tips

While not very portable at 15.4 x 10.4 inches with a 17" diagonal screen and weighing 6.8 pounds the new MacBook Pro is near perfection for a laptop in my estimation. Check out some of the specs:

• 17-inch widescreen display (1680 x 1050 resolution, TFT widescreen)
• 2.16GHz Intel Core Duo
• 667MHz frontside bus and main memory
• PCI Express architecture
• Up to 120GB Serial ATA hard drive
• ATI Mobility Radeon X1600 with up to 256MB memory on 16-lane PCI Express
• ExpressCard/34 slot
• Dual-link DVI, VGA adapter included
• FireWire 400, FireWire 800 (missing on the 15" model), and 3 USB 2.0 ports
• Optical digital and analog audio I/O, built-in microphone, built-in iSight camera and stereo speakers
• Slot-loading SuperDrive
• Illuminated keyboard, Scrolling TrackPad
• Built-in AirPort Extreme (802.11g), Bluetooth 2.0 EDR, and Gigabit Ethernet
• Mac OS X Tiger with iLife 06 featuring iWeb, iWork 06 trial, and more.
• MagSafe Power Adapter

I enjoy using a 15" G4 PowerBook. The display is awesome, the wireless adpater is carefree and the performance is very good, but the new 17 " MacBook Pro should really scream along. However, it is a bit too big for my comfort level as a portable laptop and I have to wonder how good the battery life can be with such a large screen. But as a desktop replacement it should do very well. The graphics card for a laptop is one of the best I seen with exception for the Alienware notebooks which use 256 MB Nvida adapters and have slightly larger dimensions.

This is an example of an article I sent from my cell phone. [I did cheat a little and latter edit this article via my web browser on my desktop compute, because unlike younger generations, I can only enter so much text on the small keypad of my cell phone. ]

This is a photo of my co-worker Richard at his desk that I took and sent with my cell phone:

The following is a short video clip I took with my cell phone of my co-workers. It is in 3GP format, a very compressed video format that can be played in Apple's QuickTime player.

Clip(3).3gp

The photo and video are not of the highest quality and the amount of text you can enter on the phone is limited, but for quick spontaneous blog postings it is pretty cool in my book.