The Gadgetier

Following the successful launch of their 27inch full HD monitor, Dell has launched another one, the 24inch S2409W. This is Dell’s first 24inch monitor with a 16:9 aspect ratio, meaning it gives you a full HD resolution of 1920×1080. The rest of the specs are fairly standard of modern monitors, a 1,000:1 contrast ratio, 300cd/m2 brightness and 5ms response time.

Dell’s new monitor isn’t listed on their UK site, yet, but with a price of $379 on the US section, we’d expect it to arrive at around £300.

That’s exactly what we thought when we read about Freecom’s latest product, the world’s smallest 2.5inch external hard drive. How do you make a 2.5inch drive smaller and still call it a 2.5inch drive? Anyway, Freecom claim that they’re new Mobile Drive XXS is the world’s smallest 2.5inch external drive. Measuring just 109.8 x 79.5 x 13.5mm it certainly isn’t large, and at 155grams it isn’t heavy either.

So, you think the smallest drive is lacking in storage space? Again, you would be wrong. The XXS packs in up to 320GB of storage, using USB2.0 for fast transfers. The drive be available in 160GB, 250GB and 320GB, priced at £44.99, £59.99 and £79.99 respectively, and be compatible with both Mac and PC.

Unlike most of Apple’s product launches, this one hasn’t gone quite as well as they would have hoped. When punters paid £59 for a year of services, they expected to be able to access their accounts, and at least receive email. So, to try and fix some of the problems caused, Apple have released a new blog, to help educate customers about the problems being faced, and how Apple are fixing them.

One of the major flaws with the Apple service, was that 10% of all emails handled by the service between the 18 and 22 July have been lost, not something users wanted to hear after paying £59 days earlier. So, have you been considering buying into MobileMe?

Seeing as nearly everyone has been complaining that the new wave of netbooks have been overpriced, JoinTech have decided to do something about it - hence the JoinTech J-Pro Mini Laptop. The J-Pro has an extremely low price of $99, or approximately £50-£60.

The netbook looks a little like the other netbooks available, but has a much lower spec, and when we say much lower, we do mean much lower. The J-Pro packs a full 64MB of RAM, and another 64MB of storage space. We’ll also have the pleasure of looking at a 7 inch screen, with 800×480 resolution, and using the Windows CE interface. Although there is one upside to the cheap netbook - it comes in black, pink, white or blue, so you can at least look the part when using it.

Now, all those people who complained the Eee PC and Wind were over price, we hope your happy.

On the 9th July, we warned you that a flaw had been found in the Domain Name System (DNS), and that large companies such as Microsoft and Cisco had been told to patch up their software. Now, almost three weeks later, attacks have started to surface. The flaw means that an attacker can redirect a perfectly correct address (eg. www.thegadgetier.com) to a different IP address (the series of numbers that locate the computer the site is stored on). This would allow attackers to redirect you to ‘fake’ sites, and potentially steal your details.

Dan Kaminsky says “we are in a lot of trouble” and that “Everyone needs to patch, please.” Net firms are now being urged to get on with the upgrade, to stop their customers becoming at risk.

Just about everyone into computers knows that the hard drive is the slowest part. No matter how fast you make the processor, ram or graphics cards, it all comes down to how fast the hard drive can read or write the data. So, now you all know that you need a nice fast hard drive to super charge your computer.

That’s exactly what the VelociRaptor does, a 10,000 (10K) RPM SATA II drive. No complicated SCSI or SAS here, a simple to install hard drive. With a 300GB size, it’s much larger than any other SSD drive, and provides a cheaper £/GB ratio. Unfortunately a 10K drive creates quite a lot of heat, so Western Digital wrapped the raptor in a large heat sink, partly to make it the standard 3.5inch form factor, and partly to keep it cool. But now the heat sink is no more, removed to make the drive quieter and better suited to enterprise storage.

So, if you want a faster computer, but can’t afford a shiny SSD, this is the drive to go for.

Seagate say that they will be the first manufacturer to sell a 1.5TB drive. The drive is set to launch in the 4th quarter of 2008, and will be the largest jump in capacity in 50 years, Seagate are keen to tell us. However, don’t expect this drive to be cheap on release day - 1TB drives were around the £250 mark when they were first released, so expect the 1.5TB ones to be around £300. We’re hoping this will push the prices of 1TB drives down though, to a more respectable level.

Along with 4 platters of 375GB each, the drives will pack 32MB of cache into the standard 3.5inch shell.

This can only be seen as a path forward, although 1.5TB of data is a lot to lose if the drive fails, and buying two of these drives will set you back a small fortune.

So, we all know that Hotmail, Yahoo and GoogleMail accounts have pretty relaxed rules when it comes to usage - login once every 90 days and you’ll probably keep your account. Thing is, what have you signed up for using your hotmail address, then forgotten to login? The reason we ask is because this makes it extremely easy for anyone to ’steal’ your account. Let me explain with this true story.

As you know, most businesses now have a website, and with that, comes a website manager, or admin. So, this one company had just one admin, who left the company after setting up and maintaining the website for a short while. He also registered the company’s domain, using a hotmail address as the registered email. Trouble is, when he left, he forgot to leave the domain password, not helpful for the new admin trying to migrate the website to a new hosting company.

Luckily the new admin was clever enough to do a check on the domain, and noticed it was registered to a hotmail address. He then went and registered for a hotmail account with the old username, which was free because the old admin had forgotten to login every 90 days or so. So, simply submit a forgotten password request and he was in.

The same is true for any other website you’ve registered for - so, just make sure you keep logging into those Hotmail accounts.

Apple has been busy with their new releases today, with their new iTunes and App Store going live. However, this hasn’t stopped them releasing their not so new MobileMe website. This is basically the same as the old .Mac services, but under a new name. So, what does it include? Well, for a £59/year subscription fee, you’ll get Mail, Contacts, a Calendar, a Gallery and an iDisk.

The service all looks very flashy and smart, but we can’t help think that it’s just Google’s offerings under a different name with a high price slapped on the front. Google offers both Mail, Contacts and a Calendar in the form of their GoogleMail. They also offer Picasa Web Albums, effectively the same as MobileMe’s Gallery. Google don’t yet have an alternative to Apple’s iDisk, but Microsoft do - in the form of SkyDrive, a 5GB online space, for free.

Apples big selling point, however, is their Push Email service, which automatically synchronises all your devices together, and notifies you when you have an email. This seems much the same as Windows Mobile running Outlook, which can automatically check your email and synchronise your devices.

So, does Apple’s new service justify its £59 price tag? Google offer a whole lot more in ‘the cloud’ for free, and my guess is they are a whole lot better, especially after users using Internet Explorer 7 were faced with an incompatibility warning.

You can visit Apple’s MobileMe service by going to www.me.com.

Today, Apple launched it’s new iTunes 7.7 software, fresh out for the new 3G iPhone release tomorrow. Despite all the hype however, the only addition we can see is the new App store, that allows you to download apps to your iPhone or iTouch wherever you are (providing your connected to the net). Apple is boasting over 500 applications are available at App Store, and that 25% of which are said to be completely free.