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July 1st through 7th Archives

Monday, July 7th 2003 11:50 CDT

3rd Party 802.11g Cards

Over at Accelerate Your Mac!, they've gotten some reader reports of third party (non Airport Extreme, that is) 802.11g wireless cards working with Airport 3.1 software. So far, Linksys, Buffalo, and now Belkin cards have been proven compatible. Apparently they all use a chipset manufacturered by Broadcom. If anyone's had any problems with 3rd party cards, we'd like to hear about it here.

AAPL

As part of a broad rally in tech stocks, Apple's stock is at a 52 week high right now. You can keep track of it throughout the day here.

Friday, July 4th 2003 11:57 CDT

PBZone Enters Sixth Publishing Year

As we usually do this time every year, we'd like to thank the companies that make it possible to run this site. Many thanks go out to our former and current advertisers. TransIntl, PowerBook Medic, Booq, WaterField Designs, Acme, PowerBook Tech, and all those others that have participated over the last few years have brought this site to you so support them when you can.

Thursday, July 3rd 2003 00:01 CDT

Just When You Thought We Were Done: WWDC Wrapup

Our correspondent Jeff is back at home and has had some time to ruminate on the goings-on at this year's Worldwide Developer's Conference. The final wrapup report has now been posted. Thanks to Jeff for covering the show!

TransIntl Gives Details on New Fast Mobile Drive

TransIntl sent over this press release today that gives the details on the drive announced yesterday that we covered:

Trans Intl. today released an Industry first: a 7200 RPM Mobile Hard Disk Drive in 60GB capacity and 2.5 inch form factor. The new 7200 RPM drive offers mobile users desktop equivalent performance with battery consumption at about the same level as a 5,400 RPM HDD.

The drive offers substantial improvement in mobile I/O by keeping in line with the performance characteristics of the industry's leading edge mobile drive specifications...

_ Quiet acoustics by incorporating fluid dynamic bearing technology
_ Low power consumption
_ Excellent shock performance [Increase Shock performance by 25 percent]

The new 2.5-inch drive spins 33 percent faster than its 5400 RPM counterpart, which translates into 15 percent faster data access in notebook computers coupled with 20 percent lower rotational latency and improved average seek time by 20 percent which gives excellent opportunity to mobile users looking to boost their existing system performance by upgrading their internal hard disk drive.

This 7200 RPM mobile drive has unique performance features superior to other drives currently available. Performance parameters, like:

_ Spindle Speed: 7200 RPM [Highest in a mobile drive]
Š Cache buffer: 8 MB [Megabyte]
Š Average Seek Time: 10 ms [Milliseconds]
_ The lowest drive latency of 4.2 in 2.5 inch drives
_ Delivering media transfer rates up to 568 Mbits/sec
_ The highest shock rating of: 1000G/1ms
_ Maximum Interface transfer rate (MB/sec) 100MB/sec Ultra DMA mode-5
_ Interface : ATA-6

Click for pricing and availability Š http://www.transintl.com/store/category.cfm?Category=2300

Click for Firewire/USB Portable External configuration Š The New Mobile 60 GB 7200 RPM drive is also available as an external FireWire/USB portable Disk Drive featuring the fastest sustained data transfer rate of [27-40 MB/s] enabled by an OXFORD 911 Fire Wire bridge chip.

http://www.transintl.com/store/category.cfm?Category=410

Wednesday, July 2nd 2003 11:56 CDT

PBZone Welcomes WaterField Designs to Group of Supporters

We're pleased to welcome San Francisco-based WaterField Designs to our cadre of PBZone supporters. If you've been in the market for a carrying accessory for your PowerBook, you've probably seen the unique products that WF produces. We did a review of a good chunk of their product line back during May's "bagweek." You can see that review here. We're a big fan of their products and we're happy that they've chosen to sponsor PBZone.

WWDC Pictures

We've posted just a handful of photos from the convention center and WWDC developer's beer bash here.

A Few Deals

You can find the iSight for $135 at ClubMac. Thanks to dealmac for spotting the price.

Also, ExperCom is offing the 15.2" 1 GHz PowerBook G4 for $2299 with free shipping. It's a refurbished model with a 1 year warranty. The 12.1" PowerBook G4/867 MHz can be had as a refurb for $1699 as well.

Accelerate Tests 60GB Notebook Drive

Accelerate Your Mac! has put the Hitachi (formerly IBM) Travelstar 7K60 to the test and has posted its performance figures here. At 7200 RPM, it's the fastest notebook drive available and has very low latency, according to the review. The drive costs $349 and is available in limited stock at our sponsor TransIntl.

Using iChat AV with Processor-upgraded Pismo

Also in today's news over at Accelerate!, they noted that some Pismo users are having difficulty using iChat AV for videoconferencing with their processor-upgraded Pismo PowerBooks. iChat states that it needs a 600 MHz or faster processor to run properly. Read the details on which upgrades are working and which aren't here.

Tuesday, July 1st 2003 03:29 CDT

We're Almost Five! And Speaking of Five, Here's our WWDC Day Five Report

We kicked this party off on July 4th, 1998 (any readers been around that long? We'd like to hear from you), almost five years ago. And today we're publishing our Day 5 report from this year's WWDC, where they introduced the G5. Is this all coincidence? We think not. Click just once here and read all about it. We'll have one final wrap-up report and some pictures from the show tomorrow.