Technology — the best of 2009
What stood out in 2009.
Netbooks: Toshiba Mini NB205 and HP Mini 311
If you are going to stare at a 10-inch screen for hours, the machine should not feel cramped. The 3-pound NB205 answers that with the largest touchpad in its class and a spacious chiclet keyboard. Toshiba's case rests on that touchpad, a strong keyboard, a roomy 250 GB hard disk, a battery that can last a full workday (about nine hours), and a tidy appearance.
The HP Mini earns its place another way. It plays high-definition video smoothly, even beautifully, on an 11.6-inch screen, and it runs a demanding game such as World of Warcraft without flinching, helped by Nvidia Ion graphics.
Camcorder: Flip MinoHD
Among camcorders that fit in a pocket, the MinoHD stands out by a whisker. It records very good 720p video for something this small: 116 grams, and about 1.97 by 0.66 by 3.94 inches. It is sleek enough, and simple enough, that a grandmother can use it. It has a bright 2-inch TFT LCD, 8 GB of memory, a built-in condenser microphone, a speaker, and both USB and HDMI. You can trim a clip in the camera, from the focus-free 35 mm f/2.4 lens, without connecting it to a PC or a Mac.
Operating system: Windows 7
It resumes from sleep faster, shuts down faster, and recovers from a crash faster. Battery life on laptops and netbooks is better. It is easier to find your way around, and connecting to other machines is simpler. Unlike Vista, Windows 7 runs comfortably on a low-end netbook with 1 GB of RAM, and on machines well above that.
Laptop: MacBook Pro
Apple called this the greenest lineup of notebooks it had made: more of the machine can be recycled, and it uses less energy.
The 17-inch model is lighter, at 2.9 kg, and thinner, at 0.98 inches. It is faster than the previous one, and it can run for about eight hours on a charge. A 3.06 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, with 6 MB of on-chip shared L2 cache running one-to-one with the processor, sits in a body machined from a single block of aluminium, the unibody. It takes up to 8 GB of 1066 MHz DDR3 memory and comes with a 500 GB hard drive. The 17-inch LED-backlit glossy display, 1,680 by 1,050, is driven by an Nvidia GeForce 9400M.
First written in 2010 on virtual eye.