Editorials

We bought an iPad 16GB WiFi edition a couple of days (two to be exact) after the launch.  We had quite a bit of fun and frustration playing with and testing the iPad. As many of you read in my reviews on both TweakTown and BSN*, I found the iPad to be of little more value than a toy of gadget that is fun to play with but not a replacement for a real system (either Mac or PC). So where is our iPad a few months down the road? Well let’s take a look and see shall we?

Not that long ago DFI sent me an interesting little board. This was their Mini-ITX  P55 LanParty board. Unfortunately, it died during testing (a choke blew up, literally blew up) but it was only the first of many that would begin to parade into the market.  Now sitting next to me is another Mini-ITX board, this one from GIGABYTE (and hopefully better made). It is their H55 version so it is really meant to run the Clarkdale series CPUs although it can certainly run any of the 1156 CPUs from Intel.

Not too long ago I jokingly commented that Steve Jobs was drinking his own Kool-Aid.  I did this in a “Tony Montana” voice just like in the movie Scarface. There is always a danger for companies, actors, even journalists when they begin to think they are what their hype has built them up to be. This is exactly what has happened with Steve. For some reason he has begun to actually believe that he and his products are really the best things out there.

Last year just before the launch of the Tega SoC inside the Zune HD player from MS, we all were treated to something unusual. The Green PR Machine from nVidia decided to show us a roadmap for future products. This roadmap laid out the path for Tegra and its future incarnations. According to the map we should have seen the tiny new system at CES 2010 and we did see some systems that were centered on Tegra 2. These were very early samples of the products (in most cases even the software was very shaky), but they were still there.