Today, a heartwarming story about a lad and a pet that follows him everywhere he goes, serving as a faithful companion, eager to amuse, delighted to bring him his newspaper and most happy, indeed, to go fetch.
Go fetch Web pages, that is.
The fetched newspaper comes as a download. The pet is a laptop computer. And the lad is 3 years shy of Medicare eligibility.
The vision above was brought to you by Gateway Inc., Toshiba America Inc., D-Link Systems Inc., Voyetra Turtle Beach Inc. and Panasonic America, among others.
These companies have moved quickly to field products that work in tandem with a wireless laptop to handle all kinds of “needs” that set in as one realizes the joys of toting a laptop from room to room to enjoy its various and sundry multimedia powers.
Today’s review relates to Gateway’s model M460S mobile computer. The $900 laptop comes with built-in wireless networking that connected seamlessly with my D-Link cable Internet router that puts me on the Web in a matter of seconds after opening a laptop’s case.
Making music
I took particular delight in schlepping that laptop down into my basement music studio, where I used Voyetra’s new $50 USB Music Studio Kit to link my son’s MIDI keyboard to the computer for some serious tune building and tone crunching.
Furthering that sound experience, Toshiba offers its new Multimedia Center audio/USB hub, a sweet little box that adds 4 USB ports to a mobile computer and also pumps audio from the laptop into one’s best home music player.
The paperback-size box connects to one of the laptop’s USB ports and acts as a secondary sound card by beaming music to a hi-fi system through conventional cables. There’s even the de rigueur port to add a karaoke microphone to the laptop. Sometimes, miracles go too far.
Anyway, an included remote-control clicker on the Toshiba hub lets one move from song to song without crossing the room, and Gateway’s bright, color screen makes tracking music much easier than using a conventional multiple-CD music player.
On the big screen
At the end of the list of companies covered here is Panasonic, which makes my home’s new 42-inch plasma-screen digital TV. The laptop did its most impressive stuff of all by presenting its contents across that plasma screen.
By connecting the computer to a VGA computer port on the front of the TV, I was able to sit back in my favorite chair and use my Microsoft wireless optical keyboard and mouse to bring up conventional PC fare bigger than life and twice as colorful.
Things like Web pages and my digital photos.
There was a slot on the side of the laptop that let me insert the memory cards from my digital camera and display snapshots on that wide-screen monitor.
My Excel spreadsheets displayed across the 16:9 format wide-screen display, showing twice the number of rows possible on most PC screens.
This column, by the way, looks much better on a 42-inch plasma screen than it does on paper. Of course, most of the conventional computer work still gets done when you tote the notebook to a proper desk.
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Moving from room to room, this 5.95-pound Gateway laptop provided the brainpower for the entertainment and productivity gear that we accumulate over time.
Today’s core point is that I am far from alone.
Marketplace mavens who monitor computer sales predict that sometime this summer, sales of notebooks (that’s what grownups call laptops) will exceed sales of desktop computers for the first time.
Laptop sales will grow 30 percent this year over last year, which was a very good year for customers. The resulting price war this year gives us top-quality gear at prices low enough to give the bends to chief financial officers everywhere.
More for less
The M460S isn’t even Gateway’s cheapest model. The M320S costs $799 but lacks features like a DVD drive that I think everybody needs.
The specter of low-cost laptops isn’t particularly new.
What is new is how over the past year the portable price war has compelled makers to incorporate full-blown multimedia capabilities instead of the stripped-down features that had been the case during last year’s price wars.
In the case of the M460S, this includes a 15-inch TFT screen and Intel’s 1.3 gigahertz Centrino M, with a more-than-adequate 400 megahertz front bus and 1 megabyte of L2 cache memory.
That technobabble means that the machine quickly pumps data from CDs, DVDs and the hard drive to handle machine-intensive things like games and playing with digital photos.
Of particular note was the performance of the lithium-ion battery, which ran for almost five hours while playing a series of DVDs and surfing the Web to check facts for this column–like how to spell de rigueur.
Here’s one fact I don’t need to check that we all need to remember: No matter how slick it looks, it’s wise to remember that a mobile computer can go only as far as the cord one must plug into the wall for its daily recharge.
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Binary beat readers can participate in the column at chicagotribune.com/askjim, or e-mail [email protected]. Snail-mail him in Room 400, 435 N. Michigan Ave., Chicago, IL 60611.