It used to be that the Asus Eee PC ruled the ring in the 7″, sub-1kg arena. So compelling was this baby that everyone from techeads to fashionistas lugged this punchy PC around. But that reign is about to end. Now, a flurry of muscular midgets are muscling into the Asus Eee PC arena- boasting lighter weights, heftier hard drives and more dazzling LCDs. The leading contenders to the Asus Eee PC include the Neo Explore X1, Astone UMPC and Deep Blue.

Check out the blow by blow spec chart:
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Applications for the Apple iPhone aren’t taking up the internet bandwidth and space. Actually only one company have developed an VoIP (Voice over IP) application, the Israelian company fring.

If you haven’t heard about fring, then perhaps you know one of the people behind it - Avi Schechter. He was one of the founder of the once very popular chat-program ICQ. I still remember my ICQ number 7914159, which was stolen by a hacker some time ago.
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This post follows up on my previous post about podcasts where I recommended Webb Alert as a great source of tech news on a daily basis, well I’ve now had chance to do some more ‘research’ in this area and here’s what I found!

First a bit of background, I realise I’m perhaps a little late to the party when it comes to podcasts, but I recently bought myself an iPod Classic 80gb – the first ‘proper’ iPod that I’ve owned - I’ve only had an old iPod Mini which I bought off my brother a couple of years back, it was nothing special, but it was all I needed to play music in my car.

Anyway, this now means that I can play videos (a whole new world to me!) on my new iPod including video podcasts, so here’s a few of my favourite tech-related video podcasts.

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I’m not sure about the stats quoted in this survey from the Daily Mirror newspaper in the UK, which isn’t exactly renowned for it’s quality journalism. The Mirror reported that six million people were hurt crashing into lampposts and bins last year while texting and talking on their mobiles.

The article went on to state that padded lampposts are being tested in London’s Brick Lane, which has the highest number of ‘walking and texting’ injuries in the UK.

According to the survey, 63 per cent of people concentrate so hard while texting they are unaware of their surroundings. The one that really bugs me is when I see people texting when they are driving, which is even worse than talking on the phone when driving. I let a lady pull out at the weekend who was texting and even though I gave way to her, she still nearly caused a massive accident as she wasn’t paying attention and couldn’t control her car properly with one hand.

I would love to see the latest stats on how many SMSs UK people send on average, as I’m sure usage is still increasing.

I’m in the middle of a house move that is taking forever to finalise. At the new pad I was intending to install network cabling and ethernet ports in each room, as in the past I’ve found that WiFi connections just aren’t good enough to stream HD video.

However, I’ve been reading up on new 802.11n 5GHz wireless routers and I think it might be time for me to give WiFi another chance. Rather than using the already congested 2.4GHz band like early 802.11n routers, these advanced routers are able to unlock their full potential by using the less congested 5GHz.

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