Ebuyer HQ

Could it be perfect?

Following on from Wednesday’s blog post, the main discussion taking place amongst techies this month has been about all the new products to come out of CES – the technology industry’s biggest show of the year. There has been a lot of exciting tech touted, such as the 50″ OLED TV from LG, but the one thing that excites me the most is ultrabooks.

Skylanders

In a similar way to how Formula One racing leads to innovations for everyday cars, videogames often see new technology ideas before they hit more generic devices. Whether it is the touch screen on the original DS, the augmented reality of EyeToy and PlayStation Eye or the 3D screen of the 3DS, games are often sold on their ground breaking innovations.

However, there is another way to look at technology where the real ground breaking devices are those we don’t even realise we are using. The humble pen, door handle and tap fall into this category and, in my opinion, could teach us a thing or two about not over complicating things.

Ebuyer.com... all you need to get by!

Now it’s usually around this time of year that we all start planning for our next holiday. Once you are all booked up with flights, accommodation and insurance, the mind starts wondering about what you can do while at the destination, and that’s where 24 hour guides come in extremely useful.

While we haven’t got any holidays planned as yet, this got us thinking about how you could use all the products on Ebuyer.com to get you through 24 hours…stay with me on this one!

How intelligent is your house?

Years ago, the ability to make your home smarter than a human was virtually unheard of, and today it is possible in almost every way. From thermostats that learn your family’s lifestyle and adapt to your cooling and heating habits, to controlling your lighting, and security from your smart phone, the future is here. Your home has the ability to almost run by itself for less money, and all while saving you time, and saving the Earth’s precious resources. Here are a few home innovations that are helping to save you money.

December's Top Bloggers

Now that the festive season is upon us it’s been great to read what everyone would like or recommend for Christmas.  This month’s top technology blogs are a mixture of bloggers who have covered Christmas in their own, interesting way, and a gem of a development blog that we like so much we had to mention too!

Covering Christmas these Tech blogs have been worth a read in December and will be great to follow for surfacing technology posts in the New Year as well.

Asus Transformer Prime - the tablet PC of 2012?

It’s a human thing to default to type. Although we can put up a façade of being something different for a while, eventually the effort of keeping this up gets the better of us and we return to just being ourselves — and no bad thing either.

That’s all very nice, but what’s this doing in a gadget blog you might well ask. Well, technology companies (it seems to me) often behave in a similar way. Microsoft excels at being a software company, Sony excels at being a hardware company and Nintendo excels at being a gaming company – as we see in their respective consoles.

Looking at the Asus Transformer Prime made me wonder where Asus fits into this identity equation. They have excelled with their Netbooks, but can this be extended into the tablet market? Their previous Asus Eee Pad Transformer worked hard to legitimate itself as a solid tablet entry, and with its novel keyboard dock it asked fresh questions about where the lines should be drawn between laptops and tablets.

The Asus Transformer Prime takes this enquiry and turbo-charges it with a super powerful quad-core Nvidia Tegra 3 processor and 1GB of RAM. To this it adds a high grade spun metallic finish, super slim form factor, 8MP camera with flash great sound and an impressive 18 hours of battery life.

Like their Netbook PC’s did a few years ago, Asus Transformer Prime takes aim at a market that is notoriously hard to penetrate and gets very close to a bulls-eye. Here it is the iPad rather than sub-notebooks that are in the firing range.

The hardware itself is very impressive, and although the slightly fussier finish won’t be to everyone’s taste it’s easily on a par with the iPad. Where it exceeds Apple’s device is in the inclusion of USB and SD ports, which aren’t available on the iPad without an accessory cable. Also, the provision of a full size QWERTY in the box makes for a more flexible set-up.

This flexibility is where the rubber hits the road. If you are after a more flexible experience then the combination of the Transformer Prime’s versatile hardware and open operating system (which can be easily upgraded to Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich) will make it worth the price of entry. If, however, you are after a simpler, less fussy and less complicated experience then the iPad is still hard to beat.

However you dress it up (with great quality and pitch perfect delivery) Asus, in my mind, does best at innovating and disrupting the technology market more than anything else. This isn’t really about beating Apple at its own game, but about providing a new way to look at the tablet-notebook divide. To that end get ahead of the curve this Christmas by jumping on a Transformer Prime, it really is a big step forward in all round flexible computing.

Andy Robertson @GeekDadGamer runs the GeekDad blog for Wired.co.uk and writes videogame reviews for families.

should we all learn IT at uni?

When I left University I was competent in the use of Microsoft word, I could generally find what I was looking for on the Internet and I was able to touch type. My degree was not IT or technology based so those were the main computer related skills required to succeed. Granted, this was the bare minimum, but there hadn’t really been a need to learn more than that.