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Black Friday is the day after Thanksgiving and is the beginning of the traditional Christmas shopping season in the United States. Many retailers open very early (typically 5 A.M.) and offer doorbuster deals to draw people to their stores. Black Friday is frequently but erroneously referred to in the media as the busiest retail shopping day of the year. While it has been one of the busiest days in terms of customer traffic, in terms of actual sales volume Black Friday is usually the fifth to tenth busiest day. The busiest retail shopping day of the year in the United States (in terms of both sales and customer traffic) is usually the Saturday before Christmas. This BestBuy door buster deal is for new Sony VAIO Laptop (instant saving of $350) with 1 GB memory, DVD RW and 120 GB hard drive,minimum 15 per store.

Technorati Tags: cheap laptop, best buy, BestBuy, black friday, BlackFriday, laptop, sony vaio, doorbuster

Android™, a complete set of software for mobile devices: an operating system, middleware and key mobile applications will be released as SDK on November 12, 2007. Android will be a “living” platform and google will be working with the developer community to continuously enhance and enrich the platform. Android is not the elusive Google Phone that has been rumored for several weeks, but a Linux-based software stack. SDK is going to licensed under the Apache version 2 license. Android would be a completely open, cost-effective and efficient way for developers to write applications for mobile phones. Android and the alliance are interesting because they show an effort to create some commonality in a sea fragmented by multiple operating systems. Android has an uphill battle against leading mobile operating system Symbian, which has roughly 70 percent of the market. Linux has about 15 percent of this market, with Research in Motion and Microsoft each owning roughly 5 percent. This is time for open source in mobile platform. This is good move by Google.

Reference: Where’s my Gphone, Open Handset Alliance

Technorati Tags: android, dream, google, htc, oha, sdk, open source, mobile, linux

This is exclusive inside look of new ASUS Eee PC from Tweaktown. The current ASUS Eee PC on sale has a Generic ASUS-customized Xandros Linux with “Easy” and “Standard” GUI modes that has all the essentials preloaded, including special draw programs similar to Paint, chat programs such as MSN and Skype and ICQ. According to the reviewer - With the top layer off I was ready to put down my tools and get the camera snap shots. Check out these gorgeous pictures. The Eee PC is opened up and if you zoom in you can see the backside of the motherboard. The central white crevasse in the middle is the slot where the DDR2 RAM fits in. In conclusion, the Eee PC is not for everyone; but having said that, it also seems to have a bit of everything (except a Microsoft OS, but they are working on that). It comes in a neat little package (Dimensions: 22.5 x 16.4 x 2.15~3.5 cm) with five different colors available, from the pastel green, blue or pink, to white or black. In the eastern countries it is already selling as fast as they can get them onto the market. The west however would be a little more circumspect and perhaps needs some time to grow into them, more

Static sample of Asus eee pc UI.

Technorati Tags: asus, eee pc, EeePc, disection, tweaktown, linux

This is excellent review of Asus Eee PC 701 by Laptopmag. Reviewer gives this laptop 4 out of 5 stars and compares high-end Eee model with a budget laptop for the same price of $399. In conclusion the reviewer is asking only for USB cellular data card drivers and better UI. This looks like a very decent, inexpensive ultra light Linux machine. I’m sure lot of people will use this as an out-of-the-office computer. You can’t get a comparable solid state laptop for a comparable price. The lack of an HDD is the big appeal here. They use more battery and break easily. There is also the added weight and requisite real estate. I hope the Linux community is going to be all over this thing. The only thing that concerns me is a rumor that the OS, while lightweight, takes up almost a gig of storage, leaving only another gig on the low end model. A lightweight Linux OS should take no more than 250-300 MB. Also, having a pre-configured Linux OS that already knows how to deal with the on board hardware is another argument for getting one of these as opposed to a cheap laptop with an optical drive, HDD etc, and trying to get Linux to play nice with Wi-Fi. more

Technorati Tags: cheap laptop, eee pc, asus, laptop, review

Asus announced immediate availability of their long coveted Eee PC this afternoon. Eee PCs will hit the market in four different specs, the cheapest being the Eee PC 2G Surf ( 256MB DDR2 / 2GB SSD / 4400mAh battery), at approximately $245USD, while the Eee PC 4G Surf ( 512MB DDR2 / 4GB SSD / 4400mAh battery) goes for around $305USD. The two higher end models have increased battery capacity, with the Eee PC 4G ( 512MB DDR2 / 4GB SSD / 5200mAh battery) going for $340USD, and the top end Eee PC 8G ( 1GB DDR2 / 8GB SSD / 5200mAh ) coming in with a $424USD price tag. According to ASUS’ own estimates, the 4400mAh battery will give you about 2.8 hrs of usage, while the 5200mAh one should last around 3.5 hrs.

Either make the screen bigger so it takes up the whole lid instead of having that big border around it, or make the whole computer smaller. And give it a touch screen. Now that their release is very close to the OLPC selling Nov 12th, I would buy OLPC which not only benefits a child but also features a much better screen, WiFi range and most likely battery life.

[update 10/16/2007 1:00 PM CST] Hands on preview from Engadget China. 

The SSD (essentially a CF card) is wielded to the motherboard, meaning that thumbdrives will currently be the only way to expand hard drive capacity. But the laptop has a card reader meaning that you can expend memory very cheap. A 2GB SD car sell for around 15 dollars and an 8GB one can be had for under 100 dollars. That will be more than enough for simply day to day software like MS office, FF, iTunes and others. The rest can be used to store some songs, one or two movies, documents and pictures. 

Technorati Tags: asus, breaking news, BreakingNews, eee pc, EeePc, SD Card, SSD, hands on

Reference: engadget, i4u, tonsai

Jonathan Tsang, ASUS president of Sales and Marketing, announced on October 16th, they’ll announce the prices for their anticipated low-cost, ultra-portable laptop, the Eee PC. He did say Best Buy and Newegg will carry unspecified configurations by the end of this month with prices not to be below $199. This Eee thing will surely force competitors to lower prices on the ultraportables or come up with similar models. The EEE PC is not meant to be a fully fledged laptop that will replace your current more expensive laptop. I think the EEE PC is great for what I am going to use it for. I am really glad to see that Newegg and BestBuy are going to be distributors.

Technorati Tags: asus, best buy, BestBuy, eee pc, EeePc, jonathan tsang, JonathanTsang, newegg, cheap laptop

WebApps directory unveiled today by Apple is nothing more than a fancy version of Apple’s bookmark list. Apple has neatly brought together a selection of company-approved apps that should function fine in Safari, without any new functionality. So iPod touch / iPhone users now have a central hub to go to for links to web applets. Apple is still blocking native 3rd party application support outside of its browser. Offline webapps that rely on aps or php clearly won’t work here. Directory is not even tweaked for mobile safari. It’s pretty weak, just a bunch of links to web portals, not native apps. more

Technorati Tags: apple, applications, facebook, iphone, ipod touch, IpodTouch, SDK, webapp