TechLounge

The Lenovo x300 might well set the market standard for Windows based ultraportable laptops in the future.

The X300 will have 1.2GHz Intel Core 2 Duo that fits into the same bracket as the 1.6GHz/1.8GHz chips that Mac are putting in their Macbook Air. One major bonus of the Lenovo X300 is that it has a 13.3 WXGA (1440×900) compared to the Macbook air’s 1280x 800 resolution, and everybody wants and appreciates a good screen.

We hear you cry about hard drive space only been 64GB but it’s a solid state disk compared to the Macbook air’s 80GB PATA drive, the 64GB solid state drive is only available in Apples top of the range Air, that retails at £2,028.00 on their online store. The X300 is cheaper but only just, weighing in at £1953.26

Another, I would say essential feature of the Lenovo X300 is that it has a DVD-RW drive, unlike the Macbook air. Ok well you can buy the MacBook Air SuperDrive for around £70 but if you where paying over £2k for a laptop you’d expect a DVD-Writer.

With Grand Theft Auto IV hot of the press everyone seems to have got there copies if they pre-ordered, we quickly checked eBay earlier with copies selling for around £65, not bad if you bought 2 copies you’ve made a nice quick little profit.

The main worry was online play and how people would take to it with so many big games taking a lot of the online market place. Well we’ve just signed into Xbox Live and had a very short wait before we where spawned into Liberty City with a knife, pistol and some good old fashioned hand to hand combat, and spread around the death match arena are pistols, AK 47’s and rocket launchers. We are still to see if there is no boundary’s in the multi player game like it has been stated.

The main game play early on is quite dark so as soon as you damage your headlamps on your vehicle you almost driving blind, or so we thought but after messing about with a few settings, the game was fine and was nice and bright. This is quite strange to see how much the brightness of the game varies on its default setting from TV to TV.

The cars seem quite un-realistic to drive and are almost boat like swaying from side to side and tend to roll round the corners, let’s hope some of the high end cars will handle better than the more common ones.

Other little things we have noticed are, when running round tight corners there is a nice lean to Niko, also when you run into pedestrians in cars they don’t just flop over they tend to fall how you would expect them to fall in a real life situation.

San Andreas was one of our favourite GTA games as it had a lot of new features like gang wars and the ability to have a gang follow you around, will the new and latest Grand Theft Auto IV be able to take the crown. Available now for around £34.99 from all leading outlets.

Sick of getting you Wii remote tangled? Nyko have the solution, they have just released their new wireless nunchuck called the Kama. The Kama Wireless Nunchuck has all the same functions as Nintendo’s wired version with the added bonus that you won’t be tangled up when playing boxing or Call of Duty.

The Kama comes with a lightweight and compact dongle, which attaches to the bottom of the Wii remote giving it a wireless range of up to 3 meters. Two AAA batteries are included for the nunchuck and provide up to 30 hours of play. Available to pre-order now from £25.99 and due for release on the 16th May.

The TX-SR605 is Onkyo’s first A/V receiver to embrace High-Definition media such as Blu-ray and HD DVD. The 7.1 channel A/V receiver uses the latest HDMI interface v1.3a, which allows for 1080p signals to be processed. With advanced features including, DTS-HD Master and High Resolution Audio and Dolby TrueHD and Digital Plus decoding, this is the first receiver in its class that will fully do justice to both the vision and sound offered by High definition sources.

Set up is fully automatic and boasts the added features of multi-room playback, room calibration and integrated system control. The Onkyo is also capable of up-conversion for every video input, which does a great job of improving the picture quality of your old analogue sources.

Future proof and able to deal with any media thrown at it, the Onkyo TX-SR605 is set to become the class leader and at under £400 this feature packed receiver will suit anyone wanting to upgrade to HD media.

Available in black, silver and gold, for more information and full specifications click here.

Wii Fit is set to revolutionise the way we exercise forever. It comes bundled with the Wii Balance Board which was developed exclusively for the Wii console and the software has over 40 different activities to choose from.

The software is set into four categories: Balance Games, Aerobic Exercises, Yoga and Muscle Workouts. Games include, yoga exercises, push-ups, hula hooping, jogging, tightrope walking, snowboarding and many more to keep the whole family entertained.

The Balance Board is also capable of calculating your BMI (Body Mass Index – a measure of body fat based on height and weight), measures your centre of balance and allows you to monitor how long you spent on a particular activity.

With the Wii Fit you can set achievable goals to help you and your family stay fit as well as having fun at the same time. Wii Fit is available to pre-order now and is due for release in the UK on the 25th April.

Want to fit more music, videos or pictures on you mobile phone or mobile device? You can with the new 4GB micro SD card from SanDisk. The card will fit into any mobile device with a micro SD slot and the included adapter means it works with any SD compatible devices as well.

Some versions of the card also come with a handy usb adapter so it makes transferring files from your computer to your device or vice-versa even easier. Not all devices support 4GB cards but SanDisk has a product compatibility page on their website with a list of manufacturers and products so it’s best to check that first before ordering, or alternatively check your devices handbook .

Prices start from around £7.99 but look around for the best deal and don’t forget about postage costs as well.

The rise in popularity of online gaming led to the idea of www.gamingalerts.co.uk which sees itself as a unique site offering the very latest in online casino news and online bingo bonuses.

Gaming Alerts is not just an information portal, much more than that is offers a free download to your desktop where you can select one of the four product industries of bingo,poker,casino and sport betting and receive the very latest “alerts” directly to your pc.

We found the downloads really good for tracking down the very latest offers from the whole online gambling industry. The website has already attracted a huge amount of media attention when it was profiled on Dragon’s Den a couple of months ago. To be honest for free software you can’t really go wrong.

You might think £280 is a lot to spend on something that you can get a similar device for a lot less, but we know that the sound quality will not even come close to the high expectations that we have come to love from Bose.

First of all not much has changed from the last SoundDock. The only major changes you get are the portability side and the ability for the dock to rotate out of sight. In our opinion if you’re paying £280 to dock your Ipod it will live and sleep on that Bose SoundDock and you want people to know that you have spent your money wisely and not gone for a cheaper model.

The sound quality is great and doesn’t even distort at high levels and it gets to a point where you don’t know if its going any louder or your just to scared to turn it up any more.

When we opened ours up we noticed that 2 speakers were not wired up, this is due to Bose’s superior engineering and working out that you’ll get better low frequencies if they are driven by air pressure created by the main driver.

It’s the latest update for the Apple Mac operating system and here at Tech Lounge we are indeed waiting with baited breath. Months of waiting comes to an end as the replacement for OSX is about to be released.
The release was put back due to the launch of the much adored iPhone.

Will it beat Vista though we wonder…

Leopard has some 300 new features and boasts the quality advantage over Microsoft.

Due to be released on Wednesday 10th October, finally a cheaper Playstation 3 model at £300. Around a £125 saving can be had if you buy the cut down version of the PS3. So lets get down to the important bit what’s been cut from the model.

Backwards Compatibility with PS2 Games
So your not going to be able to play your old PS2 games, well that not a major lose as that’s why you bought a PS3 because you getter a better gaming sensation

Memory Stick Card Readers
Why would you need these any way, as you could browse for the photos from your pc over the PS3 interface

SACD Playback
We don’t think you would of used this anyway because we definitely wouldn’t of. SACD or Super Audio CD is a read only optical disc media aiming to provide a higher fidelity of digital audio.

Ethernet Cable
Well most people are living now in a wireless house hold so we don’t see this slowing sales of the cheaper models.

2 USB Ports
Ok so we have lost 2 USB ports which shouldn’t either cause you any major heart aches ok its nice to have 4 but you can get by with 2.

And last but not least the HDD has been cut by 20GB. Again this runs on the same line as the USB ports but is less of an issue as it wont take long before people are hacking the console and fitting larger HDD’s anyway.

So is it really worth it, in our opinion £125 is a rather larger saving for the items that you wouldn’t use and looking at the above list there’s nothing there that shocks you into thinking I better get the high spec model.