One item that came through in Apple’s Supplier report last week was a marked increase in issues with child labor in supplier facilities, particularly in China. The report noted that Apple ” audited 127 facilities and found 91 cases including 31 workers who had been hired prior to reaching the legal age, but were no longer underage or no longer employed at the time of the audit.”

Before you get out the Apple-bashing hammer, remember that EVERYONE making devices is using these facilities – Dell, Asus, Acer, HP, even Samsung gets loads of stuff from these plants. This means it is a huge and spreading issue as Chinese companies do whatever they can… Continue reading on Gear Diary ...

I was selected to be one of a group of bloggers who’ll get the use of an ASUS Eee PC 1008 netbook for a year. This isn’t quite the typical netbook though, as this is a “Seashell Karim Rashid Edition” … and before you ask, no — I had never heard of Karim Rashid until I saw his name attached to this netbook. With that said, this is easily one of the most intriguing case designs I’ve ever seen.

The entire surface of the netbook is covered in Karim Rashid’s soft-touch “Techno-chic Digi-wave design”, and instead of being the type of shiny finger-print gathering plastic laptop case that I can’t stand, this… Continue reading on Gear Diary ...

I don’t know about you, but I have one heck of a time when I’m using my iPhone for GPS directions.  I’m alone most of the time when I’m navigating, and so it’s not like I can hand my gadget over to Sami and say, “Hon, call out the directions, would ya?”  And I absolutely hate those vocal, turn-by-turn deals; they drive me bat-stinkin’-loony.  So one of these days, I have to buy me one of those dash/windshield mount deals.

Well, USBFever thinks that’s simply not enough, and now offer a mount that works for the Asus Eee, the iPad, and other UMPC-sized gizmos.  So surf on over and check it out.  And… Continue reading on Gear Diary ...

(all photos courtesy MobileRead)

Post-CES, everyone has been patiently waiting for the flood of e-ink screens due to be released. Well, Mobileread caught pictures of the Asus DR-950 on Flickr, and from looks alone these might be enough to make you rethink your gadget budget this year!

There’s no word on pricing yet, but here is what is known, courtesy of Register Hardware:

The DR-950 measures 222 x 161 x 9mm and weighs in at 370g. A full battery charge – which Asus said takes 3.5 hours – will let owners read for up to four days. Recharges over USB 2.0 will be possible.

The machine will support PDF and ePub file formats, Asus said.

(Photo courtesy Mobileread)

Still trying to dig through the avalanche of new ebook reader announcements from CES? Been saving up your pennies and dreaming of which new, rumored, or announced device is going to be your newest tech toy? Better make some room on your wishlist, because two more devices started circling the rumor mill!… Continue reading on Gear Diary ...

Stay tuned to Asus’s special Youtube channel for a giveaway of 4 different Eee products!  Also, make sure to subscribe to the Youtube channel as well as the Facebook group and MySpace for more information.  Really excited to see what Asus is giving away!  What do you think it’s going to be?… Continue reading on Gear Diary ...

Asus is working hard at the CES 2009 show. They’ve introduced their 512 GB SSD based 3 pound computer with claimed 8 hour battery life (will 2009 be the year of the 8 hour laptop battery?). They also trotted out the Eee PC T91 which is an update of their netbook model that now includes an 8.9″ backlit touch panel that swivels to turn the computer into a tablet. However what I find most interesting is their (prototype) Asus computer keyboard. The keys look a little “Apple-ish”. What’s interesting is that right next to a full QWERTY keyboard is a small iPhone display screen. The display will use ultra wideband wireless HDMI to transmit an image to whatever display is… Continue reading on Gear Diary ...

I am a huge fan of netbooks.  The very first netbook, the Eee PC 701 started a frenzy of designs that even brought Dell and Lenovo into the netbook fold. One minor problem with the SSD based netbooks like the original Eee PC 701/702 and the 900/901 is that you may not have as much on-board storage as you might like.  The 702 tops out at 8 GB, and that’s the model I have.  While I didn’t necessarily want a lot more space, it did change how I used the little netbook; I basically dedicated the on-board storage only for OS and used my SDHC slot for media and files.  But now I can store more inside the Eee PC itself thanks to a upgrade that SuperTalent sent me.

As we prepare to give thanks for all the things we’ve been blessed with over the past year and eat a bunch of food, I was thinking of one thing I am most certainly thankful for and that’s Open Source Software.  Without it, I could not be writing this post as we are a user of FOSS or Free and Open Source Software here at Gear Diary.  Most of us use Firefox and the software that runs it is WordPress.  With out FOSS, much of the internet wouldn’t exist. So I thought it appropriate to list and write about 10 things in the FOSS community I am most thankful for.

This weekend I was using my Eee PC and went to plug it into the wall and noticed the stress relief looked weird.

So I figure I better give Asus Support a e-mail.  The following is what I got in response:… Continue reading on Gear Diary ...

While browsing around for something completely different, I came across this advert for the new Eee 1000, which was rumoured to launch on July 8th. Funnily enough, that’s today! With a pricetag, it is in dangerous waters, competing against bargain machines from Dell, Acer and HP/Compaq (not the Mini-Note though, thats ~$900 here).

I posted my thoughts on these larger, more expensive Eee’s in my Eee 701 “review”, and I stand by my opinion that the Eee branding is moving too far out of the price bracket it set out to target. I’ve found the Eee 701 for as low as AU$319 here, less than half the price of this new model. Sure it has a low-res screen, tiny storage space and only 512MB of memory, but it’s cheap. $648 just isn’t.… Continue reading on Gear Diary ...

When Asus brought out the Eee PC, they did think to include a case.  The neoprene case holds just the Eee PC itself, but if you need to carry the Eee PC and a few things, you’ll need something else.

Enter the Proporta Gadget Bag.

As you can see, it’s barely as wide as the Eee PC itself.  This case is the most ideal carrying solution that I have found for the Eee PC 701.  It is lightweight, very durable, and each compartment is padded so you won’t have to worry about bumps damaging your Eee or anything else.… Continue reading on Gear Diary ...

Gadgetmix has a collection of hot tips for you Asus EEE PC 701 owners. Starting with software to easily change between different screen resolutions to overcome the limitations of WVGA (800 x 480) screen resolution when installing applications. They also show how to reduce your Page File size without impacting performance. If you’re looking for some ways to tweak your Asus EEE PC , head on over to check out these and other tips.

Gadgetmix

Slashgear have gotten their hands on an engineering sample of the new ASUS Eee PC 901. This unit sports an 8.9 ” display and an Intel energy saving Atom processor. It is similar to the Eee 900 with the most pronounced improvements to the battery life. Interestingly the ASUS allows for three speed cycles – Super Performance (1.8 MHZ overclocked), High Performance (normal 1.6 MHZ) and Power Saving (underclocked 800 MHZ). While in power saving mode the battery is claimed to last for up to 6 hours. Head over to Slashgear for their full review. Ewdi does a nice unboxing video – pausing to explain the highlights of this device which is especially interesting for anyone looking at the ASUS… Continue reading on Gear Diary ...

I’ve been using the final release version of Firefox 3.0 since it was released a few days ago, and I’ve been very impressed. It is considerably faster than Firefox 2.0, both when first started and after several days of having hundreds of tabs opened and closed (without restart, and often 20 or more simultaneously).

This morning when I fired up my Eee, I got online using my USB HSDPA modem and downloaded the new version. Since my Eee has the tiny 7″ 800×480 display, web browsing isn’t the most comfortable experience, since 1024px wide seems to be the norm in website formatting these days. In Firefox 2.0 zooming was next to useless, and didn’t provide any benefit. I’d resorted to using AsTray to force the display res up to 1000×600, which to be honest doesn’t look good at all. … Continue reading on Gear Diary ...