Tech Newz

Okay, maybe the “not really a bird” thunderbird won’t be taking the place of the Gallic rooster as the avian mascot of France, but as far as the French military is concerned, Thunderbird is number one. Back in 2003 the French military began debating whether it would be wise to continue using a proprietary email client, such as Microsoft’s Outlook, or if it would be of greater benefit to transition to an open source client like Mozilla’s Thunderbird. In 2007 ..read more

The Mobinnova Beam is one of the first netbooks expected in 2010.

Netbooks have been a rip-roaring success since they hit the market a year and a half ago. In 2009 alone, one out of every five PCs sold has reportedly been a netbook, with estimates for the full year of sales hovering at around 35 million. Almost all of the global computer manufacturers, including HP, Dell, ASUS and Acer, have netbooks in their product lines. But if you ask companies ..read more

Every weekend, we comb our memories and archives to compile 10 useful items addressing a specific topic you may have forgotten about, or just happen to be excellent. Here are the 20 list(icle) posts that proved the most popular in 2009.

The best boxing doesn’t always happen at the heavyweight level. Likewise, some of the best things you can load onto your Windows system are tiny little guys that just make day-to-day writing, working, ..read more

John Cox in Network World describes Eight ways Wi-Fi will change following approval of the 802.11n wireless standard:

Ross Rubin (@rossrubin) contributes Switched On, a column about consumer technology.

The short history of digital content includes several examples of on-the-go services like Audible and Slacker that were started out on own devices before expanding to others, But FLO TV, which started its service on handsets from Verizon and then AT&T, has gone the other way. After being stalled by the digital TV transition delay that held up spectrum it needed to launch and expand service in several markets, FLO ..read more

We all know that Psystar is busy bleeding out in federal court, but that doesn’t mean the fun stops. We’ll be dissecting their glorious failure for quite some time. The most recent development: it seems their plan for taking a bite out of Apple’s sales was comically ambitious. How many clones do you think they sold in 2009? Somewhat under a thousand would be putting it kindly. And how many were they hoping to sell? Around a hundred times that. This ..read more

Filed under: Hardware, Odds and ends, iMac, Mac mini, MacBook Air

The sust-it website, which provides rankings of energy usage and annual energy cost for thousands of appliances, home entertainment devices, and computers, has announced that Apple’s Mac mini fills the top four spots for the most efficient desktop computer in their latest listing.

The 2.0 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo Mac mini is at the top of the chart, sipping just .94W when turned off (power still goes to circuits monitoring ..read more

Netbooks, low-cost portable computers optimized for web usage, are continuing to sell at a torrid pace, with Acer expecting 50 percent growth in the global netbook market in 2010, to 42 million units. In the meantime, standard technologies, operating systems and other options in these diminutive systems are undergoing rapid shifts. Here are eight up-to-date tips to keep in mind if you’re in the market for a new netbook.

Don’t Settle for a Tiny Display. As Om has pointed out, netbook ..read more

What’s the most dealtastic day of the whole year? Black Friday, of course. Come on in for some deep-dish regular deals and some fantastic Black Friday Deals.

Twice a week we round up the best deals we can find to share with you. This Thursday is the eve of Black Friday one of the biggest shopping days of the year and also the best day to find outrageous deals. For today’s Dealhacker post we’ve rounded our regular variety of deals for ..read more

The folks over at Tom’s Guide have gone through the web, saved what they think are the best Black Friday deals, and compiled them into one mega list. The full list is available here. For your convenience, I’ve listed the different promos below: