Sci Fi Channel’s DVICE has a popular article up about liquid-filled fuel cell cell phones. We let Matt react…

I’m honestly not sure what to make of this.

I’m highly tempted to say people are confused and that it’s a concept mock-up or something, because I don’t see how this could possibly exist as a real product in this form.

Fuel cells need a catalyst assembly to operate, and there appears to be nothing of the sort to be found here, to say nothing of the single chip with no apparent connections to anything (like the magical mystery touchscreen), or any hint of an antenna.

I don’t see how a liquid-based fuel cell could even be practical in the first place anyway. All fuel cells produce a byproduct as part of the chemical reaction — if you’re not storing that byproduct in a holding area (which these “phones” don’t appear to be, if it’s to be believed that the colored liquid is the fuel and that it drains away during use) you have to disperse it into the atmosphere somehow.

This means your phone is either going to be peeing or farting questionably hazardous chemicals all day. On top of that, typical fuel cells have an efficiency of like 50 percent, which means you’d have to refill it rather often with some esoteric substance (’cause, you know, it’s just so easy to find pure ethanol on the street these days) … possibly very often depending on which angle you happen to be holding the device at.

Whether this is supposed to be a real product or some kind of internal artist’s rendering that got leaked, someone at NEC has a lot of explaining to do. I’m certainly not going to be saving any money waiting for a cellphone based on a very questionable concept, especially not one with pictures that raise more questions than answers and no data or press release to back anything up.

All I see here is a bunch of wild speculation being passed around among tech mags.

There’s been a lot of talk about Apple’s latest laptop the MacBook Air, and a lot of this talk seems to be by people who aren’t quite clear on the concept and target market segment. First announced in the middle of January, the Air is ultra-thin, lightweight, and has a seeming dearth of standard features- a move that’s generated no small amount of controversy.

First though, the raw specs:

Thickness: 0.76in max, tapering down to 0.16
Width: 12.8in
Depth: 8.94in
Weight: 3 lbs

CPU: special micro Core2 Duo running at 1.6 or 1.8ghz
Ram: 2 gb
HD: either an 80 GB PATA, or 64 GB SSD, both 1.8in size.
Screen: 13.3 @ 1280×800

Wifi: b/g/n
Bluetooth: 2 + EDR

… and, most notably, the only ports it has are a single USB, headphone jack, and a micro-DVI, in addition to not having any form of internal optical drive (although an external usb DVD+/-DL is available).

The other big innovation is Remote Disc, a software solution that enables the Air to read (via wifi) discs mounted on another Mac or Windows machine, even to the point of being able to boot off them and install an OS (most likely through some implementation of PXE, although the details are unclear).

Reading the sheet, it seems to me that the Air is intended not as a primary machine or desktop replacement, but as a compliment to an existing workstation or server for people who want to be able to do a few things around the house with said machines without being tied to their desk (a niche known as a ‘fat-client’), and for business execs who need something lightweight they can take with them to meetings to show demos and presentations.

However, having browsed around several forums and listened in on a number of conversations, it seems that most of those with a lot of negative opinions are trying to shoehorn it into the category of ‘submicro roadwarrior’ and then complaining when it doesn’t fit:

“It’s too big/wide/etc. It should be 12/9/5 inches, etc”

People who, say, have a server downstairs that contains all of their movies and want a lightweight laptop with a decent screen that they can watch stuff on while lying around on the couch or cooking dinner in the kitchen, and 13″ gives a good compromise between portability and watchability.

Likewise, for someone trying to present a demo in a meeting without a projector, smaller screens aren’t really a plus.

Also, in relative terms of volume, a thinner laptop gives you more room for carrying extra books or marketing material or a few small packages side by side, whereas lopping off an inch or so from the edge of the machine gives you a long narrow area that rarely translates into usable storage space for anything other than some toothpaste.

Regardless of anything Steve Jobs might say about style, a thinner 13″ is generally more effective than a thick 10″.

“It doesn’t have a replaceable battery”

This isn’t as big a deal as people make it out to be.

The vast majority of laptop owners don’t have multiple batteries for their laptop(s) anyway, and these days it’s rare to be in a location without a power outlet somewhere nearby. On top of that, carrying around spare batteries largely defeats the purpose of having such a lightweight laptop in the first place.

Unless you’re doing a lot of transcontinental flying on a cheap airline with no power sockets, a single battery is plenty.

Apple has already confirmed that the onboard battery is not permanently attached to the motherboard and can be replaced easily by removing a few screws and the bottom panel of the machine (a process that any reasonably skilled technician can perform in a few minutes), and that they’ll be providing and supporting replacement batteries for some time into the future.

“The ram is not upgradable”

The Air comes with 2GB, which is more than enough for the sorts of things this machine is meant for.

For the most part, all the things that really eat up ram (3D gaming, scientific processing, multimedia creation, etc) are not things you’d be doing on a laptop, and even if you had to run Windows in virtualization (via Parallels or VMware) because of a specific application, you’d have enough to do what you needed to.

Sure 4GB would be nice, but if you need to be editing HDTV movies or running a financial database server on the road, the Air is probably not for you anyway.

“It doesn’t have any ports”

Are you really going to be connecting a non-Bluetooth external mouse and a keyboard (with no ports of its own) on the road?

Several external hard drives at the same time?

One usb port really isn’t that much of a limitation for a laptop that doesn’t sit around all the time with a lot of devices plugged into it, and people seem to forget that you can buy a pocket usb hub if you really need it.

The lack of an ethernet port doesn’t phase me either as it’s far more likely I’ll encounter a wifi hotspot in my travels than an wall jack, and if I really need it I can always buy a usb-to-ethernet dongle.

As far as video goes, Apple includes in the box adapters that enable hookup to dvi/vga, anticipating that business folks who do a lot of presentation work will probably be a large part of the core market, moreso than people who need to run a bittorrent server in range of several microwave ovens.

I realize this may come off as sounding defensive, but one thing that’s always bugged me is when people rag on a product when they don’t understand what it’s meant for.

Like when the iPod first came out, the Air is getting bad press from people who don’t understand why it’s so much better than what’s already available.

That having been said, I personally am probably never going to own an Air, precisely because I need neither a fat-client (my primary machine is a MacBook Pro, not a wall-bound tower) nor am I a business exec, but that doesn’t stop me from recommending it strongly to anyone who does fit into those categories.

The Air nicely fills a hole that’s been open in Apple’s laptop lineup for about a decade since the Duo 2300c disappeared in the late 90′s, and is very probably the best laptop on the market within this class.

For more, check out BLAST staffer Mike Preble’s take on it.

Sound Forge is Sony’s professional digital audio production suite. Long considered one of the frontrunners in its class, SF has garnered much attention and has won the hearts of many with a well-polished user interface and lots of attention to detail.

THE MEAT

Probably the biggest new feature in SF9 is its ability to directly record and handle audio streams of up to 32 separate channels. What this means is that you can, for example, capture an entire 5.1 surround sound stream in one pass, whereas previously, you’d have to break the stream into three pairs of tracks and record them separately, synchronizing them after the fact. It’s something of a wonder that this feature wasn’t introduced a long time ago. In this day and age of DVDs and 3D games with cinematic soundtracks, producers are increasingly finding themselves to be dealing with greater-than-stereo mix scenarios, and Sound Forge’s previous two channel limitation was a thorn in the side that many weren’t willing to bear.

While the phrase that would come to most people’s minds in a case like this would be “better late than never,” Sony was obviously not satisfied to hide behind this excuse and used the time effectively to do things right, rather than simply tweaking a few functions to hack in multiple channels in a few places. They took the effort to modify the supporting features of the program to cope with the new information properly, so that things like the spectrum analyzer and mix meter would be capable of showing frequency and phase cancellation issues across the composite of all channels simultaneously.

Additionally, the mix capabilities are appropriately flexible and aren’t arbitrarily limited to stereo-based notions of left and right, enabling you to crossfade and bleed any channel into several others at once so that you can precisely position things when merging down or spreading up. If that’s not enough, they also put in enhanced drag-and-drop between channels and files, and added support for exporting and saving into over half a dozen multichannel file formats, with support for over two dozen formats overall.

In addition to multichannel capabilities, SF9 now comes with Quicktime/MPEG, Noise Reduction 2.0 and the iZotope mastering effects bundle as part of the standard package, which is a significant value boost over the previous version, considering all three are worth a couple hundred dollars by themselves.

The iZotope set is particularly interesting, giving you an EQ, reverb, compressor and limiter, all with real-time graphs and meters that show you exactly what you’re working with (the multiband compressor looks especially useful). Effects also have highly configurable wet/dry mix and crossfade options now, and along with all the multichannel support comes the ability to use multichannel VST pluggins too.

Last but not least, we also get integration with the Gracenote MusicID Media Recognition Service, so you don’t have to waste time manually typing in id3 tag information when extracting songs from audio CDs.

LAST WORDS

Sound Forge version 9 is definitely a major step forward for the program. With its current feature set and price (and now Windows Vista compatibility as well), it offers a very attractive package that’s well worth considering and should be on the radar of both owners of previous versions, and anyone new who’s just getting into the business.