Ultrabooks will rule 2012

Some IT journalists and industry analysts are predicting that 2012 will be the year of the ultrabook. You know, those anorexic laptops that are less than 0.8-inch thick and weigh less than 1.4kg, come with no optical drive, have ditched the hard disk for a solid-state drive, powered by a Core i5 or i7 processor, have a battery life of about 5–8 hours, and are priced around $1,000 (about Php 43,000).

Apple, with its MacBook Air, created a new market segment. Again.

The ZenBook from Asus, one of the thin laptops, aka ultrabooks

At least, that is how Intel defines an ultrabook. By the way, if you want to use the term "ultrabook," you might save yourself some future, highly probable legal headache by getting in touch with Intel, which owns the copyright to that term.

Kindle Fire: Waiting for Amazon to "Friend" customers with non-U.S. IP addresses

Since its U.S. launch on November 14, 2011, Amazon's Kindle Fire has certainly made the tablet computer market a much more interesting space. Finally, consumers (at least, those who reside in the states) now have choices that are not limited between the expensive iPad and high-end Android slates and the low-cost, jocular excuses for a tablet computer.

Amazon's Kindle Fire is one exciting tablet computer. Local consumers, however, better wait for Amazon to resolve its geographical limits.

The Kindle Fire makes no pretensions as far as its list of features and capabilities is concerned. This doesn't mean, however, that it is a stingy and underperforming, underwhelming piece of high-tech tool-cum-toy.

Disk encryption keeps criminal data from police eyes

A research paper published in the Digital Investigation journal asserts that criminals can keep their data from law enforcement agencies by simply using commonly available hard drive encryption software. The joint U.S.-UK team of researchers has found that local and federal agencies cannot access data on a hard-disk drive that can incriminate those using the computer to commit crimes.

Data encryption protects the innocent, as well as the criminals. (Photo courtesy of renjith krishnan: www.freedigitalphotos.net/images/view_photog.php?photogid=721)   

Hollywood movies have made us believe that cracking encryption-protected disk drives is as easy as ABC. The unglamorous truth, however, is government-sanctioned hackers are unable to break the encryption, in most cases.

Researchers say that encryption is virtually heaven sent for criminals, especially for the IT-enabled variety.

Looking at the bright side, if disk encryption can help protect criminals' data, we can all take comfort from the fact that it also keeps safe data owned by the more law-abiding people like us.

Huawei brings MediaPad tablet computer to the Philippines

Months after Huawei introduced it at the 2011 CommunicAsia in Singapore, the MediaPad is finally available from your favorite local IT retailers.

Running on the Honeycomb 3.2 build of Google's Android mobile operating system, the MediaPad comes packing a 7-inch IPS LCD capacitive touchscreen, encased in a 10.5mm (or 0.4 inches) thin body frame.

The MediaPad is Huawei's take on what consumers want from their tablets.

This 390-gram tablet computer is powered by a dual-core 1.2GHz Qualcomm processor and includes a 1.3-megapixel front-facing camera and a 5-megapixel auto-focus main camera that also shoots HD videos.