Monday, March 08, 2010

Good News: JetBlue's $10 Fares. Bad News: JetBlue's Web Site is Down

JetBlue is celebrating its tenth anniversary by offering $10 flights from New York’s JFK Airport to its first ten destinations. Try to book a flight on JetBlue’s Web site, however, and you get what you see below. Not a good day for "Website Technical Issues."



Copyright 2010 Stadium Circle Features

Friday, March 05, 2010

Samsung’s Sleek R80 Series Notebooks: Color them Red



First it was beige, then it was black and now the color of today’s notable notebooks depends on which way the fashion winds are blowing. Samsung is hardly a stranger to this trend and proves it with a raft of sleek-looking notebooks poised to debut exclusively at Best Buy on Sunday.

At a press preview in New York Thursday, Samsung showed off its new R80 series notebooks, which feature the company’s Crystal Wave body design. A clear coat protects a colorful metallic shell with wavy designs etched in. The result, according to a Samsung representative, is a durable case which will still looks good after hard use.

Samsung’s R780 ($930), R580 ($830) and R480 ($730) notebooks come with 17.3-, 15.6- and 14-inch HD LED displays respectively and 500-gigabyte hard disks. The R780 and R580 come with muscular Intel Core i5 processors and high-end nVidia GeForce GT 330M or 310M graphics engines while the R480 uses a less-robust, but certainly adequate Intel Core i3 processor and a medium-strength Intel GMA 4500MHD graphics chipset.

Somewhat surprisingly, the R480 and R580 come with Blu-ray players while the R780 is outfitted with a DVD burner. All of the R80 series units are long on connectivity options, offering three (R480) or four (R780, R580) USB 2.0 ports in addition to HDMI, video, audio, gigabit Ethernet, memory card and ExpressCard slots. The new units also feature built-in webcams, microphones and Wi-Fi adapters and the R780 includes a Bluetooth adapter as well.

During an assortment of demonstrations at the Samsung Experience at the Time Warner Center in New York, Samsung representatives demonstrated how the Blu-ray-enabled R80 notebooks could send HD video feeds to nearby televisions while having enough processor and graphics muscle left over for notebook users to surf the Web, edit documents or perform other tasks without cyber hiccups.

The R480 and R580 notebooks will be available at Best Buy retail stores March 7 while the R780 will be available online only via BestBuy.com.

Text and photo Copyright 2010 Stadium Circle Features

Thursday, March 04, 2010

Bluetooth Style with Substance: Jabra Stone and Jawbone Icon

Two new Bluetooth wireless headsets, Jabra's Stone (above) and Aliph's Jawbone Icon, combine a bit of style with their nifty noise-cancellation technology.

The Icon comes in six different styles with names like Hero and Ace while the Stone comes with a charger base with its own battery, thus allowing you to keep a couple extra charges in your pocket.

What do I think? See my reviews of the Jabra Stone and the Jawbone Icon at PCWorld.com. And let me know what you think.

Text Copyright 2010 Stadium Circle Features. 
Photos courtesy of Jabra and Aliph.