ASUS Launches P750 PDA in India

ASUS has launched their latest PDA phone, the P750 in Mumbai. The P750 is a fully loaded Tri-Band GSM PDA phone with GPS capabilities as well as Wi-Fi, 3.5G with HSDPA and Bluetooth with A2DP connectivity. This particular model is also the winner of the 2007 Japan G-Mark Award.
The P750 incorporates a host of specific business features that include Ur Time (view the time of various cities on the Today screen). It ties in with Meeting Time Planner to help facilitate business planning for meetings etc. a little easier. The Newstation provides up-to-date news and blog updates through RSS settings. Another handy feature is the Auto Cleaner function that enables operating with the best performance by cleaning up unwanted data. Since the P750 has a 3 megapixel auto-focus camera ASUS has also incorporated Business Card Recognition feature

Other features include Travelog which is a feature that allows users to record and share their traveling pictures, routes, Points of Interests (POIs) and schedules. With support for Google Earth’s satellite maps format, users can create a diary of events during their travels and put together snapshots and other interesting tidbits of their travels onto their blogs – allowing them to share with others their memorable travels as they trek across from one key point to another along their journeys. The ASUS P750’s Location Courier feature will also help prevent users from ever getting lost by accurately and periodically reporting their position to their pre-defined friends' contacts.
The device runs on Windows Mobile 6.0 Professional and supports external memory with microSD cards. It's equipped with a 2.6-inch touch screen display that supports a resolution of 240 x 320 pixels and 65K colors.

The ASUS P750 is priced at Rs. 28,900 and is available in stores.

MacWorld 2008: Apple Macbook Air Steals the Show!

The new Macbook Air – 'the world's thinnest notebook' – was clearly the highlight of Apple CEO Steve Jobs' keynote at MacWorld 2008 which has just kicked off in San Francisco. We're not covering it from location at Tech2.com but here's a quick summary of the major announcements from the keynote:

• Macbook Air – a super thin laptop with an 80GB hard drive or a 64 GB SSD but no inbuilt CD/DVD drive.
• Time Capsule – a 1 Terabyte hard disk which also doubles up as a Wi-Fi base station and allows Mac users to wirelessly backup all their data.
• Free software update for the iPhone – version 1.1.3
• Paid software upgrade for the iPod Touch, which includes new apps like Maps, Mail, Weather, Stocks etc.
• iTunes movie rentals, including HD movies.
• New software and lower price for Apple TV.
• Free digital copies of purchases of 20th Century Fox DVDs.

The first two in the list above should be available in India in about a month if recent Mac launches' time-to-India are anything to go by. We suspect though, that US demand for the Macbook Air will delay its availability in Asia and therefore India for longer than four weeks.

The iPhone software update will take a while to be cracked so Indians using hacked iPhones will not be able to take advantage of the update immediately. However, once it IS cracked, the much desired "SMS to multiple contacts" feature will be a welcome relief.

The fact that existing iPod Touch users will have to pay ($20 if you have an iTunes account, which itself is not possible with an Indian credit card!) for the software update is a major downer! If the iPhone update is free, why charge for iTouch? New iPod Touches though will come with the new software, so we advise you not to buy the iPod Touch in India till the new ones have hit the shelves in a few weeks.

The iTunes store is not officially accessible in India and neither is Apple TV so the last three don't really matter to Indian readers of Tech2.com but I'm sure many of our tech-savvy international readers are scoffing at the last item. Nearly everyone who legally purchases DVDs has figured out how to create digital copies of their own stuff, but then again, the movie and music industries seem to be in denial. We're surprised that Disney didn't sign up on this as well, since Steve Jobs is the company's largest shareholder.

There's some excellent coverage of MacWorld 2008 at Engadget and Gizmodo for those of you who want all the dirty details!