This is the time of the year when contests--often run by newspaper Websites--challenge people across the nation to create dioramas that make extensive use of a familiar Easter candy: Marshmallow Peeps. Participants spend hours painting, decorating, arranging, and gluing squishy Marshmallow Peeps chicks and bunnies onto elaborate stages based on current events, movies, games, and popular culture. Our Peep-a-Palooza collection highlights the best tech- and geek-themed productions referencing Star Wars, Star Trek, TRON Legacy, Angry Birds, Mario Brothers, Nintendo Wii games, and more. Remember, these tableaux are built, not Photoshopped. Peeps and Buns also are popular with obsessed individuals who don't enter contests; we've included a few of their efforts as well. Enjoy! http://www.pcworld.com/article/226085/welcome_to_the_peepapalooza.htmlWelcome to the Peep-a-Palooza!
Mad geniuses across the nation immortalize games, movies, tech product announcements, and iconic sci-fi moments in dioramas built using our favorite Easter candy: Marshmallow Peeps. Take a look at some of the best.
The Best of Peep Dioramas Honoring Geeks and Tech
Peep-a-Palooza!
Another Windows 8
While Microsoft has not announced the release date, or even the official name, of its follow-up to Windows 7, an early pre-beta version of the OS has surfaced on the Internet, the second version to appear within a month. This is the second milestone release that has showed up on the Internet this month.Users of the Beta Archive Web site are claiming that the service's FTP servers contain a developmental copy of the next generation of Windows, Windows 8 version 6.2.7955.0 milestone 2. Access to the servers requires a user account. Microsoft Milestone releases are early pre-beta versions of its products, usually meant for internal use and testing. The first public beta release of the software may happen as soon as within the next few months, according to the WinRumors news site. Users of this Windows 8 software have said it features a Ribbon-based user-interface, similar to the one used in recent editions of Microsoft Office. This specific milestone build also has software for a Webcam, a new task manager, a PDF reader and an immersive browser. Microsoft is also developing a version of the software to run on ARM processors, in order to address the rapidly growing market for tablets. The news of the leaked software comes a week after Microsoft announced that, in the 18 months since its release, Windows 7 has sold more than 350 million licenses worldwide. Microsoft declined to verify the authenticity of the milestone release. http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/226206/another_windows_8_prebeta_surfaces.htmlAnother Windows 8 Pre-beta Surfaces
Homer Simpson
The voice of Homer Simpson is available for the iPhone TomTom satnav app. Homer - voiced by Dan Castellaneta - will say things like: "Make a U-turn," "Ha ha, you've goofed," and, unsurprisingly "D'Oh!". The TomTom UK & Ireland iOS app costs £49.99, and Homer's voice is available as an in-app purchase for £3.49. Other famous fictional voices on offer include Darth Vader, C3PO, Yoda and Hans Solo. "Homer Simpson is one of the most familiar and fondly recognised cartoon characters on the planet. So to have Homer become uniquely available for our TomTom App for iPhone is really thrilling for us. We believe Homer will bring lots of fun and enjoyment to millions of fans around the world, as drivers' very own co-pilot," said Alain Pakiry, Senior Vice President for Marketing at TomTom. "Homer's skills will help keep drivers and fans entertained in a light hearted and familiar way. It's exciting to have him on board!" he continued. TomTom is also offering its TomTom Speed Cameras feature as an in-app purchase for drivers, costing £3.49 per month or £22.99 for a year. Drivers in the United States, Ireland, Canada, New Zealand, Australia, Portugal, Luxembourg, Finland, Norway, Denmark, the Netherlands, Belgium, Sweden and South Africa can also get Homer's voice for the TomTom app. http://www.pcworld.com/article/226278/homer_simpson_comes_to_tomtom_ios_app.htmlHomer Simpson Comes to TomTom iOS App
Android
Either I'm an extraordinary psychic, or smartphone market share studies are starting to get pretty damn predictable. You know what I'm talking about, right? Every few weeks, a fresh analysis comes out with striking new details about how Android, iOS, and the other smartphone platforms are stacking up. Only every time, the results are basically the same: Android makes some meaty market share gains. Apple drops a bit, or maybe holds steady. The rest of the not-so-sexy contenders -- RIM, Microsoft, whozit and whatzit -- hang on for dear life. That trend's been repeating reliably for a good couple of years now. So when a study with some new type of insight crosses my desk here at JR Raphael World Headquarters, you'd better believe I sit up and take notice. Today is one of those enchanting occasions. A new report from Nielsen -- the same guys who handle ratings for TV and practically everything else on the planet -- finds an interesting shift not just in smartphone market share but also in smartphone desirability. It's something the Nielsen crew has been measuring for some time now, but this marks a rare instance where we see a noteworthy change. The change, in a nutshell, is that Android has now surpassed iOS in terms of consumer desirability. Or, in other words, more smartphone buyers are lusting after an Android than eyeing an iPhone. The difference itself isn't enormous, mind you, but what it represents is arguably quite large. According to Nielsen, 31 percent of mobile consumers surveyed from January to March of this year said they wanted an Android device. That's up from 26 percent in the previous period, in late 2010. Thirty percent, meanwhile, said they wanted an Apple mobile device in the most recent analysis -- down from 33 percent in the late-2010 window. http://www.pcworld.com/article/226354/android_outranks_apple_in_desirability_and_thats_huge.htmlAndroid Outranks Apple in Desirability -- and That's Huge
Angry Birds
The popularity of Angry Birds continues to soar as the game has now reached 140 million downloads worldwide, according to an executive with its publisher Rovio Mobile. The game has been a large success after it was first launched as an Apple iPhone app in December 2009, said Rovio's Peter Vesterbacka, who goes by the title "Mighty Eagle," at the Global Mobile Internet Conference in Beijing on Wednesday. Angry Birds is now available on a wide range of platforms including Android, Windows, and video game systems like the Playstation 3. The game sells for $0.99 on Apple's App Store, but also comes in a free version. The success of the game, however, didn't come easy, and Rovio built 51 other games over a seven-year period before Angry Birds really started taking off, Vesterbacka said. Marketing has played a big role in the game's popularity, he added. Rovio has invested in producing Angry Birds merchandise to promote the game and created an ad that ran during the Super Bowl. Rovio has big ambitions for China. The company aims to reach 100 million downloads of Angry Birds this year, Vesterbacka said. He did not disclose the number of downloads of the game in the country so far. The company also believes it can make Angry Birds one of the most recognized brands in China. "We are now in the top three for the most copied brand in China," he said. "We are up there with Disney and Hello Kitty." China is potentially a large market for Rovio. The country has 889 million mobile phone users, according to the country's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology. http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/226383/angry_birds_reaches_140_million_downloads.htmlAngry Birds Reaches 140 Million Downloads
Ultra-thin Lenovo ThinkPad
A surprisingly thin Lenovo ThinkPad X1 has just joined the ultra-thin laptop race, marrying the classic business sense of the ThinkPad line with the super sexy form of Apple's MacBook Air and its latest ultra-slim laptop competitors, the Samsung Series 9 and MSI X-Slim X-370. The unannounced ThinkPad X1 popped up for pre-sale in Europe and has been confirmed by internal Lenovo documents to be just 21.5mm (0.85 inches) thin and boast a fast-charging, long-life battery. Although the ThinkPad X1 is a tad thicker and may weigh almost a full pound more than the MacBook Air and Samsung Series 9 ultraportables, it may be the thinnest business laptop yet. The X1 also sports someimpressive specs. (See how X1 stacks up against MacBook Air competition) Running the Sandy Bridge Intel Core i5 processor, the ThinkPad X1 has a 13.3-inch display made of super-tough Corning Gorilla Glass ("Outdoor Panel"), an LED backlit keyboard, 160GB SSD drive and multimedia-friendly features like HD stereo speakers. Part of a new generation of ThinkPads (which includes the highly-rated ThinkPad X220), a major feature of the ThinkPad X1 is its new battery technology. The X1 may last 3x as long as typical notebook batteries (up to 10 hours with the additional battery slice), and with Lenovo's "RapidCharge" technology, charge 2.5 times faster (80% in 30 minutes). The Swiss site where the ThinkPad X1 was spotted shows an availability date of May 20, as well as a pretty steep price of around $2,900 (2,585 Francs). When the ThinkPad X1 launches in the US, we can only hope it will be more wallet-friendly, because otherwise the X1 may definitely give the MacBook Air a run for its money. The ThinkPad X1 leak also follows rumors of a Lenovo ThinkPad tablet arriving this summer, so mobile professionals have a lot to look forward to from Lenovo this year. http://www.pcworld.com/article/226183/ultrathin_lenovo_thinkpad_x1_a_match_for_macbook_air.htmlUltra-thin Lenovo ThinkPad X1 a Match for MacBook Air?
Superlight Laptops
7 Stylish Superlight Laptops
By Jason Cross and Jon L. Jacobi, PCWorld
You have to take only a couple of business trips or vacations with a 6-pound laptop in tow before you start thinking about switching to a PC with a little less meat on its bones.
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Lenovo ThinkPad X220
Although 14- and 15-inch all-purpose laptops are abundant and often inexpensive, just throw one into your backpack or briefcase and lug it around for a few days--your shoulders will soon beg for mercy. These days, fortunately, you can find plenty of laptops on the market that are slimmer, lighter, and more powerful than almost anything that you could have bought just a few years ago.
What qualifies as a "lightweight laptop"? We drew the line at 4 pounds. There's a marked difference in design, features, and feel between laptops under that weight and their heavier friends. It may not seem like much, but a pound or two can make a big difference. Consider the heft of a pint of water: 1 pound. The difference between the lightweight laptops featured here and your run-of-the-mill 5.5-pounder is the equivalent of two (or two-and-a-half) extra pints of water in your laptop bag. It gets tiresome pretty fast.
Of course, laptops that are more Olive Oyl than Bluto come with a few compromises. Giving up weight can mean giving up performance, battery life, and certain other capabilities. Most laptops that weigh less than 4 pounds lack optical drives, so forget about burning DVDs or watching Blu-ray movies without an external USB drive.
They also tend to be thinner, leaving less room for larger, longer-running batteries, and for heat sinks and fans to dissipate the heat from high-power processors, which in turn means limited processing power. Nor is there room for a high-power discrete graphics card, so gaming enthusiasts are out of luck. Finally, expect to pay a little more for a thin-and-light laptop, relative to the performance received. Sure, you can find cheap laptops under 4 pounds, but at any given price, you'll get more performance, storage space, and features if you're willing to deal with some extra weight.
Truly light laptops rarely have a screen larger than 13 inches, but they otherwise come in a variety of styles, sizes, and prices.
(For our comparison chart of the ultraportables discussed in this article--and our "find-it" to each one's full review--please click on the thumbnail at left.)
If superslim is your preference, look no further than the Samsung Series 9, the latest PC to seriously challenge Apple's MacBook Air for slim-computing dominance. Business users especially interested in usability will want to focus on the ThinkPad X220, which maintains Lenovo's excellent, long-running standards for keyboard quality and management features.
And for the more style-minded among us, Lenovo has a sleeker unit in the IdeaPad U260. Meanwhile, Sony's Z-Series VPC-Z137GX/S is a pricey alternative aimed at business executives who want it all, including a decent discrete graphics chip.
If you're on a tighter budget, the tiny size of Lenovo's ThinkPad X120e netbook should fit the bill. It's powered by AMD's Fusion E-series processor, giving it performance that's a step above the typical Intel Atom-powered netbook.
Let's look at these ultralight laptops in alphabetical order.
Lenovo's IdeaPad U260: Unexpected Style
Lenovo IdeaPad U260: With its copper (or “mocha brown”) cover, this IdeaPad could be a contender for design awards.
Despite generations of sober-looking, utilitarian forebears and a name that suggests a bad World War II submarine movie, Lenovo's $1199 IdeaPad U260 goes where the company's laptops never went before--into the queue for style and design awards.
And the U260 gives Apple and Sony something to think about. When closed and viewed from the back, with its dark copper shell (Lenovo calls the color "mocha brown") covering the black main body, this 0.75-inch-thick ultraportable laptop resembles an extravagantly bound book- or pad-holder.
When opened, the IdeaPad U260 presents you with an all-black, minimally populated keyboard deck consisting of a smallish power button, an ambient light sensor that adjusts display brightness automatically, a tiny OneKey system recovery button (accessible only if you use a pointy object), the best Chiclet-style keyboard I've ever typed on, and an equally elegant touchpad with smooth-operating buttons. In a break with tradition, Lenovo does not include an eraserhead or nubbin pointing device.
Style aside, the U260 earned mixed results in PCWorld Labs tests. Our review unit had an Intel Core i5 470UM CPU, 4GB of DDR3 system memory, and a 12.5-inch color display with 1388 by 766 resolution. But the 320GB hard drive spins at just 5400 rpm, which undoubtedly helped hold the U260's WorldBench 6 score to a pedestrian 75. (An update to one of Intel's Sandy Bridge CPUs would certainly boost the laptop's performance.)
Gaming frame rates on our test machine were in the teens (or worse), owing to Intel's integrated graphics. On the other hand, every video we tried played smoothly, even at 1080p. Audio quality is so-so, and rather quiet through the speaker.
Your connection options consist of two USB 2.0 ports, VGA and HDMI video outputs, an AC jack, a gigabit ethernet port, and a single combination microphone/headphone jack. The laptop has no internal optical drive, and the wireless is 802.11n.
Lenovo includes 64-bit Windows 7 Home Premium as the operating system, but no productivity software. You also get a VeriFace facial recognition utility that's quite cool, as well as a shock sensor and the CyberLink Webcam utility.
The U260 is an average performer overall, but its top-of-the-line ergonomics more than compensates for that. My main disappointment is the lack of an option for a faster hard disk or a solid-state drive, to improve performance.
