A video has gone up of Esquire’s lovely new E Ink cover, which you can see here. The promise of these things is immense. Imagine a newspaper with content that can be updated over the course of the day, so that the lead changes, stories are amended and breaking news is delivered to your morning newspaper.

Instead of buying a static newspaper for 60p, you buy 12 hours worth of news for £2. Then you go out and do it again tomorrow. It’s quite a cool idea, especially for folk like my dad, who buy their paper in the morning, read it at lunch and then probably won’t look at the news again until they get home from work and flick ITV on.

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I admit, I was among the first to scoff.

When Intel declared, a year or so back, that the next big thing in technology would be mobile internet devices – or “MIDs”, as they’ve inevitably become known – I wasn’t having any of it.

I mean, I already have a phone for on-the-go communications and web browsing. And I already have a laptop for running “proper” applications. I simply didn’t see what I could do with a MID that I couldn’t already do – better – with my existing devices.

And it seemed Intel didn’t really know either. The MID homepage they put up was packed with buzzwords but distinctly light on killer reasons for choosing a MID over an existing device. MIDs didn’t look like an imminent revolution, more like a marketing concept that accidentally got made. They certainly didn’t look ready to go up against the likes of the iPhone and the Eee PC. (more…)

This is Dave. You probably don’t know him, but believe it or not he’s about to become Intel’s very favourite person in the whole wide world. You see, according to my exhaustive research (well, having my eyes open in StarBucks yesterday), he’s just single handily doubled the sales of MiDs in the UK… by actually buying one.

It was always going to happen. After absolutely slating the concept with a fair degree of gusto on this week’s podcast (which you should listen to because it’s funny, and informative, and I’m northern and sound a bit like Ringo Starr), my best mate immediately goes and buys one, despite the fact that outwardly he appears perfectly sane.

For anybody not au fait with Intel’s current 15 million market terms, MiD stands for mobile internet device, a rather awkward halfway house between a smartphone and netbook which doesn’t so much fall between two stools as dig its own hole between two very useful products and gleefully chuck itself in.

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When upgrading a PC, the monitor is often the one thing people keep hold of. The rationale goes that it still works perfectly well and newer screens still use the same TFT technology that’s dominated the industry in recent times. Why shell out for a new one?

I’ve just finished testing Iiyama’s latest flagship model - a 26in monster of a display with DVI, VGA and HDMI inputs and a very impressive set of 5W speakers. It’s a solid TFT, and I was expecting a reasonably attractive price given the non-adjustable stand, but I was staggered to see just how cheap it is.

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If you keep close tabs on the smartphone scene - and PC Pro’s reviews section - you’ll know that we weren’t too impressed with HTC’s response the iPhone 3G, the Touch Diamond a couple of months ago.

We liked the fact that it buried most of Windows Mobile’s ugliness under an attractive, finger-friendly touchscreen interface, and we liked its fantastic VGA screen. We were also keen on its fantastic web browser - Opera Mobile 9.5.

But we hated its sluggish performance. The whole point of touchscreen interfaces is that they should be responsive, but this was anything but. Hit a control on screen and, like as not, you’d have to wait a second or so before anything actually happened. It was one of the most frustrating phones we’ve ever had the displeasure to use.

Would the same issues afflict its big brother - the Touch Pro, which arrived in the Labs today?

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Our review of the latest in the Eee PC roster, the 1000H, is now online, and it’s the most usable model yet. But this marvellous chart tells its own story (click to enlarge).

The “Easy, Excellent, Exciting” (yes, that is what it stands for; no, I couldn’t believe it either) brand now consists of 12 models - and that’s only those in official existence.

There’s also going to be a 701SD with external storage, an Atom-based 900A, and a Celeron-based 1000HD to complete a line-up which will comprise 15 different Eee PC options. And that’s before the $900 S101 arrives to take the brand to a whole new level of absurdity.

Without a chart like this I certainly wouldn’t be able to tell you what’s inside each one, so I can’t imagine how the average PC World shopper goes about choosing.

Polaroid jumped back into the market in March of this year with a range of cameras and a separate digital printing device called the PoGo. Producing little 2 x 3in prints in around 30 seconds, it was a nice little concept, but beyond kids printing stickers of each other to plaster all over the back of bus seats I couldn’t see any lasting appeal.

I did ask Polaroid back then about the possibility of integrating the printer into its digital cameras to come up with a true successor to the Polaroid instant camera, and the response was, with a wry smile, that advancements would come “at a later date”.

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You may have noticed the latest review up on the PC Pro homepage, of HP’s Pavilion HDX9320EA laptop. A gloriously over the top machine, with oodles of style and a price tag that’s certainly not as high as we expected when it was crane-lifted out of the box.

But is it actually a laptop? Could it feasibly be argued that this leviathan will comfortably sit on the average lap? At some point a desktop replacement becomes, well, just a desktop by another name. (more…)

No not the middle finger… Those who are keen followers of the articles pages here might have seen my little refugee item-ette from a forthcoming PC Pro feature: for those who haven’t, I confess my fragile ego wants me toshow it to you. Not because I took the photos all on my own (though I did, with my Sony with the busted CF door sensor that drives me nuts) but because I’ve just been through a bodge cycle on the HP ML115 that gave me the giggles.

I now find out of course, that VMWare Server isn’t officially supported on Windows Server 2008. Beta 2.0 is but that’s a whole different world, and I need Bowie, Iggy and friends to run without hassle. Searching in the usual places produces a load of whingers who don’t see why it can’t work, and almost nobody who really has the inside track…

…and one completely crazy fix. The problem is, Windows Sever 2008 won’t run with unsigned drivers, unless you press F8 on startup and choose the option which - well, runs without checking driver signing. There is no way to automate this within Windows: you can automate the opposite, so it never runs an unsigned driver: but you can’t turn the check off.

Well, unless you use ReadyDriverPlus that is. It’s not so much the need for somethign like this: it’s how it does it. Registry patch? Nah. Group Policy template? uh-uh.

It stuffs the keyboard buffer in the pre-GUI startup phase, to push in an F8 and the required number of up-arrows (plus a return) to always start server 2008 in unsigned driver mode.

How mad is that?

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We’ve just laid our sweaty mitts on the highly-anticipated BlackBerry Bold (aka the 9000 series) for the very first time in an hour long introduction to the product, and we have to say, we’re impressed.

For those of you who may not be completely au fait with the details (where have you been?), it’s RIM’s new flagship phone, but instead of simply relying on a (slow) GPRS connection – which we haven’t been impressed with before – the new device has a 3.5G (tri-band HSDPA) connection, and a new web browser.

The result is a completely revamped BlackBerry, with a new-look interface. The operating system has moved on to version 4.6 now and it comes complete with a slick new look and iPhone-style web browser, which gives an overview of web pages before allowing you to zoom right in.

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