Harry Mccracken

Toshiba announced new notebooks today–a bevy of updates to its consumery Satellite line, which encompasses everything from basic low-cost laptops to powerful entertainment machines. Laptopmag.com has a nice summary. Herewith, notes on a few models I found particularly interesting when Toshiba briefed me on them recently.

The Satellite A665 is an entertainment-focused system with a 16-inch screen, available in versions with Intel Core i3, i5, and i7 CPUs, as well as AMD’s quad-core Phenom II. It starts at $799.99 and has Dolby Advanced Audio, DVD upconversion for a sort of simulated HD effect, and Sleep-and-Music, which lets you plug an external music source such as your MP3 player or phone into the Harmon Kardon speakers even when the computer isn’t powered up. And some versions have Nvidia’s Optimus graphics system, which automatically switches between integrated and discrete graphics on the fly to either conserve power or boost performance as appropriate.

The Boxee Box–D-Link’s gizmo that brings the cool Boxee Internet TV service to HDTVs that don’t happen to have a PC or Mac handy–was announced last December. It was supposed to ship in the second quarter of 2010, which will end in a little over two weeks. But now Boxee is saying that it won’t be ready until November. The company says it needs until then to get the thing working properly.

As usual, I’m in favor of waiting longer for a better product. But it’s disappointing news to those whose appetites Boxee began to whet so long ago.

A couple of weeks ago, when Twitter announced that it would soon release an official Twitter app for Android phones, I fantasized that the company was going to port Loren Brichter's miraculous Tweetie Twitter for iPhone to Android. It didn't. But it's done something pretty pleasing on its own terms: It's released a really nice original (and fre) Twitter app for Android. For now, it's replacing the very-respectable-but-not-spectacular Seesmic as my Android Twitter client of choice.

The best thing about Twitter for Android is the user interface. It's arguably a little on the twee side: the Twitter bird is everywhere, there are animated clouds, and trending topics joggle up and down. But overall, it looks really attractive, it's nicely intuitive, and everything's legible -- virtues which are never a given on the Android platform. (Twidroid Pro and TweetCaster are powerful Twitter clients for Android, but they make my eyeballs hurt.)

Sad but in no way surprising: Apple is shutting down Lala, the excellent music service it bought last December. Lala has already stopped accepting new members; existing customers have access until the end of next month.

Unfortunately, Apple is continuing a long tradition of shuttered online services leaving customers who "bought" stuff at least partially in the lurch. It's telling people who bought streaming Web songs that they'll get an iTunes Store credit for the amount they spent "in appreciation of [their] support." But there's no equivalent at the iTunes Store for Web songs, which played only online but only cost a dime apiece, so the credit is more akin to a discount. I hope nobody blew too much money on Web songs thinking that he or she was assembling a music collection of any permanence.