Logitech Wireless Keyboard K340

Layout

At first look, the keyboard seems reasonably sleek and palpable enough, quite suitable for an individual who wants no frills for productive purposes. Main keys are laid out in a good way, just like a full desktop keyboard. Although the whole setup looks like common notebook layout with addition of a number pad, it works better than keyboards in most laptops. Inclusion of a Fn (Function) key is noticeable, similar to notebooks which also controls Print Screen, Pause Break and Scroll Lock in addition with hotkeys superimposed on usual function keys (F1 to F12) to deliver easier navigation in media players, opening a default browser and mail client. There are no indicators for Num Lock or Scroll Lock while Caps Lock key itself has a LED for the purpose. While it’s understood that space saving is the primary concern for this model, another indicator on Num Lock would be useful.

Typing experience is particularly good in this board, with no missing keys or difficulties reaching a particular key.  The layout really works well. But people, who are too much used to traditional keyboards, will have little difficulties locating Delete, Home, and End keys while typing. There’s a small learning curve involved here.

Wireless Connectivity

Logitech Unifying Receiver

The main aspect of the keyboard is its wireless performance, after all it’s a tail-less keyboard we are discussing here. Logitech is providing a minuscule receiver with the product called Unifying receiver.

It’s really a small thing, considering the length of USB male connector which is bigger than the receiver itself. However, it works well and even without a driver. It allowed me to pair the keyboard almost instantly after starting my PC and to enter BIOS by pressing Del from it. Although you don’t need any additional software to use the receiver, Logitech SetPoint 4.80 or better is required to activate Fn key and its corresponding functions. Since I already had the software installed (I have Logitech MX 518 Gaming Mouse), the setup was instantaneous.

According to product description, it should work within the range of 10 meters from the receiver. To test this argument, I had to come out of my room with the keyboard on my hand. I tried switching some apps using Alt+Tab and writing a line in Notepad. Adding to my surprise both worked flawlessly, even when the PC was not even on line of sight. I believe this keyboard works in the said 10 meter range even if there’s a barrier like a wall in between. While this range is a good notion, it also raises questions on wireless security. Is a user secure when using this keyboard paired with a computer? Since it uses an Advanced 2.4 GHz connection to increase connectivity and reduce battery usage, it’s also theoretically susceptible to wireless attacks using Wi Fi networks if used without encryption. K340 uses 128bit AES encryption which is good for regular cordless usage, unless you’re inputting some top secret military codes in your PC.

Battery Life

Another aspect of anything wireless is their battery life, since users aren’t sharing the power coming from an outlet. Logitech, while announcing their advanced 2.4GHz wireless input devices, specified that the model will have 3 years of battery life when going through moderate usage regularly. According to them, it means 2 million keystrokes per year in an office environment. Now this is something I really can’t comment on since there are no practical ways to visit the keyboard after 3 years, yet. The model has a battery life indicator LED on the top of number pad, which glows green when battery is fine and red in case of 10% or below battery life. That’s a good feature, considering the price of the product.

Wrap-up

Logitech have created a modest, streamlined approach to keyboard which is surely going to attract a lot of people, especially those in corporate sectors with requirements of high portability, better wireless range and great battery life entwined in a single product. The keyboard, practically looks well, feels well and works well. Apart from the only little shortcoming and a short learning curve, K340 is really worth it.

As you can see, Google Chrome 4 Dev builds have some problems with Font Anti-Aliasing, while IE shows a bit more blur than anyone else. In my opinion Firefox 3.6 Beta 5 gave the best results with both Serif and Sans-Serif fonts.

Browsers used: Firefox 3.6 Beta 5, Google Chrome Dev Build 4.0.266.0, Internet Explorer 8

OS: Windows 7 (64 bit), Cleartype ON

Fonts used: Arial (Sans-Serif) and Georgia (Serif)

P.S. I don’t have Photoshop installed currently in my PC, that’s why the graphics presented here is rather ‘basic’. Had to do with Paint.NET and don’t know much tricks on it.

This much discussed recession brought a new trend of customers buying a whole lot of netbooks. These low costs machines, while enabling users to save quite a few bucks also required lightweight, resource friendly and power saving operating systems to bring out the full potential out of them. OS Tycoon Microsoft offered age old Windows XP and customers were obliged to bring it with their machines since they didn’t have much choices either. Feeling the financial prospect surrounding this new trend, several OEMs barged in making numerous models of netbooks for emerging markets. Popular Linux distros like Ubuntu appeared on the ground with their own netbook-optimized versions. Microprocessor giant Intel (which also produces popular ‘Atom’ processor for netbooks) started a project called ‘Moblin’ which is actually a highly customized Linux based distro for specialized hardware. Google was always in the verge of venturing into this market and with debut of ‘Android’, they were supposedly in! As expected, rumour mills didn’t stop making conjectures about a certain ‘Google OS’. Yesterday, with official announcement from Google made everything very clear, indeed they are foraying into OS market.

In their official statement last day, Google did light up the fact that their new OS will be available beyond the scope of netbooks. It will enable people to interact on web more easily than ever without the hassle of usual startup of a computer (indicating very fast bootup) and going through myriad options/tools available on a full-fledged operating system. It’ll also sport a very clean and easy to use interface (a la Google Chrome) that is specifically meant to reduce redundancy. So in a gist, they’re going to make something that pushes most of the user experience towards web instead of their standalone computers, an important step in advancement of cloud computing. Now, concept of running a whole OS off the cloud is nothing new, it’s a popular idea that appeared with advent of Web 2.0. And perhaps Google is the very first significant company that’s taking prominent initial steps on developing this concept. Although Apple MobileMe & Live Mesh from Microsoft have their own ways to deal with cloud based storage and general user experience, a full-blown OS with rich internet and media playing capabilities are not seen before. If Google is really going to deliver as what they saying, it’ll be a different kind of product.

Let’s ask a few questions ourselves to get moving.

Why would you want a cloud based OS?

For Google, the answer is simple. A cloud based operating system will help users, heavily dependent on web, to get their jobs done in faster and simpler ways. They won’t have to wait for the computer to boot a regular OS, open a browser, IM app or some Adobe AIR app to get their daily online venture going on. They’ll simply start a managed environment with selected apps and a direct connection to internet, fast n easy. Web based apps, residing on Google or other servers will then deliver necessary functions to consumers, reducing resource usage.

What should I need to get Google OS running?

According to Google, they are mainly targeting low-end portable computers like netbooks for their upcoming OS. Although they hope to reach a far broader audience than that, their OS will only need bare minimums to get started. I think even older Celeron and Pentium 4 processors will support this. So if you’ve got a 5 year old PC, don’t just throw it away.

Will it be able to supplement computing just using web resources?

Now that is an important question. Since user aspects varies from person to person, even barebone computing has its own classifications. Now, a bloke who just Facebooks and Twitters his day on internet, doesn’t need anything more than a browser and Google OS just fits in. Even professionals sending/receiving a lot of emails and browsing stuffs don’t need anything more than what Google plans to offer. Online office suits are also available from a few vendors including Google which will enable online creation and editing of documents, spreadsheets, presentations, databases etc. Browsers can also play local media files like audio and video to get entertainment section rolling. Even hardware wrenching games can be streamed off web servers and played on much lower config hardware. Delicate professional jobs like image/video editing, 3D modelling are also possible on the same way.

Cool! So what’s stopping us from jumping the bandwagon?

So everything seems fine, right? Now here’s a catch. You need a very good broadband connection to achieve all of these at one go. Even if we consider that there’s no need to update the OS, no worrying about security threats on workstations, no hassles of installing and updating several software – it must requires a stable and speedy internet connection. Without which desktop like experience off the cloud is just a dream. Although regular stuffs don’t need anything beyond 2 or 4 Mbps, smooth video streaming and other high end jobs require 8 or 16 Mbps. Having said that, most countries in world don’t offer that kind of internet connection cheap and that might be a problem.

Portability will also be a big concern. Since wireless internet connectivity is still on its infancy to spread, notebook and netbook users will find themselves in a hugely disappointing situation when their machines will be unable to do a thing having lost the wireless signal. And that doesn’t speak well for reliability of this new OS. It’s not a fault from Google’s side but of the current infrastructure that lacks power and stability to move everything online.

Data security holds an important point too. We will never want our private mails to be in malicious hands when sending. Security protocol implementation needs to be more precise and responsive and widely used. Also there are some people sceptical about Google’s part in their online venture and believe that soon Google will take over the world (just like Skynet in Terminator series) with all these personal information about them in its hand. Though it’s nonsense but people will be people, right?

On a final note, Google’s ideology of a web based OS is nothing new. It’s a good idea to move everything online and cut hardware/software costs but current infrastructure won’t allow to implement it on a really large scale that today’s regular operating systems enjoy. Those Windows killing propagandas are just overjoyed notions of foolishness. Completely online computing may be game changing, but not in recent future. And who knows if Microsoft is going to give them a challenge with their own offerings? After all, it’s still a Windows world.

Does 720p and 1080p video playback on your palm sounds good? How about PC grade RPGs and FPSs running @ 45 FPS on just on your hands? NVidia Tegra claims to do just these. And the best thing is that it manages to do all these consuming less than 1W of power. That makes way for amazing battery life in portable gadgets without taking a toll on performance. Inside Tegra, lie 8 independent processors each programmed to serve its own purposes.

Tegra houses Eight different processors for efficient operations

According to NVidia, each of these independent processors works only when needed and otherwise stays powered down. They are also claiming 25 days of music playback (yeah, it’s days not hours!) and 10 hours of HD video playback, quite insane for today’s mobile chips. Interestingly, the platform is not just meant to be used in PCs which is turned on when needed but rather on mobile devices which remains always on.

The Tegra chipset is not bigger than a regular Pen Drive

Tegra shows immense potential for a mobile platform combining never seen before performance and battery life together. It just needs suitable operating system that can manage tasks efficiently and offload them in proper fashion to those 8 processors. Microsoft recently confirmed that their upcoming Zune HD will be based on Tegra and even the prototype models showed a great fluency in using them. Planned to be released on Q4 of 2009, Tegra has the innate capability of blowing away the competition.

For more information on Tegra, check out the official webpage @ http://www.nvidia.com/page/handheld.html

Two biggest players in the worldwide consumer operating system market, Microsoft and Apple, recently announced their interests on these emerging technologies to provide way better user experiences by using prowess of latest hardware line. In PDC’08, Microsoft made it clear that they’re definitely tweaking Windows 7 to use multi-core processors more efficiently and the latest publicly released build of Windows 7 shows significant performance increase than Vista with newer processors having more than one core. In WWDC’09, Apple presented their current implementation of Multi Core Processing and GPGPU support in upcoming version of Mac OS X, Snow Leopard. After the event, people who got Developer Preview of the operating system appreciated more fluency in terms of processing power and user interface in comparison to its previous version, namely Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard.

While it’s great to see that modern operating systems are going to use properly what they have under the hood, a typical comparison between efficiency levels is obvious.

Windows 7

Windows 7 is going to be the best operating system Microsoft has ever released since its existence. Unlike the vaporous hype Vista had till its release back in 2007, Windows 7 will definitely going to hit the target for Microsoft. Coming into the topic, the 32bit architecture of Windows, namely win32 was never optimised (better to say meant) for parallel processing from multiple cores. From Microsoft Chief Research and Strategy Officer Craig Mundie’s own words,

“Win32 was never designed for highly concurrent, asynchronous processing”. “Parallelism requires adjustments at every level of the stack. It involves the repartitioning of different tasks to different layers. . . . So look for a rebalancing of roles and runtimes. We need to formalize that in the operating system. Expect their first pieces in the next generation of Windows.”

Advertently, as some people were already suggesting (and are still suggesting), a complete rewrite of Windows core can only bring a solution. But MS is afraid of losing support for millions of PC that runs legacy software and hardware and since Vista shook the ground beneath their feet, they’re most eager to gain a fair share with Win 7 first. But, users need not to worry about that, Microsoft is already tweaking as much as possible keeping the current Windows core model intact and early benchmarks have shown notable extensions in performance.

In the graphics front, Windows AERO UI is already hardware accelerated and the introduction of WDDM 1.1 promises greater augmentations. Graphic card manufacturers like NVidia and AMD announced newer drivers supporting the new version of WDDM even before the actual release of the new OS. Still there’s no word on GPGPU support in this version of Windows. There are no words on GPGPU support in Windows 7 and it’s still not clear if Microsoft already implicated the technology within their new OS. I don’t think there will be much of that kind of support (if any) and MS will introduce it with DirectX 11.

Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard

WWDC’09 saw the official release announcement of Snow Leopard, featuring Grand Central Dispatch and OpenCL. Keeping up with their tradition of hypocritical Microsoft bashing, they didn’t forget to ridicule Vista and 7 in saying about some increasing complexities. While these claims are totally idiotic, Apple’s introduction of above technologies is simply great.

Grand Central Dispatch (GCD for short) is the Apple’s incarnation of native multi-core support in OS level. They want Snow Leopard to control the threads generated by various applications rather than letting those apps to do it. This gives greater control to the OS and makes it stable & efficient to use the available system resources. In their own words,

“A new technology called Grand Central Dispatch takes full advantage of multicore systems by making all of Mac OS X multicore aware and optimizing it for allocating tasks across multiple cores and processors. Grand Central Dispatch also makes it much easier for developers to create programs that utilize all the power of multicore systems.”

That means everything from opening a finder window to backing up in Time Machine will be multi-threaded and the threads are in turn processed by multiple cores at the same time. While this sounds really cool, user installed third-party applications need to be GCD enabled to take advantage of it.

OpenCL is Apple’s foray into GPGPU and they have all the major graphic card manufactures with them for that cause. It stands for Open Computing Language which is based on C and easier to implement for developers than a whole new coding system. As Apple puts it,

“With graphics processors surpassing speeds of a trillion operations per second, they’re capable of considerably more than just drawing pictures. OpenCL in Snow Leopard is a technology that makes it possible for developers to tap the vast computing power currently in the graphics processor and use it for any application.”

The everlasting feud between MS and Apple is going to take an interesting turn as they’re both waiting to release their brand new OS in a month’s difference. While Apple is quite clear with the features they are bringing to access these two current technologies, MS is relatively quiet with their part in this. I hope something significant is really brewing on Redmond that’ll blow others out of water on release. It’s too early to tell since both of the releases are at least 3.5 months away. Personally, I’m quite attracted by what Apple’s going to offer soon and thinking about buying a MacBook Pro in recent future. Let it come October, let the technology to unleash the prowess of processing power.