July 31, 2009 9:33 PM

So I broke down and bought a new MacBook Pro 13.3-Inch Laptop this week. I ended up getting the 13“ Macbook Pro with a 2.53Ghz Dual Core processor, 4 Gigs of RAM, 250GB Hard drive, and 256MB Shared Video NVidia graphics card. It was an upgrade from my 2 year old Macbook. Wow, this is such a great machine. The first thing I noticed was that the touchpad is so smooth. It feels like rubbing glass without any resistance whatsoever. I’ve never felt a touchpad that is this smooth. Also, the touchpad has removed the traditional button, which increases the overall size of the touchpad. Apple has made the whole pad a button, so you can click anywhere. The extra mouse real estate makes using the laptop even easier. The backlit keyboard adds a great look to the already sleek looking body. I’ve heard a lot about the unibody, have seen it in the store, and have touched ones my friends own, but it takes owning one and using it for a day to really appreciate the quality of the laptop’s build. The LCD display is so crisp, and the sound is very crisp and has very deep bass. You can hear the bass with the ”dong“ from the Apple boot up sound. And of course, the system is fast!!! I mean real fast. I can run my normal 6 to 8 applications, plus Parallels Virtual Machine with 3 Windows apps, and this box continues to run smooth. Lastly, the multitouch on the touchpad is so useful. The ability to use 2, 3, and even 4 fingers to do things has simplified usage. Apple continues to shave seconds off of the traditional User Interface methods.

Apple Leopard’s Time Machine proves once again that it is an awesome simple backup solution that is very intuitive and doesn’t need an expert to run. I used the Time Machine restore feature to migrate to my new Macbook Pro. I was up and running on it from my old Macbook in 2.5 hours. The only thing I needed to do was update iTunes to the latest version. With that, everything worked perfectly and I was able to work immediately with no problems.

It’s also been a month since I’ve had my Palm Pre. So far I’m still happy with the device. Additional impressions is that there is no email search. I hope Palm will address this with a later patch. I’ve been getting better battery life than reported on the review sites. This is mostly due to not using Push IMAP, and just having the phone sync once an hour. Also, I’ve found that closing all the cards is an important way of saving battery life also. WebOS 1.1 has also increased battery life. I’ve done some head to head speed tests against Annie’s iPhone 3GS, and the Palm Pre is faster with web surfing, email, and even playing music. Once Palm adds email search and gets more apps (which should happen soon with the public release of the Mojo SDK), I’ll be completely satisfied.

As mentioned earlier, we upgraded Annie’s 1st generation iPhone with an iPhone 3GS. The build of the phone is really nice. The screen is just as smooth as my Macbook Pro’s touchscreen. The phone is fast. The Voice Command feature works as advertised and is a breeze to use. The video camera is very welcome, especially due to the kids. The camera is also very clear with the Auto Focus capability, but my Palm Pre’s camera is better due to the integrated flash that the iPhone lacks.

Well, I’ll continue playing with these new toys. I don’t anticipate buying any other new gadgets, so I’ll have to find something else to write about. Maybe I’ll do some follow up reviews on my older gadgets.

~rb