R&D throughout the industry has led to significant steps in innovation this year. VARBusiness Tech Innovator Awards recognize the most innovative of these offerings from several different sectors.
Vendors submitted hundreds of entries for the 2008 VARBusiness Tech Innovator Awards, but only a handful emerged as purveyors of unique, groundbreaking products. Here's a look at the winners.
HP's first touch-screen notebook for consumers has plenty of options for work and play.
Nothing is more annoying than laptop power cables that are not interchangeable from one computer model to another or from one brand of computer to another. Power cables have been standardized on most electrical applicances, including desktop computers for decades.
Make an effort to promote and implement standard power cables for laptops.
Anyone who has had to do a lot of road work, or anyone who has even had to ferry their work notebook between home and office every night, can probably empathize with this sentiment. Having a million different kinds of cords for a million different laptops also means extra inventory or replacement-ordering work for resellers, too. But Dell has its reasons.
James Gray, who works at Dell, responds:
As far as standardized ac ports, we design them to be unique to Dell for a couple reasons:
1. We want to sell them so we make the money, not a 3rd party 2. Safety (see reason below in the batteries) 3. Because we want only the exact amount of power going to the system as what should be regulated between our motherbooard and our AC adapter, some systems are very sensitive to irregularities in voltage and if a customer calls us with a fried board because they used a 3rd party AC adapter we have to tell them they're out of luck as the problem was caused by non dell standardized parts
As far as standardized batteries goes, check out the incidents where people's laptops caught on fire. With the exception of one, the customer had bought a 3rd party battery instead of one from Dell directly and it caused an overheat/spark which set the system ablaze. The one that was a Dell battery had something else wrong with it and it should have been serviced long before the event occured to prevent the fire.
"Dawn from Dell" wrote:
We make an effort to be as "common" as possible with our power solutions while being cost-effective, and will continue to do so in the future, though we expect that products at different ends of the expanding consumer spectrum will need to be evaluated on an individual basis.
Ok. Fine. Design power cords to be unique and cost-effective. But how about ruggedizing them to make them last longer?
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