Brand: MacNews

A review of the new iBook in the Boston Globe says “there isn’t much not to love about the new iBook,” but the author faults the iBook due to his experience with the delete key coming off.

Apple’s new iBook is one of “four laptops Lilliputians might like,” according to a New York Times article that praises Apple’s compact consumer offering. “The iBook’s stealth feature is its price. The base model, at $1,300, is $500 less than the lowest-priced similarly configured Windows competitor, pounding a silver spike through the heart of the notion that Macintosh elegance necessarily commands a price premium.”

Alco Blom has posted URL Manager 3.0b12 for Mac OS X, an update to the Carbonized beta version of the excellent bookmark management utility. The software’s shared bookmarks feature are currently supported under iCab and Internet Explorer; OmniWeb does not yet support shared menus. URL Manager is US$25 shareware.

Addonics today announced the Pocket SuperDisk 240, a lightweight, 240 MB SuperDisk drive that can also read and write to ordinary floppies. The Pocket SuperDisk 240 also offers the capability of storing 32 MB of data on an ordinary 1.4 MB floppy disk. The USB drive sells for US$199.

Microsoft today released Office XP for Windows. The much heralded software offers a number of new features — many borrowed from Office 2001 for Mac — including “unlocking hidden features,” or aspects of Office that claim to boost productivity but that many previously were unaware of. Office 2001 for Mac OS X, due this fall, may include some of the new features found in Office XP.