It’s a PC. No, it’s a tablet. No, it’s both.

Not content to let Lenovo and Sony steal the show with humongous desk-bound tablets, ASUS has unveiled its own take on the “coffee table computer” – the ASUS Transformer AiO.

True to its transformer moniker, the computer runs both Windows 8 and Android 4.1, and has both an Nvidia Tegra 3 processor and an Intel Core processor. …

A “lukewarm” response to Microsoft’s Windows 8 has failed to arrest the declining popularity of the PC in 2012, as shipments continued to slip, said research firm Gartner earlier this week.

In a report out on Tuesday, it said more than 90 million PCs were shipped worldwide in the fourth quarter of 2012, down 4.9 per cent from the same period a year ago. For the full year, the shipments totalled more than 352 million, a decline of 3.5 per cent from 2011. …

Laptops will soon flip, swivel and rotate to give you both a traditional clamshell design to type on as well as a touch screen to dab at when you’re on a plane, for example.

Just how do PC makers see their role in this so-called “post-PC” era when users are expected to drastically change the way they interact with these devices? We spoke with Jessie Quek of Lenovo to find out what to expect, starting from the next few exciting months. …

Parallels Desktop will need no introduction to Mac users who use it to enjoy the best of both Windows and Mac worlds by running programs from the two different operating systems side by side on the same machine.

For them, and indeed many more Mac users, they’d be happy to hear that the latest, newly-minted version – Parallels Desktop 7 – now promises more than 90 new enhancements and features. Key among these is full integration with the latest Mac OSX Lion. …

Techgoondu had the chance to be at unConference 2009 held yesterday at the Biopolis, thanks to the kind folks at e27 who had put together an excellent program that brought together some of the top forward-thinkers in the region. Here’s a recap of what I felt were the highlights of the event:

Panel discussion: Innovation in Asia and where is it heading? …

Yes. you heard it right. Even if you are playing a single player campaign or a 1vs1 skirmish against the computer. You need to first launch Steam and log in to Steam for the game to even launch. And this is not just for initial activation, but for subsequent plays. So when I tried to run the game without logging into Steam, nothing happens at all. The game doesn’t even launch. I log into Steam and the game loads.

It’s quite obvious what these guys are trying to do – they are trying to fight piracy. But they end up alienating the users. I have played RTS since the first Dune 2, and I have never had to go online to fight against the computer. In fact, I have never played a PC game that requires me to do this, unless it is an MMOG like World Of Warcraft.

I understand that piracy is really killing the PC business, but in an environment where console games are outselling PC games (revenues for console games are about 8x more than PC games worldwide) and beating the shit out of them, you don’t want to make you legitimate PC gamers angry.

And what about selling to the countries without much of a Net penetration? Or have they given up on these countries altogether?

Update: Some forumers are asking if this will work if Steam is running in offline mode. I will try that tonight. Another issue is whether you need to have a Windows Live account logged-in to play. Will also test that tonight. But having played this game for about 6 hours, I do like it a lot.