This is a long-overdue idea: HP has decided to do away with the bulky cardboard and foam packaging systems they’ve traditionally used to package up their laptops, at least for one of their models. Instead, the laptop carry-bag IS the packaging and only uses some bubble wrap to cushion the components inside the bag. If you look at the link, you’ll see that this lets HP package 3 laptops in a shipping box instead of one box per machine (so it’s not completely box-free). And the bag is made out of recycled materials.

The net result is that HP reduced the per-unit packaging by a whopping 97% and reduced their overall packaging for this laptop by 65% (along with using some other shipping reduction methods). That’s really incredible, and I would love to see all the PC manufacturers look for similarly innovative packaging solutions. Heck, I’d go so far as to say that almost every item that sits on a retail shelf could have its packaging reduced if there was enough motivation on the part of the makers.

I know this sounds hard to believe, but there WERE other bits of news over the weekend other than Sarah Palin and Hurricane Gustav.

Comcast very cleverly used these two media meltdowns to slip out their announcement that they will start capping customer Internet bandwidth usage beginning October 1. This came as no surprise whatsoever to anyone who follows the industry news and related blogs, it was just a formal announcement of something everyone had been waiting to hear for some time.

The cap will be 250 gigabytes downstream and upstream per month, roughly equivalent to filling three typical laptop hard drives to capacity. Comcast equates this to downloading 50,000 songs a month, or sending 40 million e-mails. In other words, the cap has been set high enough that the majority of average Internet users won’t have to worry about it, at least initially. This is, frankly, Comcast’s response to getting their hands slapped over throttling throughput to curb BitTorrent and other P2P traffic. They fully expect that the cap will only be an issue with the heavy-duty downloaders, who, it seems, they are sure are up to no good. If you read some of the comments in that link above, one valid counterargument is that the increasing popularity of streaming high-definition video will challenge that assumption relatively quickly.

Personally, I am not worried about getting anywhere close to 250 GB per month, even given some of my downloading habits, but I do think that Comcast has committed one big faux pas in the process. They didn’t make any provision for their customers to be able to monitor their own bandwidth usage. This article at Download.com offers some quick reviews and links for some free monitoring tools for Windows and Mac PCs, and I would recommend trying out a couple even if you’re completely sure that you’re not going to hit the cap — it’s useful to know how much you ARE using, because another likely development in broadband services will be the transition to a “metered” model where you pay for what you use. That particular concept is being tested right now in a couple of markets and may prove more popular with the cable companies AND with lower-usage consumers.

Via Slashdot, this tech website got a sneak peek at the proposed connectors and cable for the upcoming USB 3.0 spec. The spec was first previewed back in January, and won’t be finalized until later this year, but Intel released what they’ve already come up with so far, which is about 90% of the final spec. As I posted before (see that second link above) USB 3.0 will be ten times faster than the current USB 2.0, in part because it will allow two-way data transfer. That’s a big improvement over the earlier versions. The linked article gives this example: a 27-gig file will transfer from your hard drive to your USB 3.0-compatible device in 1 minute and 10 seconds. Moving the same-sized file over USB 2.0 takes at least 15 minutes. Ain’t nobody going to complain about that. Plus, USB 3.0 will be downwardly compatible with USB 2.0, so your present-day devices won’t be doomed to the scrap heap any earlier than they would be otherwise. But, as I cautioned a few months ago, it will be at least 2010 before you see this in any shipping hardware of any kind.

Haven’t heard much about Vonage lately, which, if you’re Vonage, is a good thing. This recent post at DSL Reports says that Vonage had finally managed to stem the hemorrage of users that had been going on even before the patent lawsuits but had gotten to a critical level when it looked like Vonage was going to have to close its doors. Prior to the lawsuits, Vonage’s astronomical churn rate was almost 100% due to customer service issues, so that speaks well for their ability to fix their own internal problems. We actually switched from Vonage to Comcast when things looked bleakest for Vonage, but the actual phone service from Comcast was terrible, and you KNOW how bad Comcast’s customer support is, so after three months or so we went back to Vonage. Quite honestly, we have never had any significant problems with Vonage technically or support-wise, but I guess we’re in the minority…or we were.

The XM-Sirius merger finally went through several weeks ago, and earlier this month CEO Mel Karmazin promised that new hardware that would be cross-compatible with both services would be available in the first quarter of 2009. So much for getting that new satellite radio for your car for Christmas, I guess, but that’s ahead of the 12-month deadline set by the FCC, so good for them.

Garmin’s highly-anticipated (well, by me, anyway) Nuviphone has been pushed back to sometime in the first half of 2009 due to difficulties meeting the requirements of some of the carriers. Lately, I am so enamored of my iPod Touch that the temptation to buy a 3G iPhone has been getting pretty strong, but my blog buddy Jack and others are finding that the new iPhone isn’t quite “twice as fast for half the price”, so I will continue to bide my time to see if the Nuviphone pans out.

And this isn’t really a tech link, but it’s related: TechDirt.com points to this British IT news website’s report that 30% of Internet users admit to buying products via links in spam e-mail. The report cites a study by web security vendor Marshal, showing a marked increase from earlier studies by analysts like Forrester Research; in 2004, Forrester calculated that 20% of Internet users bought items via spam. Considering that in the traditional mail-order business, a response rate of 4% was considered huge, the success of spam is simply unheard of. That’s a lot of enlarged penises and Paris Hilton videos, kiddies.

So, the story making the rounds on the tech and gadget websites is that real sales figures for the Amazon Kindle e-book have finally surfaced and the total is 240,000 units. To put that into some sort of context, Apple sold almost 11,000,000 iPods just in March of this year. So there’s no imminent danger of the Kindle becoming the must-have gadget any time soon, but the sales figures are pretty much in line with what “The Experts” said. “The Experts” also expect sales to double or triple over the next four quarters. Combined with the sales of the e-books themselves (Amazon says they now have 145,000 titles available), the Kindle represents a billion-dollar-a-year revenue stream. That’s decent, though probably not as earth-shattering as some of the early pronouncements.

One blogging buddy of mine simply adores her Kindle and credits it with re-energizing her reading habit, and another blogger I regularly read is similarly ga-ga about his. Even one of the little old ladies I do tech support for is talking about buying one, so it’s clear that Amazon has managed to capture interest in an e-book reader far beyond the futile efforts of earlier e-book devices. I still can’t envision wanting one myself, though. I’ve never been one to tote a book along wherever I go, and remain content with paper books at home.

Unless…blogger and magazine editor Rex Hammock, who likes his Kindle (but with some reservations), mentions the 500-pound gorilla of gizmos in this post from May: could the Kindle survive at all if Apple decided to make an e-book reader as an extension of their iPhone product? The current form factor of the iPhone is too small to work well for in-depth reading, but if they made it a bit bigger it would be adequate. And if the device had the ability to do everything the iPod Touch (the phone-less iPhone) does PLUS e-books, it would be a formidable gadget indeed.