Well, the wait is over, as it’s finally made its appearance in the form of the IdeaPad S10e, a well designed netbook with a decent feature set and a competitive price tag, the only downside being the battery life from the 3-cell battery.
You can tell straight away which family of notebooks it’s related to, as the squared-off design, measuring 25 x 18.3 x 2.8cm, makes it look and feel like a ThinkPad that’s been shrunk in the wash, which to many people makes it a winner from the start. But being a netbook it’s not only available in the familiar black, it comes in red and white as well.
Acer Aspire One, a 249×170x29mm PC notebook in the history of Laptops. It is smaller than your average diary and is less than one kilo. You can have Aspire One with available colors to choose from, Seashell White, Sapphire Blue, Coral Pink and Golden Brown. People say that your color is your style, your style is your signature. Having an Aspire One is one fashion statement you can have!
It is said that this laptop boots in only 10 seconds, have a load of that! And a lot of feature an advanced laptop would possess.
Nothing special about the Singulum laptop except its fashion. Decorated with wooden finish and ivory or gold keyboard, the 15″ laptop running on 2GHz Intel Core 2 Duo and configured with plenty of RAM at 2GB, and huge storage of 160GB Serial ATA.
Running on Windows Vista Business OS, the Singulum laptop also sports DVD burner, Fax/Modem, Gigabit Ethernet, and Intel Wi-Fi.
Doesn't look too bad, either. Heck, it even has a backlit touchpad. Nice. Pricing starts at $2600, $3400 loaded.
It’s bound to appeal to some users - the larger screen inevitably resulting in a less cramped interface, but does the extra size mean you’d be better off with a regular, more powerful full-sized laptop?
Colours and contrast on the Super-TFT screen are excellent, as with the smaller Mini 9. Dell has put the extra real estate to good use, fitting a higher 1280 x 800 pixel resolution than most netbooks. With enough space for multiple windows, it offers better usability than its rivals.
Proposed to be sold as a stand-alone unit the HP LiM (Less is More) concept is set to feature a 19″ transparent touch OLED screen along with a wireless keyboard. The touch screen slides down to create a more ergonomic touch experience and easy navigation. It also features a virtual trackpad thus cutting down on mouse costs.
Staying within your budget doesn’t mean forsaking performance. The Brite Star notebooks come equipped with everything you need to work, study or play, at a price that is sure to please. Equipped with a powerful flows seamlessly from the office to your home. Plus, with its built in stereo speakers and wireless LAN antenna, these completely mobile units are capable of handling any duty from here to there. Get all of the performance and features you need to satisfy your office, home office, and personal needs with the Brite Star notebooks.
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starting from Rs. 55,990 Taxes & levies extra | | HP Pavilion tx2000 Entertainment Notebook PC series | |||
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Dell is offering Windows-Linux hybrid laptops that use both Intel and ARM processors. Though the user would never know it.
As pointed out in this EE Times report, entitled "Dell has dragged the Linux-ARM Trojan horse inside the Wintel PC," Dell is offering a processor-plus-OS subsystem separate from the main Windows-Intel system.
The goal is to give users instant access to e-mail without booting up the operating system and extend battery life by running Linux on a very low-power ARM processor. Basic ARM processor designs are licensed by U.K.-based ARM Holdings to companies like Samsung and Texas Instruments, which then manufacture the chip.
This ARM presentation slide indicates Linux is running on an ARM processor in Dell laptops.
(Credit: ARM)Warren East, president and CEO of ARM, highlighted this subsystem while discussing the company's 2008 financial results earlier this month. "(There are) interesting hybrid products where PCs are adopting ARM technology alongside Intel technology for functions such as the Internet and e-mail because that gives you much longer battery life as a user," East said during a 2008 earnings conference call.
Here's Dell ad copy for its Latitude ON feature: "Dell Latitude ON, a new technology that will enable near-instant access to e-mail, calendar, attachments, contacts and the Web without booting into the system's main operating system (OS)...on the Latitude E4200 and E4300, Dell Latitude ON uses a dedicated low-voltage sub-processor and OS that can enable multi-day battery life."
Hewlett-Packard offers an application called Quick Look 2 (PDF) but this works differently than Dell's system. HP describes it as giving the user "immediate access to information from your Microsoft Office Outlook program...by proactively capturing information and storing it outside your computer's operating system."
The next criminally overpriced laptop is the 13-inch Sony Vaio Z Series ultraportable laptop (3.4 pounds). The VGN-Z590UBB model is priced at $3,899.99. Amazingly, this comes with only a one-year warranty.
Sony Vaio Z series is aimed presumably at Wall Street firms flush with stimulus-package cash
(Credit: Sony)But first a few positives. One of the most unusual features of the Vaio Z is a discrete Nvidia GeForce 9300M graphics chip. Almost all of the newer ultraportables come with Intel 4500MHD integrated graphics only. So this is certainly a plus and echoes the Nvidia 9400M graphics in the newest MacBook Air. It also packs DDR3 SDRAM memory. This is good too.
But there is little to justify (in my opinion) a price tag approaching $4,000 (unless Sony has doubled up on gold memory connectors and isn't telling us about it). Yes, you get new Intel silicon (a P9500 running at 2.53GHz), hybrid graphics (Nvidia and Intel), a high-resolution LED display (1600 x 900), but nothing that justifies forking over $3,900, even if you're Merrill Lynch flush with stimulus-package cash.
The third up is the 12-inch Fujitsu LifeBook B6230 (3.2 pounds), priced at $1,799. Though it's listed lower than the Voodoo and the Sony, the features are strikingly unimpressive for the $1,800 list price. An archaic Intel ULV U7600 (1.2 GHz) processor (533 MHz front-side bus), 1GB of memory, an 80GB hard disk drive, 802.11a/b/g wireless (no "n" here), and a one-year warranty round out (yawn) the features.
The price of Apple's MacBook Air is less egregious than the others but still exorbitant
(Credit: Apple)In descending order of extravagance, at No. 4 is the 12-inch Toshiba Portege R600 model S4202. Price aside, a quick glance at the features would impress most prospective buyers: very light at 2.4 pounds, standard 3GB of memory, a 128GB solid-state drive, a integrated optical drive, 802.11a/g/n wireless, and a Webcam.
What's the downside to these decent features? You guessed it, the price: $2,999--and that includes a slow Intel SU9400 (1.4GHz) processor. With full-featured Netbooks costing about one-sixth the price (between $500 and $700) and an HP Pavilion dv3 ultraportable on the way priced at about $900, the Toshiba begins to look, well, overpriced.
Finally, I must mention the Apple MacBook Air (I know I'll get slammed for this). The newest version with the upgraded Intel processor, Nvidia graphics, and a 128GB solid-state drive is certainly a vast improvement over the original. But in the age of the Netbook and seriously budget-constrained buyers $2,500 ($2,499) is just too expensive.
Apple needs to bring the high-end MBA down to about $2,000. Still pricey but probably justifiable (to the lucky few out there who sold their Nantucket vacation home before the crash).
Let's start with the Hewlett-Packard Voodoo Envy 133, probably the most brazenly overpriced of the batch because it will still set you back as much as $2,700 despite the fact that it hasn't been updated in almost eight months and, accordingly, comes with obsolete hardware.
The 13-inch ultra-slim Voodoo Envy 133 model NV4050NA is priced at $2,699.99 (with "instant rebate"), but the buyer gets nothing extraordinary for this extraordinary price, with the possible exception of an external optical drive and a power adapter with a wireless access point built in.
The stratospheric-price-defying negatives include an old processor, a lagging-edge solid-state drive (64GB instead of the current 128GB standard), and last year's graphics.
Here's a quick rundown:
