CES 2010: Day 1 Round-Up

With CES 2010 now well under way, it can be pretty tough keeping track of all the latest announcements. Here's Tech Digest's round-up of the of best Day 1 at CES 2010 so far, including all the news from the…

Archos announces release details for mini PC range

Archos has officially announced its latest mini PC range, although we told you all about them last month. See our original post for the full specs – we’re far too lazy to type it all out again.

The most exciting of the new releases is undoubtedly the Archos 9 touch-screen Mini PC. It’s due to launch in September and will cost either £449.99 or £499.99 depending on the hard drive size – 60GB or 120GB.

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Next up, and in no particular order, is the Archos 13s. This lightweight notebook (the screen is far too large for it be considered a netbook according to our new rules) will be out in August and will cost £549.99.

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The Archos 10s – the successor to the Archos 10 – is officially the thinnest netbook around. According to Archos it is anyway. Answers on a postcard if you can find one thinner than 22mm. It will cost £329.99 for a 3-cell battery version and £20 more for a 6-cell. Who the heck would but the 3-cell to save £20? Again, it’s out in August.

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Finally is the Archos 9 Classmate – the shockproof, partly water-resistant, kid-friendly netbook. It’s aimed at kids aged five upwards and will be pre-loaded with key-stage educational software. It’s £319.99 and it’s out, you guessed it, in August.

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You’ll be able to purchase all of these machines directly from Archos should you so desire.

The Smartbooks are coming! Quick, the Smartbooks are coming

We called it: Smartbooks. Smartbooks are going to be massiver than massive. And the proof is in the concept pudding.

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These interesting, if not perfectly polished, concept drawings, highlight the way in which the Smartbook will evolve to fill the gap between Smartphones and Netbooks/Notebooks, and might eventually grow to replace both.

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The drawings produced in partnership with the Savannah College of Art and Design also show the way in which modular production will allow a degree of customization production, catered to each user’s preferences, not easily possible with current production methods.

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If I’m brutally honest, I think some of these drawings, are well, pretty A-level-Design-Technology, but it’s not so much the designs but the concepts behind them which I find exciting.

Sentences like this: “Smartbooks are cloud-computing-centric and characterised by all-day battery life, instant-on functionality and persistent connectivity.”

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I’ve images of small utilitarian fixed-state HDs operating specifically designed OSs with everything kept in the cloud and streamed seamlessly via uber quick all-covering 4th or 5th generation mobile networks. GBs and GBs of media at my disposal anywhere in the world, on OLED touchscreens with slide-out QWERTYs and intergrated high-lumen pico projectors. Ooh, wow sorry, got a tad giddy. But it is exciting right?

Samsung announces N310, their new 10.1 inch netbook

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It must have been, ooh, nearly a week since our last new netbook announcement, so thankyou Samsung for breaking the hours of silence by announcing the N310.

The new netbook, which follows on from the NC10 series, will be 10.1 inches, offers an unspecified Atom processor and 160gb hard disk space. Long gone are the days when your netbook’s storage space would be dwarfed by your mp3 player. It will also offer optional HSDPA or WiBro connectivity for internet when wireless signal is out of reach.

MSI Wind U110 ECO adds good battery life to the netbook experience

There are plenty of things to praise about netbooks. Their simplicity, their small form and their portability to name but a few. Battery life is conspicuously absent from this list though. To keep things small, batteries have to be scaled back – it's all a vital saccrifice. MSI's latest addition to the Wind family looks set to change this though, and the U110 ECO promises to offer an impressive 9 hours of uptime from a single charge.

Whether or not these are the kind of results we'd see in everyday use remains to be seen, as most manufacturers are generous in their estimates to say the least, but even if this is exaggerated by 2-3 hours, this is still an impressive increase. Current netbooks' batteries typically last between 2 and 5 hours, and early eeePCs like mine have been conciously underclocked in order to slow the drain.

Introducing the Pocket Yoga – the netbook that never was

These days, with every man and his dog owning a netbook of some kind, you have to do something really special to stand out from the crowd. The Pocket Yoga seemed to have done that, kicking up a storm in the blog world – and then we found out its based on a concept from two years ago.

According to the Lenovo Design Matters Blog, all the images that appeared on their Flickr feed and got people talking about a netbook/tablet crossover are just that: images – two-year-old prototypes as a matter of fact, which would have put the company well ahead of the netbook trend. That’s a real shame because, as you’ll see from the gallery below, the pictures look like a stylish alternative to the popular smartphones of the moment. Although, that said, they clearly didn’t anticipate the handcramp that extended writing on an early netbook can give one.

So for the moment at least, you can chalk this one up to a misguided rumour. The pictures are real but they shouldn’t be amounting to much more. Pity.

To see what might have been, click the picture to look through the gallery.

Alan Martin

Lenovo’s Flickr Feed (via Design Matters)