Category: Laptops / Notebooks
Sony launches semi-portable entertinment Vaio NW series
Sony has launched a rather middle of the road Vaio range in the UK today known as the NW series. Now, that’s not supposed to be as damning as it sounds. I say middle of the road because you probably wouldn’t call it a portable at 2.7kg and you you might not rely on it as your main home PC with a 15.5″ screen. I think its best description is as your secondary home machine. What do you mean? It’s a Vaio. Of course you can afford three computers.
Like the little one from earlier, it’s got a 16:9 WXGA Sony X-Black LCD which should provide a lovely picture and an HDMI port on the back so you can watch all your HD downloads on your nice big Sony Bravia. You get 500GB of HDD for your storage or if you opt for the upgrade you get a Blu-ray combo drive to playback from plus a ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4570 graphics card for good measure too.
Naturally, it has all the lush Vaio stylings but they’ve also added some quick access options in the shape of a WEB launch button which’ll express boot a tailor made browser and a DISPLAY OFF switch, which along with raw materials and recycling standards, affords the NW series an ENERGY STAR 5.0 rating of eco-generosity.
It’s powered by a 2.1GHz T6500 Intel Core 2 Duo CPU and 4GB of 800MHz DDR2 RAM, so it’s not exactly a performance machine but it should certainly do you proud provided you’re not planning on doing any really serious gaming/video editing/defragging/DVD ripping multi-tasking.
Both versions (BD and non-BD) are out at the end of this month starting at £750 and you can pick them up in silver and gun metal brown which I never thought was a shade of brown but there you go.
Sony Vaio Mini W netbook coming in August
It’s got a 1.66GHz Intel Atom N280 CPU, a 10.1-inch screen, 1GB of RAM, runs Windows XP and weighs just 1.19kg. Now that sounds to me like Sony has decided to get with the program and bring out a netbook.
The Vaio Mini W-Series looks typically smooth with an WXGA LED screen, spaced keyboard, dimpled palm rest and free carry case to match your choice of white, pink or dark brown.
On the inside, there’s DDR2 RAM running at 533MHz, WLAN 802.11b/g/Draft-N, Bluetooth and 160GB of HDD. Surprised not to see an SSD but I’ve a feeling that might send the price a little high for a netbook.
It measures 179.6 mm x 267.8 x 32.4 and it’s out from August. Rather late to be releasing something like this when every TomTom, Dixons, and Harrods already has a netbook but there’s clearly a market here that Sony recognises. I’ll be interested to see if it offers anything that the others already don’t, apart from just the Vaio name.
Gallery: Top 10 Lightweight notebook PCs
Laptops, notebooks, netbooks… whichever flavour of portable PC they are, here are ten of the lightest yet fully-featured machines currently available. Is your favourite here? Click on the picture below to start the tour, and if you don't find yours…
SHINY VIDEO PREVIEW: The Archos 9 PC tablet
I got my hands on the Archos 9 at this morning’s launch. I have to say I like it. It did feel a tad heavy – but at less than 800g that was probably just an illusion because it is so slight it doesn’t look as though it will weigh hardly anything.
The touchscreen was very responsive and the pop-up keyboard is almost full-sized so unless you’ve got some extremely fat fingers there shouldn’t be any problem.
Also at the event Tony Limrick, MD of Archos Northern Europe told the assembled hacks to keep 15th September free for an Archos IMT Android announcement.
He didn’t give too much information away apart from to say that the IMTs would combine what Archos does best – multimedia playback and so on – and combine it with an Android based telephony system – complete with Google Apps.
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.
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.
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.
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.
You’ll be able to purchase all of these machines directly from Archos should you so desire.
Apple and NVIDIA to split?
Apple and NVIDIA may be parting company so soon after the two teamed up. There seems to have been an issue in the renegotiations of the partnership after overheating materials in MacBooks led to failures of the GeForce 8400M and 8600M GPUs. That meant that Jobs Inc had to extend the warranty of their units to three years and that’s not the kind of thing that makes any manufacturer happy.
Apple has apparently described NVIDIA’s attitude as arrogant and if the two can’t work it out then we could see the latter’s chips disappear from iMacs almost immediately and from the rest of the range within three to four years.
Seems a bit of a shame given the level of NVIDIA’s technology and the way that Apple has carved itself a niche at the graphics end of the market but the Cupertino crew has always prided itself on quality of product and, when the chips are down, there’s little choice in the matter.
(via Electronista)
Samsung's 16-inch, 16:9, multimedia based R620 laptop
Samsung has updated their R series laptop range. Well, I say updated but spec-wise the R620 isn’t all that different from the R610. Sure, the ATI Mobility Radeon HD4650 graphics card may be an improvement on the R610’s nVIDIA GeForce Go 9200M GS, but the HD4650 is only included in the premium models. The ATI Mobility Radeon HD4330 in the standard version isn’t all that different.
On board memory has gone up a gig to 4GB DDR2 and the maximum hard-drive is 500GB, although the standard size is only 160GB. It keeps the 16-inch, 16:9 HD ratio for movie watching via its built-in Blu-ray player. The premium version is full HD 1080p whilst the standard version has a resolution of 1366x 768. There’s also HDMI-out if you want to hook it up to your TV.
One new feature is the anti-bacterial keyboard. It’s coated with a special finish that makes it almost impossible for bacteria to live and breed. Presumably if you spill your Yakult on it, it will simply evaporate into thin-air.*
If you’re looking for a mid-range laptop and you’re also considering buying a Blu-ray player then this laptop could help you kill two birds with stone. As a laptop alone it is decent – not exactly a world-beater – but the added Blu-ray, plus fast transfer via the combo USB/eSATA, make it a pretty good media-centre laptop.
It’s out in July and the standard version will cost you £699 from Samsung.
* This will not actually happen. The Yakult will kill your laptop – don’t try it.
Related post: Samsung R610: 16″ Blu-ray multimedia laptop
What is a netbook?
Paul and I were having a chat this morning. Actually, it was more of a go at marketing departments. Packard Bell were the ones staring down the barrel, as it goes, but it could have been any laptop makers.
“Packard Bell launches the first netbook with AMD,” the press release read, and as my colleague said, we’re not so sure.
The problem is that we’ve got no proof. No one’s really set the definition of what makes a netbook and when a netbook becomes a notebook. We’re all clear that the Asus Eee PC 700 is a netbook but things start to get very laptoppy by the time you get to the Packard Bell dot m/a.
So, I think it’s about time we made some hard and fast rules on the matter here at Tech Digest. There’s some obvious categories we can look at, like size and weight, but, before we do, it’s important to remember what a netbook is all about. What’s it for? What’s the niche?
Well, according to Wikipedia, for the want of anywhere better to look –
“A netbook is a laptop computer designed for wireless communication and access to the Internet. Primarily designed for web browsing and e-mailing, netbooks rely heavily on the Internet for remote access to web-based applications and are targeted increasingly at cloud computing users who require a less powerful client computer.”
Ok. So, straight off the bat we’ve got our first stipulation.
TECH DIGEST RULE ONE OF NETBOOKS – A NETBOOK MUST HAVE WIRELESS ACCESS TO THE INTERNET
So, all netbooks must have Wi-Fi and or 3G access built-in. External dongles do not count.
Ok, what next? Well, it says they’re designed for web browsing and e-mail and rely heavily on the internet for remote access to web-based apps. Right, so it’s not a home or work computer, as we would expect. It’s for access to files when away from your base. It’s a mobile machine in other words.
TECH DIGEST RULE TWO OF NETBOOKS – A NETBOOK IS FOR USE ON THE MOVE
If it’s for mobile computing, then it’s got to be light and you have to be able to fit it into the kind of bag that you’d be carrying round anyway, regardless of where you were going. We’re talking size and weight here, and the question is – what are you prepared to carry around or, more to the point, what extra burden are you unlikely to notice?
Anything under a kilo qualifies in my book. That’s less than a bag of sugar. I can carry sugar. Two kilos is definitely too much. Hang on. Quick straw pole of Shiny Towers…
…right, it seems the average weight of the bags here is around 2-3 kilos. I’d suggest 50% more in your bag is too much, so I’m ruling 1.5kg and over out. I reckon 1.3kg is fair.
Sizewise, we’d have to rule out anything over 12-inches straight away. Wouldn’t fit in my bag. Ten inches is definitely ok. I’d say the biggest a netbook could be is 11.5-inches.
What else? Well, the apps are largely cloud-based and a less powerful computer is needed and, through that, the netbook can save battery life because, being a mobile machine, a long life is more important than high performance.
TECH DIGEST RULE THREE OF NETBOOKS – A NETBOOK MUST SACRIFICE PERFORMANCE FOR AS MUCH BATTERY AS POSSIBLE
First up, a discrete graphics processor is right out. Any juice for powering a GPU could be used for prolonging battery life, so a big “no” there. Integrated graphics, I’ll allow and certainly the likes of the Nvidia Tegra “system-on-a-chip” which inTEGRAtes a CPU and GPU in one silicon lump.
I’m rolling the idea of single-core CPUs in my head as well but, as much as I can see how that netbooks are only really for internet based activity, I can also appreciate that they could still involve a degree of multi-tasking and, provided efficient low voltage two core and above processors can be manufactured, then I’m happy to let that go.
So, that’s size, weight, power, battery but the last area I’d like to look at is cost. These things need to be cheap.
TECH DIGEST RULE FOUR OF NETBOOKS – A NETBOOK MUST BE CHEAP
We’re getting under powered, tiny little machines here. They have less hardware and less metal and they can’t do as much as their bigger brothers. There’s no way they should cost anything like as much. So, I’m setting a ceiling of £400. You can get a full size Dell for less than that, so that’s an absolute max.
Conclusions
So a computer is only a netbook if it…
has Wi-Fi and/or 3G
weighs 1.3kg or less
has a screen less than 12-inches
sacrifices performance for battery life
has no discrete GPU
cost less than £400
So, as we suspected, by that measure, the Packard Bell dot m/a is not a netbook. Other manufacturers, please take note/net.
Packard Bell release first AMD based netbook
You may recall last month we told you that Packard Bell is back. We told you all about some of their new range including the netbooks dot m and dot s.
Well now they’ve gone and announced another netbook, the strangely named dot m/a. The dot m/a is the first netbook to come with an AMD processor – the single-core 1.2GHz Athlon 64 L110. That’s all great. Except it’s not really a netbook. It’s a small, entry-level notebook.
The specs support my argument – the screen is 11.6-inch with a resolution of 1366×768. It’s got a graphics card – the ATI Radeon X1270 and it weighs 1.25kg. That’s a bit too hefty for a netbook in my opinion.
Packard Bell even state that they keyboard is “as large as a regular notebook”. Err, that’s because it is a regular notebook.
Ok, so we’ve established it’s not exactly a netbook but what has it got going for it? Well, for £349, it’s not a bad budget option if you’re after a fairly compact notebook.
It’s got a 160GB hard-drive with 1GB of RAM – both of which are expandable to double their current size. It has a multi-gesture touch pad including pinch and flick for you iPhone fans and it’s got a 5-in-1 memory card reader. Like other Packard Bell releases it comes complete with Adobe Photoshop elements pre-installed. Bluetooth and 3G can be added at an extra cost.
It’s pre-loaded with Vista so presumably it would qualify for a free upgrade to Windows 7, according to the statement released by Microsoft yesterday. It’s available in black or red and with a three or six-cell battery. The six-cell should give four hours of battery life.
It’s out next month – get one direct from Packard Bell. Just don’t expect to receive a netbook.
PREVIEW: Asus UX30 ultra-light, ultra-powerful, ultra-swish laptop
The chips allow for incredibly high performance at minimal energy cost meaning that you can make very lightweight, powerful machines with batteries that last up to eight hours. They look pretty damn swish too. There’s the 13-inch U30. the U50 and UX50 – all of which are fairly medium sized but sport all sorts of high end specs – but then one I liked most of all was the Asus UX30.
The chips allow for incredibly high performance at minimal energy cost meaning that you can make very lightweight, powerful machines with batteries that last up to eight hours. They look pretty damn swish too. There’s the 13-inch U30, the U50 and UX50 – all of which are fairly medium sized but sport all sorts of high end specs – but then one I liked most of all was the Asus UX30.
It’s a beautiful design, weighing just 1.39kg with the Li-polymer battery inside and powers along with 4GD of DDR2 RAM and a 500GB SSD. It’s got a 13.3-inch edge-to edge HD LED backlight screen and, most interestingly of all, boasts an 8 second boot up speed when using the Asus Express boot minimal desktop program. In practice, it worked out more like 5 seconds.
It’s available from September for £999, as are the rest of the range save the U30. A very nice offering from Asus.
Asus
