Tag: laptops
CES 2010 – Sony Z Series laptops video
These are 13inch screen laptops whose key feature is a smart backlit keyboard and a LED backlight that adjusts automatically to lighting conditions. It will be on sale shortly for around $1900 It is in dark box to illustrate…
Virgin launch gadget help service
It can be mighty frustrating, settling down for a marathon internet-trawling session only to be bombarded with error messages to let you know that, as ever, your Wi-Fi connection has gone up the creek. The ever-industrious Richard Branson and his…
Dell form retailing partnership with John Lewis
Dell and John Lewis have signed a deal which will make the shop the first department store to sell Dell products. John Lewis will exclusively sell the Adamo XPS laptop, touted as the thinnest in the word at 9.9mm thick….
Acer launches Timeline notebook series – video hands on
While the gentlemen from Acer were busy dropping the Windows 7 bomb, they were also launching a bunch of computers too. We were all quite excited by the prospect of getting out hands on the Revo and the bigger Acer Aspire One but, for me, they were all overshadowed by the Timeline series that had remained under wraps.
They may not have the colour of a bright happy Dell but there’s something in the matte finish on their aluminium grey chassis that gives them a proud sense of style in the flesh. Take a look.
Yes, you heard right. Each of the 13.3″, 14.1″ and 15.6″ sizes starts at £549 and finishes somewhere in the seven hundreds if I’m not mistaken. They’re all around an inch thick, nice and light and highly recommended. Do watch out though. The 13-incher doesn’t come with an optical drive whereas the others have DVD burners. I’d feel pretty good about having one of these myself, particularly as there’s plenty of room to add up to 8GB of DDR3 and the option of a dedicated GPU.
The Timelines come loaded with Vista but Acer did make brief mention oo a new product for launch around the end of Q3 that will come with the option of a free Windows 7 upgrade if you buy it before 23rd October. That will be their All-in-One touchscreen machine, which’ll be Atom powered and come in 18.5″-23″ sizes. More on that one in the coming months no doubt but, fingers crossed, there’ll be some NVIDIA Ion action on that one too.
They did show us a demo of that graphics platform at work on the Acer Aspire Revo with its Atom chip and plethora of USB ports quite happily running a fps game at low graphics. It was as smooth as we’d been led to believe.
Last up, I finally got my hands on the bigger second generation of the fantastic Acer Aspire One netbook. This time it’s blessed with 11.6 inches of screen and a full size keyboard but somehow it’s lost a little of that style.
They’re out as of today and still running XP. Even if they’re not as pretty, you’ll never suffer from finger cramp again, you’ll have doubled the battery life and you even get Dolby Pro Logic sound thrown in too. Can’t say fairer than that.
Acer Timeline
HP launches Pavillion DV3 – £699 entertainment PC
Having launched their DV2 notebook, HP hasn’t decided to stop there. Today sees the announcement of the HP Pavillion DV3 entertainment laptop complete with 13.3-inch LED widescreen, 512MB NVIDIA GeForce G105M GPU and DVD RW/Blu-ray drive. A good start if you’re serious about film watching and gaming to the degree of £699.
It’s out from next month month in two colours dubbed Espresso and Moonlight because of the swirly coloured imprints you’ll be able to make out on the cases just over the jump. Got to admit they look quite nice and I won’t break their hearts by referring to them as black and white. Whoops.
You get a built-in 34mm remote control so you can set up and sit back, a 5-in-1 card reader for full compatibility and dual headphone jacks so that you and the Mrs/Mr don’t have to wake the baby.
It’s all served up with Windows Vista and the HP media software package and looks really quite reasonable for the cash. Naturally, the memory and processors will be negotiable on price.
HP
HP DV2 Preview:
GALLERY: Packard Bell lightens up with EasyNote Butterflies and dot netbooks
For the budget end of the Acer family, Packard Bell has announced some rather swish looking options in the notebook/netbook department today. The cost seems to be that they’re perhaps not quite as cheap as you’d expect from PB but then that might have more to do with the exchange rate than anything else.
Each comes with some kind of Dolby sound technology and 16:9 wide, LED backlit screens to save as much battery life as possible. All look like reasonable options but it’s the EasyNote TR85 I’ve got my eye on the most.
Click the pretty looking image below for a closer look at all four.
UK Government donates a thousand old PCs to charity
Fancy a bit of a feel-good story for Friday afternoon? The UK Government’s Department for International Development has decided to ship a thousand laptops that it doesn’t use any more to Africa. It’s all being done through charity Computer Aid, who we’ve covered before.
The laptops, previously in use by civil servants, aren’t OLPCs or any other low-cost, low-spec machines – they’re proper full-on laptops. They’re going to organizations like the Prof. Iya Abubakar Community Resource Center in Nigeria, which helps local people start their own businesses.
Rumours that each laptop is chock-full of confidential documents and databases are so far unsubstantiated.
TECHNOLOGY DEATHMATCH: Notebook vs Netbook
It was just over a year ago now that netbooks first hit the scene. Of course, we didn’t know them as netbooks at the time. They were Eee PCs, until the world and his wife brought their own versions out and suddenly we needed to invent a new category.
We toyed with sub-notebook for a while and you’ll still see me drop it in the odd post when I’m searching for another word for netbook but this isn’t the point. The point is that they’re here now. The game has changed. The paradigm has shifted and now that the dust is settling is the novelty wearing off?
So, today here on Technology Deathmatch, I’m affording you an entirely subjective view on the matter with the odd bit of balance thrown in. It’s George vs the Dragon, David vs Goliath, Jonah vs the Whale – yes, NOTEBOOK VS NETBOOK!…
Toshiba Qosmio X305-Q708 gaming laptop raises the bar and the price
Toshiba has announced a new pink gaming laptop, the Qosimo X305-Q708, presumably aimed at that key demographic of “girls who like gaming enough to buy a high-spec gaming laptop, but are surprisingly still girly enough to be the sort of people who buy things that are pink.
Asus is hiring – boosting laptop manufacturing by 77% to cope with demand
The globally beloved small laptop maker has said it’s well on target to sell 11.3 million notebooks and netbooks this year and will shift a massive 20 million next year, making it one of the “top four” laptop sellers in the world.
Asus is currently hiring old women and buying hair-nets and raw materials in an attempt to boost its factory output by 77% this year, as it attempts to cope with rocketing demand for its extremely wide – and rapidly widening – range of cheap laptops…
