Hasta La Gadget!

In his recent review of the Lenovo ThinkPad W700, Cisco Cheng noted that this high-end portable workstation for photographers and artists would soon be available with an optional secondary display to complement its 17-inch, 1,920 by 1,200 screen. The idea is to relegate lower-end tasks like reading e-mail, word processing, and Web surfing to the smaller screen, leaving the full 17 inches of the primary screen free for photo or art editing.

The dual-screen version, the W700ds, has arrived in our labs, and I took it out for a spin. It works as intended, and many professionals in its target audience may find it worth it to plunk down the 400+ bucks for this novel option.

Unheard of widescreen
impressive for a netbook,
if a bit pricey.

—Nicole Price Fasig

For the full-length, free-verse Dell Inspiron Mini 12 review check out PCMag.com.

This touch-screen tablet
is plenty rugged and light,
but will only irk.

—Nicole Price Fasig

For the full-length, free-verse Panasonic Toughbook CF-U1 review check out PCMag.com.

As if we didn’t have enough already, here comes some more bad tech news.

Tech research company Gartner said Wednesday that during the fourth quarter of 2008, the worldwide PC industry suffered its slowest growth rate since 2002. Gartner reported that worldwide shipments of PCs totaled 78.1 million units, which was just a 1.1 percent increase from the fourth quarter of 2007.

The region most affected by the recession in terms of PC growth was Asia/Pacific, which “recorded the worst shipment growth since Gartner started its PC statistics research,” said Mika Kitagawa, principal analyst for Gartner’s Client Computing Markets group. Comparatively, in the U.S., the PC market declined 10 percent, which is the worst shipment decline since the last U.S. recession in 2001.

The biggest winner in this time period was Acer, which continued to show incredible growth with PC shipments growing 31.1 percent worldwide and 55.4 percent in the U.S.

The biggest loser was Dell, which declined 16.4 percent in the U.S., where it leads the region for computer shipments.

Post by Sean Ludwig

Coby has never really been known as a manufacturer of high-end electronics. Heck, they sell the company’s products at my local bodega–not behind the counter. Until my trip around the CES showroom floor tonight, I had always associated the company almost exclusively with low-end MP3 players. Turns out Coby is in the notebook business, too.

The NBPC892 is Coby’s entry into the netbook space. The computer features an 8.9-inch screen, an Intel Atom N270 processor, and a surprisingly roomy 160-500GB hard drive. The netbook runs either XP or Linux, features 1GB to 2GB of RAM, and has a built-in 1.3-megapixel camera.

All in all, I’d wait for a review before rushing out and picking one up at your neighborhood 7-11.