Hasta La Gadget!

Crucial has already managed to stuff its m4 SSD into Ultrabook sizes, but the 7mm thick design may still be too portly for the thinner laptops in the pack. With that in mind, the flash memory guru has just started shipping the m4 mSATA, a barebones card that sits cozily next to the motherboard either as a cache for a rotating disk or as a main drive. It’s still as speedy as many of its bigger cousins, with read speeds of up to 500MB/s per second. We suspect most buyers will be lured in by the low prices: at just $53 for a cache-friendly 32GB SSD and no more than $226 for a 256GB example, it’s entirely feasible to give that spinning-drive Ultrabook a shot in the arm.

Continue reading Crucial ships mSATA-based m4 SSD upgrade, your Ultrabook never felt better

Filed under: Laptops, Storage

Crucial ships mSATA-based m4 SSD upgrade, your Ultrabook never felt better originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 17 Jul 2012 15:21:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Analysts claim there could be a new leader in the PC market, with the possibility of Lenovo overtaking Hewlett-Packard’s top spot before the end of the year. If it does happen, it would be the first Chinese PC maker company to take the top place in any global technology sector. Last year, Lenovo PC sales overtook Dell sales in the third quarter, moving its way up to the number two spot globally with a 14.9 percent market share—just a mere 0.6 percent short of HP’s market share.

Despite inching toward number one, analysts are saying that the Lenovo’s fast growing market share has come at the expense of profit margins. The slump in market growth for personal computers combined with tougher competition in the tablet sector are a couple of the biggest challenges Lenovo is facing. PC shipments slowed down during this year’s second quarter in response to the wait for the release of Windows 8 scheduled to come out in October.

Lenovo should benefit from the increase in PC sales if Windows 8 encourages more demand, but an added drawback to the up and coming OS release is that it’s designed for both tablets and computers. Along with other Android vendors, still competition stemming from the Windows tablet market may cause some setbacks for Lenovo PC sales as well as its LePad tablets.

[via Reuters]

Lenovo close to overtaking HP as world’s top PC maker is written by Elise Moreau & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

Sure, thin, light and power-efficient may be the latest trend in notebook design, but one category of portable computing isn’t afraid of going against the grain: the oversized gaming laptop. These big machines often flirt with double-digit weights, with screens in excess of 17 inches and the most powerful chipsets under the hood. Samsung’s Series 7 Gamer is no exception, of course, weighing in at 8.39 pounds and packing plenty of power. The machine’s recent US debut isn’t its first foray into the market, however — this machine first appeared in Europe late last year, albeit with an older processor and GPU. Now, Sammy has brought the rig stateside, adorning it with new parts for the New World, namely a 2.3GHz Core i7-3610QM CPU and NVIDIA’s GTX 675M graphics processor. How does Samsung’s first oversized gaming machine measure up? Let’s find out.

Continue reading Samsung Series 7 Gamer review: the company’s first gaming laptop makes its way to the US

Filed under: Gaming, Laptops

Samsung Series 7 Gamer review: the company’s first gaming laptop makes its way to the US originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 14 Jul 2012 12:00:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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HP has been fleshing out its Ultrabook lineup as of late, most recently adding the metal-clad Envy Spectre XT to the mix, but the company is also addressing the lower end of the market with its Sleekbook line, announced back in May. Confusingly, these thin-and-light systems look exactly the same as the new Envy-branded Ultrabooks, except that the Sleekbooks are less expensive — namely because for one reason or another they don’t meet Intel’s Ultrabook guidelines. One such notebook, the Envy Sleekbook 6z, stands apart from the Ultrabook fold with an AMD Trinity APU — a spec that helps keep the starting price nice and low at $600.

That’s not to say that all of HP’s Sleekbooks ditch Intel processors, but given the choice between and AMD- and Intel-based model we quickly chose the former. After all, the 6z is the first Trinity-powered system we’ve had the chance to test, so we were naturally curious to see how it stacks up against recent Ivy Bridge machines — and we imagine you are, too. So without any further ado, let’s get to it.

Continue reading HP Envy Sleekbook 6z review: an inexpensive thin-and-light with AMD innards

HP Envy Sleekbook 6z review: an inexpensive thin-and-light with AMD innards originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 13 Jul 2012 16:00:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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For a while there, the march of Ultrabooks was comprised almost entirely of halo products: skinny, relatively expensive things designed to help Intel and its OEM partners make a good impression on the general laptop-buying public. But with 110-plus models in the pipeline, they can’t all be expensive, right? By now, you may have noticed that Ultrabooks are starting to look a little less uniform: there have been larger ones, heavier ones, some with optical drives, some with discrete graphics.

Next up: cheaper ones. Just in time for back-to-school shopping season, we’re seeing a wave of more reasonably priced Ultrabooks, many of them with traditional spinning hard drives and slightly heavier frames. One of these is the Lenovo IdeaPad U310, a machine that brings Core i5, 4GB of RAM and hybrid storage for $799. Oh, and its design is pleasantly reminiscent of the IdeaPad U300s, a higher-end Ultrabook we reviewed late last year. No doubt, then, it’ll be a tempting option for people who can’t afford to spend $1,000-plus on a laptop. But is it worth it? Let’s find out.

Continue reading Lenovo IdeaPad U310 review: a reasonably priced Ultrabook for the masses

Filed under: Laptops

Lenovo IdeaPad U310 review: a reasonably priced Ultrabook for the masses originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 13 Jul 2012 12:00:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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