You don’t have to be an organization fiend to love these new products by Skooba, but it helps. Check out the Cable Stable, above left. This organizer opens like a book and features a grid of elastic hold-downs in different sizes and orientations. The strips can stretch and expand to accommodate nearly any portable gadgets, cord, adapter, or other accessory. If you travel with a half-dozen electronic accessories, this is a great way to organize the cables you’ll need to power them. It lists for $39.95.

The new Skooba Wraps (above right) are simpler but just as handy. These padded squares can be wrapped and self-secured around nearly any mobile device. Protect a digital camera with the small wrap or a notebook with the large one. The company says they’re an ideal way to cope with the challenges of air travel. Ranging in price from $12.95 to $17.95, they look like helpful accessories to have on hand.

Gelaskins, which makes artist-designed protective coverings for cell phones, notebooks, and other devices, already has an impressive stable of talent, but the addition of six Frank Miller designs makes a comic geek’s heart beat a little faster. The portfolio includes four black-and-white images from Sin City and two color images from 300.

The horizontal images can be made into gel covers for 13- to 15.4-inch laptops, while the vertical images work great as iPhone covers. Prices range from $14.95 for an iPhone cover to $29.95 for a laptop cover. The covers use 3M adhesive technology and can be easily removed if you want to sell your laptop or simply use a different cover. All six Frank Miller designs are available now.

Our crack team over at Engadget Chinese has managed to snag the above roadmap slide for Lenovo’s mobile computer division. We’ve seen earlier versions of the same slide — when the Edge and T410 / T510 were freshly added — but the very latest iteration contains a sprinkling of even newer machines. Most intriguing will be the L400 and L500, which are set to replace the former “corporate mainstream” mainstay R series, which incites the more hopeful among us to believe that perhaps a new chassis design is on the cards too. No less notable are the new X201 models, though we might surmise by the mild numerical change that they’ll just be upgraded to low-voltage Arrandale CPUs and left well enough alone. For more info on the likely specs of the W701, you should check out our breakdown of its FCC appearance right here.

Update: In light of the X201 discovery, we’ve combed through our CES 2010 imagery and found a photo of an X200 with a touchpad, which was a curious thing to see when Lenovo has never sold such a creation. Our suspicion is that the X200 on display was in fact an early showing of the touchpad-enabled X201 that is soon to come. Browse past the break for the evidence.

Continue reading Lenovo X201 Tablet, W701 and new L series revealed by ThinkPad roadmap slide (updated)

Lenovo X201 Tablet, W701 and new L series revealed by ThinkPad roadmap slide (updated) originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 02 Feb 2010 04:47:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Since the royal unveiling of HP’s six new Elitebooks and ProBooks last week, the Elitebook 8440w (w standing for workstation) has been making the review rounds, and receiving overwhelmingly positive feedback from the chaps at Notebook Review, LAPTOP and Computer Shopper. All were impressed by the Core i7-620M and NVIDIA Quadro FX 380M power that’s been crammed into the 14-inch chassis, but unsurprisingly that causes some warm underside temperatures. Other than that, the 8440w received high praise for its durable gunmetal-build and “exceedingly” comfortable keyboard, but the touchpad was noted as being too small. Actually, the guys over at Notebook Review even go as far to say that the laptop would be “absolutely perfect” if that pad and its buttons weren’t so squished. Now that’s quite a bold statement. All in all, the 8440w seems like a solid and very mobile workstation, but hit up the sources if you’re dying to know more about the $1,650 rig.

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HP EliteBook 8440w lives up to its “workstation” title, says the reviewing masses originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 16 Jan 2010 01:47:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Somewhere between the buttoned-up utility of the ThinkPad and the sleek efficiency of the IdeaPad sits an untapped sweet spot for affordable, entry-level notebooks. At least, that’s clearly what Lenovo is banking on with their new ThinkPad Edge series.

The ThinkPad Edge purports to be targeted towards small and medium-sized businesses, but it’s just as easy to say that it’s equally unfit for both casual users and serious professionals. While it’s a perfectly capable machine in most respects and a decent buy for the money, it often feels like a compromise to an argument no one was having.

Price and Configuration

The system we tested was loaded up with a 1.3 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo SU7300 ULV processor and Intel GS45 chipset, and 4GB (2x2GB) of DDR3 RAM (1066MHz). You can also customize up to 500 GB of HDD storage. That set-up will run you $899, while the $549 base model ships with either AMD’s Turion (clocked at 1.6GHz) or Althon (1.5 GHz) dual core processor, 4GB (2x2GB) of DDR2 RAM (667MHz), and a 160GB HDD.

Design

The mash-up is clear the instant you unbox the Edge. The rounded corners and glossy black finish are reminiscent of the IdeaPad, but when combined with the ThinkPad-like flat display back, the 13.3″ model I reviewed (14″ and 15″ models will be available in the spring) brings to mind a futuristic cafeteria tray.

The reflective gloss is also a fingerprint trap, so expect a lot of smudges unless you’re prepared to give your notebook regular wipe-downs.

The 13.3″, 720p (1366×768) screen offers better sharpness than you might expect from an entry-level rig. There’s no latch to keep it closed, but it opens easily on its hinges. And my god is this thing flexible: I’m not sure why you’d ever want it to, but the display can recline over 180 degrees.

Like the rest of the ThinkPad line, the Edge comes equipped with both a trackpad and a TrackPoint nub. The trackpad’s multitouch capabilities are appreciated, but its narrowness and frenetic responses definitely aren’t. As for the nub, I’ve never been a big fan, but it’s integrated well with the keyboard and works just dandy, if you’re into that kind of thing.

Speaking of that keyboard: the island style that Lenovo has moved to for the Edge is a welcome design improvement over previous ThinkPad models. It’s less industrial, more welcoming. The keys are raised and have some spring to them, and while they feel a bit blocky at times it’s overall a smooth typing experience.

The Edge also has the distinction of being a thin and light notebook that’s not that thin (one inch, although the 6-cell battery in our test model adds another .5 inches in the rear) and not that light (3.6 lbs. with a 4-cell battery and about 4 lbs. with the 6-cell). But it’s still portable enough that it wouldn’t be cumbersome to take on all of those small and medium-sized business trips.

The ports are distributed along the sides, as on the IdeaPad, and it’s a decent array: three USB ports, VGA out, HDMI, and a multi-card reader to go along with your standard ethernet, microphone, and speaker jacks. Conspicuously absent is a DVD drive.

The Edge’s solution to potential design blemishes like speakers and the battery appears to be to sweep them under the rug. The speakers are placed on the notebook’s underside, and offer decent—though at times tinny—sound quality. I actually love the battery solution: its placement underneath the rear of the computer creates a natural keyboard incline.

Performance

This isn’t a computer you’re going to want to do intensive gaming on (thanks largely to the integrated graphics), but then again it’s not supposed to be. To its credit, the Edge does handle streaming HD videos without a hitch for when you need a Muppets Bohemian Rhapsody fix at the office.

As far as benchmarks, the Edge falls where you’d expect it to: somewhere between the IdeaPad U350 and the ThinkPad T400. A more appropriate comparison would be another 13″ thin-and-light like the Asus UL30A, and our GeekBench testing indicates that the two are pretty evenly matched.

Bottom line, you’re not going to want to do much more with the ThinkPad Edge than get on the internet, send some emails, and bang out a few Excel spreadsheets. And that’s what it’s designed to do. Then again, so are netbooks.

Battery Life

Here’s where the Edge really delivers. Lenovo claims that the six-cell Intel model gets an impressive 7.8 hours of battery life. I tested our system with higher performance settings, medium screen brightness, Bluetooth off, and a page automatically reloading every 30 seconds on Firefox to simulate active web browsing.

Total Run Time: 5 hours, 20 minutes

And that obviously can be further improved by settling for lower performance/higher battery life settings.

The Reason of Edge?

So what has Lenovo introduced to the world? A lot of not quite. It’s a thin-and-light that’s not quite either. It’s a notebook that’s not quite powerful enough for heavy lifting and not quite affordable enough for casual use. It has a contemporary design that’s not quite, well, smudge-proof. And for all it does right, this new ThinkPad still strikes me as a computer with a target audience that’s not quite identifiable.

At its introductory price point, the Edge sounds like a competitive machine, but remember that you’re also losing most of the things that distinguish it in the first place-the ULV Intel processor and the 6-cell battery, in particular. Honestly, if you’re in the market for a new notebook, there’s a good chance Lenovo already has something that fits exactly what you’re looking for. And that it’s called either IdeaPad or ThinkPad.

Solid battery life


Good number of ports


Island-style keyboard is a welcome improvement


Glossy top is a smudge-magnet


Frenetic track-pad


Who is this really for?