So Acer’s new Aspire 3811TZ and Aspire 3811TZG may not be puke-green like Sony’s VAIO W Eco, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t some of the greenest — as in eco-friendly — laptops out there. Part of the company’s thin-and-light Timeline series, the two 13.3-inch laptops have been named by Greenpeace as being completely free of those bad-for-the-environment materials, including PVC (polyvinyl chloride) and BFR (brominated flame retardants). Powered by Intel ULV Core 2 Duo CPUs, they are more power-efficient than most and last longer on a charge. There doesn’t seem to be an official statement from Acer on availability and price on these models, but we assume like the rest of the Timeline bunch there will be models both north and south of a grand.
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.
The people behind Moleskine, not content with the $20 they manage to get in exchange for a blank notebook, have come up with a new money-making scheme, a way to part us poor, fashionable fools with even more of our cash.
A grand product deserves a grand name, and the $40 Moleskine 2010 Color A Month Daily Planner Volant Box Set delivers. It consists of twelve of the softcover Volant notebooks, tiny, slim pamphlets of just 54 pages each which normally come in sets of two, delivered in a box also equipped with all the stickers and bookmarks the obsessive organizer could want.
As you can see from the opening lines of this post, I fully intended to mock this overpriced wad of paper and thin, smooth, perfectly textured card, but I can’t. The strong stationery fetish that all geeks harbor within themselves has been drawn out and now I want to buy this full set, even though I almost never set pen to paper anymore. Just look at those colors!
I’ll leave quietly now, while I still have a little pride left intact. I’ll see you all over at the Amazon Moleskine Store. Yes, there’s an Amazon Moleskine Store.
Along with its much anticipated tablet (still in the rumor stage), Apple could announce an upgrade for its MacBook Pro notebooks featuring new Intel chips in a late January event.
Intel has sent e-mails members of its Intel Retail Edge program, promoting a chance to win two MacBook Pros equipped with Intel’s new Core i5 processors during January, according to a report by MacRumors.
Multiple independent reports say these promotional e-mails have been sent to members in the United States, United Kingdom and Spain.
Intel offers its Retail Edge program to employees at retail stores where Intel-based products are for sale. It’s a training program to educate employees on Intel products. The program also offers promotions and discounts.
The MacBook Pros still feature Intel’s older Core 2 Duo processors. It’s reasonable to expect Apple to upgrade its MacBook Pro family with Core i5 chips soon. Intel’s newer chips have significantly outperformed its older Core 2 Duo processors in early benchmark testing. Also, several manufacturers at CES showcased notebooks with Intel’s latest chips, including the Core i7 processor found in the 27-inch iMac. That means Apple needs to catch up soon.
Apple will host a special event on Jan. 27, according to The Wall Street Journal, where the company is expected to launch a touchscreen tablet. Apple could use the event to promote new MacBook Pros, as well. The company has done similarly in the past: At 2009’s Worldwide Developers Conference, for example, Apple announced new MacBooks prior to the major announcement of the iPhone 3GS.
Updated: Intel has dismissed the promotion as a mistake and said it meant to promote new HP notebooks instead. (Though it’s possible the mention of MacBook Pros was an accidental slip, and Intel is playing cover-up for its partner, Apple.)
Pixel Qi‘s magic transforming displays seemed too good to be true: One screen that’s both a bright, full color LCD and a reflective, E-Ink quality display for reading in light. It is pretty damn incredible.
It’s not hard to see the overall trend with gadgets: They’re being reduced almost entirely to the display. Which is why, in this near-future vision of a single tablet thing that does everything—computer, video screen, reader—what Pixel Qi’s doing simply makes sense. If you’re carrying something that’s basically just a screen, and expect it to do lots of different things, a screen that adapts to precisely what you’re doing is how it has to be.
In the Pixel Qi display’s current form, it’s impressive, though nowhere near perfect. In its backlit LCD mode, it’s just about as good as any other 10.1-inch, 1024×600 netbook display, except that the viewing angle seems more limited, before the color started warping. Head on, color seems solid. Though it won’t win any illumination showdowns, it’s plenty bright—Pixel Qi won’t reveal how many nits it’s at when running at full brightness. How it handled motion was a bit harder to gauge, given the quality of the available video clip. On the Lenovo S10 used as the demo unit, it immediately switched to the electrophoretic reflective mode—where backlighting is replaced by ambient light reflecting off the back of the screen. In that mode, it really is just as crisp as the Kindle for reading text. You can watch video in this mode too, though it’s not exactly pretty (the point being you don’t have to wait 10 years for the damn screen to refresh when you turn a page). They wouldn’t speculate on how much battery life improves when you turn off the backlight, simply stating that it saves you 2 watts of power.
Pixel Qi CEO Mary Lou Jepsen says that they’ve signed up more fabs to produce their displays, which doesn’t just mean they’re on track to produce “millions” of them this year, but that they’ll be able to produce different sizes, for different form factor devices, meaning we should see them in a lot of different things over the next year or so. (Tablets! Netbooks! Phones?!) Probably, we’ll see the first stuff later this year. Device makers using the screen have got full multitouch running, since in terms of adding capabilities like capacitive touch, it’s just like any other LCD. Which is the real advantage here: Their screens are made using existing LCD factories and existing LCD technology, which is why we don’t have to wait for years to see them in the real world. (Pixel Qi works a bit like the chip designer ARM—the design the screens, license the tech, and somebody else makes ’em.)
In a battle against e-ink, which has so many obvious limitations, this really is the projected winner. We still need to see this thing in a device that’s capable of running for “days” without a recharge, but we are hoping for that soon.
I’d say it’s two generations away from being perfect enough—a wiiiider viewing angle, much higher resolution—for a truly finicky company to put these screens in their tablet or notebook, but it’s clear, I think, that a screen like this one is the key to a future where everything is about the screen.
LAS VEGAS — Toshiba this week introduced a high-end notebook powered by the newest Intel chips.
The Satellite A505 is a 16-inch notebook focused on home entertainment. Customers can choose between the Intel Core i3 (2.13GHz dual-core), Core i5 (2.2GHz dual-core) or Core i7 (1.6GHz quad-core) processors.
That’s a lot of numbers, right? What you mostly need to know is the Core i7 is Intel’s high-end mobile chip at the moment, and having a quad-core notebook will be pretty intense. Most premium notebooks last year shipped with dual-core processors, such as Intel’s Core 2 Duo, which is now the previous-generation Intel mobile chip.
The A505 features a high-definition widescreen display and “Resolution+” upconversion software that Toshiba claims will make even standard-definition DVD look more like high-definition. Configurations are available to add a Blu-ray player, an LED backlit keyboard and a slot-loading DVD drive.
The A505 is priced between $770 and $1,250 depending on the options you choose. More specs are as follows:
LAS VEGAS — Along with the tiny, powerful Alienware M11X, Dell has also updated the Mini 10 netbook, proving the company’s CES PR spin that it is obsessed with cramming hot tech into tiny boxes.
The new Mini 10 comes with the usual netbook accouterments: an Atom N450 processor, a gig of RAM, up to 250GB of HD space and a small ten-inch screen. What is new, though, is the souped-up high-def hardware.
Being a Dell, the hardware is almost infinitely customizable at point-of-sale, so we’ll talk about the hypothetical best configuration, which is the one Dell wants you to buy. The tiny screen can playback 720p movies (1366×768 pixels) and the machine has an HD processor chip in there to handle it. Also inside is a hi-def TV tuner, and GPS for location services.
I took a look at the new machine, in fetching hot pink, at Dell’s CES lounge, located out in the wilds of Vegas at the Palms Resort Hotel (it feels like the low-rent casino in Swingers). Windows 7 choked on a weirdly encoded video, but once working it looked great. I thought HD on a ten-inch screen was a waste of time, but it is actually a nice way to watch video, and with the nine hour battery life, a good companion on a plane or train.
This unit had a Dell sound-bar running along the top, to boost the sound. It boosted it indeed, making the thin, hissing, music thinner, hissier and louder. It beats the standard netbook speaker setup, but you’d do better plugging in a pair of headphones.
Available this month, prices rise from $300 as soon as you add any useful features.
LAS VEGAS — Dell has managed to pack an entire Alienware gaming rig into a tiny, 11-inch notebook body, and it kicks ass. It will also cost less than $1,000.
Regular readers will know I’m a Mac user. Normally, no matter how good a PC might be, if it doesn’t run the Mac OS I’m not interested. The Alienware M11X is the first machine to tempt me to the other side.
Dell decided not to bother with a heavy, power-thirsty CPU. Instead, the M11X is tricked out with a Core 2 Duo and hardware to push graphics. The NVIDIA GT35M can be switched in and out, so you can pick the internal graphics hardware for your e-mail and a 6.5-hour battery life, or fire up everything for two glorious hours of on-the-go gaming on the 720p, 1366 x 768 screen.
The M11X even goes one better than the MacBook Pro, which has a similar GPU-switching trick, but requires a logout to do it. When I asked Alex Gruzen, Dell’s VP of consumer products, if you had to restart the machine to change modes he smiled. “No, you just hit a switch,” he told me, “it takes about two seconds.”
I took the machine for a spin. On battery power, the M11X was running Modern Warfare 2 at full tilt, with almost everything turned on, at 30fps. It looks gorgeous. Kick up the volume and the sound thunders, crisp and clear, from a pair of speakers under the front edge, and when you pick it up and flip the thick but compact body over, there is even a glowing red light inside the fan-hole. Classy.
So nice is the output that, through the press conference, there was a Star Trek game running onstage on a big screen. We all assumed it was powered by the huge Alienware desktop next to it. It turned out that it was powered by the little M11X, which outputs via HDMI, DisplayPort or VGA.
It’s probably the best netbook you could buy, and it comes in at under $1,000. I wonder if I could Hackintosh it?
LAS VEGAS — MSI has launched yet another upgrade for its popular Wind netbook, dubbed the U160.
The new model gains a brand new polished case, a bumpy trackpad and a Chicklet keyboard with elevated keys. It includes Windows 7 Starter, a 1.66-GHz Intel Atom N450 processor, a 250-GB hard drive and a 6-cell battery that lasts 7.5 hours, according to MSI.
I had some hands-on time with the Wind U160, and though it looks different from its predecessors, the experience is mostly the same. The U160 is noticeably lighter, weighing only 2.2 pounds. It sports a glossy champagne finish, a black keyboard and a screen with a black border. It kind of looks like a miniature MacBook Pro.
Its keyboard still suffers from an awkwardly small question-mark key. I disliked the puny trackpad on the first MSI Wind (which I used to own), and I dislike the U160’s bumpy trackpad even more: The purpose of the bumps is to mouse around more accurately, but I was doing the opposite.
This upgrade is mostly about looks, which isn’t surprising because netbooks are generally a repetitive, monotonous product category. More interesting at CES this year is the “notbook” — a new flavor of netbooks adding some variety to 10-inch mini notes. Some examples include the Lenovo Skylight smartbook, which features an ARM-based processor, and the Lenovo S10-3t, a convertible touchscreen tablet.
LAS VEGAS — Toshiba was one of the last manufacturers to get into the netbook game last year, and its offering — the Mini NB205 — was decent. The company announced an upgrade for the netbook that eliminates some of the shortcomings seen in its predecessor.
Dubbed the Mini NB305, the 10-inch netbook carries a 1.66GHz Intel Atom N450 processor, up to 2GB RAM and a 6-cell battery promising 11 hours of life.
We reviewed the NB305’s predecessor, the NB205, last July, and its standout strength was battery life (six hours from our testing). One complaint was its battery, which stuck out awkwardly and felt uncomfortable on the lap. Also, the test unit we received, a pink model, wasn’t ideal since the vibrant case tricked your eyes into perceiving purplish colors on screen.
Toshiba seems to have listened. The NB305’s battery now fits into the netbook without sticking out, and the company isn’t shipping a pink model. The netbook is available in brown, white and blue.
However, one minor issue that remains unchanged is the placement of the keyboard keys. In our review of the NB205, we noted the awkward place of the tilde (~) key awkwardly located to the right of the Alt key. After hours, I still couldn’t get used to that configuration and kept typing ~ when I meant to hit Alt; I’d expect the NB305 to pose the same problem. Still, progress is progress, especially with netbooks, which generally don’t change much.
More specs are below the jump. The Mini 305 will ship Jan. 12 starting at $350.
10.1-inch widescreen backlit LED display
Windows 7 Starter operating system
Intel Atom N450 processor
1GB DDR2 800MHz RAM, upgradeable to 2GB
250GB HDD
802.11b/g/n wireless and 10/100 Ethernet
Bluetooth V2.1 + EDR (available on select models)
Hard drive impact sensor
Weighs 2.6 pounds
6-cell battery with battery life rating up to 11 hours
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