With PC laptop shipments projected to decline by 7.3% this year, Windows 8 machines desperately need a shot multiple shots of adrenaline. The Toshiba KIRAbook may be just that. The KIRAbook is Toshiba’s first entrant in their newly fashioned “KIRA” line of luxury ultrabooks. At first glance, you can see that the KIRAbook is meticulously designed, and it radiates a Cupertino-esque level of… → Read More
Nestled between the $400-$500 netbooks and the more fully-featured but far less portable laptops like Thinkpads and MacBooks at say $1200 is what we like to call a market vacuum. People who don’t want the limitations of a tiny laptop but need something more portable than a full-size laptop either have to comprimise one way or the other, or else pay through the nose for a MacBook Air or really thin… → Read More
Cloudbooks or MIDs or ultralights have been around for years. These are basically tiny laptops with puttery processors that you’re supposed to drop into your murse and carry around the city with you. With the rise of the Asus eee, however, these things are getting much more attention. Om Malik of Om’s House of Web Reviewery took a look at the latest, the 2133 miniNote, and pronounced… → Read More
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Do you own a small fabricating plant in Taiwan? Do you have an engineering team of ten PhDs? Do you want to make small laptops? Has VIA got a deal for you. The VIA OpenBook reference design is not actually a product — it’s more of an idea. Because it is ostensibly open (the CAD plans are available on the VIAOpenBook site) you simply buy the chips from VIA and use the plans to build… → Read More
It’s either feast or famine when it comes to laptops. If you need something small and light, you’re stuck without an optical drive and poor performance. If you need something for gaming or high end apps, you’re stuck with something that you need a truck to lift. That’s why I’m pleased with the VYE S41 from Kohjinsha, a Japan-only — but available at Dynamism.com… → Read More
Sweet. I might actually be able to use a little XP machine at these specs. People are probably going to make noise about the thing costing $549 (more than expected, I think), but really it’s still an incredible bargain and the hardware bump allays the concerns many had about getting an Eee. It’s got a gig of RAM now and 12 or 20 gigs of solid-state hard drive space (12 for XP, 20 for… → Read More
New rule; No challenging the MacBook Air if you can’t beat it in the thickness department. It’s one of its main selling points, if not THE main selling point. According to Electronista, “Frontier today put out an aggressive challenge to Apple by claiming a system which is both lighter and tougher than the MacBook Air.” That’s all well and good but it’s thicker… → Read More
[photopress:vaio.jpg,full,left]Being the largest ultraportable is something of a dubious honor, like being the healthiest model or the least-convicted child rapist, but Sony wears it with pride, touting its new VAIO VGN-SZ750N/C laptop as just such a beast. And the description is true, at only four pounds, it definitely fits as an ultraportable in weight, but the 13.3-inch LED backlit display… → Read More
New rule: no using the term “ultra portable” to describe a notebook that weighs “a mere 1.89kg” — roughly 4.2 pounds — and has a battery that tops out at just barely over three hours. Let’s rightfully refer to that as “thin-and-light” like everyone else. At any rate, the P200 Ultra Portable Notebook PC from Samsung was just announced at CeBIT. → Read More
Looks like HP may have decided to jump on the UMPC bandwagon. Yippee. Hopefully it doesn’t have a keyboard and costs, like, $1200. Ha! Hold the phone, CNET’s Darius Chang says it’s “likely to be competitively priced, much like the ASUS Eee PC.” I’m listening… Oh man, it gets better! Someone on HP’s staff told Chang, “you won’t even need… → Read More
The video’s about on the same level of quality as Heidi Montag’s new music video, but considerably sexier. Well, maybe. In any case, it doesn’t give you the sense of how compact the thing is since there is no way of telling the scale in the video. It could be a galaxy-sized Cloudbook in a white void, but likely it’s just their production model, set to hit the street hot on… → Read More
If the MacBook Air is the bouncy, anorexic cheerleader of the ultraportable world (though 13.3″ is pushing the “ultraportable” label; I guess that would make her awkwardly tall in this metaphor), then this Lifebook P8010 is the greasy, frizzy (bad picture before) slick, capable know-it-all. Yet somehow lighter. This Fujitsu wonder has three USB ports, Wi-Fi, ethernet and… → Read More
Next to Everex’s Eee-killer, they had another product, more a prototype than anything, but with a similar form factor. This one has its baby touchpad in a more traditional spot, which made it look even more lonely and puny. It truly is only about as big as your “tab” key, though it works surprisingly well. → Read More
Light AND durable notebooks? Is it possible? Apparently it is. Panasonic’s three new "business-rugged notebook computers" make up the 7 series and include the the T7 tablet replacement, the W7 ultraportable, and the Y7 thin-and-light. They’re rugged, yes, but here’s the kicker; they’re all under 4 pounds. → Read More
Oh boy, I can’t wait for the next bi-monthly strategic planning meeting. That’s when I get to whip out my new InFocus IN12 mobile projector with “extraordinarily adjustable 1.4x zoom lens.” → Read More
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