Toshiba Notebook Limited Time Offer Starting at $449 Up to April 22 Only

Toshiba launches a limited time promo for their laptops & notebooks starting at only $449



Just go to Toshiba Direct to get your new Toshiba laptop on sale until April 22 only

Voodoo Envy 133 laptop

Voodoo Envy 133 laptop weighing less than 3 1/2 pounds sits on the red corner to battle Apple's MacBook Air. Being only half an inch thick I think makes it a worthy contender with carbon fiber shell. Hewlett Packard (HP) I guess has been trying to be more competitive in this market

Highlights:

• 133 stands for 13.3” display
• 0.7” thick
• Carbon Fiber casing
• WiFi N (100+ Mbps)
• Starts at $2099

HP's New $499 Mini Notebook Out Now!

Here's a nice review from PC World's Glen Fleishman

HP announced a $499 laptop today targeted at the education market. The HP 2133 Mini-Note PC seems remarkably underfeatured to me for the price: it has no DVD or even CD drive; no hard drive (a 4 GB flash module is included); an 8.9-inch display; just 512 MB of RAM, and the Linux operating system (SuSE Enterprise Desktop 10). What gives?

It's all about the weight, durability, and market segment. I could go and buy a Dell Inspiron 1525 for $499 and get Windows Vista Home Basic, a CD burner/DVD writer, 2 GB RAM, an 80 GB hard drive, and 15.4-inch screen, among other features.

When I drill into the details, too, I find a lot about the HP model that's particular to this market as well. It's got a sudden-motion sensor for drive safety built into the models with hard drives that start at $549; Dell offers that only as a $150 capacity/feature upgrade on the 1525. The small screen is WXGA--least 1,280 by 768 pixels, which means images and video should be crisp, not blocky. A built-in VGA camera on the HP 2133 costs $25 more to add to the Dell unit.

But the biggest tradeoff is weight and size: the Dell starts at 5.9 lbs (2.7 kg); the Mini-Note PC, just 2.8 lbs (1.3 kg). For students and staff alike, that's a lot less to carry, and may be a big part of its appeal, just like Apple's somewhat less-than-fully-equipped MacBook Air that sheds 2 to 3 pounds off similar devices from Apple and other makers.

The Mini-Note PC is quite small, too, measuring 10 by 6.5 by 1 inches (25.5 by 16.5 by 2.7 cm) to the Dell Inspiron 1525's wedge of 14 by 10 inches (36 by 26 cm), with depth tapering from 1.5 to 1 inches (3.7 cm to 2.5 cm).

For a little more, you can get something like a "regular" laptop: $599 gets you Windows Vista Home Basic, 1 GB of RAM, and a 120 GB hard drive, as well as 802.11a/g networking instead of the plain 802.11g found in both the Dell and Mini-Note.

It seems that for an increasing number of users, less may be much more.

First Ever Ruggedized Notebook By Dell

This laptop is built for rough terrain. The first of its kind. If we have gone through life, pampering our laptops from heat, rain or impact - Dell has revolutionized laptop hardware to withstand all these...

Rugged and Ready

The Latitude XFR D630 is Dell’s first fully ruggedized notebook. Designed for outstanding performance in virtually any environment, the XFR meets strict military standards for extreme conditions, MIL-810F.

Die cast magnesium alloy chassis Sealed keyboard and door covers Shock isolated hard drive and display protection Patent pending thermal management system

The Latitude XFR D630 meets environmental challenges by offering a variety of innovative usability options, including:

Industry's first fully rugged 14.1" wide-aspect LCD with DirectVue(tm) technology Optional touch screen supports finger, gloved or passive stylus inputs Next generation performance with Intel® CoreTM 2 Duo processors

Built on the successful Latitude D family, the Latitude XFR D630 laptop maintains commonality with the Latitude D630 series and offers all of the quality, reliability and support offered by an established platform.

The New Lenovo Ultrathin ThinkPad X300 Laptop To Challenge Apple's MacBook Air

Lenovo today launched the much-anticipated ThinkPad X300 ultraportable, challenging Apple's MacBook Air (read a Marketing Critic's Review of MacBook Air) as the lightest and thinnest notebook available today, as announced on PCWorld.com

Weighing started at 2.93 pounds. Lenovo claims ThinkPad X300 is more feature-rich than Apple's 3-pound MacBook Air. Lenovo has included three USB drives and an ultrathin DVD burner, while MacBook Air has only one USB drive and no optical drive. With a DVD-RW drive, the X300 weighs 3.13 pounds, Lenovo said.

The laptop measures 0.73 inches at its thinnest point by 0.92 inches at its thickest point, bigger in comparison to MacBook Air, which measures 0.16 inches at its thinnest part and 0.76 inches at its thickest part.

Targeted at business users and consumers, the laptop uses 25 percent less power than previous ThinkPad models with a 64G-byte solid-state storage drive for data storage, a 13.3-inch LED-backlit display and use of a lithium-polymer battery, Lenovo said.

The lithium-polymer chemistry provides better battery life than standard lithium-ion batteries found in most laptops today, said Tom Ribble, director of Thinkpad product marketing at Lenovo. The system supports up to 4G bytes of memory and includes integrated graphics, a digital camera, and wired and wireless networking. It includes both touchpad and trackpoint scrolling capabilities.

The system will come with WiMax capabilities later this year with Intel's updated Centrino platform, according to Lenovo. The buyer may choose that the machine come preloaded either with Windows XP Professional or Windows Vista.
The ThinkPad 300's Processor

The X300 is powered by Intel's Core 2 Duo SL7100 LV low-voltage chip, operating at 1.2GHz. Like the Core 2 Duo processor specially developed for Apple's MacBook Air, Intel shrunk the SL7100 LV processor to make it 60 percent smaller than standard-sized processors belonging to Intel's Merom family. The chip is manufactured using the 65-nanometer process, like other Merom processors.

Although the size is the same, the SL7100 LV chip consumes less power. It uses 12 watts of power, according to processor details provided by Intel. The Core 2 Duo processor for MacBook Air uses 20 watts of power, while operating at 1.6GHz to 1.8GHz. Fujitsu also uses the SL7100 LV chip in its ultraportable LifeBook P8010 laptop, which started shipping in the U.S. this month.

Lenovo has pumped the latest technology into its laptop that both consumers and business users will appreciate, Ribble said.

Prices for the X300 start at $2,799, and it is available through Lenovo's Web site and through retail partners.

(image from Slashgear.com; article via PC World)

Lenovo Set To Challenge HP And Dell In Consumer Notebooks

An article from Information Week reports that Lenovo last Thursday officially entered the U.S. consumer notebook market with three products for people willing to spend more than the basic-notebook price in order to get better entertainment features.

The notebooks fall under the new IdeaPad brand, which will be the consumer side of Lenovo's mobile PC business. The Chinese company is best known in the United States for its ThinkPad line of business notebooks.

The IdeaPad Y510, Y710, and U110 models are powered by Intel's dual-core Centrino mobile platform, use facial-recognition technology in combination with a 1.3-megapixel embedded camera for security, and have five Dolby Home Theater speakers. In addition, the notebooks have Wi-Fi support, DVD/CD recordable combo drives, touch-sensitive control surfaces, textured outer cases, and frameless screens. "They look very smooth, sleek, and clean," Craig Merrigan, VP of global consumer marketing for Lenovo, said of the screens.

This new product is meant to go head-to-head with Hewlett-Packard's Pavilion entertainment notebooks and Dell's XPS line. Both combine sleek design with features for playing and organizing music and video, as well as editing and showing photos.

Lenovo is hoping its notebooks' design, VeriFace Face Recognition software, and Dolby Home Theater system will help differentiate them from rivals. The VeriFace software uses the notebooks' embedded camera to recognize a user's face for login, making it unnecessary to remember passwords. "Your face becomes your password," Merrigan said.

The sound system includes four speakers on the top of the machine -- front, top, and each side -- and a subwoofer underneath. The systems also include Lenovo's Multimedia Control Center software, which the company claims makes it easy to play movies, listen to music, and view photos. The notebooks also have touch-sensitive controls for choosing multimedia files and for setting volume and the built-in equalizer.

Buy a Laptop at $100

The One Laptop per Child association (OLPC) from Delaware, USA aims to design and make available to the public a laptop with a retail price of $100. Their website - laptop.org isn't exactly pushing it to sell, I think it's more of a public service for less privileged children. That's what I get from their mission statement anyway.

Would be quite difficult to set up in that I don't think anyone wants to marginalize the ongoing retail costs for laptop. The design and functionality of this laptop should be at par with its price, not hurting current laptop prices and product lines. So we should expect the $100 laptop to not be as hot as current laptop models and only enough for children's use.