Tech News and Reviews
Laptops
HP crams Fermi-based Quadro 5000M GPU inside 17-inch EliteBook
Jul 29th
Gotta live up to the name, right HP? NVIDIA’s new pro graphics solution for mobile creatives, the Quadro 5000M, was unsheathed only yesterday but HP appears to have been first in line to get some of that new 40nm goodness. Electronista reports that the world leader in PC shipments is readying a 5000M solution for its 8740w EliteBook, which will bring 320 CUDA cores and a jumbo 2GB of dedicated memory to the party. That comes replete with the latest DirectX 11 and OpenGL 4.1 compatibility, naturally, as well as a bunch of pro-friendly computational enhancements. Dell’s also going to be offering a 5000M-equipped rig, but lest you get too excited, bear in mind that getting the current best Quadro-equipped 17-incher from HP costs north of $3,000, so affordability is clearly not a priority here. Skip past the break for NVIDIA’s joyous press release announcing the new Quadro chips.
Augen’s $99 GenBook smartbook preview
Jul 28th
That’s right, not only does Augen — a company unbeknown to us before yesterday — make an $150 Android 2.1 tablet, but the company is also stocking Kmart shelves with a $99 Android smartbook of sorts. How’d we find out about this one? Well, when we headed to our local Kmart in hopes of picking up the 7-inch tablet, one last, very lonely GenBook 74 was dwelling on the shelf. We aren’t the kind of people that could just leave the little guy there all alone, so $100 later we were the proud owners of a 7-inch, Android 1.6 clamshell device. Is the little laptop really capable of surfing the web and downloading apps, or would your hard earned cash be better spent elsewhere? Find out after the break.
ASUS Eee PC 1018P and 1015PE review
Jul 24th
You’d think after running into ASUS’s next generation Eee PC 1018P and 1015PE over five months ago at CeBIT, our excitement may have waned for the stylish netbooks. Oh, but it’s actually the opposite, and when the brand new netbooks arrived last week, we grabbed the X-Acto knife (safely, of course) and eagerly unboxed them to see if the aluminum clad little laptops were as svelte as we’d remembered them. Sure, the $350 1018P and 1015PE have standard netbook internals (an Intel Atom N450 CPU, 1GB of RAM and Windows 7 Starter), but without a doubt they’re some of the best quality netbooks ASUS has made in quite a while. Hit that read more link for an in-depth look at these two, and to see if they’re all we had hoped for and more.
HP TouchSmart tm2 gains Core i5 CPU option, a whole new level of respect
Jul 22nd
Don’t you just love it when a plan comes together? Or when a rumor plays out perfectly? We’re looking at a case of the latter here today, as HP‘s oh-so-lovable 12-inch TouchSmart tm2 is now available to order with a Core i5 processor. Just months after gaining Core i3 support, the convertible tablet can now be ordered with a 1.2GHz Core i5-430UM (capable of hitting 1.73GHz with Turbo Boost). Said CPU can be paired with integrated Intel graphics or with a discrete ATI Mobility Radeon HD 5450, and 4GB of DDR3 RAM is standard on either configuration. Hit the links below to investigate further, but be sure to keep your plastic far, far away unless you’re kosher with impulse buys of a rather significant caliber.
Acer TimelineX 4820T review
Jul 15th
Pulling the 14-inch Acer TimelineX 4820T from its box, one thing went through our mind: this could be the perfect thin and light laptop. The $717 system is about an inch thick, weighs only 4.7 pounds, and still has an onboard DVD drive. And unlike the past Acer Timelines and their sissy ULV processors, it has a standard voltage Core i3-350M CPU, 4GB of RAM and a 320GB hard drive. Oh, and it promises over seven hours of battery life. Sound like the perfect no-compromise ultrathin laptop to you too, right? Well, even after our unboxing, the TimelineX 4820T did live up to many of our expectations, but disappointed in some unfortunate others. We’ll explain it all in our full review after the break.
Onkyo netbook gets covered inside and out with Miffy
Jul 15th
Miffy (or Nijntje) is a small, Dutch, female rabbit who appears in picture books. How exactly she became a cultural hit in Japan we don’t know, but we do have a good idea how she found herself plastered all over this netbook: some combination of Onkyo having a bunch of extra C4 units lying around and Namco-Bandai having a Miffy license it wasn’t fully utilizing. On the hardware side this thing is particularly disinteresting (1.6GHz Atom CPU, 1GB RAM, 160GB HDD, etc. etc.), but its lid has been liberally covered with character silhouettes. Its Windows installation (7 or XP) has received a similar treatment, with Miffy-themed apps and wallpaper ruling the desktop thanks to that partnership with Namco-Bandai. No word on price, but predictably this one is Japan-only.
Sony thinks E Color is the new black, gives you a whole site’s worth to choose from
Jul 15th
If your gear isn’t pushing the performance envelope, you typically have to resort to alternative means for attracting those precious customers. Sony’s newish VAIO E series is an exponent of just such a philosophy, with its lurid colorings and replaceable keyboard skins. The company’s decided to take things up a notch, however, by now offering a Color Combo site where we can combine the gnarliest hue mismatches this side of Colorware. The chromatic choices include the laptop’s case and keyboard as well as the additions of a wireless mouse and a reversible sleeve. Everything that isn’t bolted down to the computer will of course cost you extra, but will you really let a little bit of cash stand between you and that magenta dream machine?
ASUS Eee PC 1005PX looks lovely in your choice of colors
Jul 15th
Another pretty little seashell has washed up on the Eee PC shore, and ASUS is making this one official — sort of. A listing for the 1005PX has appeared on the company’s site, but it’s sadly a broken link for the moment. No worries, as Notebook Italia has all the details about this little chromatic lappy, which is available in white, black, red, blue, and that pastel pink above that has us really craving a tall glass of strawberry milk. Beyond the clean aesthetics there’s nothing particularly exciting here, your typical 1.6GHz Atom N450 CPU, 1 or 2GB of RAM, up to 320GB of storage, and a 10-inch matte 1024 x 600 LED-backlit LCD. Longevity is said to be a healthy 8.5 hours with a six-cell battery, though we don’t know just how much this one will cost ya — nor when ASUS will fix that link.
Toshiba Portege R705 review
Jul 15th
Stuck on the Toshiba Portege R705′s magnesium alloy palmrest is a shiny sticker celebrating the company’s 25 years of “laptop innovation.” Now, we’re the first to hate on the plethora of decals that festoon Windows laptops these days — and this one also deserves to be peeled off and tossed into the garbage — but the sticker actually happens to speaks volumes about why the $800 R705 is such a big deal. We promise to keep the history lesson short, but for years the Portege series has been Toshiba’s top-of-the-line ultraportable brand, featuring the latest CPUs while usually setting the standard for portability, and always been attached to seriously hefty price tags. Take the Portege R500, which was the worlds lightest laptop in 2007, and cost two grand.
Acer said to be launching 7-, 10-inch Android tablets before the end of the year
Jul 15th
Acer’s already offered some indication that it planned to launch at least one Android-based tablet before the end of the year, and it looks like we’re starting to get few more tidbits of information. According to DigiTimes (reasonably reliable when it comes to Acer rumors), the company is planning to launch both 7-inch and 10-inch tablets sometime in the fourth quarter of this year, both of which will reportedly be ARM-based and run Android 2.2 (complete with Flash support_. Details are otherwise still pretty light, but DigiTimes is backing up earlier talk that Acer’s looking to partner with mobile carriers on the devices, which we presume means they’ll both at least have a 3G option.
