laptops

New Toughbooks by Panasonic

If you haven't heard about Panasonic's Toughbook line of laptops, they're a series of notebooks designed to be used in the most rugged conditions: shock, vibration, high temperatures, spills, drops, you name it. Now there are two new models, the CF-19, a tablet PC, and the CF-30, a standard clamshell notebook.

Both are successors of previous models, the CF-18 and CF-29, respectively. Both are built from a magnesium alloy with shock-mounted screens and hard drives to be able to stand anything you can throw at them. (Do I mean that literally? I'm not quite sure.) Battery life has been improved over the previous models: both laptops are rated at six hours of use before the battery dies.

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Fujitsu Laptops Featuring Samsung SSDs

Fujitsu's Lifebook Q and B series ultra-portable notebooks are getting a major performance boost. Both laptops now have an upgrade option that lets you have one of Samsung's new SSDs (solid-state drives, their new flash memory-based drives) instead of the conventional hard drive. The two drive options are 16GB and 32GB, and they add $700 and $1,400 (respectively) to the cost of the laptop.

The new SSDs definitely give the two Lifebooks a serious performance boost. Samsung's SSD can access data so fast that it's not even comparable to standard hard drives. But is it worth the price? I guess it depends on how much you're willing to spend for the extra performance.

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Q30SSD by Samsung: The First Laptop with a Solid-State Hard Drive

A short while ago Samsung announced that they had built a solid-state hard drive based only on flash memory. The drive has 32GB of storage space, which by today's standards isn't much, but it's completely silent, it has no moving parts, it's not as likely to crash, and it consumes less power and produces less heat. Not a bad deal, especially if you're just using it as a system drive. Loading times for your operating system and software would be faster, and your computer would run a lot quieter.

Now Samsung is the first to put together a computer based on a flash hard drive too. The Q30SSD is the first computer (a laptop, in this case) to use a solid-state drive, and it's already available in South Korea. It's definitely not cheap; the laptop currently sells for about $3,700, but there's always a price to pay to get the newest in technology.

Hopefully the prices drop a little by the time these laptops and others reach all of us not living in Korea.

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Apple Preparing for Core 2 Duo MacBook Pros

Rumor has it that Apple is getting ready to introduce new MacBook Pro laptops with Core 2 Duo processors. These laptops, if they are really coming soon, should be released by the holiday season, which should give Apple an added presence in retail stores toward the end of this year.

The new laptops are rumored to have 2.33GHz Core 2 Duo processors, which actually aren't even out yet. I guess all we can do now is wait and see, but at this point it could go either way. Now is probably a bad time to buy a MacBook, though, in either case.

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Velocity Micro Notebook Now Available at Best Buy

Velocity Micro's latest notebook PC, , is now available in select Best Buy stores. (I guess their website wasn't good enough.) The L80x Ultra sports a 15.4" LCD, an Intel Core 2 Duo T7200 (2.00GHz), 2GB of RAM and a 100GB hard drive, along with NVIDIA GeForce Go 7600GS graphics. It even has a built-in webcam and a fingerprint reader, just in case you get into a contest about whose laptop is better. "Ultra" doesn't just refer to the specifications, though; at $1,999, it's also ultra-expensive, if all you're looking for is a good mainstream laptop. The standard L80 is available at Velocity Micro's website for $1655.

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Sony VAIO VGN-SZ270P Laptop Review

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Looking for a laptop boasting the power to glide through the most intensive of applications without the burden of being about as light as a rock? With a 2 GHz Core Duo T2500, a gig of RAM and graphics catered for by a mobile GeForce Go 7400 chip, the Sony VAIO VGN-SZ270P laptop weighing just 4.1 pounds (or 3.7 pounds, should you opt for the premium version) may just be the thing for you.

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Dell recalls over 4 million batteries due to fire risk

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Dell and the US Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) have issued the recall of over 4 million batteries supposedely manufactured by Sony due to the risk of spontaneous combustion - sometimes rather violently.

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Samsung Q40 Laptop - Pretty In Pink

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The pink obsession continues. Initially, it was only pink handbags, but now just about anything can be had in pink, from cars to mobile phones and Nintendo DS portable consoles. It seems the fairer sex is really having an impact on the colours gadgets are brought out in.

Well guess what? Samsung have decided to release it's brand new Q40 laptop in pink. Retailing for £1300, you'd expect it to be powered by an Intel Core Duo, have a gig of ram and its graphics fuelled by a nVidia GeForce Go GPU, but no. What you get is a 1.2 GHz ultra low voltage Core Solo processor, 512 MB of RAM and onboard graphics. It seems you're paying a premium to be noticed rather than for a fast laptop.

Ah well, girls will be girls...

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Asus VX1 Lamborghini Laptop

Fancy a muscle powered laptop to go with that brand new Lamborghini parked in your garage. Well now you can have supercar status in your personal computing. If you remember the Acer Ferrari laptop, you'll get an idea of what this beast is all about. Sporting a V12, twin exhaust, 0-60 in 4 secs, 2.0GHz Intel Core Duo T2500 and a Gig of memory under the bonnet, it certainly has the specs to carry the name.

At 1.2 inches thick and 5.7 pounds, it's no lightweight but the 15 inch screen, full size keyboard and leathery touchpad do a good job of representing the Lamborghini name. Let's just hope it has better fuel economy figures than the real thing!

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Merom based notebooks soon to support nVidia's SLi

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According to our sources at nVidia, Merom (the codename for Intel's T-series mobile Core 2 Duo processors) based notebooks will soon be supporting it's SLi dual-graphics technology.

Reports suggest that nVidia's executive chairman, Dan Vivoli, attended the launch of Intel's Core 2 Duo range at Silicon valley. This indicates a possible sign of cooperation between both companies, which is rather a coincidence following AMD's takeover of ATi.

Apparently the 945 Express chipset will be powering the upcoming mobile SLi machines, which is interesting as the "945 Express family of chipsets only support a single PCI Express x16 slot without lane dividing capabilities to divide the PCI Express graphics bandwidth towards two slots"

We'll keep you posted on further developments.

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Alienware announces three new notebooks with dual core aspirations

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Alienware has announced a new group of Core Duo notebooks which feature screens ranging from 14" to 17". The Sentia m3450, Area-51 m5550 and Area-51 m5750 all feature Alienware’s unique lid design and attention to detail.

The 14.1" Sentia m3450 can be equipped from Core Duo processor ranging from the lowly T2300 on up to the T2600. Although one normally associates Alienware systems with over the top excess, you'll only find integrated Intel GMA950 graphics on this unit to power the WXGA (1280x768) screen. Storage options range from 40GB to 120GB SATA hard drives, while an 8x dual-layer DVD burner can be added to replace the standard CD-RW/DVD drive. The 4.5-pound unit device features a webcam, three USB 2.0 ports, one Firewire port, ExpressCard slot and a 4-in-1 media reader.

Moving up a size class, we come to the 6-pound Area-51 m5550. Like the Sentia m3450, this notebook can be equipped with Core Duo processor ranging from 1.66GHz to 2.16GHz, but it adds discrete graphics to the option sheet. Customers can choose from a 128MB ATI Mobility Radeon X1400 or 256MB NVIDIA GeForce Go 7600 graphics card to handle graphics duties. Customers also have the choice of either WXGA (1280x768) or WUXGA (1920x1200) screen resolutions for the 15.4" screen. The Area-51 features the same I/O lineup as the aforementioned Sentia m3450 minus the integrated webcam.

Leading the pack is the 8-pound, 17" Area-51 m5750. It can be optioned up with a speedy Core Duo T2600 processor and either a 128MB ATI Mobility Radeon X1400 or 256MB ATI Mobility Radeon X1800 graphics chip. The m5750 also has the option for dual hard drives in a RAID-0 configuration. Screen options are WXGA+ (1440x900) or WUXGA (1920x1200) -- both with ClearView technology. Also included are four USB 2.0 ports, one Firewire port and a 4-in-1 media reader.

The Sentia m3450 will start shipping on July 10 with a starting price of $1,099. The Area-51 m5550 and m5750 will both ship on July 24 with a base price of $1,399 and $1,499 respectively. Considering that Alienware just announced these models, it's surprising that they aren’t shipping with the option of the new Core Duo T2700 processor. That 2.33GHz chip is currently shipping and clearly fits into Alienware's performance strategy.

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