laptops

As Lenovo can attest, it's tough to keep a secret in the Internet age. Today Sony joined the club of PC makers with leaked product plans, as forum posters at NotebookReview uncovered details of new Vaio laptops buried deep on Sony's European site.

The new models, reportedly due in July, will include the 11.1-inch ultraportable TZ11 (a follow-up to the existing TX series), the 13.3-inch SZ5, and two new models in the 15.4-inch FZ series. In addition to refreshing the systems with Intel's new Santa Rosa chipset and X3100 graphics, Sony will also be … Read more

That didn't take long. Just yesterday, Lenovo hinted at a press conference that the "Cloud of Promise" design on its Olympic torch might be used on future computers. Now, only a day later, the first of them has appeared in the form of a laptop.

The "Xiang" notebook is reportedly the product of a partnership with gold medalist Liu Xiang, though not much else is known about it, including any specs. Coolest-Gadgets says it's just one of a line of products designed to promote Lenovo's partnership with the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing, … Read more

Thursday's briefing by Nicholas Negroponte on the One Laptop Per Child initiative seems to have meant different things to different folks.

The Associated Press led with the rising price of the laptop, designed for school-age tots in developing nations ("'$100 laptop' to cost $175"), while the Reuters news agency focused on the potential for use closer to home ("U.S. schools may join inexpensive laptop project"). And The Boston Globe, for which the just-across-the-Charles-River OLPC is in part a local business story, got caught up with the laptop's sense of fun, style and mission (&… Read more

As fond as we are of Philips designs, we're a bit curious about the origins of its new "Longneck" laptop. The photos we've seen look awfully similar to images of the "FlyBook VM" from Japan's Dialogue that were widely circulated last December.

But no matter. Philips has done what Dialogue didn't, which is offer the computer at a bearable price. With what seem to be comparable specs--an extendable 12.1-inch widescreen LCD, Intel Core Duo chip, 1GB of memory and a 100GB hard drive--for just under $1,700, according to Tech Digest. … Read more

NotebookReview pointed us to spec lists for the refreshed ThinkPad T61 and ThinkPad R61, both of which will be built on the platform formerly known as Santa Rosa. The announcement is limited to new configurations for the Asia Pacific region, but we don't think it much of a stretch to assume we'll see similar Centrino Pro ThinkPads in the States.

One of the most intriguing features listed on the Lenovo page is the "Intel Turbo Memory 1GB hard drive for faster performance." We assume this is the official name for the Robson caching technology Intel demonstrated … Read more

Intel showed off an interesting concept laptop this week at the spring Intel Developer Forum in Beijing. The ultrathin laptop, which Intel is calling the Metro, measures just 0.7 inches thick and weighs a scant 2.2 pounds. The Metro's most unusual feature is neither its secondary display (which we've seen here) nor its colorful array of leather wraps (which we've seen here).

It's the shoulder strap that promises to attract the attention of female tech buyers and purse snatchers alike. While the Metro lets you leave your laptop bag behind, I hope that shoulder … Read more

This LG laptop may be named "Return to Nature," but we're not buying it. After all, it's not made of bamboo or anything.

The limited-edition "Xnote S1" does have some nicely engraved foliage adorning its case, somewhat reminiscent of Medion's crystal flower design. More impressive is what's inside the 15.4-inch-screen computer--a 2.15GHz Core 2 Duo processor, 2GB of memory and a 160GB hard drive, according to BornRich.

The price of the laptop, which is destined for the Korean market, is unknown. We hope only that it's a tad less … Read more

The plot thickens. Last month, we mentioned a mysterious "$1 million laptop about which precious little was known. That's still the case, but a few more tantalizing (and still unconfirmed) details are slowly emerging.

Luxurylaunches claims to have the first "official" photo of the laptop from Luvaglio, the namesake company of entrepreneur Rohan Sinclair Luvaglio, and describes it thusly: "The laptop combines intelligent gadgetry with state of the art technology, such as solid-state storage, Blu-ray, built-in USB memory stick and MP3 player, integrated screen cleaning and functional jewelry. The laptop will be finished to the … Read more

That darned hard drive industry just keeps giving us excuses not to weed out all those old files on the laptop.

Samsung on Wednesday announced a new 2.5-inch hard drive, taking a step ahead of the herd with a 200GB model with a 7200rpm rotation speed.

The SpinPoint MP1 line also will be available in 80GB, 120GB and 160GB capacities when it begins shipping in May, the Korean electronics giant said. The drives use a 3-gigabit-per-second SATA connection and will have 8MB or 16MB of cache memory.

Faster rotational speeds allow drives to find data more quickly and transfer … Read more