This week in laptops

The minilaptop reigns supreme for yet another week (will we never see another behemoth laptop?) with the debut of the HP 2133 Mini-Note PC. The little guy was designed for students, but has a decidedly more upscale look than the similarly low-priced Eee PC and Classmate PC. The real shocker, though, is inside the case, where you won't find an Intel Atom CPU; the company opted to use a low-cost processor from Via, a manufacturer that's better known in Europe and Asia than here in the United States.

In other little-laptop news, Asus shipped a Window XP version of the Eee PC, which we unboxed, then posted our first impressions. Feeling left out, Dell revealed that it, too, would be releasing a minilaptop; expect it in the June time frame.

In the rumor mill this week, we saw leaked information about a possible refresh to Lenovo's ThinkPad lineup. Speculation also swirled as to whether the MacBook would be going under the knife to achieve a more svelte look.

Elsewhere in the world, Fujitsu showed off a cedar version of its wooden laptop (sure to repel moths everywhere) at a furniture show in Milan. And Australia-based Pioneer Computers started hawking the first notebook based on Intel's yet-to-arrive Centrino 2 platform.

Also in the news this week: Toshiba offered more details on 11 new Satellite models; Dell upgraded the displayson its XPS M1530 laptops; and Gateway updated its FX gaming systems. If you're ready to adopt one of these new laptops, NotebookReview has a handy guide to selling your old notebook. Or you could just dress your old laptop up with a groovy "motherboard" skin.

Finally, we thought the ultramobile HTC Shift was far too expensive when we reviewed it a few weeks ago, but free sounds like a fair price: Engadget is giving one away to a lucky commenter.