Business

Dell seems to have picked up on a trend: shoppers really like the idea of low-cost, small-screened notebooks. Dell’s dabbled in this category already with its Studio 14z.

Now, the company has expanded its small business-oriented Vostro line to include the 1220, a 12.1-inch ultraportable starting at $799, a price that, before this year, would have been unheard of for a notebook this size, particularly in the business category.

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During CES, ASUS introduced its first touchscreen enabled Eee PCs and we got a good look at the hardware on the T91 and T101. However, the Windows XP touch user interface left something to be desired, and now, six months later, ASUS is fulfilling that desire in ways we really couldn’t have imagined.

On display at ASUS’ booth at Computex were a number of 8.9-inch Eee PC T91s (no sign of the 10-inch T101, but our U.S. ASUS representative confirmed that it is planned to hit the U.S. market). The touch interface (which doesn’t have a firm name, though TouchGate seems to appear in a few places) is launched by simply pressing a button on the bezel just below the screen. You can also launch it from the Eee Dock on top of the Windows XP desktop.

The interface launches with a series of three panels, similar to Apple’s Cover flow. Lightly swiping a finger across the screen will flick the panes. The main menu pane brings up a number of touch friendly applications on a swivel pane, including a memo pad and photo viewer. You can also select Internet Explorer which ASUS added a layer of touch functionality over. In IE you can select a large on screen keyboard to input your address or tap on another icon to zoom in.

Another pane brings up a Widget Mode that is built upon Yahoo’s widget platform. You can easily select and drag the widgets around the screen with a finger.

Really you have to see it to beleive it so hit the jump and hit the play button and watch the very impressive touch interface in action.

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Nvidia has been teasing us with its Tegra platform for months and today the company and its partners had some substantial plans to announce and devices to show.

First, Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang took the stage and introduced the Tegra processor. The processor, which aims to be extremely low-power, is made up of eight independent processors including ARM 11, ARM 7, GPU, 2D Engine, HD Video Encoder, HD Video Decoder, Audio, and Imaging.

“We are enabling a revolution. We are focusing only on products where the visual experience is vital to its users,” Huang said. Tegra is meant for small form-factor handhelds and for notebooks.

The Tegra platform will run Microsoft CE6 and Nvidia has created a user interface that lies over the basic operating system. The company has also teamed up with Adobe and Tegra will support full Flash and Flash accelerator. The processor and platform will also support full HD (1080p) playback.

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Today, Dell announced the Studio 14z, a 14-inch thin-and-light starting at a student-friendly price of $649. Curiously, despite its screen size it has no optical drive. That’s a design move we’ve grown accustomed to with netbooks, but don’t expect with larger screen systems. In any case, in part thanks to the lack of an optical drive, its starting weight is a very reasonable 4.3 pounds and it’s just .79 inches thick at its thinnest point.

The notebook also boasts FailSafe protection, a feature similar to LoJack for Laptops, which uses IP addresses to track a computer if it’s been reported stolen. Additionally, its USB ports can charge gadgets even when the notebook is powered down. Finally, it comes with Dell Remote Access software.

Consumers can choose from Intel Pentium, and Core 2 Duo processors, and hard drives with capacities as large as 500GB. A six-cell battery, Nvidia GeForce 9400M graphics, and 1.3-megapixel webcam are standard. Upgrade options include Bluetooth and a Blu-ray drive.

The Studio 14z comes in six colors: Black Chain Link, Midnight Blue, Spring Green, Plum Purple, Ruby Red, and Promise Pink (if you buy the latter, Dell will donate $5 to Susan G. Komen for the Cure, a charity that raises funds for breast cancer research). It starts at $649, and is available today online for U.S. and Canadian customers.

Notching 3.5 stars, Lenovo’s original IdeaPad S10 was a solid netbook but it had its drawbacks, including a cramped keyboard and a standard three-cell battery. Lenovo wasn’t ashamed to admit its shortcomings and fixed both of those main issues in its new IdeaPad S10-2.  For $349.99 the newest netbook on the block looks to make the competition shudder. We had some time to play around with the S10-2 a few weeks ago and came away impressed; check out our impressions and video of the system in action below.

The S10-2 differs most from its predecessor in looks. It has a rounder look and, according to the company, is .4 pounds lighter and .1 inches thinner. Instead of the matte lid of the original, it has a glossy cover (available in black, white, pink and gray) with adorned with a repeating pattern that looks strikingly similar to Target’s Bullseye. Surrounding the system are 3 USB ports (the first only had two), a 4-in-1 card reader, VGA and a head and mic jack. Lenovo nixed the Expresscard/34 slot of the original S10.

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Consumer Report’s June rankings for laptops are out, and Microsoft isn’t going to be too pleased. While the company’s aggressive advertising campaign emphasizes PCs’ low cost, Apple MacBooks dominate the upper echelon of the organization’s rankings.

The report, which is available on the Consumer Reports site, but only to subscribers, encompasses performance, design, versatility, battery life, screen quality, and technical support. Unfortunately, the ratings are so biased and the rating system so opaque, it sounds like CNBC’s Jim Goldman was running the Consumer Reports test lab.

High Ratings for Macs

In the 13-inch category, the leaders were the Unibody MacBook, the MacBook Air, and the last-generation plastic MacBook with scores of 62, 60, and 55, respectively. The HP Pavilion dv3 came in fourth place, just behind the plastic MacBook. More on the wacky scoring system further down.

The MacBook Pro led the 15-inch category with 75 points, followed by the Toshiba Satellite M305, which won 64 points. The Sony VAIO FW from the Microsoft’s third PC ad received a score of 62 points.

In the 17-inch category, the MacBook Pro steamrolled the competition by an even wider margin, winning 80 points when the top PC got 64. The HP Pavilion dv7 from the first PC ad got 54 points, placing fourth.

Now, for the analysis:  I call shenanigans. (Full disclosure: I own a Mac, and love it, and I still call shenanigans.)

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Maybe you haven’t heard, but the world is in something of a tizzy about Influenza A (H1N1), the virus that, up until last week, was known as Swine Flu.

At the heart of the public’s anxiety seems to be a fear of travel: many companies have cancelled trips to Mexico, the suspected origin of the pandemic, and several airlines have sharply cut their flights there.

But a story from CNN today focuses not on why people should avoid travel, but how to do it safely. Just over a month ago, weeks before H1N1 exploded, I did a similar story that asked whether flying really increases your chances of getting sick. As it turns out, CNN’s expert, Mark Gendreau, M.D., agrees with mine: you’re not necessarily at greater risk while on an airplane.

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Today, HP unveiled a new line of notebooks for small business users, starting at a recession-friendly $529. The ProBook has a stylish look (when’s the last time you saw a red business notebook?), comes in 15- and 17-inch screen sizes, and boasts many of the security features offered in the premium EliteBook series (oddly, a fingerprint reader isn’t one of them).

How good is the performance and design? Check out our full review of the ProBook 4510s, which offers a 15.6-inch display, full size keyboard and numberpad, a 2.1-GHZ Core 2 Duo processor, 2GB of RAM, 250GB hard drive, and DVD burner for $699.

Read on for more details.

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Acer officially launched the first Nvidia Ion powered computer with its nettop AspireRevo last week, and like we have been hearing for months now, the Nvidia Ion netbooks are on the way.

Pocket-Lint.com is reporting that a number of companies are preparing to announce Nvidia Ion powered netbooks in June and many of them will be available as soon as July.

The site’s source was hesitant to reveal which companies would unveil Ion netbooks, but “confirmed that there will be some big announcements from ‘key’ players at Computex, the annual PC trade show in Taipei at the beginning of June.”

Nvidia’s Ion graphics solution combines Intel’s Atom processor with GeForce 9400M graphics.  We reviewed the Ion Reference Design and were impressed with its graphics performance and are drooling to finally see it hit netbooks.

From Somalia to Sweden, things didn’t go well for pirates–seafaring and otherwise–this week.

Earlier today, a Swedish court convicted four men for running The Pirate Bay, a site that aided in the distribution of thousands of copyrighted songs, movies, and other materials. Each was sentenced to a year in prison and ordered to pay roughly $3.6 million in fines, pending appeals.

But what will this accomplish? As Mark Mulligan, a Forrester analyst in the New York Times article states, this will have little meaningful impact on curbing the illegal downloading of copyrighted materials.

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