Notebooks / Accessories

Those tech companies seem to be taking the approach of America’s Independence Day pretty seriously with announcements of bringing new products to the old US of A. Not only did Samsung reveal that it will land its Ion based N510 and Go netbook on U.S. soil in the coming months, but it will be joined by the Archos 9.

Announced a month ago out of France, the Archos 9 tablet PC features a 9-inch touchscreen with virtual keyboard provided by Microsoft Windows 7.  However, for those that prefer to navigate with a mouse, the right edge of the device has an optical trackball and buttons.  Taking the shape of a Mobile Internet device (and less of a netbook), the Archos 9 is equipped with a new Intel Atom processor (Z515), 1GB of RAM and a 120GB hard drive. And because it would make no sense without it - it has 802.11bgn wireless.

The Archos 9 PC Tablet is scheduled to be in stores this Fall. No word on pricing, but if we had to guess we would say this guy should be in the $500 to $700 price range.

If you haven’t heard of Tegra yet, you will. This system on a chip, which packs in powerful graphics and video capabilities, is the guts inside the upcoming Zune HD from Microsoft and a host of mobile Internet devices, like the Mobinova elan we played with at Computex. And now MobileCrunch and others are reporting that we will see a phone from a top-five manufacturer by the fourth quarter of this year powered by Tegra for $199.

So why all the hype around Tegra? The technology promises a first-class Flash experience, console-quality gaming, and up to 1080p video playback (depending on the device). Plus, Nvidia boasts that Tegra offers five times the battery life of current netbooks.

We sat down with Michael Rayfield, general manager of mobile business at Nvidia, to find out more about Tegra’s potential and how it compares with competing technologies vying for a bigger slice of the smartbook/smart phone market.
Here are the quick highlights:

• Nvidia claims that Tegra is superior to Qualcomm’s Snapdragon and Freescale’s technology because it’s working with Adobe to accelerate Flash using the GPU.
• Tegra will initially support only Windows CE smartbooks, but the company is already working on bringing Tegra to Android phones and will embrace the platform for larger screen devices once it’s mature enough.
• Nvidia believes that Tegra is superior to the latest iPhone 3GS when it comes to gaming. “Tegra has more graphics and 3D capability than any device that’s shipping in a mobile handset today.” Whether or not this capability will be leveraged on the Zune HD or later devices remains to be seen.

Read on for the full interview and all the juicy Tegra details.

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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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According to the Wall Street Journal, Dell is considering joining the Mobile Internet Device brigade. The article claims that the pocket-sized device is ARM-based and powered by the Android operating system.

But don’t call the device a smartphone. It is being positioned as a Apple iPod touch competitor or, as the headline says, a “pocket Web Gadget.” In our opinion, MIDs have been tweener devices that don’t yet have voice capabilities (yes, we did say they make no sense).

Other than ARM and Android, there are not too many details, except that the project could be “delayed or scrapped entirely.” All in all, we have more questions than we know what do do with. What will be the internal platform? Nvidia’s Tegra? Qualcom’s Snapdragon? Is this the rumored Dell smartphone we have been hearing about for months? And above all…do people even want a Android MID? Tell us in the poll and in the comments.

The Nvidia Ion train seems to have left the station and second on the notebook stop (Lenovo’s S12 was the first) is Samsung. Though details are slim, Nvidia confirmed this morning that the company is working with Samsung to bring an 11.6-inch notebook to market with its Ion platform.

Though Nvidia would not confirm the specs, Netbook Italia is reporting that the laptop is called the N510 and packs a 1.66 GHz N280 processor along with Nvidia’s GeForce 9400M graphics. It will also feature 1GB RAM, 160GB hard drive, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, 3-in-1 card reader, and a 6-cell battery.

We will be digging up more details on the N510 including U.S. availability. Stay tuned.

Today, Gateway announced a new line of notebooks, the inexpensive NV series. These two 15.6-inch  notebooks, which cost $499 and $599, both have a generous 4GB of DDR2 RAM to offset their fairly low-end processors (the more expensive one has Intel Core 2 Duo, as opposed to AMD dual-core).

Aside from their price, they target students with multimedia features such as an HDMI port, a 16:9 aspect ratio, and Dolby Sound Room speakers.

More uniquely, there’s a MyBackup button, which allows forgetful or harried students to back up with the press of a finger. As with other backup solutions, users can customize to which location they send data, as well as which files get duplicated, and when or how regularly this backup happens.

The notebooks will be available in NightSky Black, Coffee Brown, Midnight Blue and Cherry Red.

After the jump, check out the breakdown of the two configurations.

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Why would anyone want souped up graphics on a netbook? Good question. And we got our answer during a brief video demo with Nvidia today, who showed us its Ion platform (which combines 9400M graphics with an Atom processor) running on the eagearly anticipated Lenovo IdeaPad S12. The good news is that the performance looks pretty stellar.

The bad news is that you’ll now have to wait til the fall to scoop up this version of the S12, which will sell for $495. Lenovo had originally said “later this summer” in its May 25th press release. We’re guessing that this could be a launch netbook for Windows 7. Based on our brief hands-on time, we think the Ion-powered S12 will be worth the wait.

The S12 we saw played a 1080p trailer of the Dark Knight (most netbooks can handle 720p but choke on 1080p), while the CUDA-enabled BodaBoom software transcoded another video clip in the background. We didn’t notice many dropped frames, and the S12 finished processing a 2-minute clip in about 2 minutes, whereas the typical Atom-only netbook takes 30 minutes to transcode a 5-minute clip.

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Road warriors have plenty of compelling netbooks to choose from these days, but HP’s Mini 5101 makes other machines look like toys.

We spent some alone time with the 5101 (starting at $449), which replaces the Mini 2140, and we like the durable new design, large and comfortable keyboard, and welcome features like hard drive protection. Check out our impressions, video, and gallery, and tell us if you think this mini is worth the premium.

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While 60 percent of netbooks don’t get to leave the house, HP’s new Mini 5101 is one machine you’ll want to show off at the airport. Targeted at mobile professionals, the Mini 5101 sports a durable new design, high-def display option, and 7,200-rpm hard drive, and it will start at $449 when it becomes available in July.

Replacing HP’s Mini 2140, the 10-inch 5101 is housed in  a new chassis. Though the silver aluminum covering is gone, the black Mini 5101 features a magnesium base and anodized aluminum display enclosure. We especially like the soft touch paint on the lower palm rest, which has a nice feel. There are two display options: 1366 x 768 (HD) and 1024 x 600.

Also gone is the silver keyboard that dates back to the HP Mini 2133. The Mini 5101 has a 95 percent, island style keyboard that’s protected with HP’s DuraKeys coating. One change we appreciate is that the trackpad’s mouse buttons are now located below it (rather than vertically straddling it). Unfortunately, these mouse buttons have the same piano-key like feel as HP’s ProBook line.

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Last night, we posted our review of the ThinkPad T400s, Lenovo’s new slimmed down, sexied up 14-inch business notebook.  Having spent over a week with the new ThinkPad, we fell in love with its super-thin chassis, ultrafast boot times (ours had a Toshiba SSD), and incredible keyboard / touchpad, which were even more responsive and comfortable than a typical ThinkPad’s. We also loved the performance as the system returned the highest score on PCMark Vantage, a popular performance benchmark, that we’d ever seen, besting even some quad core desktop replacements we tested.

There’s no such thing as a perfect notebook. So we also noted that, with a starting price of $1,599 and an MSRP of $2130 for our tricked-out review sample, this is an extremely expensive system, particularly in comparison to the regular ThinkPad T400, which can be had for under $800 in its minimum configuration. For over $2,000, we would also hope to get more than its modest 4.5 hours of battery life and we would have hoped for better graphics performance as its integrated Intel 4500MHD graphics chip delivered below average scores. But the performance and thin, durable form factor are so fantastic that it’s easy to overlook these flaws.

But, as always, we’re curious to see what our colleagues at other sites think. Let’s have a look:

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