netbook

This evening I was a guest of HP’s at Vivienne Tam’s fashion show here at New York City’s fashion week. What does HP have to do with a renowned Asian fashion designer? Well they have teamed up with the designer to create the “HP Digital Clutch.”

The red clutch was in hands of the models as they walked down the runway. I was able to only catch a few shots of the device on the runway (see the gallery below).

According to the information provided by HP the clutch will sport a peony flower design and “features a unique blend of Asian and Western cultures, antiquity and modern style, technology and fashion.” Fact: the Peony is the national flower of China.  The bag was inspired by Tam’s “China Chic” style.

We will getting a look at the HP Digital Clutch at the after party, but we have been told that its the HP Mini-Note under the clothes. Of course, what we care about is if it has an Atom processor!

Updated: We got tons of shots of the Digital Clutch (along with Vivianne Tam and Serena Williams showing it off) at the after party; they are in the gallery below. We confirmed that it is the next generation of the HP Mini Note since it sports a larger 10-inch screen.

The HP Vivienne Tam Special Edition Notebook will be available early next year. No price yet but we can expect, like a Vivianne Tam dress, you will have to pay a pretty penny.

Beyond being one attractive netbook, the ECS G10IL packs built-in mobile broadband support, a feature that sets it apart from the other netbooks on the playground.

The built-in Ericsson F3507g WMC 1.0 Data Modem coupled with a slot for a SIM card under the battery allow the 10-inch netbook to connect to a GSM network, like AT&T or T-Mobile. Our review unit came with a working modem so I popped in a colleague’s AT&T SIM card.

What do I think? Only that every mini-notebook should come with this feature.  When you have got your netbook but no Wi-Fi, it is like having cereal without milk. There is no reason that you shouldn’t be able to share your phone’s data connect with your netbook while on the move.

Setting up the connection was fairly simple. I removed the battery and slid in an AT&T 3G SIM card.

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Averatec might be working on a nameless mini-notebook but it sure looks a heck of a lot like the MSI Wind. The Gadgetress over at the Orange Country Register is reporting that Korean Averatec is going to bring to market an Intel Atom-powered 10-inch netbook with a 120GB hard drive.

There doesn’t seem to be any more details at the moment, but I just had to state that from the pictures the Averatec system make it look exactly like the MSI Wind. Call me Nancy Drew, but the evidence just adds up. The LED lights are on the right hand of the palm rest (same place as the Wind), the touchpad bar is solid (just like the Wind’s) and the VGA out port is colored blue (just like the Wind’s). Oh and the keyboard appears to be the exact same size. Need I say more?

It doesn’t surprise me that MSI is licensing its hardware to other U.S. based OEMS. In fact, another company will be bringing the Wind to market under another brand in the coming weeks. All I have to say is thank goodness! Maybe our dear readers will finally be able to get their hands on the 10-inch netbook that has been so hard to get, particularly with a 6-cell battery.

Timed perfectly with the deluge of mini-notebook news coming out of Computex, Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu Linux, announced its new operating system: Ubuntu Netbook Remix.

Set to arrive preinstalled on mini-notebooks later this year, the Ubuntu Netbook Remix will feature some of our open-source faves such as Firefox 3, Thunderbird, Pidgin, OpenOffice, Rhythmbox, FBReader, Lifrea, and F-spot.

We sat down for a conversation with Gerry Carr, marketing manager at Canonical, to discuss the new Atom-powered OS that’s designed to make Ubuntu the face of the mini-notebook space.

What is Ubuntu Netbook Remix and how does it differ from other Linux distributions?
It’s not a distribution. Those are products with daily builds for end users to get the ISO and put on any PC. This isn’t. We’re calling it a remix, so basically it takes the core elements built into the desktop edition and it’s optimized for the Intel Atom processor. It’s built for small-factor machines and is fast-on, fast-off. It’s all about getting on the Web quickly, as that’s the primary user experience on these machines. It’s built equally for touch as it is for mass driven.

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