The biggest news this week has been coming out of IFA 2008, with SlashGear’s roving reporter there, Milena Glimbovski, sending back all the details of the hottest new hardware. The netbook train shows no sign of slowing, with LG’s X110 and Fujitsu’s AMILO Mini Ui 3620 finally stepping out of the shadows and getting full announcements. There’s too much good stuff to mention it all individually, so check out the IFA 2008 tag for SlashGear’s full coverage.
Fujitsu have today finally confirmed their netbook, the AMILO Mini Ui 3520, at IFA 2008. Measuring 32.2 x 17.5 cm, the Mini Ui uses Intel’s Atom 270 1.6GHz processor, 1GB of RAM and has a choice of 60GB or 80GB hard-drives from launch, with a 120GB option coming in December. As previewed, the Mini Ui has interchangeable lid covers with five colors available from launch, together with a clear cover for you to sandwich photos in the lid.
Intel have been holding their annual Developers’ Forum in San Francisco this week, and quite a few prototypes and commercial products have come out to play. Of the former, most exciting seems to be the UrbanMax Tablet PC concept; of the latter, Viliv’s S5 MID and S7 UMPC both promise to crank the netbook market up a gear or two.
That’s probably not what Acer want to hear; the company has snipped pricing off of their Aspire One netbook, presumably remembering (only a little late) that the ultraportables are meant to be cheap. Not far from the shelves, Fujitsu’s Amilo Mini and Dell’s Inspiron 910 continued to leak information, but still no official word from the tongue-tied companies themselves.
Fujitsu-Siemens have announced a Tablet PC aimed at entry-level users and students. The Lifebook T1010 has a bi-directional swivelling 13.3-inch 1280 x 800 indoor/outdoor display with a passive (e.g. resistive) touchscreen, and uses either a 2.26GHz Core 2 Duo P8400 CPU or a 2.16 Celeron-M together with 1GB or 2GB of RAM (max 8GB supported) and up to 320GB hard-drive. There is no SSD option.
The Fujitsu U2010 has only been available in Asia since earlier this month, but that hasn’t stopped owners modifying the 5.6-inch convertible UMPC. Although Fujitsu sell versions of the U2010 (which will be known as the U820 in the US) with a 64GB SSD, it’s an expensive option above the standard 60GB HDD; UMPC Fever forum member datamate decided to take a different approach, using a 16GB Compact Flash card with a ZIF adaptor.
Fujitsu Siemens have unveiled their new CELSIUS H-series mobile workstations, based on Intel’s Centrino 2 platform with an option to upgrade to the Intel Core 2 Extreme or upcoming Mobile quad-core processors. Both the CELSIUS H265 and H270 have a 15.4-inch display with a choice of 1680 x 1050 (WSXGA+) or 1920 x 1200 (WUXGA) resolution panels, run off an NVIDIA Quadro FX 770M video card with 32 CUDA Parallel Computing Processor Cores.
According to ITworld, Fujitsu have confirmed that they will be officially announcing their Amilo Mini netbook at the upcoming IFA trade show in Berlin. Little is known about the 8.9-inch budget ultraportable aside from that it runs Windows and has interchangeable colored casing plates.
Fujitsu-Siemens have taken the wraps off of their own mini desktop PC, the ESPRIMO Q5030. Unlike the ASUS Eee Box, which has an energy-efficient but relatively low-powered Atom CPU, the Q5030 offers Intel’s latest Centrino 2 chipset together with up to 4GB of RAM, a 250GB 5,400rpm hard-drive and slot-loading DVD drive. What’s most impressive, though, is the fact that even running a 2.26GHz Core 2 Duo P8400 processor the Q5030 still merely sips electricity.
The fight got dirty in the netbook arena this week, as Monday saw VIA’s Nano CPU take on Intel’s Atom with a 1080p smack-down video only to become mired in controversy when bloggers ran the tests themselves and came up with wildly different outcomes. Still, we had Lenovo’s finally-official IdeaPad S10 and S9 to cheer us up, together with the rumor that Gigabyte plan a 10-inch dual-core version of the coveted M912 tablet-netbook.
Of course, ASUS couldn’t bear to be out of the headlines for a single minute, and so announced the S101 (the size of an Eee, the branding of an Eee, but it’s not an Eee) together with a cloud storage option. Netbooks are so much the niche of the moment that this week’s “He Said, She Said” editorial was all about whether the best value comes from there or from a second-hand laptop off of eBay.
Fujitsu has finally made their LifeBook U2010 UMPC official in the Asia-Pacific region, unveiling the full color options in the process. The convertible device has a SuperFine 5.6” WXGA 1280 x 800 touchscreen, 1.6GHz Intel Atom CPU and a choice of 60GB HDD or 64GB SSD, in casings gold, silver, red, blue or black. Fujitsu are promising a maximum 8hrs of battery life from a single charge.
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