Gateway have announced a bevy of new thin-and-light notebooks, the EC14, EC54 and EC58, each packing Intel CULV processors, WiFi b/g/n and up to 8hrs battery life. The Gateway EC14 is the baby of the bunch, with an 11.6-inch display, up to 500GB storage and up to 8GB of RAM. Meanwhile the EC54 and EC58 both have a 15.6-inch display, are an inch thick and have an aluminum chassis.
Say what you like about Sony – their machines might be expensive and their customer service might throw the occasional wobbly, depending on who you speak to – but they certainly know how to put together a slick, appealing notebook. The Sony VAIO X has fallen lightly into the hands of T3, and they’ve been putting the carbon-fiber marvel through its paces.
Some analysts are saying that the economy is starting to show signs of recovery, which is a good thing for all of us. The latest quarterly numbers for the PC industry are in from research Firm IDC and PC shipments have reportedly risen by 2.3% and there have been some changes at the top of the PC shippers list.
Back in the days of the Super NES there was a game that my brother and I played that shipped with 3D glasses. I can’t even remember the name of the game, but I do remember it sucked. Today you can get some impressive 3D effects on PC games and 3D is coming to console systems as well. Acer has announced its first 3D notebook called the Aspire 5738DG.
Wireless provider AT&T has been beefing up the number of notebook and netbooks that it offers with subsidized integrated 3G WWAN. The new notebook is one of the Dell machines that AT&T has announced the addition of with embedded mobile broadband.
HP is the largest computer maker in the world and as such, it is always offering new and updated products for its customers. HP has gone official with the announcement of the dv8 multimedia notebook in the UK along with updates to its dv7 and dv6 notebooks. We already know about the dv8 from its September unveiling here in the US.
The remainder of Toshiba’s new notebook line may not get touchscreens like the M505 Touch and U505 Touch, but you can’t accuse the company of missing out any particular niche. The Windows 7 update gets applied across the board, with the Toshiba Mini NB205 netbook getting Win 7 Starter and either 160GB or 250GB storage (MRSP from $399.99), all the way up to the 18.4-inch Satellite P500 with a choice of Intel Core 2 Duo or AMD Turion II CPUs, optional Blu ray and harmon/kardon speakers (MRSP from $799.99).
Acer isn’t the only one with touch on the brain today, with Toshiba outing a range of new Windows 7 laptops of which two offer a multitouch display. The Toshiba Satellite U505 Touch (U505-S2980-T) and Satellite M505 Touch (M505-S4990-T) have 13.3-inch and 14-inch displays respectively, both use Intel’s Core 2 Duo T6600 2.2GHz processor with 4GB of memory (8GB max) and pack 500GB hard-drives. Toshiba also load on their own touch-friendly software, including the Bulletin Board organizer and digital media display, and the ReelTime timeline-based history.
HP’s leaked consumer device catalog at the end of September warned us that the company had a new, 11.6-inch CULV notebook in the works, and sure enough HP Japan have just announced the new machine. The HP Pavilion DM1 gets a dual-core 1.2GHz Intel Celeron SU2300 processor along with 2GB of RAM (5GB supported), a 250GB 5,400rpm hard-drive and Intel GMA 4500MHD graphics chipset.
It’s not quite the multitouch marvel, but Acer’s new 11.6-inch Aspire Timeline AS1810TZ does at least share the Windows 7 underpinnings of the company’s other new models today. The CULV ultraportable uses Intel’s dual-core processors and promises over 8hrs of runtime from the standard 6-cell battery.
JP
