Articles about Laptop

On Monday night while watching "Resident Evil: Afterlife" on USA Network, Google aired the first Chromebook commercial -- not once but twice. The ad played a lot better during primetime than on YouTube, with that oh-so tempting $249 price reaching out from the screen. Advertising where real people go shows Google's seriousness to reaching the masses. Make no mistake, something of a computing revolution quietly is brewing here.

Chromebook is still the top-selling laptop at Amazon, and that while being out of stock. Meanwhile, the cloud-connected device gains some surprising followers. On Google+, Chromebook chatter cracks the pipes, and mainly because of the newest model, which matches MacBook Air's form factor and ergonomics, including 11.6-inch screen and better keyboard, for one-quarter the price.

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In advance of Windows 8 Day on October 26, the big computer makers are all rolling out incrementally updated models in their different PC lines to support the touch activities central to Windows 8. Friday, long-running Texas PC maker Dell announced it had put up three new touch-enabled PCs for pre-order in the U.S., which will ship on October 26.

The three new PCs fall under the category of "seen it before, but not in this exact way," and they include the XPS 12 convertible notebook with the "spinning target" hinged display we first saw on the Inspiron Duo two years ago; the XPS One 27 All-in-one PC, and the Inspiron One 23 All-in-one, both of which had launched previously, except without the touchscreens.

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A couple of months ago, BetaNews contributor Mihaita Bamburic complained that he couldn't do his engineering work on any tablet, and what he really needed was a tablet with at least a 15-inch touchscreen. Sony appears to have met my colleague's demands with five inches to spare in a new tablet-ish PC of massive size. Sony calls it the Vaio Tap 20 PC...the first "mobile tabletop PC."

Imagine if you took a desktop all-in-one PC and slapped a battery inside its chassis. That's essentially the Vaio Tap 20. It has a 20-inch screen (1600x900) with 10-point multi-touch recognition and it has a built-in stand which allows it to be propped up and used as a traditional all-in-one PC when not being used as a pseudo-laptop-tablet thingy.

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Back in June, computer maker Acer launched its Aspire Timeline Ultra M5 line of Windows 7 Ultrabooks which came with a clause for $15 Windows 8 upgrade. Today, four months later and just a couple of weeks ahead of the official launch of Windows 8, Acer has debuted new Aspire M5 Ultrabooks equipped with a 10-point multitouch display to go with the new OS.

Like the M5 models unveiled last June, the new M5s come with either 14" or 15" displays, third generation Intel Core i3 or i5 processors, 500GB HDD/20GB SSD storage configuration plus optical drives, and a promised 8 hours of battery life. In case the same "M5" name didn't give it away, I'll make it clear, these are practically the same notebook spec-wise, just with the added touchscreen, Windows 8 installed out of the box, and no "Timeline" in the name.

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Windows 8 launches on October 26. Why wait that long? If the idea of purchasing a new laptop or even an all-in-one desktop PC with Windows 8 pre-installed has a nice ring to it then you're in luck -- the Home Shopping Network has just the thing for you.

Three Windows 8 laptops and two all-in-one desktop PCs are available for pre-order from the HSN website. They range from a relatively inexpensive $699.95 to a more daring $1,199.95.

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Americans still love their PCs for sitting back and surfing the web, but, hey, it's the post-PC era, baby and times are changing. In August, 13.3 percent of web pageviews -- from browsers, not apps -- went to mobile phones or tablets, according to comScore. That's double the number in a year.

Mobile phones accounted for 9 percent of pageviews and tablets 4.3 percent. The latter foreshadows the category's huge potential to disrupt the PC-browsing paradigm. Tablet install base is tiny compared to handsets.

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Do you own a Windows laptop, iPad and Android smartphone? Welcome to the post-PC era, which transition IDC describes as "profound". During second quarter, smartphones and tablets commanded 69 percent of smart device shipment share, dwarfing PCs.

"Recent shipment data clearly demonstrates that we have fully entered into the multi-device era, where individuals are buying and using multiple devices per person, most often with different combinations of operating systems", Bob O'Donnell, IDC vice president, says. "The implications of this development on application developers, device makers, Web service providers, businesses and even individuals is profound".

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Panasonic on Tuesday debuted the second generation upgrade of its lightweight Toughbook 53 notebook computer, which features a faster processor, a larger storage capacity, and improved battery life.

For almost fifteen years, Panasonic's Toughbook has been one of the most recognized brands in ruggedized mobile PCs, and it has included a number of different enterprise-class form factors. Last year, however, the company took the Toughbook brand into two new directions that mirrored the state of the consumer PC industry at large, and the impact it has been having on enterprise devices: Android-powered mobile tablets and lighter-weight touchscreen notebooks.

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Talk about your bitter clingers! Here I am, minding my own business, just writing about my experiences using an Android tablet, when out of the woodwork comes this wave of angry post-PC deniers. I mean, the level of rage on display is unreal. You'd think I walked into a Steve Jobs memorial service wearing an "I love Android" t-shirt or something!

For those of you who missed my earlier post, I noted how pleased I was with the outcome of my own post-PC experiment. I wrote how, with the right supporting peripherals, I could be perfectly productive on even a cheap Android tablet -- like my trusty Acer Iconia Tab 200. In fact, I was so impressed with the results that I declared being done with laptops forever. I would literally never buy another traditional laptop PC.

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That is the conclusion I reached after several weeks living la vida post-PC. With nothing but my trusty Acer Iconia Tab to work on while waiting for my house sale to close in Florida (see previous post about not needing a smartphone), I've managed to remain productive and connected without touching so much as a byte of "wintel" technology.

Well, maybe a few bytes. There have been the occasional detors off the Android wagon -- for example, when I needed to quickly print, sign and re-scan some legal documents and hijacked my daughter's Dell Inspiron for a few minutes (it was like pulling teeth -- she's quite possessive of her toys). However, for the most part I accomplished everything I needed to from the comfort of my Ice Cream Sandwich-based tablet. And the secret of my success had as much to do with the accessories that I surrounded the tablet with as with the device itself.

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Dell must have read my story on “What will it take to make Linux popular?”, agreed with Linus Torvalds' initial thoughts, then thought that it might be a good idea to publicly announce “Project Sputnik”, which despite the name doesn’t have anything to do with spacecraft like Dell would want you to believe. (Okay, so the skunkworks project predates my story by six months, but surely official timing can't be a coincidence?)

What Project Sputnik does is bring “an official developer laptop based on the Dell XPS 13 with Ubuntu 12.04 LTS preloaded, available in select geographies”, meaning Linux for the people on the Dell XPS 13 in much simpler words. Dell is taking the project to the next level by officially releasing it this fall. Timing is interesting with Windows 8 launching October 26. Since the laptop comes with Linux, presumably it will cost less than its counterpart running Windows.

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Oh man, what a hellish 10 days this has been.

Before we get too far, let me just warn you that when the doorbell rings, this little chat will be over. I don’t care if I’m in mid-sentence. That’s it. Period. End of story.

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Surely we can blame Tim Cook for that. Wait. You're too young to remember Compaq? Well, Apple's CEO worked there in the 1990s, and his leadership brings some decidedly bad Compaq habits from Texas to California. So for those of you thinking Apple is different under Cook than Steve Jobs, most definitely.

See, my eyes buggered when reading in iFixit's terrific MacBook Pro with Retina Display tear-down: "Unlike previous generations of MacBook Pros, the MacBook Pro with Retina display is guarded by Apple's proprietary pentalobe screws". Proprietary screws? That sounds familiar. Oh yeah. Compaq!

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I ask because one of my colleagues already has ordered one (shipping time is a couple weeks), and I got into an interesting Google+ debate about display technologies earlier today.

Apple announced the new laptop yesterday during its Worldwide Developer conference. The new MBP is thinner and lighter, which are nice-to-have features but nothing remarkable. The 2880 x 1800-resolution, IPS screen is really what sets the portable apart from other notebooks, whether Macs or Windows PCs. Apple has raised the standard of art, but the technology isn't gamechanging, as some bloggers or reporters claim. Apple is a laggard with respect to high-res displays, which on Windows PCs have outclassed Macs for years.

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May you live in interesting times. It’s an ancient curse. Or is it a blessing? There are volumes devoted to that age-old issue. In my world, though, there’s nothing gray about this topic. I get paid to answer questions, so interesting times are a blessing. Straight up. When clients don’t have any questions, now that’s a curse.

These are blessed times we live in, my friends. At least it is in my world. It’s hard to believe that it’s only been two years since Apple sold the first iPad. The year before, the tech world marveled at the vitality of the PC. Incredibly, shipments grew in 2009, defying gravity at a time when the rest of the economy seemed to be in a free-fall. My, how things have changed.

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