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HP's fast fashion, Linux wins and losses: The week in laptops

This week, your Intrepid Editor returns from vacation, just in time to catch a Hewlett-Packard laptop-news trifecta. First, the company announced that it had achieved a mobile-computing milestone by getting the HP EliteBook 6930p to operate continuously for 24 hours on a single battery charge. Then came word that the Voodoo Envy 133 laptop, introduced in June, started shipping to customers. And finally, the company brought a bit of geekiness to New York's Fashion Week when a Vivienne Tam-designed HP mininote hit the runways.

Sony also initiated a multipronged attack on the headlines this week, first with its 18.… Read more

No more Linux for consumer-level Lenovos

According to a story at Desktop Linux, Lenovo has quietly stopped offering the Linux OS as a preinstall option for its ThinkPads, IdeaPads, ThinkCenters, and IdeaCenters on its Web site.

In January 2008, Lenovo finally began offering ThinkPads with Linux preinstalled. Now, if you want to purchases any of those systems from Lenovo's Web site, you have no choice but to pay the "Microsoft Tax" and get it with Vista installed. This can be seen as quite a blow to the loyal ThinkPad Linux community, where ThinkPads are the laptops of choice for Linux users.

Ray Gorman, … Read more

New Lenovo PCs cue up free Napster service

Buyers of most new Lenovo laptops and desktops will get to relive the good old days of free music via Napster--for a couple of weeks, at least.

The PC maker and the once notoriously embattled digital-music pioneer announced Friday that Lenovo customers will get a free, 14-day trial subscription to Napster To Go. The service lets users listen to songs on their PC and transfer an unlimited number of music tracks to any compatible MP3 player or music-enabled cell phone without paying per track.

The beleaguered online-music company is clearly looking for ways to attract new subscribers. After a high-profile … Read more

Lenovo external hard drive responds to touch

I reviewed the WD My Passport external hard drive recently and thought it was really cool with the storage gauge that lights up when plugged in to show how much storage space has been used. Lenovo has gone one step further with an external hard drive concept that can reveal the same information without even being plugged in.

The concept external hard drive features a finger-touch access button, much like a biometric reader, and an external display. Once you touch the button, the display will show the remaining storage space in the form of simple digits.

It's unclear how … Read more

Buzz Out Loud 800: It took 800 episodes, but we've finally arrived!

Well, OK, we won't have arrived until someone gets Kevin Rose to blog about how The Beatles are totally coming to iTunes on September 9, quoting an "anonymous source" (us!). Also, Brian Tong joins us for our historic discussion of the Google Chrome Web browser, lava rock problems in Hawaii, the extreme resource hoggery of IE8 Beta 2, and just how boring Spore will actually be. Listen now: Download today's podcast EPISODE 800

Apple Store in Hawaii still not open http://www.ifoapplestore.com/db/2008/08/23/hawaiian-spirits-dictate-storefront-materials/

Meet Chrome, Google’s shiny new browser … Read more

Solid-state drives slip into the mainstream

Solid-state drives, if not yet ubiquitous, have arrived. You can find them in laptops big and small and as a high-octane storage option for gaming PCs.

SSDs made their mark by appearing in the trendiest ultraportables like the Apple MacBook Air and Asus Eee PC--typically as stratospherically priced options, fashion statements rarely seen in the real world.

These drives are now coming off their rarefied shelf space and appearing across a wider range of laptops and ultraportable computers.

Any new, lightweight enterprise laptop worth its salt comes with a large-capacity solid-state drive option now. Hewlett-Packard recently introduced the 3-pound EliteBook … Read more

IDF news and the end of back-to-school: The week in laptops

This week's Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco kept us all busy this week, with plenty of new components and products that use them. We'll start off with the event host, Intel, which announced small-form-factor versions of its Centrino 2 processors (that should ignite plenty of rumors about a Centrino 2-based MacBook Air). Intel also broke out a SATA solid-state drive and announced a dual-core version of its Atom processor, due next month. The company also showed off an update to its tiny Classmate PC, which will include a touch screen.

There were plenty of other manufacturers' Netbooks … Read more

Lenovo refreshes 13.3-inch ThinkPad

When the Centrino 2-equipped ThinkPad X200 waltzed into our Labs and demonstrated not only impressive performance but also jaw-dropping battery life, we wondered when our other favorite ThinkPad, the X300, would be spruced up with Intel's latest components.

Turns out, we didn't have to wait long. Today Lenovo announced the ThinkPad X301, a component refresh to its popular 13.3-inch laptop. The new version will incorporate an ultra-low-voltage Core 2 Duo processor that's expected to be unveiled at the Intel Developer Forum this week. The ThinkPad X301 will also come equipped with DDR3 RAM, which (combined … Read more

At Siggraph 2008, up close with mobile workstations

LOS ANGELES--This week's Siggraph conference attracted a diverse crowd of graphic designers, animators, and industrial designers, and both HP and Lenovo were on-site to show off their new mobile workstations for graphics professionals. I had a chance to meet with both companies at the show to talk about some of the key features of these new models.

HP started the week by announcing the 17-inch EliteBook 8730w and 15.4-inch EliteBook 8530w, both of which support Intel's not-yet-official quad-core Core 2 Extreme processors, 8GB of RAM, and Nvidia's next-generation Quadro FX cards with up to 1GB of VRAM. In addition, these latest EliteBooks feature a few small design enhancements, such as a new latch designed to reduce stress on the display and a special coating on the keys and touch pad to help prevent wear. Even cooler is the VGA camera on the display bezel, which pairs with included software to double as a business card reader.

The EliteBook 8730w is also the first workstation on the market to include an HP DreamColor display option. The RGB backlit-LED screen can display millions of colors and displays true color even when the screen is dimmed. I got a quick demo of the EliteBook 8730w and I was impressed with not only the stunning color quality but also the ease of switching back and forth between sRGB and Adobe RGB on the display.

Also remarkable: both the 15- and 17-inch EliteBooks were quite thin and sleek, especially for such high-powered machines.

After HP I moved on to get a glance at Lenovo's ThinkPad W700 workstation, which was announced Tuesday. The beast was even larger than I'd imagined; after all, Lenovo representatives have emphasized that it's a workstation first, and mobile computer second. It's obviously larger than HP's 17-inch workstation, but the ThinkPad W700 also packs some bonus features: a built-in color calibrator and an integrated digitizer pad next to the touch pad. … Read more