The first Netbook we've seen with the Atom N450 is the Asus Eee PC 1005PE.
Intel has officially announced the next generation of its popular Atom CPUs for Netbooks. While probably the worst-kept secret in personal computing, unveiling the Atom N450 (previously codenamed "Pinetrail") weeks before the upcoming CES trade show means Intel doesn't want this key announcement to get lost amid the thousands of new products set to debut in January.
One of the brightest spots in the consumer electronics industry over the past two years has been the growth of Netbooks. These small, low-power, low-cost laptops are popular with almost every segment of the computer-buying public, from students, to business travelers, to seniors.
But, these machines had became largely commodity products, with identical components and features, driving prices down to $299 (or less, with subsidized deals from mobile phone providers). More recently, PC makers have attempted to create new tiers in the Netbook market with high-def displays and improved Nvidia Ion graphics, or even competing CPUs from AMD and Via. ... Read more
Amazon has announced small enhancements to certain Kindle models.
(Credit: Amazon)Just in time for the holidays and facing heavy competition from Barnes & Noble's upcoming Nook e-book reader, Amazon has announced that it has improved the Kindle's battery life when the wireless connection is turned on and will now be offering native PDF support for its e-book reader. Both the battery-life boost and native PDF support will be available to owners of new Kindles and some older models via a firmware upgrade.
In a press release, Amazon says the Kindle now has battery life of up to seven days with wireless turned on compared with four days previously. However, battery life with wireless turned off remains the same (around two weeks).
"Battery power management for portable wireless devices is a complex technical area, and the battery life improvement announced today is the result of a six-month firmware improvement and testing program," the release notes.
As for the native PDF support, Amazon says you can now "read professional and personal documents in their original ... Read more
(Credit:
LG)
It turns out LG is working on a sequel to the X110 it released last year. Not excited? We don't blame you, but what if we tell you the new X130 is set to have arguably the longest battery life in the Netbook industry? Yes, we thought that might get your attention. For a second or two.
The X130 will come with a nine-cell battery, which according to LG will last up to 12 hours during light use, or up to 7 hours 30 minutes while watching movies. That sounds amazing--and a tad optimistic to us--but if it gets anywhere near this figure we'll be absolutely delighted.
There's not much else to write home about. Rather than building on the fairly solid foundations of its predecessor, LG's follow-up simply seems to regurgitate old ideas. The hinge now has a chrome strip, and the lid now says X-Note on it, but the X130 still packs a 10.1-inch, 1024x768-pixel display, 1GB of RAM, a 160GB... yawn... hard drive and a ... Read more
The Acer Aspire Timeline 15.6-inch, 1.3Ghz laptop
(Credit: Acer)Now that surfing the Net while flying is no longer new, I really want a computer that can last the entire flight from San Francisco to NYC, which is about 6 hours long.
Acer seems to have a solution for that. On Tuesday, the company announced its newest Aspire Timeline series, which it claims offers more than 8 hours of battery life on average in one charge. If this is true, it'll really set a new standard for mobility and productivity.
According to Acer, the Aspire Timeline series achieved this extended battery life thanks to a combination of factors, including a unique design, Intel's ultralow-voltage processors, advanced power management, high-capacity batteries, and LED backlit displays. The result is a series of laptops that are thinner, lighter, and much more energy-efficient than other laptops.
The best thing about the new Aspire Timeline series, however, is the price. Ranging from $598 to $899, the Timelines are among the most affordable laptops.
However, there's a catch and it's rather big: the three laptops in this series use very low-performance CPUs. ... Read more
At first glance, Samsung's take on the traditional 10-inch Netbook is about as bland as these tiny little systems get. It lacks the big keyboard of HP's Mini 1000 or the ExpressCard slot of the Lenovo S10, and if you stuck it in a lineup with Netbooks from Acer and MSI, you'd be hard-pressed to pick it out.
The NC10 does, however, have one of the best batteries we've seen in a Netbook, second only to the current 9- and 10-inch Eee PC models from Asus. With about five hours from a not-too-bulky 6-cell battery, it's a good choice for long flights or extended coffee shop sessions.
This week, Donald and Jasmine make a valiant-yet-stumbling attempt to explain LaLa's new music service.
Also on tap: SanDisk's cheap new music player made especially for slotMusic albums, super sweet earphones from Klipsch, and a grab bag of MP3 players with ultralong-lasting batteries.
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We just reviewed a new retail-specific version of Dell's popular Inspiron 1525 laptop, and found ourselves wondering why this new system's battery life was so poor compared to its very recent (and largely identical) predecessor. How can two versions of essentially the same laptop have a difference in battery life as big as the 3-hour vs. 2-hour one we found? We looked a little closer and found a potential culprit.
Both $650 laptops (the newer 1525-139B and the older 1525-121B) have six-cell batteries, but that's not always the most useful number to look at. Most laptop batteries are labeled for 56Wh (or watt hours), which means they can hypothetically power a 1-watt load for 56 hours. The 1525-121B had a standard 56Wh battery, while the 1525-139B has only a 41Wh battery, which one would never notice without taking the battery out and reading the fine print stamped on it--as the batteries (and systems) look pretty much exactly the same.
Thus, our shorter battery life, and one more area where budget-minded PC makers ... Read more
The latest software update appears to have improved the iPhone 3G.
(Credit: Corinne Schulze/CNET Networks)Recently, I asked iPhone 3G owners to tell me if the 2.1 software update had fixed the widespread issues with dropped calls, short battery life, and faulty 3G connectivity. Now, just over a week later, I've wrapped up your comments.
At the time of this writing, we received 56 comments (I had to discount a few because they weren't on topic). While this is an entirely unscientific survey, almost half (48 percent) reported significant improvements in all areas, 20 percent reported no positive changes, and 32 percent said that it fixed only a few issues while leaving other problems unchanged. I've included a sampling of comments after the break.
As for me, I have to fall in the neutral camp. On the upside, backups on our iPhone 3G review model are quicker, contacts load faster and application crashes are nonexistent. I never had many dropped calls, so I didn't see a change there, but the keyboard lag has improved as well.
On the downside, however, I haven't seen much a battery life improvement at all. Still I can only get a day's worth of battery, even if I leave it resting on my desk for a few hours. Though one satisfied reader said he was happy that his iPhone 3G now lasted a full day rather than a few hours, I still think that's unsatisfactory.
What's more, I'm still wondering exactly how the update changed the 3G feature. In its release notes Apple promised that 2.1 would bring "improved accuracy of the 3G signal strength display." So what exactly does that mean? Like my colleague Dong Ngo, I've seen a few more bars on my display but the 3G reception seems to be about the same.
Finally, some readers said that after the 2.1 update their iPhone started fetching e-mail far less frequently. I've haven't seen a change in that area so please tell me if you have. ... Read more
This is an HP laptop similar to the one that offers 24-hour battery life.
(Credit: Hewlett-Packard)Hewlett-Packard says it has achieved a mobile-computing milestone by getting the HP EliteBook 6930p to operate continuously for 24 hours on a single battery charge. The laptop used in the test is, however, rather different from those consumers would pick up at the store, at least for now.
The machine's equipped with high-end components including Intel solid-state hard drives (SSDs), a mercury-free LED display, and an optional ultra-capacity battery.
The cream-of-the-crop components played a crucial role in making the 24-hour battery life possible. HP says the Illumi-Lite LED display, by itself, boosts battery run time by up to four hours compared with traditional LCD displays, and the Intel SSD provides up to a 7 percent increase in battery life compared with traditional hard drives.
In addition to helping achieve outstanding battery life, Intel's SSDs provide greater durability and reliability as well as faster system responsiveness. HP claims its benchmarks show overall performance boosts of up to 57
... Read more
Last week, GameSpot posted an interview with Sony PlayStation's Director of Hardware Marketing, John Koller, in which he gave us a video tour of the upcoming PSP 3000.
In case you missed the initial announcement, the PSP 3000 isn't all that different from the current "Slim" PSP, the PSP 2000, but it has a built-in mic for Skype calls (and other voice features in games), 480i output for older TVs, and a more vibrant anti-reflective screen that should allow you to view the screen--and play with the device--much better outdoors. However, Koller said in his interview that the jacked-up screen would suck more power than the old screen and thereby reduce battery life by about 20 to 30 minutes.
Well, now Koller's essentially retracted his statement and posted a blog in which he says that with the help of some power-management magic, the two systems' battery lives will be the same.
Here's the full ... Read more
