Surprising virtually no one, Hewlett-Packard has finally officially announced its new low-cost, low-power NetBook-style mini-laptop, called the 2133 Mini-Note PC. Of course, we've been following every detail of this system for months, including the presumed launch date, but they're finally officially on sale starting today, from $499-$749.
We've had a chance to play around with an early test unit for about a week now, and so far we like it a lot. Like the Asus Eee PC or Intel Classmate, the 2133 Mini-Note is a smaller-than-ultraportable laptop that trades high-powered specs for portability and price. The HP 2133 keeps the compromises to a minimum, however, with a decent 1,024x768 resolution on its 9-inch screen, and options for 2GB of RAM and even a 7,200rpm hard drive. Its best asset is a unique keyboard, which manages to cram in nearly full-size keys, as opposed to the tiny, hard-to-use keys found on other small laptops.
Our main sticking point was the pokey VIA processor (although VIA's integrated Chrome 9 graphics runs the Vista's graphical interface smoothly), especially with Intel's new Atom ultramobile chips around the corner, and skimpy battery life with the default three-cell battery (you can also get a larger battery, but it's so big as to defeat the purpose of having tiny laptop like this).
The upshot on NetBook-style laptops like this is that they're best for basic tasks, such as Web surfing and working on office documents--but that's 90 percent of what we spend our time doing on laptops anyway.
Check out our full review and video of the HP 2133 Mini-Note PC for a more in-depth look.
We've been seeing blurry cellphone pics and hearing rumors for weeks, but Intel is finally showing off the next generation of its Classmate PC at the Intel Developer Forum in Shanghai.
The new Classmate is, as we expected, the same machine we saw a few weeks ago in some surreptitiously taken photos, and referred to at the time by Intel's generic NetBook platform name. Then, last week, we learned that one of the companies selling the new Classmate would be a laptop vendor named Computer Technology Link, or CTL, and they were going to call it the 2go PC (Intel is creating the basic reference design, while OEMS in different regions will manufacture the systems).
The Classmate is designed for students, and Andrew Chien, an Intel vice president and director of Intel Research said in a statement, "Only 5 percent of the world's children today have access to a PC or to the Internet. Education is one of the best examples of how technology improves our lives."
The new version of the Classmate (we looked at the original last year) trades the 2GB SSD drive for a more traditional 30GB hard drive, and increases the display from 7 to 9-inches -- changes intended to appeal to what the company calls "mature" markets, which means the U.S. and other Western countries, where it should sell for about $400, depending on the configuration.
We got to spend a few days checking out one of the new Classmate PCs last week, and you can check out our full review and video for more details.
The 2go PC.
Those recent pics of an Intel NetBook floating around online finally have an official name attached to them. It's the 2go PC from a laptop vendor named Computer Technology Link, or CTL, according to a spec sheet dug up by Engadget (and it looks suspiciously similar to a laptop we had sitting in our lab last August).
Intended for the education market, the 2go PC clearly has its roots in Intel's Classmate PC platform. That's not surprising, since we told you last August that the low-cost design of the Classmate would, "lead to cheaper, smaller laptops for everyone, although likely not directly from Intel, which wants to stay out of the system-selling business." In other words, Intel would come up with the basic design, but the actual laptops would be, "sold by local OEMs, who offer customized software configurations for the needs of each individual market."
The Intel Classmate
The main difference between the Classmate we looked at last year and the 2go PC/NetBook is the 40GB 1.8-inch 4200 hard drive, as opposed to the Classmate's 2GB SSD hard drive, and the display, which has been bumped up to 9 inches, from 7 inches, but keeps the same 800x480 resolution. Both have a 900Mhz Intel Celeron processor and basic 802.11b/g Wi-Fi.
Take a peek at this vendor photo of the 2go PC and our shot of the Intel Classmate, and you'll see a pretty clear DNA match between the two. Expect the 2go PC to hit the market in the next couple of months, for around $400, and we're sure we'll see NetBook-like systems from other vendors in the same time frame.
We've seen a lot of activity lately around the concept of low-cost laptops powered by Intel's upcoming Centrino 2 and Atom CPUs, which promise decent performance and small sizes. Now DigiTimes is reporting that the CPUs to power these systems will be priced very aggressively by Intel, which means we should see these new systems at a fraction of the prices we're seeing in the current $2,000-plus UMPC market.
According to the DigiTimes report, "The CPUs include the Celeron 585 with a core frequency of 2.16GHz priced at US$107 in thousand-unit tray quantities, and Celeron 575 at 2GHz and US$86...Intel has also set the price for its Atom N270 notebook CPU (Diamondville) which forms part of the company's Basic Mobile Platform at US$44."
Earlier today, Matt Elliott told us about the just-announced Atom-powered ECS G10IL mininotebook, and we snuck a peek at some leaked shots of Intel's NetBook yesterday--which looked suspiciously like Intel's Classmate PC (although we now hear the Classmate itself will be available to retailers in the near-future). All these systems, including some not-yet-announced mininotebooks from major PC makers, should fall somewhere in the $300-to-$900 range.
Does the Intel NetBook have a drinking problem?
(Credit: Tech Corner )Through the magic of Flickr , we've all spent the afternoon pondering blurry photos of what might be the Intel NetBook, a heretofore hypothetical computer powered by Intel's upcoming low-power Atom chips.
While we've already seen details of the desktop version, called the NetTop, via some leaked presentation, but the NetBook was a less-defined concept. Until now, that is. According to the original poster (on a blogspot blog called "Tech Corner"):
"My buddy works for a US Based OEM, and showed me a sample of one of the products that will be hitting US shores soon...It has a 900Mhz Celeron, 512 Ram, 40GB HD, 9 Inch screen, wifi, and Ethernet. It seems to be about 7" x 9"x 1.5". I asked him how much it was going to cost, and he said he didn't know but would probably be around 400 bucks. Said it should be available in the US by June."
If all this seem oddly familiar, it's because we've already seen a lot of this in Intel's Classmate PC, and a lot of the same concepts have already been commercialized in the best-selling Asus Eee PC.
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