Laptops Arena

If I would be one of those really in love with technology and attractive designs, I think I simply wouldn't sleep at all these days. Why? Nightmares, that's the answer! Why nightmares? Well, just look at all the awesome netbooks already available, and they just wouldn't stop! Now, the time has come for LG X120, the cutie below!

No, no, I am not talking about the chicks, although they are also pretty hot! ;) According to LG, the X120 should arrive by the end of this month to Japanese consumers, while Europe and 20 countries from the rest of the world should get it by the end of April.

Wondering about what's inside the box? Well, what about a 160GB hard drive, Splashtop-powered LG "Smart On" quick-boot interface and 10.1-inch WSVGA display, pushed forward by some Atom processor, all with a weight of 1.26 kg?

The details are still somewhat sketchy, and the Japanese product page looks extremely funny, once you use Google Translate or any other similar service to figure out what it says. Just for the record, no matter how bad could be that translation, I simply couldn't spot any processor info, but - as a last hot piece of news - it seems the LG X120 will feature 3G HSPA connectivity.

Other than the above...just wait and we'll all see, sooner or later!

If you're not much into hardware, then let me tell you a very simple thing - as lower the voltage needed by a certain chip, the lower its temperature. When overclocking processors, increasing voltage is the last thing to do to ensure the system works properly, but considering the small chips used these days in notebooks, and the fact that most of us have more computing power than needed on the road, we need even lower voltage chips to get things right.

According to various sources, Intel's Consumer Ultra Low-Voltage (CULV) initiative will have as leaders two of the largest PC makers,probably Dell and HP, both expected to come up with tiny notebooks with screens between 11 and 13 inches, sometime during this summer.

These sources also claim that Acer and ASUS should be hurt by these new releases, since they have a solid percentage of their income coming from that part of the market. Now, I only ask myself how similar to the ASUS Eee PC will be those new notebooks? The reason is obvious - you want to win a game, you have to play by its rules, and in the UMPC market, ASUS is the main player, as well as the one setting the rules.

Since pricing and processors expected to be used in these platforms are currently only rumors, I won't say anything else. Let's just wait and see what happens, shall we?

The ASUS Eee PC family is getting larger with each month, I guess, and since they were the first ones to bring the netbook to the masses, I see nothing wrong with it. Well, this exponential growth should stop one day, but we're not going to talk about that now. Basically, we have some ASUS Eee PC 1008HA news. What kind of news? Its price!

According to various sources, the 1008HA is expected to be available for UK-based consumers at a price point of £359, including VAT. That's a bit over $500 in the US, or €382 in the rest of Europe. So...what will we get for this price?

Leaving aside the fact that the 1008HA is quite a handsome gadget, the 10.2-inch LED backlit screen with 1024x600 native resolution, the Intel N280 Atom CPU and 1GB of RAM aren't that ugly, either. While no SSD version is currently planned, the 1008HA will come with a pretty large 160GB hard-disk drive, at least for a netbook.

Considering the above, it's quite surprising to find that the ASUS Eee PC 1008HA is only 1-inch thick and a weight of 1.1kg. ETA? Next month!

This world is spinning around to fast, that's a fact. No, this has nothing to do with the fact that our planet is actually spinning faster and faster(that has been proven already, but we won't be thrown into orbit too soon, don't worry), because what I care about here are laptops, and not world peace and prosperity. The laptop targeted now is HP's Pavilion dv4t, an older product that's getting better...the quiet way!

No less than three Pavilion laptops got various updates during the last few weeks, and the dv4t is one of them. Why the dv4t, and why now? As I said, the world is spinning around much too fast, and HP surely got that right.

Just as a side note, the Intel Atom CPU reached 2 GHz... so netbooks may soon catch up to some entry-level full fledged laptops, if the laptop producers are not taking care to keep their product lines updated! Anyway, for now, everything's safe, because the Z5xx processor series is mainly targeting the mobile market, and possibly the tiny Sony VAIO P...

...so let's get to the HP Pavilion dv4t update: LED-backlit display, Espresso Black and Moonlight White color options, integrated WWAN (Verizon or AT&T), a generous 500GB HDD, as well as optional NVIDIA GeForce G 105M graphics with 512MB of dedicated memory. At last, there are some high-end features available on request, like the Blu-ray drive, integrated HDTV tuner, and a 12-cell battery!

Now, if you want to throw away your desktop forever, grabbing a Pavilion dv4t and adding all the available options seems like a really interesting(and pretty expensive!) option, don't you agree?

A little itsy-bitsy netbook capable of 1080p video? While this makes me shiver, I can only think about the paradox that we're going to have a netbook able to do what it can't do. How's that? Well, we may have a 1080p capable CPU+GPU pair, but I don't even want to think how ridiculous would be to have a 10-inch display with 1920X1080 resolution...

...but that's no big deal for now, because we're only talking about a mainboard reference design from VIA. Even more, you can say I'm a fool, and I won't mind, because the full HD video will be played only using external displays. Now I'm really left in the dust! What can I say?

You probably know that I am not really crazy about laptops when a desktop computer can get the job done, and despite the fact I like netbooks a lot, the idea of having a full HD-capable device that needs an external display to go full HD is a bit strange...

The real story is very short, since the VIA Surfboard C855 has been officially announced by Via Technologies, and this solution is built around the new VX855 chipset, with a really impressive feature list:

- 1080p Full HD video playback
- 8-channel HD audio
- hardware decoding for H.264, MPEG-2/4, VC-1 and WMV9
-support for Bluetooth, WiFi, GPS and 3G connectivity

The best part comes at the end, since the company behind it claims this platform is able to play HD video with less than 40 percent CPU load, with up to 1366 x 768 internal display resolution, and no less than 1920 x 1440 when using some external display. Damn, that's HOT!