Lenovo X Series: Core i7-Powered Bid’niss Laptops

Lenovo unleashed their new X-series ThnkPad laptops last week, each featuring a burly Core i7 processor. The X201 and slim-and-trim X201s are “perfect for mobile professionals that need full performance and long battery life,” as Lenovo’s website eloquently puts it. These are indeed computers for traveling business-folk, at a feathery 2.5 lbs (for the lightest X201s model), a 12-inch LED-backlit screen, and a battery life of up to 12.5 hours (that’ll get you from New York to Hawaii, which sounds like a great business trip). The X201 starts at $1,099 (though the base model comes with only a Core i5 processor), and the X201s at $1,399.

The real head-turner is the X201t. This convertible tablet is “great for students, healthcare, education and construction professionals,” or at least Lenovo hopes so. This is no iPad, and at $2,134 to start, it’s definitely aimed at a niche audience (but what student has $2,000 for a computer?).

All three models come equipped with some serious security measures as well, including a USB-based, 128 bit-encrypted, keycode-required hard drive. Lenovo is a leader in business-class laptops, so give these a look if you’re serious about serious work and have a serious budget to match. (more…)

Sony Vaio E Series: Mid-Tier Laptops With Panache

Sony announced their latest line of Vaio laptops last week, the brightly colored mainstream E Series. The color options are certainly, uh, flamboyant? Styles listed on the Sony Style web store include: Coconut White, Gunmetal Black, Lava Black, Hibiscus Pink, Iridescent Blue, Caribbean Green. Gadget blog CrunchGear also listed matte colors Maple Brown and Silver White.

From the Sony Style blog: “The key benefit of this series is flexibility, personalization and customization. With that kind of fun, you just know Sony Style team couldn’t leave that alone.” More after the jump. (more…)

The Apple iPad: Nerds’ll Hate It, Laymen’ll Love It

In case you’ve been trapped under a bus for the last 30 hours, Apple announced their “latest creation” in San Francisco yesterday, a “magical and revolutionary device.” It’s the tablet computer that the world has been expecting from Apple for nearly 10 years now, the product of Steve Jobs’ dreams.

It’s called the iPad, and we think it’s pretty rad for what it is. It’s too underpowered to be a real laptop like the MacBook (and lacks the keyboard to even be a netbook), and it’s just too big to be a handheld, on-the-go device like an iPod Touch. But we tend to agree with Steve Jobs and the rest of the Cupertino Crew that it fills a significant gap between those two devices because it can handle any kind of media (pretty much) and make that media accessible anywhere. We break it down after the jump:
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Acer Debuts Powerful Budget Laptops

Acer is giving Intel’s powerful i3 and i5 Core processors a home in a pair of new budget-minded laptops. The 15.6-inch Acer Aspire AS5740 and 17.3-inch Acer Aspire AS7740 will both start at $750 when they ship on Sunday, January 17th. The larger AS7740 comes standard with a 2.14 GhZ Core i3-330M processor, 4GB of RAM, a Blu-ray drive (to make use of that large screen), and Windows 7 Home Premium. The smaller AS5740 lacks the Blu-ray drive but packs a wallop with the 2.26 GhZ Core i5-430M processor.

Both feature other niceties like multi-gesture touchpads, built-in webcams, six-cell lithium ion batteries, a slew of ports, and 500GB hard drives. The designs could be sleeker and the battery life won’t be great, but that’s a lot of computer for under $800. Of course, better configurations are available for a bigger price tag as well.

Why does such a solid computer suddenly go for a reasonable price, you ask? Well, the International Consumer Electronics Show just wrapped up. A bunch of hot new configurations were unveiled in Vegas last week, so keep your eyes peeled for deals on powerful new models and cheap old models.

Update 2/24: These are even cheaper than announced already, as little as $599. Check the listings below.

Intel’s New Pine Trail Netbook Processors

Intel’s new Pine Trail processors have finally launched, and it’s about flippin’ time. A chunk of all netbooks released in the past year or so have run on Intel’s 1.6 GHz Diamondville Atom N270 or N280 processors, which is a nice configuration for a portable mini-computer. Battery life is decent, performance is OK, though it’s no jaw-dropper. It’s aging fast, especially in light of competition from graphically superior NVIDIA Ion chips, so Intel hit us with an upgrade–sort of.

The new 1.66 GHz processors integrate the memory controller and GMA 3150 graphics, which reduces the size and improves efficiency. Early reviews of new Pine Trail computers like the ASUS Eee PC 1005PE indicate that the battery life is notably longer (20 percent), but the performance is largely the same. It “felt slightly snappier than netbooks with Atom N270 or N280 chips, but not by much,” Joanna Stern of Engadget said. It’s capable of comfortably running several small-footprint programs at once (a browser, messaging clients, music libraries, for example), but any kind of heavy media editing is best left to a more powerful machine.

Long story short: Pine Trail netbooks are slightly improved versions of older Atom-based netbooks. This falls short of the true overhaul that enthusiasts had hoped for, so we’ll all have to keep our fingers crossed for something better to roll along, but still a decent option as long as the price is right.