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Laptop Advisor’s Buyer’s Guide
Update 1/11/10: We originally published this post back in October as a holiday guide to help you choose a laptop for you or your loved one. The holidays are over now, but this post has taken on a life of its own — we get new comments every day seeking advice, too many to keep up with most of the time. We’ll keep this post up at the top of Laptop Advisor until the models we listed below are obsolete (which, in the laptop world, is probably another two months). In the meantime, we’re busy keeping up with the newest models and planning a major update to LaptopAdvisor.com, so feel free to chime in with some advice for your fellow laptop buyers. Thanks all!
Whether you’re planning to make a switch over from desktop to laptop, upgrading from an old laptop to a new laptop, or just buying a gift for a loved one, finding a new laptop can be daunting. It can be a lot like buying a car. First you have to choose whether you want an SUV, a van, or sedan, then pick a manufacturer, then look at the dozens of other options and find out which features you want or need. Finally you sift through hundreds of cars and find the perfect one for you, only to be left with the choice of color.
Buying a laptop has essentially adopted a similar methodology. That method may be great for some, but for those of you that don’t want to spend hours comparing complex spec lists, and don’t want to look at hundreds of laptops, here’s a different method. We’re going to make recommendations based on interests and specified needs:
Laptop News
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…)
No Comments — add one!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.
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.
The JooJoo Pad Tablet
The mythical Crunchpad has actually (almost) arrived–only now, it’s the JooJoo Pad. It’s been a dramatic saga so far. Long story short, TechCrunch.com’s Michael Arrington decided in July 2008 that the world needs a web-ready media tablet computer for $200. Singapore-based developer Fusion Garage agreed to design such a device. Things were going swimmingly until summer 2009, when some delays popped up. A $200 tablet suddenly became a $300-$400 tablet, and the street date became a vague “by the end of 2009.” On November 30th, Arrington declared the CrunchPad project dead. On December 7, Fusion Garage CEO Chandra Rathakrishnan announced that, no, it’s actually still alive and Fusion Garage will release it independently as the JooJoo Pad–for a whopping $500. In a move that surprised nobody, Arrington filed a big ‘ol lawsuit against Fusion Garage on December 10.
All the in-fighting aside, the JooJoo Pad should finally ship to pre-ordering customers in 8-10 weeks according to Fusion Garage. $500 is a lot to ask for a keyboard-less device with the guts of a standard $350 netbook, but it sure is slick. It resembles a gigantic, 12-inch iPhone, but with several ports and inputs for future expansions (currently it only supports WiFi, so I’ll take a not-so-wild guess and say that 3G support would be part of any expansion). Rathakrishnan is mum on the exact processor inside this machine (though he’ll have to blurt it out eventually) but for something rumored to be running on the Atom processor, it plays 1080p video very, very well. Check out a JooJoo Pad demo and a chat with Rathakrishnan with Engadget below.
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