Never mind the dual screens, dual hard drives, Wacom tablet, and integrated color calibration… If you buy a Lenovo W700ds, your co-workers will strip naked for you.
The Sony press conference just wrapped, and the one thing that really got the camera flashes popping was the official announcement for the VAIO P Series Lifestyle PC. Since it’s Sony, they of course had to come up with a different name than ‘netbook’, but between you and me, that’s what you’re getting. However, it is one of the smallest and sleekest looking ‘lifestyle’ PCs I’ve ever played with.
As Sony claims, it’s about the length of a business envelope and weighs just 1.4 pounds. And after carrying around a backpack with a MacBook inside for about 2 days now, that’s music to my ears. It’s also got integrated wireless WAN, LAN and Bluetooth, as well as GPS that doesn’t require an internet connection. (Yay!)
The high-resolution ultra-wide LCD display is great for viewing websites with minimal horizontal scrolling or resizing, and the model I played with seemed to have no trouble running Windows Vista. I’m still cautious about netbooks after my misadventures with the Asus EEE, but Sony sure puts forth a strong argument for an ultra compact laptop with this one. The VAIO P Series Lifestyle PC should be available for pre-order at the Sony Store tomorrow (North America only I believe) and at select retailers next month for about $900.
IBM has a new entry into the realm of absolutely beastly laptops portable desktops, and the ThinkPad W700ds includes a feature you won’t find anywhere else, as far as I know: an integrated secondary display that slides out of the primary display. The main screen is 17″ 1920 x 1200 CCFL backlit, while the secondary screen is 10.6″ 768 x 1280 LED backlit. All together, that’s a lot of real estate in a compact package.
It doesn’t stop with the displays, either. The W700ds boasts Intel Core 2 Quad processors, an NVIDIA Quadro FX 3700M GPU, up to 8 gigs of ram, and up to nearly 1 terrabyte of mixed HD and SSD storage. Want more? How about integrated color calibration and a little Wacom tablet and stylus in the palmrest? Tasty.
The ThinkPad W700ds starts off at an unsurprising 11 pounds and $3600, and will be available this January. If you’re looking for something cheaper, The W700ds has a little brother, the W700, which includes all the rest of the goodies except the secondary display starting $3000.
First, the bad news: you can’t power your laptop from the solar panels on the Voltaic Generator solar laptop bag. I know, it sucks. But the good news is, you can use the solar panels on this messenger bag to charge you laptop, and all the rest of your electronic crap, anywhere it isn’t dark, for free, over and over, for the next 5 billion years or so at which point the sun will enter a red giant phase and swallow the earth and the ambient surface temperature around here will probably exceed the safe operating limits of your gadgets.
Until that all happens, though, you can enjoy the 15 watt output of the rugged solar panels on the Voltaic Generator, which is pretty significant. It’s enough to recharge a “standard” (read: 1-3 hour) laptop battery in about 5 hours of full sunlight, or boost the runtime of your laptop by somewhere between 20 and 45 minutes per hour of sunlight. An hour of sunlight is also enough to fully charge most cell phones, MP3 players, and small digital cameras. If you don’t have anything in dire need of charging, the Generator comes with an internal 58 watt hour lithium ion battery that can be charged from the solar panels, giving you a way to charge your gadgets at night. And if all else fails, you can cheat, and charge the battery pack with a wall plug or car adapter.
The Voltaic Generator comes with about a million adapters for electronics, and is available now in a few different colors for a not insignificant $499.
The one potentially major deficiency of netbooks, in my opinion, could be the lack of an optical drive. Blu-ray or not, optical discs are totally, totally ancient technology (they should do us all a favor and put movies on USB keys), but for whatever reason they’re still around and we have to deal with them. Sigh.
This laptop cooling pad is specifically designed to be small and convenient for netbooks(it measures 227x180x16mm), while also having enough space for 2 additional USB ports and a drive bay, which can handle either a SATA HD (up to 320 GB) or a slim IDE optical drive depending on which model you get. The downside of the optical drive as opposed to the HD is that you’ll need an external power adapter, but it’s not a bad little setup to have if you feel like you need the option. Not that netbooks really need cooling in the first place, but whatever.
It’s about $40, but as far as I can tell you’ll have to order it from Japan.
What happens if you rip the battery and LCD off of an MSI Wind netbook? You get a damn skinny little computer, that’s what. Skinny enough, in fact, to be bolted onto the back of any VESA-mount monitor and turn it into a flat little computer. The “WindBox,” as it’s called, has pretty much the exact same specs as the netbook: 1.6 gHz Atom, 1 gig ram, 160 gig HD, WiFi, Windows XP, 3 USB ports, an SD slot, and a VGA out which you’d presumably just plug straight into the back of the monitor. Hook up a wireless keyboard and mouse, and you’re good to go.
If you’ve got any spare LCDs lying around (if not, they’re a dime a dozen on Craigslist), the WindBox could be a quick and easy way to set up a dedicated multimedia system, especially if you duct taped a couple extra USB HDs back there too. And for only $250, it’s nearly as cheap as one of those crappy WiFi enabled digital picture frames. It’s just too bad that for the moment, you’ll have to go to France to pick one up.
The Yogen Max foldable laptop charger eschews fuel cells or any other fancy schmancy type of portable power technology for the worst source of power ever: you. Although the details are sketchy nonexistent, Easy Energy’s charger purports to recharge things like MP3 players or even laptops with your beastly muscles. Just step on the pedal for an unspecified amount of time, and your batteries will be charged an unspecified amount. It’s an eco-friendly and potentially convenient concept prototype, especially if you travel a lot, but seriously, they expect me to work to charge my laptop? That’s nonsense. Utter nonsense.
There’s a limited amount of stuff that you’re generally able to… stuff… into a laptop, which is why you can buy laptop docks with more room to add peripherals. And generally if you’re the type to try to overperipheralize your laptop, you also have the type of laptop that’s hot enough to sterilize you, your pets, and if you’re lucky, your dirty laundry.
Brando’s laptop pad will solve some of these problems in a mediocre way, as it includes two cooling fans and three USB ports. The interesting bit is that it also includes an integrated interface for a bare 2.5″ SATA hard drive, which have a lot of storage and cost a dime a dozen nowadays. The size limit for the HD dock is only 250 gigs, but you can find drives of that size for about $50, which works out to be what, $0.20 a gig? Not bad at all.
The Brando USB Notebook Cooling Pad costs about $33.
Fujitsu computers is launching a program called Laptop4Life, that does just that: buy one of their Lifebook laptops, and then every 3 years, you’ll be able to get a brand new model, absolutely free. The only attached string seems to be that you need to buy the 3 year extended warranty (and you can only upgrade using Fujitsu parts), but otherwise, you’ll just need the original receipt and your old laptop in “good” condition. The new laptop you get will have the same value as the one you originally bought, plus 10% to cover inflation, but the big draw is of course the updated hardware and software that you’ll get with the new system. And you can keep on doing this until you die, although Fujitsu does stipulate that you can’t pass the Laptop4Life program on in your will.
I have no idea why why Fujitsu is doing this, but who am I to punch a gift horse in the mouth… They say that they’ll make money by selling you services and accessories, but I can’t see how that could possibly cover the cost of one new laptop, much less thirty (I plan to live a looooong time).
The smart thing to do (if you have faith that Fujitsu will last as long as you do) would be to buy their highest end system, which looks pretty decent. I personally have no experience with Fujitsu, but this program is making me seriously consider their stuff. Maybe I’ll buy three Lifebooks over three years, and then just keep on rotating ‘em out for a new one every year…
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