If you've dreamed of owning an ultraportable but you blanch at the sight of the typical price tag, the Lenovo 3000 V200 is a happy compromise. It isn't as light or as sleek-looking as some models, but it is very nicely equipped for a reasonable price--so long as you don't need built-in mobile broadband.
The V200 starts at less than $1200, though our test unit cost $1550 (as of 9/12/07). The design is low-key but attractive, featuring a sloped front, a silver lid, and a dark keyboard. Except for very small arrow keys, typing is easy. Features include a built-in Webcam, a fingerprint reader, and an instant-on multimedia button that will play media without your having to boot Windows. The plentiful ports include three USB and one FireWire, and you get both an ExpressCard slot and a three-in-one media card slot. Including an integrated dual-layer DVD burner, our test unit's minimum weight came in at 4.3 pounds--that's on the heavy side for ultraportables, many of which don't have an integrated optical drive.
Performance was very impressive; in fact, it was more like a full-size laptop's. Our Windows Vista Ultimate review machine, equipped with a top-of-the-line 2.2-GHz T7500 processor, 2GB of RAM, and a 160GB hard drive, earned a WorldBench 6 Beta 2 score of 79, a result that was 46 percent better than the average score of 54 earned by 14 recently tested ultraportables. Its battery life of 4 hours and 4 minutes was 11 minutes short of average for this class of notebook. Still, 4 hours will let you get a good chunk of work done in transit.
In the ThinkPad X61, Lenovo has introduced its successor to the ThinkPad X60. The X61 uses Intel's Santa Rosa mobile processor. Otherwise, it's the same light, sophisticated ultraportable as the earlier model; like the X60, it lacks an integrated optical drive but offers dazzling battery life.
This 3.6-pound X-series member goes to the top of our list of ultraportables for mobile professionals. Our X61 test unit, with a 2-GHz Core 2 Duo T7300 processor and 2GB of DDR2-667 SDRAM, earned a WorldBench 6 Beta 2 score of 75, which is tops among currently tested ultraportables. The extended-life four-cell battery lasted an amazing 6 hours and 14 minutes.
The bright, 12.1-inch screen and the keyboard might feel a bit close at first, but the cramped feeling quickly goes away. The keyboard has no touchpad, but the eraserhead pointing device is first-rate and easy to acclimate to. The usual nice touches found on Lenovo keyboards, such as volume buttons and a one-press launch of the recovery system, are also present.
The UltraBase docking station adds four more USB ports (for a total of seven) as well as legacy parallel and serial ports. In addition, the modular optical drive has a side release, so you can swap with one hand between an optical drive, a second battery, or a second hard drive (those are optional accessories). Including the base, which is easy to snap on and off, the unit's total weight is a little over 6 pounds.
TOKYO, Japan-- The global rollout of Apple's revamped iPhone kicked off Friday in Asia with countdown celebrations and quick sellouts as crowds of gadget fans streamed into stores after long waits.
Bruno Afonso reacts as he is handed two iPhones to choose the color after Apples new phone went on sale for the first time in Portugal in the first minutes of Friday, July 11 2008, at a shop of carrier Vodafone in Lisbon.
The target of desire was Apple's much-hyped new product that uses 3G, or third-generation, cell phone technology -- an upgrade of the model that went on sale last year in the United States and several other nations.
Australia, New Zealand, Hong Kong and Japan were the Asia-Pacific locations getting the new phone, with festivities shifting to Europe as the global day and 22-nation launch progresses. In the United States, phones will be available at 8 a.m. in each time zone.
"Just look at this obviously innovative design," said Yuki Kurita, emerging from a Tokyo store with the brand new 3G-capable iPhone he barely knew how to use.
The 23-year-old system engineer, among about 1,500 people who had camped out on the street by one downtown store, said he was too excited to feel tired and called his mother to boast about his new buy.
"I am so thrilled just thinking about how I get to touch this," he said, carrying bags of clothing and a skateboard he had used as a chair during his waitKurita acknowledged, though, that the iPhone would replace only one of his two phones. He and other Japanese buyers said they wanted to check out how services such as e-mail worked before they decide to forsake their old phones.
The iPhone's capabilities are less revolutionary in Japan, where people have for years used tech-heavy phones from domestic makers such as Sharp Corp. and Matsushita Electric Industrial Co. to exchange e-mail, search for restaurants, download video and play games.
But networks prevalent up to now offer only limited access to the Web, and the iPhone is designed to browse the Web in much the same way computers do. Its arrival marks a significant foreign entry in a market dominated by local brands.
Japanese media, including The Nikkei, the nation's top business daily, are talking about "iPhone shock," alluding to Commodore Matthew Perry's black ships that forced an isolationist feudal Japan to open to Western influence in the mid-1800s.
The frenzy over the iPhone was visible elsewhere in Asia as well.
In Hong Kong, designer Ho Kak-yin, 31, wearing a T-shirt that said, "Jealous?" was the first in line in a queue of about 100 inside a Hong Kong shopping mall.
"I'm very excited. It's very amazing," Ho said, after lining up two hours ahead of the kickoff.
Hundreds queued outside stores in New Zealand's main cities got their iPhones earlier at midnight Thursday.
"Steve Jobs knows what people want," Web developer Lucinda McCullough told the Christchurch Press newspaper, referring to Apple's head. "And I need a new phone."
Exactly how many iPhones will be available has been uncertain, fueling the hype about the Apple gadget with a cool-factor reputation.
"This is the year that the cell phone becomes an Internet-connecting machine," Masayoshi Son, president of Softbank Corp., the only carrier selling the iPhone in Japan, said at the countdown ceremony. "Today is that day that will make it real, and it's a historic day."
Softbank said it sold out of iPhones at three major Tokyo stores before they opened. It has refused to say how many iPhones are being sold and said it didn't have a nationwide store tally.
Tomohiko Katsu, a 38-year-old Japanese banker, said he has rarely lined up for any product in his life but wanted to make sure he got the iPhone and got in line Thursday afternoon.
"All the features come packed in a compact machine," he said. "It's really small for a mobile PC device."
A report this week by Mizuho Securities Co. said the iPhone's had potential to change lifestyles and bring new business opportunities.
Japanese tend to spend an hour or more on daily train commutes, and the iPhone could get them Netsurfing more than reading or listening to music, it said.
The iPhone's arrival could also change the relationship between manufacturers and carriers because of Apple's clout. Up to now, carriers have had considerable leverage over manufacturers, the report said.
In Hong Kong, Apple and its local service provider Hutchison Telecom, have limited initial sales to 1,500 people who have been longtime customers or were preselected by an online lottery. Still, those picking up the gizmo were welcomed with a rollout event at a mall.
People in line celebrate the start of selling Apple Inc.'s iPhone in Tokyo Friday morning, July 11, 2008. The 3G wireless connecting iPhone went on sale Friday at Japanese carrier Softbank Corp.'s store, making its debut in Japan.
Bruno Afonso reacts as he is handed two iPhones to choose the color after Apples new phone went on sale for the first time in Portugal in the first minutes of Friday, July 11 2008, at a shop of carrier Vodafone in Lisbon.
Tetsuya Umeda, 21, shows off iPhone he bought at a Tokyo store Friday morning, July 11, 2008. Apple Inc.'s 3G wireless connecting iPhone went on sale Friday, making its debut in Japan
Japanese Taichiro Nakamura shows off iPhone he bought at a Tokyo store Friday morning, July 11, 2008. Apple Inc.'s 3G wireless connecting iPhone went on sale Friday, making its debut in Japan.
It's almost too big for a single lap, but HP's new, huge portable computer may be just right for a movable entertainment center
Laptop computers don't run on gasoline. This might explain why our cars are getting smaller, while our computers are getting bigger.
Researchers at IDC Corp. in Framingham say Americans will buy more laptop computers this year than desktop machines. Though they're not ideal for playing games or editing videos, laptops easily meet the computing needs of most users. Besides, they're compact, attractive, and portable.
But portability matters little to some users. They want a reliable, powerful home machine that's big enough for comfortable viewing and typing, but also tucks neatly out of sight when company's coming. Computer vendors are happy to oblige.
Making computers smaller can require some fancy engineering, so larger laptops can be cheaper than their little siblings. Japanese computer maker Toshiba sells its 7.5-pound Satellite P305 machines for about $1,000. That buys a 17-inch screen, an Intel Core II Duo processor, four gigabytes of memory, and a 320-gigabyte hard drive.
Like most laptops these days, the Satellite P305 has a small camera mounted above the flat-panel screen for online video chats. Toshiba also includes a face-recognition program that will log you on to the computer on sight. It's a fun feature, though not entirely reliable. You need to get close to the camera and to have plenty of light hitting your face. In ordinary home or office lighting, it often failed to recognize me. With a bright light on my face, it worked fine. Luckily, you can use traditional passwords as a backup.
The Satellite's not the most comfortable machine for touch typists. My fingers skittered across its flat, slick keyboard like a puppy on ice. Still, my experience was generally a happy one, until I tried installing a popular Internet-based action game, EnemyTerritory: Quake Wars. Apart from delivering hours of good-natured carnage, this humans-versus-aliens slugfest makes for a good test of a computer's processor and 3-D graphics chip. Trouble is, the Toshiba began freezing and crashing once EnemyTerritory was installed. It's apparently a software conflict of the sort that happens all too often with high-end computer games. So it's probably not Toshiba's fault.
Indeed, remedies for such problems apply to all computers: Install the latest software updates for your machine. Make sure you have a restore disk - a CD or DVD that will return the computer to its original factory settings. New computers usually come with such a disk, or give you a way to burn one yourself. And of course, regularly back up your files to an external disk or an Internet-based backup service.
Apple Inc. has benefited more from the laptop boom than any other computer maker. Sales surged 61 percent in the first quarter of 2008, and Apple is now the nation's fourth-ranked laptop vendor. Apple's super-thin MacBook Air has attracted most of the media attention, but the company also offers a meatier 17-inch MacBook Pro. At 6.6 pounds, it's twice the weight of the MacBook Air, but nearly a pound less than the Toshiba, and far sleeker - folded, it's just an inch thick. Apple sent the premium version, with an upgraded high-definition monitor that's excellent for movie viewing or professional graphic arts work.
Unlike the Spartan MacBook Air, the Pro has lots of extras. There's a slot-loading DVD burner, built-in stereo speakers, a Nvidia 3-D processor with half a gigabyte of memory for prettier graphics, and a 200-gigabyte hard drive that offers faster data access by spinning at 7,200 revolutions per minute instead of the usual 5,400.
Apple being Apple, you will pay plenty - $3,400 for the machine I tried. But you will get a portable that's powerful enough to serve as a main machine and light enough for the occasional plane ride.
The least portable computer of the bunch provided the most fun. Heaven knows why Hewlett-Packard Co. designed a 15.5-pound "notebook" computer with a 20-inch screen, a five-speaker stereo with subwoofer, and a remote control. But the result, the Pavilion HDX Entertainment Notebook PC, is an impressive home entertainment center. I tried a high-end model priced at $2,500 but HP offers HDX notebooks for as little as $1,600.
It's a full-fledged computer, running Microsoft Corp.'s Windows Vista. But the HDX also packs a digital tuner for HDTV viewing and an FM radio tuner as well. You can order it with a Blu-Ray disk drive for playing high-definition movies. And the huge screen and high-quality graphics processor are excellent for gaming. I got EnemyTerritory up and running without a hitch, and spent several happy hours getting massacred.
The remote control with its tiny buttons is hard to manage, and HP's entertainment software interferes with Microsoft's WindowsMediaCenter software. That makes the HDX more difficult and confusing than it should be. Still, the HDX is an appealing device that's well-suited to bedrooms or college dorms. It's far too large and heavy for real portability, but once you've tried an HDX, you may want to stay home anyway.
