First look: the Virgin Media Freedom netbook

Tuesday, August 11th, 2009

While mobile broadband dongles are undoubtedly well-matched with netbooks, most mobile broadband firms offer third-party netbooks with their respective dongle deals: T-Mobile bundles its dongle with an Eee PC 904HD, Vodafone entices customers with a Samsung NC10 and Orange lets prospective buyers choose between HP, Asus, Samsung and Toshiba models.

Virgin Media, meanwhile, is the first mobile broadband company to release its own netbook and, while it’s undoubtedly very similar to Zoostorm’s offering – even sharing the same name, the ambitious “Freedom”, – it’s an interesting move and a good-looking product.

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Are netbooks really “better with Windows”?

Friday, May 29th, 2009

Asus – the company that started the netbook phenomenon with the Linux-based Eee PC 701 – has apparently decided that the open-source OS isn’t so spiffing after all.

The company has teamed up with Microsoft to create the rather prosaic It’s Better With Windows website.

“Windows helps you quickly and easily get online and connect to your devices and services – without dealing with an unfamiliar environment or major compatibility issues,” the site proclaims. It then shows a series of videos, with Eee PC-wielding people going about their lives in blissful harmony.

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Netbook rivals battle it out at CeBIT

Wednesday, March 4th, 2009

The big netbook guns are out in the halls of CeBIT this year, with MSI, Asus and now Gigabyte showing a raft of new low-cost models. Here’s a round-up of what’s new.

MSI
On the MSI stand, the Wind U100 series has blossomed into the U110, U115 and U123 series. The U110 Eco promises to bring the Wind’s Achilles Heel – its battery life – up to snuff, with a claimed 12 hours on the standard battery. MSI says this is possible with the use of the new Intel Menlow mobile platform, originally intended for Intel’s pet MID (mobile internet device) product category but now half-inched for netbooks.

The U115 is, MSI claims, the first hybrid netbook with both SSD and hard disk storage, but aside from that looks the same as the U110, and both share the same styling as the original Wind U100:

The Wind U123 is slightly higher-end, with a posher, more angular look and aimed at business users, and it brings an integrated 3G broadband adapter to the Wind range:

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The fastest laptop on earth

Tuesday, March 3rd, 2009

UPDATE: Read the full review of the Asus W90.

Asus might be most famous for its low-cost netbooks, but its latest multimedia powerhouse is the kind of laptop that’ll give your average desktop PC an inferiority complex.

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Eee PC versus the world!

Friday, November 21st, 2008

Is the Eee PC brand the fastest growing in the world right now? When it first appeared at Computex in June 2007 it was intriguing, a new, outlandish idea that we genuinely didn’t think would catch on. Low-power internet-only machines for £100? Pah! It’ll never work!

When I had my first hands-on at IDF that September I was impressed, saying “the Eee PC could be a huge success in schools, particularly in emerging markets abroad.” If they’re totally honest, I reckon that’s what Asus thought at the time, too – I find it hard to believe anyone really predicted how big the lightweight laptop would become. 

Alright, Asus didn’t quite manage to hit that stunning price, but the Eee still struck an unexpected chord with consumers, growing in that short time from a newsworthy novelty, into an early-adopter fad, and onto a social phenomenon. Just count how many you see on the train each morning. (more…)

State of the netbook nation

Friday, October 17th, 2008

In the last six months, I’ve spoken to a variety of laptop vendors about netbooks, and the sheer range of opinions and strategies is fascinating.

This week, for example, I was talking to Thomas Teckentrup, the general manager of Toshiba Europe Computer Systems, and his take on netbooks was decidedly downbeat: “We have to find out the usage of these products”, he said, explaining his company’s late arrival into the market and the fact it hasn’t exactly exploded onto the scene – the Satellite NB100 is only available with one specification, and there are no options. “We [still] have to see for ourselves how consumers are going to leverage the features of a netbook,” he later added. (more…)

MSI’s new-look Wind U120 – now with integrated 3G

Thursday, October 9th, 2008

MSI’s Wind U100 has earned quite a few admirers in PC Pro’s offices, but if there’s one thing lacking from it and all the current crop of netbooks, it’s integrated 3G. 

Right on cue, MSI have just sent us a few shots of their forthcoming Wind U120, which will be officially launching in January. Draft-N and HSDPA 3.5G will be integrated as standard, and we presume the rest of the specification will be the usual netbook fare. So you can expect an Atom N270 processor, 1 or 2 gigabytes  of memory and probably a 120GB hard drive as a bare minimum given MSI’s propensity towards mechanical disk drives in their notebooks. We have a gut feeling that it might even be the first netbook in the range to sport Intel’s forthcoming N330 Dual-Core Atom processor.

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What’s in a name?

Tuesday, July 15th, 2008

Abbreviations are great, aren’t they? BBC, DVD, HSBC, DVLA, GCSE. Why use normal words when you can take almost as long to recite them as letters instead?

Of course, some conveniently shorten into a series of letters that can actually be said as a single, new word. Think acronyms like NASA, SCUBA, laser. Think VAIO.

Today I read of Sony’s redefinition of the famous VAIO brand, and it occurred to me that I had absolutely no idea what it had stood for since its creation.

Very Attractive If Overpriced, perhaps? (more…)

Just in: Asus Eee PC 901 (with added Atom)

Friday, June 13th, 2008

Here it is, the Eee PC 901. A minor refresh from the Eee PC 900, but a vital one – this is the first laptop to arrive in the PC Pro Labs with one of Intel’s Atom processors.

It uses the 1.6GHz Atom N270, with its 512KB L2 cache and 533MHz front side bus. Whether this will prove to be faster than the previous 900MHz Celeron remains to be seen; from our tests with the desktop Atom 230, we reckon it’ll prove to be similar, or perhaps slightly slower.

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What every notebook needs: sapphire and sound effects

Tuesday, June 3rd, 2008

We don’t see many laptops here at PC Pro that are unashamadly devoted to luxury, but this Asus Lamborghini VX3 bucks that trend with a barrage of extravagent features.

The wrist-rest, for instance, is clad in leather, and there’s a gilded Lambo logo on the lid – just so people on the train know that you’ve spent £1,500 on such a quality product. The laptop itself is housed in a smart box and then, inside that, a plush velvet bag. Even the included Bluetooth mouse comes with a little pouch all of it’s own, and there’s a leather-coated mousepad to compliment it, too – and that’s also adorned with the Lamborghini logo.

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