Ultra-thin Lenovo ThinkPad X1 a Match for MacBook Air?

By Melanie Pinola, PCWorld Apr 25, 2011 10:38 AM

A surprisingly thin Lenovo ThinkPad X1 has just joined the ultra-thin laptop race, marrying the classic business sense of the ThinkPad line with the super sexy form of Apple's MacBook Air and its latest ultra-slim laptop competitors, the Samsung Series 9 and MSI X-Slim X-370. The unannounced ThinkPad X1 popped up for pre-sale in Europe and has been confirmed by internal Lenovo documents to be just 21.5mm (0.85 inches) thin and boast a fast-charging, long-life battery.

Click to ZoomAlthough the ThinkPad X1 is a tad thicker and may weigh almost a full pound more than the MacBook Air and Samsung Series 9 ultraportables, it may be the thinnest business laptop yet. The X1 also sports someimpressive specs. (See how X1 stacks up against MacBook Air competition) Running the Sandy Bridge Intel Core i5 processor, the ThinkPad X1 has a 13.3-inch display made of super-tough Corning Gorilla Glass ("Outdoor Panel"), an LED backlit keyboard, 160GB SSD drive and multimedia-friendly features like HD stereo speakers.

Part of a new generation of ThinkPads (which includes the highly-rated ThinkPad X220), a major feature of the ThinkPad X1 is its new battery technology. The X1 may last 3x as long as typical notebook batteries (up to 10 hours with the additional battery slice), and with Lenovo's "RapidCharge" technology, charge 2.5 times faster (80% in 30 minutes).

The Swiss site where the ThinkPad X1 was spotted shows an availability date of May 20, as well as a pretty steep price of around $2,900 (2,585 Francs). When the ThinkPad X1 launches in the US, we can only hope it will be more wallet-friendly, because otherwise the X1 may definitely give the MacBook Air a run for its money. The ThinkPad X1 leak also follows rumors of a Lenovo ThinkPad tablet arriving this summer, so mobile professionals have a lot to look forward to from Lenovo this year.

http://www.pcworld.com/article/226183/ultrathin_lenovo_thinkpad_x1_a_match_for_macbook_air.html

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Superlight Laptops

7 Stylish Superlight Laptops
By Jason Cross and Jon L. Jacobi, PCWorld

You have to take only a couple of business trips or vacations with a 6-pound laptop in tow before you start thinking about switching to a PC with a little less meat on its bones.

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Lenovo ThinkPad X220
Although 14- and 15-inch all-purpose laptops are abundant and often inexpensive, just throw one into your backpack or briefcase and lug it around for a few days--your shoulders will soon beg for mercy. These days, fortunately, you can find plenty of laptops on the market that are slimmer, lighter, and more powerful than almost anything that you could have bought just a few years ago.

What qualifies as a "lightweight laptop"? We drew the line at 4 pounds. There's a marked difference in design, features, and feel between laptops under that weight and their heavier friends. It may not seem like much, but a pound or two can make a big difference. Consider the heft of a pint of water: 1 pound. The difference between the lightweight laptops featured here and your run-of-the-mill 5.5-pounder is the equivalent of two (or two-and-a-half) extra pints of water in your laptop bag. It gets tiresome pretty fast.

Of course, laptops that are more Olive Oyl than Bluto come with a few compromises. Giving up weight can mean giving up performance, battery life, and certain other capabilities. Most laptops that weigh less than 4 pounds lack optical drives, so forget about burning DVDs or watching Blu-ray movies without an external USB drive.

They also tend to be thinner, leaving less room for larger, longer-running batteries, and for heat sinks and fans to dissipate the heat from high-power processors, which in turn means limited processing power. Nor is there room for a high-power discrete graphics card, so gaming enthusiasts are out of luck. Finally, expect to pay a little more for a thin-and-light laptop, relative to the performance received. Sure, you can find cheap laptops under 4 pounds, but at any given price, you'll get more performance, storage space, and features if you're willing to deal with some extra weight.

Truly light laptops rarely have a screen larger than 13 inches, but they otherwise come in a variety of styles, sizes, and prices.

(For our comparison chart of the ultraportables discussed in this article--and our "find-it" to each one's full review--please click on the thumbnail at left.)

If superslim is your preference, look no further than the Samsung Series 9, the latest PC to seriously challenge Apple's MacBook Air for slim-computing dominance. Business users especially interested in usability will want to focus on the ThinkPad X220, which maintains Lenovo's excellent, long-running standards for keyboard quality and management features.

And for the more style-minded among us, Lenovo has a sleeker unit in the IdeaPad U260. Meanwhile, Sony's Z-Series VPC-Z137GX/S is a pricey alternative aimed at business executives who want it all, including a decent discrete graphics chip.

If you're on a tighter budget, the tiny size of Lenovo's ThinkPad X120e netbook should fit the bill. It's powered by AMD's Fusion E-series processor, giving it performance that's a step above the typical Intel Atom-powered netbook.

Let's look at these ultralight laptops in alphabetical order.

Lenovo's IdeaPad U260: Unexpected Style

Lenovo IdeaPad U260: With its copper (or “mocha brown”) cover, this IdeaPad could be a contender for design awards.
Despite generations of sober-looking, utilitarian forebears and a name that suggests a bad World War II submarine movie, Lenovo's $1199 IdeaPad U260 goes where the company's laptops never went before--into the queue for style and design awards.

And the U260 gives Apple and Sony something to think about. When closed and viewed from the back, with its dark copper shell (Lenovo calls the color "mocha brown") covering the black main body, this 0.75-inch-thick ultraportable laptop resembles an extravagantly bound book- or pad-holder.

When opened, the IdeaPad U260 presents you with an all-black, minimally populated keyboard deck consisting of a smallish power button, an ambient light sensor that adjusts display brightness automatically, a tiny OneKey system recovery button (accessible only if you use a pointy object), the best Chiclet-style keyboard I've ever typed on, and an equally elegant touchpad with smooth-operating buttons. In a break with tradition, Lenovo does not include an eraserhead or nubbin pointing device.

Style aside, the U260 earned mixed results in PCWorld Labs tests. Our review unit had an Intel Core i5 470UM CPU, 4GB of DDR3 system memory, and a 12.5-inch color display with 1388 by 766 resolution. But the 320GB hard drive spins at just 5400 rpm, which undoubtedly helped hold the U260's WorldBench 6 score to a pedestrian 75. (An update to one of Intel's Sandy Bridge CPUs would certainly boost the laptop's performance.)

Gaming frame rates on our test machine were in the teens (or worse), owing to Intel's integrated graphics. On the other hand, every video we tried played smoothly, even at 1080p. Audio quality is so-so, and rather quiet through the speaker.

Your connection options consist of two USB 2.0 ports, VGA and HDMI video outputs, an AC jack, a gigabit ethernet port, and a single combination microphone/headphone jack. The laptop has no internal optical drive, and the wireless is 802.11n.

Lenovo includes 64-bit Windows 7 Home Premium as the operating system, but no productivity software. You also get a VeriFace facial recognition utility that's quite cool, as well as a shock sensor and the CyberLink Webcam utility.

The U260 is an average performer overall, but its top-of-the-line ergonomics more than compensates for that. My main disappointment is the lack of an option for a faster hard disk or a solid-state drive, to improve performance.

http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/225874/7_stylish_superlight_laptops.html

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Too-high Android tablet

Too-high Android tablet prices spook developers

Apple's iOS remains the top dog, but programmers cool to Android

Computerworld - While developer interest in Apple's mobile devices remains solid, interest in Android has stalled among programmers disappointed with tablet prices and pressed by Android fragmentation, a survey published today showed.

"Interest in Android on tablets has stalled, or plateaued, however you want to put it," said Scott Schwartzhoff, vice president of marketing at Mountain View, Calif.-based Appcelerator.

The poll, conducted two weeks ago by Appcelerator and research firm IDC, polled more than 2,700 developers who use Appcelerator's Titanium cross-platform compiler to produce mobile applications using JavaScript, HTML and CSS.

The numbers reflect a growing frustration that Android tablets don't stack up against Apple's iPad, and that their biggest weapon -- lower prices -- has not been used.

"After CES, there was a lot of excitement in Android tablets," said Schwartzhoff, referring to the January trade show were scores of tablets were announced. "But after the initial tablet devices were rushed to market, developers saw that they came with a higher-than-expected price. That's a major factor in the drop in enthusiasm."

Of the developers surveyed, 91% said that they were "very interested" in creating apps for the iPhone, a slip of one percentage point from Appcelerator's last quarterly survey. Apple's iPad collected 86%, also a drop of one point.

"The iPhone maintains that really lofty status from a developer perspective," said Schwartzhoff.

But interest in Android on smartphones fell two points to 85%, while on tablets the "very interested" number was 71%, a three-point slide.

Although the survey's margin of error is +/-2 points, Schwartzhoff read the drop in Android tablet development interest as significant.

"How many times will we go through this cycle of [Android] tablet introductions to mixed reviews, and at higher price than expected?" said Schwartzhoff. "Then we wait for the next tablet, rinse and repeat. Every time that happens it reinforces the thought, 'I don't know about Android on non-phone devices.'"

Schwartzhoff contrasted the new dip in Android interest with last quarter's enthusiasm, when Google's mobile operating system jumped five points on smartphones, 12 points on tablets.

In that survey, developers identified the price of Android tablets as the top factor to their success.

While several Android-powered tablets have appeared, notably Samsung's Galaxy Tab and Motorola's Xoom, Schwartzhoff argued that their prices are still too high for developers to bet on.

One indication, he said, is that the 71% of developers who said they were "very interested" in Android on tablets wasn't matched with similar numbers when they were asked about interest in specific hardware. Only 51% said they were very interested in developing for the Galaxy Tab, and just 44% said the same of the Xoom

http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9216180/Too_high_Android_tablet_prices_spook_developers

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Dell

Dell brings remote desktop capabilities to workstations

IDG News Service - Dell on Tuesday announced a desktop workstation that acts like a server from which remote client PCs can exploit graphics processing capabilities.

The Precision R5500 workstation renders and delivers pixels to client PCs over a network, said Don Maynard, senior product manager for Dell's Precision tower and rack workstations. Graphics can be delivered in 2D or 3D formats to Dell's FX100 thin client using the PC-over-IP (Internet Protocol) remote graphics protocol, or to standard desktops and laptops with VMware's View software.

The new feature extends the processing power of workstations to more computing resources in organizations, Maynard said. The remote access technology could reduce the need to deploy multiple workstations, while centralizing engineering and graphics applications in one location.

The workstation is targeted at organizations involved in design projects or content creation, Maynard said. The workstation can also be relevant in vertical industries such as mining and health care.

Dell already offers servers with graphics processors, but the workstation has specific features that make it more relevant to client PCs, Maynard said. The workstation runs client operating systems such as Windows 7, which support engineering applications such as AutoCAD. The workstation also has the ability to provide more dedicated graphics processing power for such applications.

The quality of images delivered remotely depends on the complexity of graphics and bandwidth, Maynard said. There could be some latency if the graphics are complex, or if a PC is far away from the workstation.

Beyond remote access capabilities, the Precision R5500 is also a high-end desktop designed to run complex scientific and graphics applications. The dual-socket workstation runs on Intel's Xeon processors, and can accommodate up to 12 CPU cores. The desktop supports up to 192GB of RAM and has multiple storage slots. The desktop is offered with optional Nvidia graphics cards.

The R5500 is priced starting at $2,551 and will be available in the U.S. and EMEA (Europe, Middle East and Africa) on May 3. It will become available in Asia-Pacific and Japan on May 10.

Dell also announced new Precision laptop workstations that are desktop alternatives. The DM4600 and DM6600 include 15.6-inch and 17.3-inch screens, respectively, and run on Intel's latest Core i5 and i7 processors.

The laptops support up to 32GB of RAM, and 750GB of hard drive or up to 256GB of solid-state drive storage. They will be available with optional graphics cards from Advanced Micro Devices and Nvidia. They also will come with multiple USB 3.0 and 2.0 ports, and multiple monitors can be connected through display ports.

The M4600 starts at $1,678, while the M6600 starts at $2,158. The laptops will become available worldwide on May 10.

http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9216169/Dell_brings_remote_desktop_capabilities_to_workstations

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Week Without Walls

Peep-a-Palooza!

Welcome to the Peep-a-Palooza!

Mad geniuses across the nation immortalize games, movies, tech product announcements, and iconic sci-fi moments in dioramas built using our favorite Easter candy: Marshmallow Peeps. Take a look at some of the best.

The Best of Peep Dioramas Honoring Geeks and Tech

Another Windows 8

Another Windows 8 Pre-beta Surfaces

Homer Simpson

Homer Simpson Comes to TomTom iOS App

Android

Android Outranks Apple in Desirability -- and That's Huge

Angry Birds

Angry Birds Reaches 140 Million Downloads