laptops

Crave presents the week's laptop news, in digest form.

Apple did its best to distract us, but we kept our focus on laptops this week--aided by the tunes pumping out of our new iPod Classic. Ahem. It was a big week for business laptops: ThinkPad officially announced the leather-bound ThinkPad Reserve, whose $5,000 price tag and limited number will appeal to jet-set execs looking to impress. For lower-level workers, HP announced three new business laptops with an updated look and feel; the company also said that it would begin offering 64GB solid-state drives on its professional laptops and … Read more

Leaks of new products are pretty commonplace these days (unless you're talking about Apple), and nowhere is that more true than the laptop scene, where pretty much every unannounced new product release is leaked, discussed, blogged, and photographed long before the first press release goes out.

The latest entry in the laptop leak-athon is the Sony VAIO NR, a 15-inch system that popped up briefly on Sony's German Web site before being pulled down. Notebookreview.com managed to grab the spec sheets in time, and even though they're in German, we still kinda like what we see. … Read more

The show may be over, but the gadgets are yet to come.

If you couldn't get to Berlin over the last week for the IFA consumer electronics show, don't fret. ZDNet Germany and CNET News.com have teamed up to bring you some of the highlights. A lot of the gear, whether brand-spanking new or updates of not-so-old favorites, will only be hitting stores sometime this month or later still.

GPS devices--such as the Navigon 2100 pictured here--were prevalent at the gizmo fest. Notable, too, among the consumer-friendly machinery were a circular Sony PC for the living room, … Read more

At an evening press event in New York, HP announced a much-needed new look for its business laptop line. With a silver finish, drop-hinge panel, and scooped-out keyboard, the new models look more modern than the boxy corporate HPs of yore, though they'll still blend in with traditional business environments. Inside the redesigned cases you'll find all the component options you'd expect from a business laptop: Intel Core 2 Duo processors, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, DVD burners with LightScribe, and HP's ProtectTools support software. The three new models announced today include the 14.1-inch HP Compaq 6520s (… Read more

Sadly, it looks like I'm going to have to call shenanigans on the $150 Swedish laptop. When I placed my order for the Medison Celebrity laptop on July 25, the Medison Web site estimated the Linux-based laptop would ship within four to six weeks. Well, today marks six weeks, so unless I see the UPS man within the next hour or so, Medison will have failed to honor its commitment to ship me a laptop in the stated time frame. The company hasn't even bothered to inform me how much it plans to charge for shipping the laptop, … Read more

Crave presents the week's laptop news, in digest form.

The week before the U.S. Labor Day holiday brought some pretty big news: Taiwanese manufacturer Acer has agreed to purchase Gateway. The deal delivers a one-two punch to Acer's rival, Lenovo; not only will the acquisition thrust Acer ahead of Lenovo to become the third-largest PC maker in the world, but it potentially could also stymie Lenovo's attempt to acquire Packard Bell (turns out, Gateway has right of first refusal to buy that company). The upshot for consumers, though, is far from earth-shattering; Wired reported that Gateway's familiar dairy cow branding will stay… Read more

Frankly, we're a little disturbed by the latest naming trends for rugged notebooks. Previously, we had the straightforward ToughBook and the innocuous XTG630. But last week we saw the fully rugged Victum, and today Systemax announced the 14.1-inch Assault. Despite its tough name, the Assault is not built to military specifications; in fact, many of the Assault's ruggedized features--a magnesium alloy case, antishock design, and a spill-resistant keyboard and touch pad--can be found on corporate models from Dell and Lenovo.

Still, those features aren't exactly common on a laptop with a starting price of $1,000. … Read more

We met up with fine folks at Gateway last week to check out some of their upcoming wares. While they were happy to tell us about the top-secret products the company had in the offing, not a word was whispered hinting at yesterday's announcement that Taiwanese computer maker Acer has agreed to acquire Gateway, currently the No. 4-ranked PC vendor in the world.

News.com's Erica Ogg reports that the purchase price is $710 million--far less than the $7 billion the company was valued at when Compaq offered to buy it back in 1997.

J.T. Wang, Acer'… Read more

Just weeks after blaming paint issues for delays in shipping some models of the XPS m1330, Dell has acknowledged that the same problems have affected the much-hyped multihued Inspiron line as well. Apparently the fancy colors that are the centerpiece of Dell's marketing are the very colors causing delay; the black and white Inspirons are shipping more or less on schedule. As with the XPS m1330, Dell is characterizing the issue as a problem of scale--they're struggling to produce a consistently high-quality finish as they manufacture larger numbers of the machines. "We'll continue to work directly … Read more