culv

Acer is getting greener, at least according to Greenpeace.

The computer maker unveiled two new notebooks on Friday that have already received kudos from the international environmental group. The Acer Aspire 3811TZ and Aspire 3811TZG are designed to be energy efficient, recyclable, and biodegradable, thereby winning high marks from Greenpeace, which rates PCs and other electronics for their environmental friendliness.

As part of its green initiatives, Acer said it built the two new Aspires to be free of PVCs (polyvinyl chloride) and BFRs (brominated flame retardants).

PVC is a cheap but durable plastic that has been criticized by Greenpeace for … Read more

It's been a hot year for Netbooks, but not so much for the rest of the portable PC market.

Netbook sales are likely to hit $11.4 billion this year, a 72 percent rise from last year, thanks to a 103 percent leap in shipments, according to a new report from DisplaySearch. But notebook revenue overall will be down around 7 percent from last year.

The latest DisplaySearch Quarterly Notebook PC Shipment and Forecast Report, released Tuesday, found that the surge in Netbook (mini-notebook) sales was not enough to offset declines for ultra-portables and larger laptops. Aside from Netbooks, … Read more

During Intel's earnings conference call on Tuesday, CEO Paul Otellini talked about the growth of notebook PCs versus Netbooks, and Windows 7 adoption in business, among other topics.

Otellini was quick to trumpet the fact that its mainstream notebook business beat Netbook growth. "We saw the sequential unit growth rate of notebook processors and chipsets actually exceed the growth rate of Atom processors and chipsets," he said.

Later in the call, Otellini said: "While Atom and Netbooks are important growth drivers for us, our traditional notebook business remains one of the primary drivers of revenue growth … Read more

We have a bit of a beef with a trend that's currently happening in full-size (by that we mean 13-inch and above) thin-and-light laptops, the machines that as of late have shaved thickness at the expense of optical drives and often processor power. While the battery life on thin-and-lights generally exceeds expectations, the compromise that's often been used is incorporating a single-core ultra-low-voltage processor, which provides marginally better performance than the Atom processor on any Netbook.

Unfortunately, thin-and-lights are more expensive than Netbooks--often by several hundred dollars at the least--and other than increased screen size, they run the … Read more

Whether CULV thin-and-light laptops will ever fully find a spot between the Netbook world and the full-featured laptop world, they are most definitely a category that's growing every day. Dropping an optical drive and throwing a low-voltage processor alongside a long-lasting battery is the trend of 2009, although the low-voltage laptops we've seen so far have often sacrificed either build quality, performance, or value-for-dollar.

It's relieving to say, therefore, that the 13-inch Asus UL30A-A1 is a thin-and-light that we'd gladly carry around in our bag for a long time to come. With a sturdy frame, a … Read more

It's still dog days for those in the business of making and selling PCs.

Global PC shipments fell 2.4 percent in the second quarter of the year compared with the same quarter last year, and the value of those shipments dropped 19.1 percent over the same period, according to a report released Wednesday by IDC.

Desktop shipments dropped 17 percent for the quarter as more and more people continue to opt for portables, according to IDC's Worldwide Quarterly PC Tracker report. Consumer laptops and Netbooks accounted for the only bright spot, with overall shipments growing 44 … Read more

Updated at 1:30 p.m. PDT: adding information about Core i7, i5, and i3 branding.

Intel's upcoming "Arrandale" will be the first highly integrated chip of its kind from Intel and is expected to run the gamut of laptop designs, from ultrathin to mainstream.

Due by the fourth quarter, it will be the first Intel product to put two processor cores and a graphics function together in the same chip package. Intel covered the underlying architecture in a presentation at the Hot Chips conference in Palo Alto, Calif., this week and in a recent blog described … Read more

Despite many Netbooks and thin-and-lights ditching optical drives in favor of more compact computers, corporate folks are apparently still concerned and looking out for us suddenly-DVD-free folk. MSI has announced availability of a new thin-and-light ULV (ultra-low voltage) notebook, the MSI X600, which comes with its own external DVD/CD drive right in the box.

For $899, the X600 comes with a 1.4GHz Intel SU3500 ULV processor, 4GB of DDR2 RAM, a 320GB hard drive, ATI HD 4330 graphics, and a 15.6-inch 1366x768 screen. It includes a six-cell battery, an improvement on the X340, which had a somewhat … Read more

Can we all agree on something? There's no longer a difference between a Netbook and a notebook. Thanks to Netbooks' move to more features and larger-size screens, the distinction between the two can now be considered little more than marketing speak.

We recently wrote about the fall's coming battle between Netbooks--a category now 2 years old--and thin and light notebooks with consumer ultra-low voltage (CULV) processors. In theory, the value of a Netbook--with its small keyboard, small screen, and lack of an optical drive--vs. an ultralight laptop with a long battery life and a full-size keyboard for roughly the same price was very low.

But now that we're actually seeing how PC makers are packaging and selling CULV notebooks (take Dell's recent introduction of its Inspiron 11z notebook) it's obvious: Netbooks are nothing more than smaller, cheaper notebooks.

The distinction made some sense early on. The first Netbooks were very small, around 7 or 8 inches, and were used for little more than getting online. They were marketed by smaller brands such as Asus and MSI as super portable, inexpensive notebooks that ran Linux, cutting out much of the cost tacked on with a Windows license. But they didn't really take off until Microsoft began offering Windows XP specifically for Netbooks, long after it was no longer available on new laptops and desktops.

The big PC makers, understandably, wanted a piece of the action too, but not at the expense of cannibalizing their budget-conscious traditional notebook lines. So Netbooks were sold as a "companion device." As in, if you keep some of your data "in the cloud" as with e-mail on Yahoo or Gmail or pictures on Facebook or Picasa, and you stream music on a service like Pandora or Last.fm, you can use your regular notebook at home and use something smaller on the road that still affords access to a lot of your stuff.… Read more