Sony Vaio F Series

The good: With a Blu-ray drive, Nvidia GeForce 540M graphics, and a full 1080p resolution display, the Sony Vaio F Series is a full-featured movie and gaming machine, with a sharp look and useful preloaded software.
The bad: The 16-inch screen can sit uncomfortably between midsize and desktop replacement laptops, and the Sony price premium is nearly on par with Apple's. Plus, the battery life is disappointingly weak.
The bottom line: If the size is right for you, the Vaio F Series is a well-made high-end laptop, and is a good reminder that Sony is one of the few brands that comes close to Apple on design and polish.
Sony certainly makes distinctive-looking laptops. And in a market saturated with cookie-cutter grey boxes (or now, endless MacBook Air knockoffs), that's more important than it may seem at first. Even better, Sony also happens to make very good laptops, and I can probably count the number of real lemons found in the Sony Vaio line over the past five-plus years on the fingers of one hand.

Acer Aspire Ethos 5951G-2418G75Mnkk review

Also known as just the Ethos, the Acer 5951G does a good job when it comes to sound, with a license paid to Dolby for its Home Theater software to enhance audio playback.
The 15.6in glossy screen is a let-down, though. In terms of colour depth, it does a fine job, but we were disappointed to find a resolution of just 1366 x 768 pixels, which makes individual pixels visible to the eye. Nor is it high enough resolution to support 1080p HD video without downscaling.
This Acer Aspire Ethos 5951G-2418G75Mnkk laptop’s optical drive is CD/DVD only anyway, so if you’re looking for Blu-ray playback or high-definition video enjoyment, keep looking.
To top it off, the screen has a glossy finish, meaning that visibility is a problem outside of darkened rooms.

Sony VAIO S Series

The Sony VAIO S Series laptop won't win any awards for performance or multimedia playback, but it's a great light PC for a business professional.
The Sony VAIO S Series isn't the most powerful all-purpose laptop, but I like it - and not just because I have a soft spot for Sony. Although the VAIO S Series offers mediocre general performance and modest graphics speed, it's also light, thin, stylish, and very portable.
Our review model, priced at £999, sports an Intel Core i5-2430M processor, an AMD Radeon HD 6470M graphics card, and 4GB of RAM. It also has a 500GB hard drive, a DVD-RW optical drive, and built-in Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 3.0. This model runs the 64-bit version of Windows 7 Home Premium.
In our WorldBench 6 benchmark tests, the VAIO S Series earned a score of 112. This is a decent, but not excellent, score that puts the VAIO S Series right around the middle of our recently tested mid- to power-priced laptops. While the VAIO S Series should be fine for most basic work tasks and streaming video, it's by no means a graphics powerhouse or a gaming laptop. See also: What's the best laptop?

HP EliteBook 8740w XT914UA

The HP EliteBook 8740w XT914UA is billed as a Mobile Workstation, but mobile is not the first word that springs to mind when you look at it.
It's absolutely huge, with a 17.3in display – and with a 16:10 aspect ratio rather than 16:9 – and despite HP's claims that the EliteBook 'only' weighs in at 3.57kg, that figure may be rather conservative. Our scales were quivering at around the 3.85kg mark.
And that's not where the hefty aspect of the HP EliteBook 8740w XT914UA ends - it will cost you around £3000 to get your hands on one of these, depending on configuration. But both build quality and specification are largely representative of a laptop at this price level.

Samsung Series 5 Chromebook 2012 Specs Announced

The Samsung Series 5 Chromebook released last year is going to be getting an update in early 2012. The current Samsung Series 5 Chromebook sells for $379.99 on Amazon.com. For those who don’t know, Chromebooks are basically laptops with Google’s Chrome OS instead of Windows installed. Chrome OS is all about working and storing in the cloud, so there’s a minimal amount of storage on a Chromebook itself and the OS is light weight and fast to start. Put simply, it’s like having a laptop with nothing but a Chrome browser installed.
So what’s new with the Samsung Series 5 Chromebook 2012 version? Not a whole lot to be honest, just an updated lid finish that is less shiny and glossy than the 2011 version and an Intel Celeron processor instead of Atom. Here are the known specs on the new Samsung Series 5 Chromebook:
Processor: Intel Celeron
Screen: 12.1-inch 300 nit display, 1280 x 800 resolution
OS: Google Chrome
Storage: 16GB SSD
Memory: 2GB RAM
Weight: 3.2lbs
Dimensions: 11.6 inches x 8.6 inches x 0.8 inches
Ports: Two USB 2.0, 4-in-1 memory card reader (SD, SDHC, SDXC, MMC)
Availability: June 2012
Battery Life: 8 hours
Price: $399 for Wi-Fi only version, $449 with Verizon 3G and Wi-Fi
Unrelated to laptops, Samsung will also be releasing a desktop version they’re dubbing the Chromebox. The Samsung Series 3 Chromebox will have the exact same internal specs as the Series 5 Chromebook. However, it will include a wireless keyboard-and-mouse combo and also have more ports including five USB 2.0 sockets, DVI, DisplayPort and a headphone jack. The cost of the Series 3 Chromebox will be $399 and availability is also slated for June 2012.

It’s doubtful Samsung sold a whole lot of the Series 5 Chromebooks, it’s one of those devices that early adopters and geeks will love but the fact it’s so hard to print and has limited capabilities will deter the average consumer. You can read our review of the Acer AC700 Chromebook to get an idea of what the limitations are you run into with the Chrome OS. That said, if you’re looking for a cheap and portable laptop that’s only use will be to get on the web, it could be a good option as a secondary computer to a more fully fledged Windows or Mac computer.

Gateway ID47H02u

The good: Strong battery life and a clean design along with a fast processor and USB 3.0 make the $699 Gateway ID47H02u stand out; the laptop also manages to fit a 14-inch display into the body of a 13-incher.
The bad: The Gateway ID47H02u lacks Bluetooth and dedicated graphics, and plenty of other 13- and 14-inch competitors offer similar features for a similar price.
The bottom line: The Gateway ID47H02u is a slim-bodied, full-featured 14-inch laptop that offers a surprisingly strong mix of performance and design at a price that hovers between budget and mainstream. While there are plenty of similar alternatives from other manufacturers, this Gateway should keep up with most of them.

Gateway NV55S05u (white)

The good: The Gateway NV55S05u is a budget laptop with more-than-average hard-drive space and RAM, and the included AMD A8 APU has better graphics than you get on similarly priced laptops.
The bad: The NV55S05u has no-frills features and a generic design, and with the AMD A8 it performed everyday tasks more slowly than equivalently priced Intel Core i3 laptops. The battery life was underwhelming, too.
The bottom line: You could do a lot worse than the Gateway NV55S05u for a solid RAM-hard drive combination and an all-around decent processor in a 15-inch laptop, provided you can live with poor battery life.
The landscape of budget laptops often looks like a police lineup of suspects: a muddy confusion of similar-looking faces and bodies. For $600 you can buy a lot of computer lately, though you're not likely to get something that's particularly sexy.

Toshiba Extreme Entertainment Qosmio X770

 
Superstar Entertainment
No other PC takes fun more seriously than our Qosmio® X775 laptop computer. Spin up the optional built-in Blu-ray™ Disc player, gaze into the dazzling screen, and zoom out with unforgettable movies. Enjoy symphonic soundtracks thanks to premium harman/kardon® stereo speakers and a subwoofer tuned with sound enhancement technologies from Dolby® and Waves Audio. And scale up your standard-def viewing with Toshiba Resolution+® technology.

The iPad: The full story

The iPad is just such a powerful item in today’s world. It is so simple, has two ports, one speaker, yet it can do so much. It has so many uses, yet for some it is useless. Because of this, I’m honestly going to be all over the place with explanations. I’m going to try to begin with what the iPad is all about in terms of its use, place in the Apple line of products, maybe even its place in society. From there I will hopefully work my way into the actual hardware, how it is unique to other tablets, effectively what the iPad 2 is all about. Try and bear with me here, for I think any questions that you have will be answered.

Apple Store Grand Central Opening Friday

Grand Central Terminal in New York might be best known as a train station, but the truth is that it actually gets more tourist foot traffic than commuter traffic. And that’s probably why Apple has decided it’s a great place to open their next retail store. The Apple Store Grand Central will open this Friday, December 9th at 10 a.m. so that you can either pickup a Mac on the way to work or make it a part of your tourist sight seeing when in the Big Apple. Apple has opening hours and a landing page for the Grand Central site, Apple Grand Central opening hours will be as follows:

Laptop Guide: Advantages of IPS Display Laptops and Where to Find Them

With the advent of the Apple iPad more people are now aware of what an IPS (in-plane switching) display is and the advantages of it. Most tablets on the market these days come equipped with an IPS display. This makes sense, the major benefit of an IPS display is its extremely wide viewing angles, meaning colors stay true no matter what angle you view it from. A tablet is designed to be viewed from any angle and so color reproduction from wide angles is important.

Non-IPS displays, such as the TN (twisted nematic) technology used in most laptops tend to wash out and have color distortion when you view it from angles other than straight on and perpendicular to your eyes.

The difference is pretty shocking, the same images are used on both the Apple iPad screen and the Acer laptop screen and you can see how much better the colors are on the iPad at various viewing angles compared to the Acer.

HP Envy 15-3000 Benchmarks with AMD 7690M Graphics and SSD

The new HP Envy 15-3000, also referred to as the Envy 15 Late 2011 release, has been conspicuously absent from being reviewed. While a full review will be upcoming on this site, the overall system performance benchmarks for the Envy 15-3000 deserve they’re own page in the sun and as such that’s what this article sets out to do. The system as purchased came with a 500GB Toshiba hard drive spinning at 7,200RPM. To make things more interesting we plopped in an 80GB Intel X25-M SSD. Now, granted this is not the latest and greatest SSD on the market but it gives a very good idea of what kind of performance advantage an SSD is going to give you, even if it’s last years technology.

A Look Inside the HP Envy 15-3000

One consideration when buying a laptop such as the HP Envy 15 is how easy it is to access and upgrade components. This is especially a concern for power users who want to right away upgrade memory, install an SSD or maybe replace an optical drive with a storage drive. There have been a few questions regarding how easy it is to access components in the Envy 15-3000 so here’s a picture tour of opening up the machine and what is and isn’t easy to get to:

Above is the Envy 15-3000 with bottom cover in place.

HP Folio 13 Vs. Toshiba Z830 Ultrabook Comparison

The HP Folio 13 and Toshiba Z830 are both classified by their respective companies as Ultrabooks, but there’s quite a bit of difference between the design and build of these two laptops. I’ve been using each of these ultrabooks on and off for about a week so have a good idea of the pros and cons of each and how they compare. First you might want to check out this quick video overview I did comparing the Toshiba Z830 and Folio 13 side by side:
The marketing on these two laptops is quite different. HP is targeting the business crowd with the Folio 13 but adding consumer touches such as the glossy screen, shiny keyboard and industrial aluminum design. Meanwhile Toshiba is marketing more to consumers and trying to appeal to the crowd that wants an extremely thin and light laptop, you’ll find the Z830 in retail stores such as Best Buy (where I purchased mine). 

Vizio Laptops to be Unveiled at CES 2012

Vizio, a company well known for its cheap flat panel TVs, is now entering the PC market and will launch at least three laptops in 2012 according to their CTO. Vizio will be at the CES 2012 show next week in Las Vegas and will be showing off three new laptops. The CTO, Matt McRae, said in an interview with Bloomberg that the laptops would go on sale by June at a “price that doesn’t seem possible”. Since we’ve already witnessed $299 laptops from Lenovo being sold in Best Buy recently, you have to wonder how low Vizio can really go with pricing. In the article it is mentioned that Vizio plans to enter the ultra thin and light category, which can only mean an ultrabook. Right now ultrabooks retail for around $1,000 so there’s definitely room for Vizio to undercut the competition.Based on some early pictures released of the Vizio laptop it seems to confirm that at least one of the offerings will be an Ultrabook:

Lenovo IdeaPad Yoga Windows 8 Tablet Convertible Specs Revealed

Lenovo has already announced over 20+ laptops in the past few days, but they’re not done, the IdeaPad Yoga Windows 8 Tablet convertible style laptop was unveiled today at CES 2012. The IdeaPad Yoga is a laptop to tablet convertible that quite literally flips over itself. The hinge is like that of a door that can open in both directions, so you can either close the screen down onto the keyboard like a typical closed laptop or rotate it almost 360-degrees the other way so the screen lid is on the base of the laptop. The hinge and screen are very flexible, and thus the name Yoga. The specs on the Lenovo IdeaPad Yoga are as follows: