Digital Trends
IntroductionPerhaps no tech company short of Apple makes style more paramount than Sony. The new Vaio CW series, however, melds Sony’s knack for sharp design with a trait more foreign to the company: affordability. The fresh Vaio line of Nvidia-powered 14.1-inch notebooks charts an intelligent course between style and substance, while keeping price in check all the while, making it a great choice for the practical fashionista on a budget.
The first purchase for absolutely any laptop owner should be protection. Whether it’s a stylish messenger bag or backpack for around town, a briefcase for travel, or just a simple sleeve or case for home, keeping your computer safe is essential. We’ve rounded up some the most stylish, fashionable, and practical laptop bags on the market.
Skooba’s “checkpoint-friendly” messenger bags unzips down the middle to reveal your notebook in a clear-sided pocket, eliminating the need to remove it when going through airport security.
Built-in laptop speakers suck. Even the best we’ve tested barely manage to cough up enough volume for the occasional YouTube video, much less playing real music with any appreciable volume. And getting even a murmur of bass? Forget about it.
Asus, a company not unfamiliar with the notebook sound issue, has its own take on a solution. Rather than launching the typical pair of bland desktop stereo speakers, the company took a cue from recent trends in the home theater world in introducing the uBoom – a pair of aftermarket notebook speakers packaged neatly into a soundbar.
Rubber gaskets, shock-mounted hard drives and rugged exterior coatings may go a long way in making a notebook tough, but they certainly don’t flatter them on the scale. Most rugged notebooks weigh far more than their consumer-grade counterparts, leading to an interesting paradox: You can take them anywhere, but probably won’t want to.
Getac’s new 9213 rugged business notebook defies that expectation with a weight of just 3.9 pounds – not at all excessive for a machine in its 13.3-inch size class. Getac pulled it off with a magnesium alloy chassis, which is extremely strong for its weight, along with other light-but-tough components.
General Dynamics might be best known for building M1 Abrams tanks, Stryker armored personnel carriers, and the fabled F-16 fighter jet, but once in a while, it cranks out a laptop or two, as well. This week, the company’s computer arm, Itronix, released the GD8000 rugged notebook. And if the company’s other products are any indication, it can take a beating.
Like rugged competitors from Panasonic, the GD8000 uses a magnesium shell that’s been sealed tight against any number of environmental woes, from the relatively tame dust to far-more-hazardous hurricane-strength wind and rain (it had to survive 30 gallons blown over it at 40mph for four hours to meet the get the elusive MIL-STD 810F rating). It will also survive falls of 42 inches to the hard ground.
Look familiar? The VX5 isn’t the only supercar-inspired laptop on the market, or even the first from Asus, but for its latest iteration of the fabled Lamborghini line, the Taiwanese manufacturer had added a few new twists.
The exterior styling this time around comes from Lamborghini’s Reventón, the company’s most expensive car ever built, with a price of one million Euros, and only 20 ever built. The car’s tell-tale design cues are all over the scalloped, hood-like lid (which bears the Italian car company’s famous shield) right down to the trackpad, which has an angular, trapezoidal shape, and has been surrounded with leather trim on the wrist rest.
When you start hearing analogies between the hum of a computer processor and the roar of an F1 car, you know you’re in the sludgy depths of some pretty thick PR speak. So it goes with Acer’s new Ferrari 1200 notebook, which, according to Acer, has a “unique ventilation design” that “echoes the exhaust pipes of F1 cars.” Right.
The rest of the Ferrari machismo packed into this ‘book, we can believe. That includes design touches like a carbon fiber cover for strength without the weight of metal, an anodized metal touch pad that mimics a Ferrari’s brake pedal, and a soft-touch coating on the inside that’s inspired by a Ferrari interior. There’s even an included Bluetooth mouse that follows the same design cues.
Though Intel’s Atom has owned the emerging netbook arena since the company introduced the tiny chip back in April, AMD hasn’t been sitting idly by in its Sunnyvale, Calif. laboratories. At this year’s Consumer Electronics Show, the chipmaker unveiled Athlon Neo (previously codenamed Yukon), a platform especially developed for ultra-thin, affordable PCs. And in perfect unison, HP ripped the wraps off the DV2, which will be the first notebook to use it.
Just when you thought manufacturers had finished carving out enough different laptop screen sizes, someone has to go and scribble another odd one onto the scale. Acer did it earlier this year with an 18.4-inch behemoth that created its own size class, and now Sony has done the same with its very own 16.4-inch laptop, which it claims is the first of its kind as well.
While Americans still seem to prescribe to the old “bigger is better” mantra when it comes to cars, houses, and gas-station soft drinks, there’s no question that in the realm of laptops, smaller is sexier. Miniature notebooks like the MacBook Air, Asus Eee, and Lenovo X300 have proven that point over and over in the past year by successfully spinning small size into sales. But despite the trend, not all notebook manufacturers have been ignoring the other side of the spectrum.
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