This is the MEGABOOK (no relation) straight out of Korea from a manufacturer I’ve never heard of. It sorta has a Dell industrial look and runs Windows Vista and specs out pretty well.
17″ WXGA (1400 x 900) screen, 1GB of ram, Core 2 Duo processor, Nvidia GeForce 7600, DVD burner, 120GB HDD, 4 in 1 card reader, built in 1.3 megapixel camera, DVI, and S-video out.
The price? Nothing mentioned yet but judging from other Korean laptops, it should be a lot more affordable than its Japanese and American counterparts.
Face it, your computer is a fat piece of crap and unless you do something drastic (*cough, fingerinthethroat, *cough) it’s always going to be that way. There has been plenty talk of laptops switching over to flash memory and as you can see, a beautiful slim look is just one of the many benefits. The codenamed Metro notebook is a measly 0.7 inches thick and weighs in at only 2.25 pounds, yes, “holy crap” is correct.
Nicholas Negroponte, the esteemed Chairman Emeritus and founder of MIT’s Media Lab, has had his philanthropic vision undermined by a cheaper laptop. In his well-publicized campaign to provide One Laptop Per Child, Nicholas has dedicated hundreds of hours and money in order to provide less fortunate or low-funded school children with low end laptops that will improve education and spark interest for young students all over the world.
Since $100 dollars per child may still be too much, Indian HRD ministry has begun a project to commission a $10 laptop, and already has several top Indian designers and engineers competing for the contract. While the actual production cost will be around $47 per laptop, at a price of $10 per pop, simple grade school math shows that today’s education funds could provide 10 times as many laptops per child (that’s at least a %1 increase- at least) when compared to Negroponte’s model.
As per the design/engineering contract, the laptop components must be on a single board and the winning creation will be the laptop that is the most powerful at the cheapest production price. Although this new take on the One Laptop Per Child campaign is interesting, expect the $100 laptop sooner, since:
Sources say it would be another two years before the laptops become a reality. “We do not want to rush into it. Many issues remain to be resolved like royalty to the designer after the design is patented. Prototyping would also take time. We would even conduct destructive testing and create a proper maintenance network,” said one official.
The fall 2007 release of the $100 laptops (that may be $150) will definitely be a huge step forward in global education standards, but with the eventual release of India’s $10 laptop, helping children just got a whole lot more competitive. Of course, there are some schools that receive computer equipment from donations alone, so even charging $10 per laptop may be too much for districts that get them for free.
In a typical day of working and traveling, millions of wireless devices are used, seen, bought, and sold. All of these products share one thing in common: their innate ability to consume and engulf batteries and power from outlets. The sheer amount of environmental pollution and waste created by the use of disposable batteries and dead chargeable batteries is enormous, not to mention the average cost of replacing and charging those batteries.
Along with the cost is the huge inconvenience of having a device lose power from lack of battery charging or actual battery inoperability. There are several ways to fix this problem, the most straightforward one being to create longer-lasting batteries that have less of an environmental impact. But now, four companies are poised to take the battery market into a new era: wireless charging and power. Read on for a preview of Wildcharge, Powercast, eCoupled, and Splashpower, all of which have their own respective method of providing power on-the-go. (more…)
Starting March 27, 2007, Systemax PC will start selling a new version of their Pursuit 4155 laptop product line, now with the Genuine Windows Vista Ultimate Edition. The Systemax Pursuit 4155 laptop is already packed with some great features like a built-in 1.3 Mega Pixel camera, several input/output ports, up to 1000 Mbps LAN, and a great processor from the Intel Centrino Duo Mobile family, and with the addition of Windows Ultimate already installed, this laptop is a great deal.
Right now, the Pursuit 4155 laptop is being advertised at $999.99, which is a competitive offer that gives consumers the option to save money on a new version of the Windows OS while purchasing a powerful laptop.
Read the rest of the story for the full laptop specifications. (more…)
If you’ve got $2200 to lay down on a laptop just to look cool then the ASUS W5Fe is probably what you want to spend it on. Here’s a video of what I consider a sloppy popular mechanics review. What’s noteworthy is just watching Windows Vista’s sideshow work on the external screen (read: ignore the guy).
It’s nifty but not blatantly practical. It may have its uses that I can’t think of. Perhaps porn watching on the go or something. Maybe you can have a picture of a hand flipping the bird on the lid of your laptop so that you don’t have to. The possibilities are practically endless aren’t they?
There’s an old saying that states it’s sometimes cheaper to replace than to repair. There’s also the classic “you get what you pay for.” Put them together for what should have been a simple laptop repair, and what you get is a good warning for consumers. Names are changed to protect the not-too-innocent (and to prevent us from getting sued), but my name hasn’t been changed; I can’t protect the stupid. (more…)
