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Asus is starting to roll out an updated version of the Eee PC T91 touchscreen convertible netbook. Like the unit I reviewed a few months ago, the new model is powered by a 1.33GHz Intel Atom Z520 processor and includes an 8.9 inch touchscreen display that can be folded down over the keyboard for use in tablet mode. But there are three things that set the new Eee PC T91MT apart from the earlier model:
- It runs Windows 7 Home Premium
- The touchscreen supports multitouch gestures
- The solid state disk has been upgraded from 16GB to 32GB
As with a number of other new Asus laptops, the company is offering Eee PC T91MT customers 500GB of free online storge.
You can pre-order the Eee PC T91MT from Amazon for $549 . The laptop has a non-removable battery which Asus says is good for up to 5 hours, 802.11b/g/n WiFi, Bluetooth, and supports up to 2GB of RAM, (although it ships with just 1GB).
thanks Urban Strata!
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Asus is ready to release an updated version of the Eee PC T91 touchscreen convertible netbook. The new version is powered by a 1.33GHz Intel Atom Z520 processor with a 1GB RAM (up to 2GB), Microsoft Windows 7 Home Premium, a 16GB or 32GB SSD, and an 8.9-inch touchscreen display that can be folded down over the keyboard for use in tablet mode. Its touchscreen display also supports multitouch gestures. If you want one, you can pre-order the Eee PC T91MT from Amazon for $549. The laptop has a non-removable battery which provides up to 5 hours of operation time. Additional features include 802.11b/g/n WiFi and Bluetooth. [Liliputing] Source
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HP have officially announced that the HP Compaq Mini 311 netbook will be coming to Russia in November 2009. The company will sell the netbook for a retail price of $580. So here’s what you get, an 11.6-inch 1366 x 768 LCD display, a 1.6GHz Intel Atom N270 processor, a NVIDIA Ion chipset, a 1GB RAM, a 160GB HDD, a web camera, a 3-in-1 card reader, WiFi, Bluetooth, an HDMI output and Windows 7 OS. [HP] Source
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The Mirus JWHX netbook is a rather mundane looking laptop with a 10.2 inch, 1024 x 600 pixel display, 1GB of RAM, and 120GB hard drive. It has a 1.6GHz Intel Atom N270 CPU, a 3 cell battery, and runs Windows XP. For the most part, it looks like almost any other netbook that was released over the past 18 months. But there’s one thing that does set the Mirus apart from the competition: The price.
The Mirus netbook is available from Walmart for $248. While you can sometimes find other 10 inch netbooks going for similar prices, it’s not that often that you see a mini-laptop launch at that price.
The netbook has 3 USB ports, 802.11b/g/n WiFi, a VGA output, and an SD card. It measures 10.2″ x 7.4″ x 1.1″.
via NetbookFreaks
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 Asus smartbook prototype (Summer, 2009) Asus CEO Jerry Shen says that the company will launch a smartbook during the first quarter of 2010. There aren’t any further details, but smartbooks are typically defined as low power, 3G-enabled ultraportable laptops with ARM-based processors. There’s no word on whether the Asus smartbook would run Windows CE, Linux, or Google Android, but the company did briefly demonstrate a Google Android-powered netbook this summer before deciding it wasn’t ready for the world to see and hiding it away.
The prototype was based on a 1GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon processor which enables long battery life,В and integrated GPS, 3G, WiFi, and graphics capabilities. But it’s not at all clear whether the upcoming Asus product will be built on the same platform as the early prototype.
Shen says the new device will run about NT 6,000 which is roughly $184 US.
via Shanzai
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Last week Chris Guthrie at netbook Reviews ran a battery test on two virtually identical netbooks: An Asus Eee PC 1008HA with Windows 7 and one with Windows XP. He found that the Windows 7 model ran for an hour longer than the Windows XP model, which made it look like the operating system actually helped improve battery life on that netbook. I was impressed and wrote up a summary of the experiment on Liliputing.
But then things stopped adding up. Asus sent me a Windows 7 Asus Eee PC 1008HA to review and I ran Battery Eater Pro on it. Not only did I get about half the run time that Chris got on his test… but I found that the laptop ran for about an hour less than the Eee PC 1008HA with Windows XP that I reviewed this summer. In both cases, we’re talking about virtually new demo units sent directly from Asus.
And then the plot continued to thicken. Kevin Tofel at jkOnTheRun has been using a Toshiba NB205 netbook for a little while. He purchased one with Windows XP but later installed Windows 7. When he ran the Battery Eater Pro test on his netbook he found that it ran for about 5:50 under Windows XP and only 5:15 under Windows 7.
Since I happen to have a Toshiba NB205 Windows 7 review unit handy, I ran the same test and got only 5 hours and 16 minutes. That’s not a bad score at all (since Battery Eater stresses the CPU pretty heavily, it means you’d probably get 6 to 8 hours of run time in real life). But it does show that for the Toshiba NB205, it seems that Windows 7 doesn’t improve battery life: it hurts it. And despite Chris Guthrie’s test results, it looks like the same is true on the Asus Eee PC 1008HA.
What’s interesting is that Windows 7 does give users far more control over their advanced power settings than Windows XP. But the operating system also incorporates more graphics and animations that could be taking a toll on battery life. But that doesn’t really explain very much either, since most netbooks, including the Toshiba NB205, ship with Windows 7 Starter Edition which disables many of those graphical effects. The Asus Eee PC 1008HA does come with the fuller-featured Windows 7 Home Premium, though.
What do you think? Do you have any experience testing devices with Windows XP and Windows 7? Have you noticed any change in battery performance?
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 MSI has quietly introduced an updated version of the company’s U2xx series of 12.1 inch laptops. The MSI Wind U230 looks almost identical to the U200/U210 laptops that are already available, but the new model features two major updates:
- It runs Windows 7 Home Premium instead of Windows XP
- It features a dual core AMD Neo X2 processor
Here’s a rundown of the specs:
- Display: 12.1 inch, 1366 x 768 pixel screen
- CPU: AMD Yukon MV40/L335 dual core processor
- Graphics: AMD Radeon HD3200
- RAM: Up to 4GB of DDR2 667/800MHz RAM (2 DIMM slots)
- Storage: 160GB/250GB/320GB HDD
- Connectivity: 802.11b/g/n WiFi, Ethernet, optional Bluetooth
- I/O: HDMI, 3 USB ports, mic, headphone, VGA, 4-in-1 card reader
- Webcam: 1.3MP
- Battery: 3 or 6 cell options
- Dimensions: 11.7″ x 7.5″ x 1.2″
- Weight: 2.9 pounds (with 3 cell battery)
MSI claims that the laptop should get about 4 hours of battery life, which generally means you’ll probably be able to get 3 to 3.5 hours if you’re lucky.
via Netbooked
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You know the holiday season is just around the corner when the Black Friday ads start to leak onto the web. Black Friday, for the uninitiated is the day after Thanksgiving. It’s often one of the busiest shopping days of the year, and it got its name, because it’s about the time when many retail stores are finally in “the black” for the fiscal year meaning they start turning a profit.
Anyway, one of the first ads to leak was for Office Max, and while the ad is no longer available online, the folks at Gizmodo documented all the important bits, including one of the best deals on a netbook I’ve seen. Office Max will reportedly have a 10.1 inch Acer Aspire One with 1GB of RAM, a 160GB hard drive, and Windows XP available in stores on Black Friday for $149.99.
It’s not clear whether this is an Acer Aspire One AOD150 or AOD250, but the store only seems to stock the AOD250 currently, and that is Acer’s flagship model at the moment. Either way I expect that for that price you’re going to get a netbook with a 3 cell battery rather than the higher capacity 6 cell battery option.OfficeMax currently charges $299.99 for the Acer Aspire One AOD250 with Windows XP and a 3 cell battery.
For $150, I’d almost expect to see these netbooks hanging out with the candy and bubble gum in the impulse buy area by the cash registers.
via Netbook Reports
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If you’ve ever used a laptop in a coffee shop, library, park, or other public location, odds are you’ve had someone look over your shoulder to see what you’re doing. That’s why there’s a cottage industry for laptop screen privacy filters.
A privacy filter is a piece of plastic that you can place over your laptop display to seriously restrict the viewing angle. If you’re sitting directly in front of the computer you should have no problem reading the screen. But if you’re looking at it from an angle, you won’t be able to see a thing.
Most privacy filters are designed for full sized laptops, but as netbooks become more popular, we’re seeing more accessories for them. And Peter at Netbooked discovered that 3M is making filters for 10 inch nretbook displays. The company has them on display at a trade show in Japan this week, but you can also check to see if a privacy filter is available for your netbook model at the 3M web site.
In a nutshell, if you’ve got a 10.1 or 10.2 inch screen, you can probably use one of the company’s filters which are available from Amazon for $30.82 .
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 Could developers cool to Android if they think Google might swallow their apps’ functionality and roll it into OS updates? That’s the opinion of Steve Andler, vice president of marketing for Networks in Motion (makers of VZ Navigator and Gokivo for iPhone). According to him, the free Google Maps for Navigation Beta is the second time devs have been burned by Google. Latitude was the first shot across the bow when it got added to Google Maps, leaving the likes of Loopt scrambling to justify their relevance.
It’s obviously in Andler’s best interest to defend Networks in Motion and the work that they do in the GPS space, but given his expereince in the PC industry–including at Toshiba, Fujitsu, and Apple–he brings an interesting perspective to the debate over whether Google may be biting the hands that feed Android. Check out the interview and decide for yourself.
What do you think Google’s free GPS navigation means for the GPS industry?
The reason it’s sad for me is that Google is attacking the most profitable part of the mobile software development community. Clearly, they can call Android an open platform, but we all know that that’s a bunch of hooey. They completely control and own it. While people can make changes on top of it, the reality is what’s going to be in Android 3.0 and 4.0 is totally and completely controlled by the warchest at Google.
Do you think Google has what it takes to be successful in the navigation market?
It’s easy to do one device and show up with a premiere device–anyone can write a spiffy UI, especially if you have lots of money and talented engineers. But it’s hard to replicate all those years of testing and integration and working with the handset vendors and working with the content providers and working with the carrier support teams with their network to make sure all these things work together. Because doing real-time navigation is a very complex problem. It’s not like doing something on the Internet, where you do it once and it pretty much works.
And what you’re dealing with here is a map database that is brand-new, completely unproven, and is that really something that should be used for such a mission-critical function as real car navigation? So you can’t just put a bunch of smart programmers on this and assume that you’re going to have a stable, serviceable solution quickly.
And that brings us to the next point, which is that, if they’re going to make this part of the Android platform, who’s going to do all the dirty work? Who’s going to do that integration and porting work for each new device, each new screen, each new chipset, each new set of firmware, each new tweak to the OS.
Why do you think Apple decided not to roll out its own navigation solution?
Until the day Apple announced that they were going to allow us to do our turn-by-turn solution, publically, we didn’t know which way they were going to go. Because there was a very large contingent inside of Apple and the software development community said, “We can do that just as well as they do it.” And it actually would have been easier for Apple since there’s only one device.
But they realized that what was going to change the world was an ecosystem for software developers to impress consumers with their vision of how to do things. Now, do you think if Apple had chosen to take some really key applications and go, “well, we could make more money if we did that ourselves,” that they would be as robust a development community as there is?
So do you believe Android developers will be turned off by this behavior?
The robustness of the ecosystem will certainly suffer when software developers go to get money, the VPs go, “So your business plan is to port this to the platform, and if you have a home run, then likely what will happen is Google will look at that and go, ‘Oh, there’s something we could kill off and put more ads into’.”
They took the most profitable, proven piece of the software ecosystem–two of them, actually–social networking and now navigation and said, “Well, we’re going to say we did this because it’s the most demanded thing by our customers, not because we decided to disenfranchise our software development community and keep all the profits for ourself and turn it into an advertising solution.” Even though it’s a proven thing that people would pay a subscription fee for, which there are very few of those. Because of course everybody would like something for free, right?
How long do you think Google can offer navigation for free?
I mean that’s what Google does, right? They go look for something that people value, and then they go, “Well, we could give that to them for free, if we can add it to our monopoly of properties that we totally control the way to monetize.” But if you take away subscription monetization and wireless, then you’re left with, “Well, I have to monetize by sustaining my product with ads,” which for some products is okay and for other products is not okay.
So you think Google could sabotage their own platform if they continue down this road?
I think so. I think what they’re going to end up with is, it’s the Google solution? While they say it’s an open platform, what vendor, going forward, is going to be able to modify the Google platform, Android platform, to make something special out of it, because they won’t be able to keep up with the next version of Android? And Google will just roll over them. So Google is doing exactly what Microsoft did, which is, they integrate stuff into the core, leaving no room for anyone to innovate.
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