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CHINESE PC MAKER Lenovo has announced its next Ultrabook class laptop prior to next week’s consumer electronics show (CES) in Las Vegas.

The T430u Ultrabook is Lenovo’s follow-on to the U300s, which it announced in September. The T430u will be on show at CES next week and will be available in the third quarter in the UK with a starting price of £545.

“The T430u Ultrabook represents the next generation in thin and light computing,” said Dilip Bhatia, vice president of Thinkpad at Lenovo. “From small businesses that literally live their life on the road to corporate professionals working in a managed environment, these new crossover laptops fundamentally change the way people think about mobile computing technology.”

Like all Ultrabooks the laptop will come in a slim and light design at 20.3mm thick and less than 1.8kg. It will have a matte finish with an aluminium cover and will be available with a 14in high definition screen.

The T430u will come with an unknown Intel processor. The words “third generation” were mentioned in the pre-CES briefing we attended but Lenovo has not confirmed whether its Ultrabook or other laptops will have Sandy Bridge or Ivy Bridge processors. The latter seems more likely.

It will come with an optional Nvidia graphics card and up to 1TB of disk storage or a solid state disk (SSD). Lenovo touts a battery life of up to six hours and features such as quick resume and fast boot. It will also be the first Ultrabook with a DVD drive according to the firm.

The Lenovo T430u will have to compete with other recent entries to the Ultrabook category such as Toshiba’s Z830 and Asus’ Zenbook UX31E. We expect Ultrabooks to make a large showing at this year’s CES. µ

We’ve reviewed just about every line of laptops that Dell makes over the years, but we haven’t had a chance to look at the Vostro line until today. Vostro is essentially Dell’s entry-level business laptop brand, with an emphasis on business-class support while maintaining a lower price point than the Latitude line. What that means is you give up some of the performance options of the consumer Inspiron and XPS lines, but you usually get better support and a matte LCD. Build quality is a bit of a question mark, and something we’ll discuss more in the review. The V131 we received for review is also quite thin, nearly at ultrabook levels, which raises an interesting question: how does an 0 (often less) business laptop compare with the upcoming ultrabooks and other thin and light laptops?

We’ve already had our first ultrabook review with the ASUS UX21E, and we expect more ultrabooks in for review in the next month, which makes this review of the Vostro V131 all the more pertinent. It supports full-power Core 2011 dual-core processors and uses integrated graphics, but it also has a standard battery that can easily be swapped out—and a larger battery capacity as well. If you’re interested in seeing how the Vostro V131 stacks up against the recently reviewed XPS 14z and ASUS UX21, or you’re wondering what you give up in moving from Dell’s Latitude line down to the Vostro, we should have all the information you need in this review.

MAKER OF EXPENSIVE PRINTER INK HP has announced its refreshed Pavilion DM1 laptop.

The Pavilion DM1 will have an 11.6in HD LED display with 1366×768 resolution and feature HP Beats Audio.

HP said, “With HP Premier Experience, consumer notebooks have quicker boot-up, shutdown, sleep and resume times, allowing users to access their content quickly. The dm1 shows an approximate 29 and 25 percent improvement on shutdown and resume times, respectively. Boot times and sleep times are also improved.”

The DM1 will be powered by an AMD dual-core processor, come with 3GB of DDR3 RAM and will have a 320GB SATA hard drive and a Truevision HD webcam. Keeping with the AMD theme, the laptop will also have an AMD discrete graphics GPU.

The HP Premier Experience features Coolsense, Quickweb and Protectsmart. Coolsense keeps the temperature of the laptop low whilst Quickweb gets you on the internet, er, quickly and Protectsmart locks the hard drive if the device gets bumped or dropped.

HP said the laptop will be 25mm thick and weigh 1.6kg. The company claims the Pavilion DM1 has a battery life of up to 9.5 hours.

It will tip up on 2 October with prices starting at £349, µ

In the rush to move everything into the third dimension, Toshiba has announced their latest glasses-free 3D notebook, the Qosmio F755 3D. The laptop is even capable of displaying 2D and 3D content at the same time. So how does it all work?

Toshiba achieves the 3D glasses-free viewing by using the latest in auto-stereoscopic display technology. The 15.6" LCD is a full HD TruBrite panel with Active Lens technology, with double parallax technology that allows it to project two sets of images at the same time, splitting them between the left and right eyes to create the 3D effect. Toshiba’s Face Tracking technology then uses the laptop’s webcam to optimize the projection of the image by reacting to the motion and position of the viewer, delivering a broad viewing zone from which to view 3D content. The end result is the ability to view and enjoy real 3D sans no glasses.

What about simultaneous 2D and 3D content? There's nothing particularly revolutionary here; as one of the first implementations of windowed 3D content (courtesy of NVIDIA's latest drivers), users can watch 3D content in a full-screen or condense it to a smaller window, leaving the rest of the content in standard 2D mode. Like other 3D laptops, Toshiba also includes the ability to convert 2D movies into a faux-3D mode, though I've never felt that looked particularly good.

The Qosmio F755 3D comes with all the other accoutrements you'd expect from a modern high-end notebook, though the GPU is lacking if you're hoping to play games with 3D Vision enabled. The CPU is a Core i7, while graphics come in the form of the GeForce GT 540M. Storage consists of a 750GB hard drive and a Blu-ray/DVDR combo drive, and as usual Toshiba uses harman/kardon speakers to deliver improved sound quality.

The Qosmio F755 3D will be available in mid-August with a 00 MSRP at select e-tailers and ToshibaDirect.com. Pre-rendered images of the laptop are below, showing Toshiba hasn't lost their verve for glossy red exteriors.

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TAIWANESE HARDWARE MAKER Asus has launched its U36 laptop in the UK, which is only 19mm thin to rival laptops from Apple and Samsung.

The Asus U36 laptop is designed to be ultra-thin and powerful. It is 2mm thicker than the fruit themed firm’s Macbook Air and a bit heavier too at 1.44Kg. However, it is only around half the price at £699.

Asus said, “The U36 has broken the mould in design innovation by unleashing the superior performance of a standard voltage Intel Core i5 processor from within a delightfully sleek 19mm chassis.”

The Samsung Series 9, which we recently reviewed, also has an Intel Core i5 processor and is a little thinner at 16.3mm. It is also slightly lighter than the Asus U36 at 1.31Kg but similar in cost to the pricey Macbook Air.

The U36 comes with a 13.3in TFT display with 1366×768 resolution. There is an Nvidia graphics card with Optimus technology and 4GB of DDR3 RAM.

Asus touts a long battery life of 11.5 hours because of its Super Hybrid Engine technology, which “intelligently manages energy consumption”.

The laptop ships with a 500GB SATA hard drive, a USB 3.0 port and a 0.3MP webcam. There are also two USB 2.0 ports, an HDMI output, a VGA connector and a 5-in-1 card reader.

The Asus U36 laptop comes with Windows 7 Professional 64-bit edition and Acer said it is available in-store and online now. µ

Product Samsung Series 9 900X3A
Website http://www.samsung.com
Specifications Intel Core i5 Processor 2537M 1.4GHz with 3MB cache, 4GB of DDR3 RAM, 802.11bg/n 2 x 2 (MIMO), Intel HD Graphics 3000 with memory shared with system, 128GB SSD drive, 328.5x227x15.9-16.3mm, 1.31kg
Price £1,300 ex. VAT

EVEN NON-BRAINWASHED FREE-THINKERS have to admit that Apple’s Macbook Air is a pretty amazing piece of equipment. It achieves the holy grail of being light, but still managing to have battery life measured in hours not minutes. It is, however, woefully underpowered and has depressingly few useful I/O ports.

Samsung’s 900X3 ultra-slim laptop addresses such many of these problems by providing more useful I/O ports – although still too few for out tastes – and slightly better specifications, albeit for slightly more money than Apple’s Macbook Air. You do get the benefit of USB 3.0 ports, though, and Samsung has opted for an HDMI output rather than Displayport.

On the series 9 you get an Intel Core i5 processor running at 1.4Ghz and 4GB of RAM. Storage is handled by a 128GB SSD and graphics powered by an integrated Intel GPU.

As easy as it is for us to hate the Macbook Air, Apple deserves at least a little credit for making its PCs boot very quickly. Samsung has used similar battery enhancing techniques here too. Shut the lid, and the Series 9 goes to sleep quickly to save power. It might sound simple, but Windows-based PCs fudge the all-important sleep-mode all too often.

Reduced Boot Time
The 900X scores very well when it comes to boot time. From being off to loading Windows can take as little as 15 seconds. This is thanks to good hardware specifications, and no doubt that fast, silent SSD. Solid state drives might push up the price, but when you’ve used a PC with one, we think you’ll be sold on their advantages.

Another area where Samsung has gone after Apple, but with much less success, is with its trackpad. As with the Macbook Air, there are no buttons on the Series 9. Instead, mouse clicks are achieved by pressing the trackpad. Mac users will know this works well on Apple hardware because there is no right click mandated by the operating system. Microsoft, on the other hand, makes quite extensive use of this feature, so Samsung has opted to have the right hand side of the pad act as the right click and the the left performs a left click. Sadly, this just doesn’t work when you want to ‘right click’ on something that you’ve moved the cursor left to get to. An idiotic decision in our view.

There’s a backlit keyboard too, handy if you do a lot of typing in the dark. Typing on this keyboard is also a pleasant experience, with the island-style keys well positioned and large enough for bigger fingers.

Battery Removal Requires An Engineer
The 900X has a pretty wild estimate of how long it can power the laptop from its built-in battery. From a 100 per cent charge, the machine thought it could manage six hours. But after about 15 minutes we discovered that it had rethought that and dropped its claim to five hours. In fact, users will probably see battery life of between four and five hours. This was borne out by our Battery Eater Pro tests, which managed 5 hours 31 minutes in the “reader” test mode. Our tests using the more intense “classic” test on Battery Eater had the Samsung holding on for 2 hours 25 minutes. An excellent result, which should help people who need to do more on the move than just editing word documents.

It is also worth considering that the battery is not user-replaceable, another filthy trick learnt from Apple, no doubt. Getting it out will most likely require a Samsung engineer or some warranty voiding process.

Screen Time
The LCD screen on this laptop is backlit by LEDs. This means that the lid is incredibly thin and the screen very bright, something it manages without murdering the battery life. It also has impressive sharpness and detail and is a very readable screen. This is very important when it comes to spending a lot of time working, and crucial for reducing eye strain.

There is a 1.3MP webcam embedded in the lid, which will enable you to make video calls, or participate in 2010′s Chat Roulette. There’s a small microphone embedded near the power button too, so you shouldn’t need to use any extra hardware to get up and running.

Back at CES 2011, Samsung showed us something that may have seemed futuristic. They showed us a monitor that connects to your laptop wirelessly and on top of that, the monitor acts as a USB hub and the USB devices connect wirelessly too. Samsung calls this technology Central Station. You simply connect a small USB dongle to your laptop, take the laptop within the monitor’s range, and your laptop automatically connects to the monitor and any peripherals attached to it, wirelessly. You walk away and the monitor goes black. Pretty simple, right? Read on for the further specs and our thoughts. 

ELECTRONICS FIRM Kogan has sprung out of nowhere with its announcement of the world’s first laptop running Google’s Chrome operating system (OS).

The Agora laptop is available to buy now and will be delivered on 7 June according to Kogan. The company has jumped ahead of Acer and Samsung to release the world’s first laptop that runs Chrome OS. The Agora laptop is priced at £269.

The Agora has an 11.6in LED display with 1366×768 resolution and is powered by a 1.3GHz Intel Celeron processor. Kogan has put 1GB of DDR2 RAM in the laptop along with a 30GB solid state disk (SSD) drive.

There are three USB ports plus an Ethernet port, a 1.3MP webcam and an HDMI port. Kogan claims that the Agora boots up in 4.5 seconds. The device weighs 1.3kg, is 25mm thick and Kogan claims it has a battery life of 3.5 hours.

The news comes shortly after we heard straight from Google that its cloud-based operating system is for notebooks only. Security firm Kaspersky has commented on the security of Google’s new operating system, which includes such features as self-healing and automatic updates.

Ruslan Kogan, CEO of Kogan said, “We’ve been able to beat the rest of the world to bring the first commercially available laptop running Google’s Chromium OS.” µ

JAPANESE ELECTRONICS MAKER Toshiba came to The INQUIRER towers today to give us a closer look at its Portégé R830 laptop and some insight into the PC market’s future.

Toshiba senior product manager Ken Chang showed us the R830 and dubbed it the company’s “Hero Product”, telling us, “We’ve put everything we know about a PC into this product.”

Chang told us that the R series of Toshiba laptops has six key strengths and said those are that they are thinner, lighter, faster, stronger, smarter and easier.

For starters the R830, which is priced from £949, looks very smart with its brushed magnesium alloy chassis and it’s certainly light, weighing just 1.5kg, 630g lighter than Apple’s white Macbook.

It’s suitable to compare it to the Macbook as the R830 has a 13.3in screen. We like the LED display on the Toshiba, which has 1366×768 resolution. It is also non-reflective, which might not look as glamorous as a glossy screen but provides a much better experience for the user.

Toshiba has included support for both e-SATA and USB 3.0 to cover both formats, but Chang gave us his opinion, saying, “Now that we have USB 3.0 there is no need for e-SATA.”

Mobility is where it’s at with the R830, with its size, weight and impressive hardware including an Intel Sandy Bridge Core i5 processor. Toshiba also touts a notable 10 hour battery life, which will definitely help if you’re taking the laptop out and about.

We asked Chang what he thought about the growing tablet market, which is threatening the laptop market. He answered, “Everyone wants to go and be the next Ipad and to grab a slice of this new market.”

We really like products such as the Asus Transformer that combine the content consumption strength of tablets with addressing content creation by adding something like a keyboard dock, so we asked if he thinks the laptop market will be threatened by these kinds of devices.

He told us, “You still can’t beat the input device and I can’t see that disappearing.” He backed up this claim by showing us the consistent sales figures of laptops. He also said, “Over the next six to nine months the playing field will be clearer.” And, he added, “We’re trying to pick the right horse.”

So it seems that Toshiba is taking its time before jumping into the tablet market, intending to study the market so that it can create the right device. Maybe we’ll see it announce that within the next few months. µ