While Toshiba’s stateside reps had us convinced its 14-inch Ultrabook wouldn’t see the light of day until sometime in June, that message of withholding apparently didn’t make it Down Under. Outed by its Australian arm today, that would-be Portege is actually the company’s Satellite U840. We already knew the electronics giant had intended on shuffling this Windows 7 machine out under that brand umbrella back at CES, but now we have a $1,500 AUD (about $1,608 USD) price tag to go with a list of confirmed specs. Officially on deck for this aluminum-bodied laptop are an Intel [...]

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Taiwanese firm Action Electronics has pushed the boundary of taste to its limits in an ad for its new Android tablet, the Action Pad. Taiwanese comedian/impersonator Ah-Ken features in the advert dressed in Jobs’ iconic black turtleneck sweater, blue jeans and white trainers, but also features a set of angel wings and a halo. Ah-Ken is seen striding across a dark stage with a familiar looking chair and table set up to one side and at the end of the ad exclaims “Thank God I finally get to play other tablets”. Clever PR or crass stupidity? It seems surprisingly bold to take such [...]

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This year’s laptops are set to be all about one word: Ultrabooks. The term Ultrabook is actually pure marketing, dreamt up by Intel for a new generation of portable PCs featuring its technology. Like Centrino but unlike Viiv, it’s starting to stick as a catch-all term for thin and light laptops, or ultraportables as they’re sometimes classified. The best way to think of an Ultrabook is a MacBook Air that isn’t made by Apple, a netbook that isn’t underpowered or a laptop that’s been on a crash diet. Ultrabooks all feature a Core i3, i5 or i7 processor, plus fast [...]

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Shocker! Victorinox has officially pulled the wraps off of its latest pocket-knife and thumb drive combo here at CES — you know, the one we spied just yesterday during the show-floor setup. Simply titled, SSD, the “pocket-sized drive” is apparently the only one in the world that connects to eSATA II / III and USB 2.0 / 3.0 with a single connector, and it’s also being touted as the smallest one around. Furthermore, SSD features a 96 x 48 Bi-Stable monochrome graphic display for keeping track of what’s stored inside of it, and Victorinox states that you won’t [...]

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And really, it’s no surprise. Considering the wild success it enjoyed with its first Touchpad fire sale, why wouldn’t HP try to recreate that magic in time for the holiday shopping rush? According to a release the company sent out to employees this week, the redux will kick off on December 11th at 6 PM, on HP’s eBay Store. There, consumers will be able to get their hands on a refurbished 16GB or 32GB model for $99 and $149, respectively. They’ll also have the chance to get a case, charging dock and wireless keyboard as part of a $79 bundle, though the sale isn’t entirely [...]

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You have all heard of National Brand laptop’s on the market today; such as Alienware/Dell, HP, Toshiba, Compaq and Sony. It may be surprising but none of these companies actually manufacture their own laptop’s. These National Brand companies purchase their laptops from an ODM (Original Design Manufacturer) such as Clevo, Compal, Asus, MSI, Quanta, Wistron, Mitac, Arima and Inventec. The ODM’s design & manufacture the machine and sell it to these National Brand companies as a barebones system. The National Brand companies then customize the system with a Processors, Hard Drives, [...]

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Best gaming laptop: 8 reviewed Is the golden era of laptop gaming a goner? Let’s consider the past a second. Wind the clock way back to September 2005 and Nvidia had just launched the GeForce 7800 GTX Go. It was a big, bad 24-pipe beast. What’s more, the mobile and desktop iterations were absolutely identical, save for a small gap in clockspeeds. Finally, mobile machines could go toe to toe with their desk-bound buddies. Sadly, it was but a temporary anomaly. Nvidia did manage a follow up with the closely related 7900 series but since then, there hasn’t been a pukka mobile graphics [...]

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For three weeks now, Android fans have been fidgeting impatiently. Specifically, ever since ASUS chairman Jonney Shih took the stage at last month’s AsiaD conference and teased the next-gen Transformer tablet. Though he only gave us a quick glimpse, he recited a laundry list of specs: a 10.1-inch display, 8.3mm-thick body, mini-HDMI output, microSD slot and an update to Ice Cream Sandwich by the end of the year, if not sooner. Not to mention, it’ll be the first tablet packing NVIDIA’s hot-off-the-presses Tegra 3 SoC, making it the first-ever quad-core tablet. We knew this: we’d [...]

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Overview The Asus Zenbook UX31 is one of the first laptops to conform to Intel’s Ultrabook specification. And, right away, we’ll tell you – it stands toe-to-toe with Apple’s MacBook Air in the fight for the title of best luxury ultraportable. More competition is to come, however, in the form of the Lenovo IdeaPad U300 S, Acer Aspire S3 and, potentially, others from the likes of HP and Dell. Back to the present though and Asus has done a terrific job with the Zenbook’s design – even if you have to acknowledge that the designer took more than a sneaky glance at [...]

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The Indian government thinks the $35 Aakash Android tablet has the power to change the world. After testing one out, we’d tend to agree. An Aakash tablet was brought to the VentureBeat office on Tuesday by Vivek Wadhwa, a visiting professor at the University of California at Berkeley and Duke. Wadhwa, who is researching the Indian education system, and is a columnist with the Washington Post, was given the tablet by Kapil Sibal, the Indian minister of human resources and development, who has been the driving force behind the tablet project. The device (whose name means “Sky” in Hindi) was [...]

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