Last week, the 13.3-inch U Leader Design Altro was officially revealed at CeBIT 2009 (it had made a brief appearance in January at CES 2009). The Altro is the first in the new “U Leader Design” series from Olidata S.p.A. It has a very elegant design, and a very competitive price – Under 1.000 Euros ($1280 USD), with availability being sometime in 2Q 2009. While it weighs under 3.5 pounds (1.6kg), it’s still able to compete with the 13.3-inch Apple MacBook Air (especially on price), with the optical drive being external as well. That brings the maximum thickness down to 0.86 inches (21.8mm). It’s running on a Intel Ultra Low Voltage (ULV) Core 2 Duo/Centrino 2 platform.
Although it’s not as much of a name brand in the US as it is in other parts of the world, Olidata plans on changing that, with widespread availability of this line, according to the CEO of Olidata (Antonio Masenza):
“U Leader Design is not just a new notebook, it will be a line of products that Olidata is developing with support from Intel Corporation. These products represent a mileston in the IT market for two main reasons; first, the stunning innovation and state of the art notebooks we are bringing to the end user at an acceptable price;, second the strategy behind U Leader Design. U Leader Design notebooks will be available worldwide through an international alliance strategy……Thanks to this alliance, all leading OEMs in the computer industry will be able to bring innovative and competitive notebooks to market”.
Apparently, accelerometers will be used in several different ways – as part of the “SmartDisk” function to protect the HDD should the notebook be bumped or dropped, and as a part of the “SmartAlarm” that will trigger an anti-theft application and sound an alarm should the notebook be moved by an unauthorized users. The anti-theft measures can be armed and disarmed through the normal Windows logon process. It can also detect the orientation of the notebook and rotate the screen accordingly.
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