The Inquirer is reporting that the price of Intel’s Core Duo CPUs is set to drop at the end of May, along with faster Core Duos rolling out. As an example, they cite the 2GHz Core Duo (T2500) dropping from $423 to under $300, with the 2.16GHz Core Duo (T2600) dropping over $200.
This could drop some of the Core Duo-based laptops to well under a $1000 (before rebates/coupons/special offers, etc.).
LAPTOP Magazine is reporting on Maxtor’s announcement of two external harddrives, as well as a new web-based application, “Project Fusion” to manage data stored on them and/or transferred back and forth. Of interest to portable users is the Maxtor OneTouch III Mini ($149 – 60GB, $199 – 100GB) which is “small enough to fit in the palm of your hand“.
Added into the mix is “Project Fusion”, which “is designed to aid consumers in organizing and distributing digital files stored on either their main hard drive or an external hard drive. Users can tag, rename, and sort files into various categories and make them available for public or private use.” This will conceivably help you in managing your backups, etc., with the Maxtor OneTouch III Mini.
CNET News.com is reporting that Best Buy will soon start selling ThinkPads as well as Lenovo’s new 3000 series PCs/Notebooks. This is in addition to their retail sales through Office Depot.
This comes at a good point, as the ThinkPad X60 and X60s are getting lots of positive press, and with rumors of a ThinkPad X60 Tablet PC around the corner as well.
There are a couple of articles about a “Fujitsu LOOX P705 or P70S” Tablet PC that came out today, but I’ve spent some time looking into it, and what is on Fujitu’s site is information about a Fujitsu LOOX or Loox P70R. This only comes in one color (one of the articles talking about this mentioned nine colors, however that was a reference to their T series). The P70R is an 8.9-inch widescreen laptop powered by a Pentium M Ultra Low Voltage (ULV) 1.2GHz CPU and has up to 1GB of memory. It converts into a Tablet PC and runs Microsoft Windows XP Tablet PC Edition 2005.
There are some articles that have been floating around presenting the Flybook A33i as a “new” ultraportable notebook/Tablet PC. It’s a little confusing, as I think that some people/sites are confusing the older Transmeta-powered Flybook with the new Flybook V series. I’m seeing people present the older Flybook’s specifications as the new Flybook’s specifications. One important difference is the CPU – the older is powered by a Transmeta Crusoe CPU, the new series is powered by an Intel Ultra Low Voltage (ULV) Pentium M.