Zigzag Designs has put together an interesting collection of laptop patents/inventions that have been filed over the past several years, including some from HP, IBM, and Samsung. Some of the ones with projection displays interested me – if you could work out a small enough projector with a decent resolution and refresh rate, it’s possible you could save weight, size, battery life, or all three (then again, nobody has done it so maybe it’s not possible).
Akihabara News has information about a new ultraportable notebook line from Mitsubishi, the Apricot AL C Series. It weighs in at around two pounds (under 1kg), and there is no word yet on its display size.
LAPTOP Magazine has published a review of the WinBook X610, the ultraportable laptop from WinBook, with a 12-inch display (non-widescreen) and powered by a 1.6GHz Pentium M (which can dampen the battery life). This is one of the most inexpensive ultraportables of its class (the model reviewed had an 80GB harddrive and a Dual-Layer DVD burner and cost around $1400 USD).
>Ounae (Spanish/French only) has several pics that were recently published on the main Flybook website, of the ultraportable Flybook V3. The Flybook V3 is powered by an Ultra Low Voltage (ULV) Pentium M, and comes with a 8.9-inch widescreen display (which also functions as a touchscreen). Of note in the pictures, what looks like custom-designed purses/shoulder bags.
In kind of a follow-up to the mention of the biometric/fingerprint-reader hardware security options, there is also software available for those who don’t have that option, that may help you recover a stolen notebook.
Gizmodo mentions a piece of software for tracking stolen Macs (iBook, PowerBook, MacBook), called Orbicule Undercover. In addition to emailing IP information, it sends other information that may help identify the person(s) who stole or received a stolen Apple notebook. Undercover costs $29.99 and the money is refunded if your notebook can’t be tracked down.
In the course of the discussion that followed, a Gizmodo user pointed to a Windows-based piece of software, from Absolute Software, called CompuTraceComplete and CompuTrace LoJack, that has similar goals, and has the added bonus of a “Absolute Recovery Guarantee (PDF)” of up to $1000 dollars if they are unable to help you recover it within 60 days.