Other Mfrs

Announced: MSI S262

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Daily Tech has news of the MSI S262 notebook. The MSI S262 is a new model from MSI Computers, the successor to the S260. It’s powered by an Intel Centrino Core Duo and has a 12.1-inch widescreen display (WXGA). It weighs in at 4.3 pounds, rather hefty for one in this class, but it does have an optical drive (upto a Dual-Layer DVD Writer), and it has room for 2GB of memory – with two memory slots (the ASUS W5F which Daily Tech compares it to only has one and is only capable of 1.5GB of memory).

Flash Memory to Rival Hard Drives

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vnunet.com is carrying a story detailing plans Samsung has to start 16GB Nand Flash chip production later this year. This could definitely have an impact on ultraportables, probably starting in 2007 or thereabouts, although from the sound of things, it’s easily adapted, so it might even allow for retrofitting into existing laptops. Imagine being able to replace your current harddrive with Flash memory and increase your battery life substantially as well as adding some durability.

Review: Samsung X1 (Pocket-lint.co.uk)

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Pocket-lint.co.uk has a review of the Samsung X1 Laptop, which they consider to be the upper end of ultraportable laptops – It’s under 4lbs (3.7lbs/1.7kg) so the weight is certainly down there, but the interesting thing is, it has a 14-inch screen and a height of just one inch. It has an optical drive (although it’s on top and not on the side) and is powered by a 1.2GHz Pentium M Ultra Low Voltage (ULV) CPU, which gives it a battery life of upto 5 hours (depending on which capacity battery you use). One shortfall is the keyboard, some may not like it, plus the ULV CPU is not the fastest CPU around for a machine with such a large display.

I mentioned this because more and more of the 14-inch – 13-inch laptops are slim and light enough to fit into the ultraportable category (not that there is any set screen size – I consider an ultraportable to be a 12-inch display or less, but after handling several of the 13-inch Sonys I am working on adding them into the mix, because they are weighing in at under three pounds).