Reviews
LaptopLogic has published a review of three portable wireless routers, the Linksys WTR54GS travel router, Apple’s Airport Express, and 3COM’s OfficeConnect Wireless Travel Router. Those of you who travel a lot and need a wireless solution on the road might want to check the reviews out – these routers are small enough to be carried around in your laptop bag or briefcase.
PC Magazine has published a review of the Fujitsu LifeBook P7120, the Pentium M Ultra Low Voltage (ULV)-powered ultraportable with a 10.6-inch widescreen display. The 7120 weighs in at around 3 pounds. They gave it 4.5 out of 5 stars.
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).
Tablet PC Talk has put together a huge chart, the Tablet PC 2004-2005 Quick Comparison:
Find the latest Tablet PCs announced since September 1, 2003. This comparison allows you to sort or reverse sort the table of Tablet PCs by clicking on the links at the top of the columns so you can easily identify the Tablet PC that supports the attributes you want. Also, this table will print in landscape mode nicely as well. For the detailed comparison see the Tablet PC Talk – 2004 Hardware Comparison
Quite a few convertible ultraportables are listed.
PC World has released their current Top 5 Ultraportable Laptops listing: Lenovo ThinkPad X41, Acer TravelMate 3000, Fujitsu LifeBook T4020 Tablet PC, WinBook X512, and the Dell Inspiron 710M.