U Leader Design Altro Announced

U Leader Design Altro 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.

Features:

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All Sony VAIO P Models/Options Benchmarked (Pocketables)

Jenn Lee over at Pocketables has assembled a comprehensive look at the 8-inch high-resolution (1600×768) Sony VAIO P Series, including faster models not yet available in the US. The models available in the US are all powered by Intel’s 1.33GHz Z520 Atom CPU (the 1.6GHz … Read more

Windows 7 – Turning Features On and Off

Windows 7 Some interesting news coming out of Windows 7 development (which is on track for a Release Candidate – RC). The “Turn Windows Features On or Off” function has been greatly expanded. It even includes the ability to turn off Internet Explorer 8.

You can now turn of quite a few things in Windows 7 – the files are literally not loaded by the Windows 7 operating system. One of the developers sees this as a big benfit for “security-conscious customers”, but I’m thinking in terms of netbooks/ultraportables/mids/etc. where the resources are much more limited than on larger laptops/notebooks.

It is mentioned that even if you turn off a feature, that the data/binaries/software still exists on the drive. The benefit is that you don’t need a DVD to enable the feature, which is important to those with smaller devices which don’t have optical drives.

However, and it’s not quite addressed by any of the developers in the article, it doesn’t appear there is a way to remove the actual features, which might free up some space. As somebody in one of the follow-up comments mentioned, storage space is becoming less and less of an issue. Solid State Drives (SSD), where storage space is at a premium, have only been increasing in size while decreasing in cost. As I mentioned yesterday, you can easily get a netbook/ultraportable with a 16GB or 32GB SSD for under $400 USD.

Back in November, we mentioned that we were seeing Windows 7 take up 20GB in a fresh install. Chances are that the space requirements would come down by the time Windows 7 is released to manufacturing, since there was probably a lot of debug code and binaries that would be removed before RTM. By the time Windows 7 is released later this year, 32GB SSDs will probably be much cheaper and more widely available as an option in these devices.

From the MSDN blog:

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Dell – More Inspiron Mini 9 Deals, Advice

Every few weeks, Dell has some very good deals on their 8.9-inch Intel Atom-based Inspiron Mini 9 netbooks. You can pick up the base for $249, but some of their pre-configured models with better features, and some of the upgrades are on sale or discounted. … Read more