The PC Report

Surely you all remember the 9.9mm thin Dell Adamo XPS, one of the thinnest laptops you can buy – well it appears to have been discontinued by Dell. The Adamo line of laptops will continue but the Adamo has been pulled from the shelves and listed as “discontinued” by places such as Best Buy. Dell however claims that the laptop was a proof of “Dell’s design and engineers capabilities” and said that the ultraportable was more like a “limited edition” model.

Whether the model is a true, but unannounced Limted Edition model, or just been pulled due to faults or lack of purchases is yet to be discovered by inside sources. One thing still remains though – you can no longer order or purchase the Adamo XPS.

MSI is putting on a pretty good deal here with their new C-Series laptops. There are a total of 4 new laptops in the new series -  the 16″ CR600 and 15.6″ CR620-030, CR620-031 and CR620-033 – ranging from US$530 to US$750. All laptops come loaded with Windows 7 Home Premium, and have 16:9 HD displays at 1366×768.

The CR620 models have either a new Core i3 or Core i5 processor from Intel, 4GB of DDR3 memory, come with either a 320GB or 500GB hard drive and the CR620-033 comes with a Blu-ray combo drive – possibly the best deal because it’s only US$699 and comes with an i3 CPU as well. The CR600 has Nvidia GeForce 8200M graphics but unfortunately only carries an Intel Pentium Dual Core as a processor.

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The Asus Eee PC T101MT is the latest touchscreen addition into the Eee PC range – and it also packs a swivel display. The official word on this laptop is that it comes with a 10.1″ swivelling resistive multi-touch touchscreen display with a resolution of 1,024×600, an Atom N450, up to 2GB of RAM and 320GB hard drive, Windows 7, webcam and the usual netbook-style ports and a 6.5 hour max battery life.

As per usual, Asus has denied us info on a price or release time frame, but we also know that with the netbook purchase you get a free one year 500GB Asus WebStorage trial.

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The new HP G62t is a fairly nice looking laptop, comparable to the Envy 15, and comes with a fairly nice price tag too of only US$599 for the base model. For that price, you get a new Intel Core i3 processor at 2.13GHz (although you can pay more and get an i5 or i7 instead), 3GB of DDR3 RAM, a 160GB hard drive that’s upgradeable to 500GB, a 15.6-inch LED display, Intel HD graphics (not so great), DVD burner, Wireless N and a multitude of connectivity options.

If you want to get this Macbook-Pro-esque laptop it should be available now in stores as well as via the HP website.

Feel like something light, portable but a good amount of power and an optical drive? MSI’s new X-Xlim X620 fits that description perfectly. The 15.6 laptop comes with an Intel ULV (Ultra-Low Voltage) processor, ATI Mobility Radeon HD 5430 graphics, up to 4GB of RAM and a 500GB hard drive – and that DVD drive to seal the deal.

The laptop weighs in at 2.2 kg and is 3.5cm thick, which could be a bit too large/heavy for some users, but if you don’t really care and you want the extra features then it should be fine. The laptop should ship with Windows 7 Home Premium, though when and for how much is still yet to be determined.

It’s heading up to CES 2010 so it’s just about the right time for huge amounts of new machines to start flooding in for users to enjoy. Heading off the pack is the Lenovo line-up refresh, which has been officially released today.

First up is the new Lenovo ThinkPad Edge, which is rather sexy for a ThinkPad machine and will be available in a few different colors. At launch, you will be able to grab the 13-inch model (14- and 15-inch models coming later) with either an AMD Turion Neo X2 or AMD Athlon Neo X2 processor with up to 4GB of RAM and a 500GB hard drive. Other features include WiFi b/g/n, optional 3G/WiMAX in-built modem, a built in card reader and HDMI out. It will come preloaded with your choice of either Windows 7 Home Premium or Professional (32-bit or 64-bit)

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The Sony Vaio T line was once phased out in the US, but apparently it’s coming back loaded with Windows 7 and a CULV processor with some serious battery life. The Vaio T’s will now be coming with either an Intel Celeron Dual-Core SU2300 @ 1.2GHz, an Intel Core 2 Duo SU9400 @ 1.4GHz or an Intel Core 2 Duo SU9600 @ 1.6GHz as their processor. Alongside these CULV processors you’ll see Intel GMA 4500MHD graphics, 11-inch display 4GB/8GB of RAM and up to 512GB of storage via either a HDD or SSD.

It goes further than just that though; you can add optional extras such as Wireless N, a Blu-ray drive and a digital TV tuner. The whole bundle is said to last 11 hours on the standard battery (17 with the extended) and retails currently (and has been for the past 2 months) in Japan for ¥129,800 (~US$1400) – hopefully they’ll spread further into the western world.

Looks like we have another contender for the netbook Pine Trail competition. Acer’s Aspire One AO532h is nothing special, really: it has a fairly standard 10″ display in a fairly standard looking case. It packs the latest Intel Atom “Pineview” N450 processor at 1.6GHz, GMA 1350 graphics, 1GB of RAM and a 160GB hard drive – again, nothing particularly special apart from the Pineview CPU.

It does pack a 4,400 mAh six-cell battery that is stated to last for 10 hours without a recharge, which isn’t bad although we’re always skeptical of battery life claims. It will come loaded with Windows 7 Starter Edition for US$299, which is cheaper than the other two Pine Trail netbooks we’ve seen (the Asus Eee PC 1001P and 1005P/PE). You should be able to grab one in the coming weeks.

Another Pine Trail Eee PC has surfaced, this time on Amazon.de. Available now for pre-order at ~US$360 is the Asus Eee PC 1001P (what seems to be the little brother of the 1005P/PE) which packs the usual 10.1″ display in a clamshell body alongside a 1.6GHz Intel Atom N450, 1GB of RAM, a 160GB hard drive loaded up with Windows XP. Oh, and no dodgy bumpy trackpad! If you pre-order one now it will ship by January 6.

The One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project is set to take another step forward with their cheap laptops for third world countries with news that they are planning on releasing a few new models. Of course, the new models plan on being cheaper and more powerful, which should be great seeing as though the price of the original OLPC was more than hoped for.

We should be seeing an OLPC XO 1.5 in January of 2010 which has the same design but replaces the AMD processor with a VIA one, has 4x more DRAM and flash memory for 2x more speed. It should ship for ~US$200 at launch. The OLPC XO 1.75 (which should launch early 2011) will be cheaper, at around US$150, and carry 2x the speed at 1/4 the power thanks to an ARM processor on the inside.

Most interesting is the OLPC XO 3.0, (concept) pictured above, that should be hitting markets in 2012 for under US$100. It features a single sheet of flexible plastic with a touchscreen that covers most of the surface area, and insides similar to the OLPC XO 1.75. The XO 3.0 is going to replace the unreleased XO 2.0 in the line-up. We are eager to see if the XO 3.0 concept does carry out at such a cheap price; it’s an interesting concept that should catch on in more places than just developing nations.