HP Cuts Envy 13 Ultraportable Gaming Notebook

Wow. The 13" ultraportable market just might be the new battleground for price. For months on end, the real price war was ongoing in the netbook sector. Companies kept pushing the barrier lower, with a few machines selling for under $200 at times. But now, the 13" market is heating up. Apple's new MacBook Air, Maingear's Clutch 13, and HP's Envy 13 are just a handful of the ultra-mobile machines that are vying for your dollars. As more and more people consider a powerful, mobile machine for their travel arsenal, companies seem more eager than ever to compete at this level.

We remember a time when the 13" ultraportable market was catering mostly to the affluent and to companies where price wasn't a concern. It used to be quite costly to bring home a 13" notebook. Now, they're become more and more affordable. HP has just slashed the price on the Envy 13, which is widely viewed as one of the best 13" gaming laptops on the market. Just yesterday, it was selling for $1450+, and today it's listed for $999 after a $450 instant rebate.

That's a huge discount, and some are suggesting that this could mean that a new ultraportable is on the way. It's hardly a secret that Intel is planning a huge chip reveal for CES, most likely to affect the notebook sector, and it's also possible that HP's simply looking to clear stock of the existing CPUs to make room for the new ones. We're always fans of seeing design overhauls, but that's definitely not set in stone.

If you're wondering what $999 will buy you, that version of the Envy 13 includes a 1.6GHz Core 2 Duo SL9300 CPU, Windows 7 Home Premium, a 13.1" LED display, Beats Audio, an external 8x DVD writer, 250GB hard drive, integrated Gigabit Ethernet, 802.11a/g/n Wi-Fi, two USB 2.0 ports and a fair amount of pre-loaded software.

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Dell 13-inch XPS M1330 Amazing 15.4" Display Laptop

Dell produced an important work in 2007 to listen to purchaser suggestions criticizing Dell's older, thick and heavy laptops. The complete result was the amazingly slender and gentle XPS M1330, amid the sexiest looking notebooks of 2007. the brand new Dell XPS M1530 can be an amazing 15.4" display laptop produced comparable to (just bigger than) the really worthwhile 13-inch XPS M1330.

The Dell XPS M1330 has been given higher praise for its design and design and function build in an amazingly 13.3" convenient type factor, but probably the most well-known reselling laptops are within of the 15.4" display size. Dell, getting within of the business of reselling much more laptops and producing consumers happy, figured it may be sensible to provide a specific thing that's bigger and appeals to much more people. And that's precisely what the M1530 is -- a bigger edition using the M1330.

While the XPS M2010 was a really remarkable beast, it wasn't right up until the arrival using the XPS M1330 last twelve weeks how the XPS broad range found out its exact identity. The M1330 was, and nevertheless is, the finest looking pc Dell has actually produced, and so it's no disappointment to locate how the M1530 shares its good feeling of style.

Naturally enough it also keeps identical wedge shaped design and design and for just about any laptop of its sizing the M1530 is genuinely really slim, measuring 23.7mm at its thinnest phase and 35.1mm on the back. It's also really light. Dell estimates a "starting weight" of 2.6kg, but our sample is primarily a no much less amazing 2.74kg using the supplied six-cell battery. You can also specify a nine-cell battery and although Dell didn't send out us one, it's an exceptional bet the all round extra weight really should stay below 3kg.

It's just superbly solid, and no subject how difficult we tried, the M1530's bottom failed to exhibit the slightest hint of flex. It's tiny shock how the 15.4in show is much more pliant, but once again we experienced to genuinely prod and poke with too much force earlier to we observed any distortion concerning the displayed image.

Overall, the Dell XPS M1530 is primarily a appear inclusion to the Dell laptop lineup. We praised the scaled-down XPS M1330 for getting "a design and design that is 2nd to none in its worth range" but we didn't really feel really as powerful concerning the design and design using the bigger M1530. while this could be certainly the hottest 15.4" laptop offered from Dell, it's difficult to shake the sensation that we're looking at a "fat" M1330 using a bigger screen.

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New Laptops Santech Leaks Set Showing at CES 2011

There have been a whole lot of pre-CES leaks of late, and it seems that Santech is joining in. And what the newest kid who can’t wait for tech company equivalent of Christmas morning spilled the beans on its new project, the N67.

The N67 from Santech will be packing a whole bunch of new Sandy Bridge hardware, starting with the Core i7-2630QM, a quad core processor running at two gig. There’s also an i7-2720QM at 2.2 GHz, an i7-2820QM running at 2.3 GHz, and an i7-2920XM topping out at an unsettlingly sweet 2.5GHz.
That’s just the processors available to you. The spec sheet continues a grand string of raw awesome by offering up to 16 gigs of DDR3 RAM, as much as 750 gigs of storage (if you go the straight hard drive route, that is–you can also go the solid state route for 160 gig), a matched pair of USB 3.0 (and yes, that’s 3.0 ports, the extra-fast kind) ports, and a 15.6 inch display with a whole lot of options on its own. You can get the display in either glossy or matte, and depending on your preference, the resulting screen will run in either 1366 x 768 or 1920 x 1080 resolution.

They’ll be showing these at CES 2011, if I understand right, so if you want to get an early look, this is your shot. Or, you can just hold out a while as they’ll start delivering on these January 27th. Prices, meanwhile, will start at a fairly reasonable $1577 and work their way up to an “are you out of your mind” level of $3943, depending on the specs you want.

They look like solid pieces, in all honesty–price is a bit of an issue here, but not so much, especially with that pair of USB 3.0 ports, which anybody who does a lot of data transfer will no doubt welcome. You can probably do better than these if you’re willing to make some compromises, but still, you’ll likely be pretty happy with Santech’s new set of Sandy Bridge.

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