Low Cost Laptops
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Toshiba AC100 / Dynabook AZ Smartbook Hands On
Jun 28th
Toshiba announced a handful of new products today worldwide, two of which will of interest to Netbooked readers. Here’s the first one, the Toshiba AC100 or Dynabook AZ as it is known here in Japan.
It’s a 10.1-inch smartbook with Android 2.1 and powered by Nvidia Tegra 250 (1.GHz, Tegra 2). My initial impressions are good regarding the build. Thin and extremely light, trackpad is large enough and buttons aren’t too stiff. Keyboard is solid and not cramped. While Android 2.1 was cool (with a custom interface), you’ll have to get 2.2 to get Flash 10.1 running though you can install that yourself once it is available. Some things did not appear to be ready – instant ON for instance was not available on these demo models. Another point regarding Android is that it is built for touch screens and there is no touch screen here. Everything I have been reading about smartbook OSes indicates they are just still not ready.
Toshiba AC100 / Dynabook AZ
* 10.1″ 1024 x 600 display (glossy)
* Android 2.1 OS
* Nvidia Tegra 250 processor (1 GHz – Tegra 2)
* 7 hour battery / 1 week standby time
* 512MB DDR2 RAM (fixed)
* 16GB flash memory (3.5GB reserved)
* Bluetooth 2.1+EDR
* Mono mic, stereo speakers
* 802.11b/g/n Wi-Fi, WiMAX, audio jacks
* 1x USB 2.0, 1x mini USB ports, SDHC card reader
* HDMI out
* 7 hour battery (180 hour standby)
* SIM card slot behind battery (3G ready)
* 262 x 190 x 12 – 21 mm size
* 870g / 1.9 pounds
Hands on video:
Via.
Acer Aspire One 521 Netbook Unboxing
Jun 26th
Balazs over at nDevil has an unboxing video of the newly released Acer Aspire One 521 netbook, which goes for $350 on Amazon.com.
This a 10-inch AMD powered netbook though compared to pretty much most 10-inch netbooks this one is much more powerful than those that have come before it. It’s got a single core AMD Athlon II Neo K125 processor (1.7 GHz) and ATI Radeon HD 4225 graphics.
Stand outs include a large access panel for everything on the bottom, HDMI port, Gigabit LAN and a screen that folds back almost 180 degrees – all three features are not that common on netbooks.
Dell Chrome OS Netbook?
Jun 21st
A little while ago Lee Mathews over at Download Squad spotted some clues in Google’s Chromium respository revealing that HP, Dell and Acer are very likely candidates to come out with the first Google Chrome OS netbooks later this year (who’d have guessed, right?) Well, today a Dell rep has stated that it is in talks with Google about using their Chrome OS (and Android for that matter as well) but no announcements were made – so we’re basically back where we started.
Via.
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