Notebook news: Dell does density, but Lenovo's a lot lighter January is here and CES is in full swing. That means a fresh crop of new devices, including a refresh to notebook lines for most companies. Two of the more interesting notebooks to have appeared this week are new models from Dell and Lenovo that both look to break new ground in the design space. From Dell, the XPS 13 boasts a …
>Thanks, I have no clue what pounds, gills, furlongs translate to. In fact, I thought there only were three bears.
Young people today! What do they teach you at school?
You may be pleased to know that the "Ye" in the title does not mean "Your" (which wouldn't really make sense grammatically) but the Y is an approximation of the now-sadly-defunct letter, "thorn", which has been replaced by "Th" as in "The"
> Young people today! What do they teach you at school?
I am assuming that you are of course being flippant, rather than a bemused left-pondian, but north-central left-pondians (bemused or otherwise) should remember that they make up only a mere 300 M or so of the world's 7 G (~7000 M) population, and the rest of us always or mostly conceive of weights (masses, for the pedants) in kg, so lbs aren't really all that much help for the rest of us in knowing how heavy a laptop is. Didn't the Reg make a policy decision to use standard metric measurements (or the El Reg special measures) not so long ago?
(And while I'm here, similar proportions of the world's population print on A4 paper rather than the baroque boutique special(i)ty of "US Letter". It'd be nice if all software could default to something sensible for those of us in the majority there, too..)
I always assumed that the assumption was that the rest of the world is bright enough to change the printer to A4, but the Americans who write the reviews that determine the success of electronic products would be totally baffled by having to change a printer from A4 to USL, and give a bad review.
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> Young people today! What do they teach you at school?
Young people? The Decimalisation in the UK happened in 1971 and I believe schools were required to teach metric units from 1969. You'd need to be in your late 60s to have left school before that all came in. And, though I wasn't born then, I'm reliably informed that they were already teaching the metric system for many years before the act was passed.
> The lightweight laptop is limited to a 128GB SSD and Intel HD integrated graphics. Lenovo said the
> notebook won't be shipping until May and will sport a starting price of $1,299. ®
Intel Integrated crappics and a price of $ 1299,- ?
LOL, is it April 1 already ?.
"From Dell, the XPS 13 boasts a full 13in screen crammed into the casing of an 11in notebook model. The Texan PC giant was able to squeeze a couple more inches of screen space into the notebook by nearly doing away with the bezel (the black part around the screen)."
Surprised this got mentioned; but at least Dell have followed the example set by others (such as Compaq with the E500 and IBM with the T60) and made it a high res screen and hence a real feature: 3200 x 1800 resolution and a luminance of 400 (cd/m2).
Physical screen size helps to answer the "will it fit into my rucksack" question, but screen resolution determines whether the laptop will actually be of any practical use for 'work' (of any kind) or not.
So what are the screen resolutions of these laptops? If they are less than 1600×900 (better, 1600×1000), I'm not interested..
My company spent the extra on a 1600x900 display on my 15.6" (sorry 396.24mm) laptop, and I wish they hadn't. It spends most of it's life tethered to a 1920x1080 584.2mm monitor. As the OS doesn't let me set a font size per screen, I either have the text on my main monitor insanely large or the text on my laptop screen unreadably small. You pays your money...
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Re resolution: That's why I bought a used Lenovo W500 when my 2001 Toshiba 1600x1200 laptop finally died a year or two ago. No one makes laptops with UXGA (or better, WUXGA ie 1920x1200) screens anymore and I didn't want to lose vertical pixels while gaining horizontal resolution, thanks to the lemming-like rush of manufacturers to join the HD 16x9 format. I don't think anyone makes a 1200 vertical resolution screen anymore
Apart from fitting the HD movie format (minus useful screen real estate to fit player controls), what's the benefit? None that I can see. Nearly all my computer use is writing documents, email, or web browsing - all of which suffer on a HD screen compared to UXGA or WUXGA.
And as for the damn near wholesale adoption of glossy screens for everything? Why would you care if colours look brighter when you can't see them while trying to use your fondleslab or phone outdoors, or keep seeing the window or lights behind you while trying to work?
My first thought, when I read news like this, is "In the smallest bag you can put it in, will it comply with RyanAir's restrictions for a second piece of hand luggage?"
I do wish corporate box tickers would have similar thoughts. The Dell sounds like an ideal business travel laptop for the budget flyer.
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