Intel has introduced a new segment of Laptops that would make notebooks, netbooks things of the past. Ultrabooks is a new segment that would bring portability to laptops without sacrificing performance. Ultrabooks would be powered by dual core i5 and even upto quad core Cire i7 processors with performing GPUs, which can give enough throttle to your Ultrabook to play graphics rich games.
Lets take a look at the best Ultrabooks that caught limelight at CES 2012.<

Acer’s S5-shaped
Acer S5 weighs merely three-pound and has a 13.3-inch display that turns on instantly. The body is sleek onyx black magnesium-alloy cover. Its all-metal chassis still feels solid, and we continue to be wary of that shallow keyboard. That 15mm-thick chassis is as impressive as ever — maybe even more so, now that we know half of this year’s Ultrabooks are likely to be larger. But man, is this thing even more beautiful in the light.

VAIO Z measures 13-inch and is thinner and lighter than the current Apple Macbook Air, but will cost almost twice the price; £2,699. However, Asus UX21 is the nearest competitor by being the thinnest Core i7 Laptop.

Sony VAIO Z just weighs 1.18 kg (compared to 1.32 kg for Air and 1.1kg for ASUS UX21) and be just 16.65mm thin (compared to 17mm of MBA). Full dimensions are 210 x 16.65 x 330mm. Vaio Z comes with a backlit keyboard, ‘button-less’ touchpad.

The laptop packs in huge number of pixels in small 13” display. With resolutions of upto 1600×900, VAIO Z is among the highest pixel density laptops. The display has an anti-reflective coating that cuts glare.

VAIO Z Specs

• CPU: Intel Core i7-2620M 2.70GHz (with Turbo Boost up to 3.40GHz),
• RAM: 8GB of DDR3 SDRAM,
• Hard disk: 256GB SSD RAID storage (4 SSDs)
• Display: 13.1” 1600×900 or 1920×1080 HD display
• Quick Boot that cuts down boot time to half
• Embedded VAIO ‘everywair’ 3G WWAN on selected models connects via your mobile broadband operator.
• biometric sensor to log in and unlock.
• Power media Dock: a “monolithic expansion module” an brings with it Thunderbolt connectivity (Light Peak), HDMI and VGA connectivity to connect up to four displays, and 1GB of RAM extra graphics courtesy of AMD to boost overall graphics performance. It also comes with a DVD / Blu-ray drive.
• Battery: 7 hours  + 7 hours sheet battery (14 hours total)
• HD web camera powered by Exmor technology

Availability & Pricing: Sony VAIO Z would be available in late July 2011 and cost nearly $3000.

Related: http://geeknizer.com/thinnest-core-i7-laptop/

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ASUS X21 ultrathin laptop packs Core i7 in under 17mm thickness at its thickest end. The entire body is built from an aluminum alloy that makes it weigh freaking low at 1.1kg. It also features fast resume capability with resumes from sleep as fast as 2 seconds.

Other specs includes a SATA III SSD, USB 3.0 connectivity, a glass trackpad and a metallic keyboard keys. UX21 is coming in September 2011, stay tuned.

image credit: engadget

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Last year when I first built my Hackintosh Laptop, I seriously missed one thing: The Bright White Glowing Apple Logo on the back of my HP Notebook. I looked around for a proper DIY guide to do it, there was one but it eventually went down.

Luckily, I took an offline copy of it, while I was trying to build it. So here I present the exclusive tutorial of Creating Glowing Apple Logo Mod for your Notebook/Netbook.

Original work by EdsJunk from the MSI Wind Forums (link seems to be down)

So if you have Installed Snow Leopard on PC with our Hackintosh guides, this thing would add to the grace.

What you need

1. A Crystal clear Apple logo possibly made of crystal (you can find it off an old iBook, or even sol seperately on eBay in some countries. If it ain’t available in your country, try getting a plastic-glass cut in the exact shape.
2. A diffusion type material (Most Apple logos already have this at their back)
3. Dremel tool and or files to smoothen-out surfaces.
4. Masking tape.
5. Spray paint ( of the color of your Notebook) (optional)
6. 800-1000 grit WetsandPaper (optional)
7. A good Adhesive: superglue, elfy, quickfix etc.
8. Misc: Tools to remove lid
9. That’s it, no LEDs or Wiring required, we would light it from the LCD’s back-light source.

First thing first, here is the Apple glass Logo we talked about in 1.

Step 1. Removing the Lid

Method of removing the lid could differ from manufacturer to manufacturer, but here is something very generic.

Remove the 4 rubber pieces on the screen bezel, beneath them are screws, remove them. Carefully pry up the bezel. Next, remove the final two screws that hold the screen to the hinges. When done, the LCD and lid will be separated. Go ahead and remove the LCD connection, unplug it and put your LCD to the side. If your laptop has a camera, mic, carefully remove them. Also what needs to be removed is the antenna wires that are used with the inbuilt wifi. Carefully remove them and keep them aside.

Step 2. Cutting the lid

Now that the lid is nice and lonely, you need to cut a hole through the foil/black padding. Normally, it depends on the size of the Apple Logo you are embedding, a 3″ x 3″ square is enough for most cases.

Next we trace the apple logo on the lid using masking tape. Keep it upright and centred. Msot important thing is that your trace should be mirrored, since it will look 90degrees apart from the outside.

Next up we do the toughest task, cutting it to the trace. Best practce would be to drill out of center and then use files to match the trace’s shape. Spend alot of time on this, if you do this wrong, it would look ugly with grooves visible from outside and there’s no way back. Try to keep a small margin from the traces so that you can push hard and stick the glass log in.

Keep putting the clear logo up to it to make sure your filing out the right parts. And when you are satisfied, stick it in with a glue. Don’t worry if leave minor grooves, those can be fixed by painting the glass-back black (or the color of your notebook) with sharpie markers (or any others).

Step 3. Wetsanding, Painting (optional)

At this point, you can wetsand the outside surface, and paint it again, but I didn’t really feel the need for it.

Step 4. Diffusion Material at back (optional, good to have)

Next, apply the diffusion material over the back of the clear logo. This will cause you not to see shadows or the LCD wiring. You can even threw colored plastic in there to get a different color apple!

Step 5. Getting the Light source

The backlight for the logo can messup the illumination of your LCD screen, so we need to isolate it. Cutting away the plastic and foil that keeps the back light from shinning threw the back of the LCD.

So grab that LCD screen, lookout, there is going to be some tape foil towards the bottom covering up the circuitry. Cut away all that you dont need, just leave enough to cover the circuit board. Go ahead and tape off any openings and the connection because you dont want any dust getting in there. Now you gotta cut out a good portion of that white plastic cover(dremel with cut off disk would do). Towards the top of the LCD the white palstic cover kinda clips onto the metal frame. Carefully unclip the two, you will notice you dont get much play room. I got enough room just to lift the white plastic cover up a little bit so i wouldnt cut threw my screen. Now carefully cut about a 3″ x 3″ square (same as what you did previously) out of the plastic. You will get a alot of dust if you are using a dremel. As long as you mask everything off, it’s all good.

Block it using a silver foil.  You gotta remove a square of foil and you will get light. IMPOTANT: You need to be careful. This foil is directly adhered to the material used to distribute and even amount of light to your screen! It comes off easily but, it will take some time. Cutting through the white material under the foil would leave very dark spots on the screen. It can be fixed back, the hard way. Simply stating, just take enough time and carefully peel away enough foil. (removing just the foil does NOT affect your screen at all, just make sure you don’t remove White area). After the foil is removed, the light is all yours Apple! Bright and attractive.

Step 6. Putting things back

Now go ahead and put all of the stuff you removed back into the LCD lid. The antennas, camera and mic back on the bezel, route the wires nicely and screw it all back together. For almost all screens, screen goes onto the lid then the hinges ontop of that. And while stuffing things back, make sure hinges don’t hurt your wires. Reinstall the bezel and then clip the hinge covers back on. Now the glory is yours, and the Apple shines.

Before:

After:

And now thinking of modding my Sony VAIO

Only trouble is the logo is way too huge to be altered.

But wait a minute.. Why cutting the screen Baklight area, why Not use LEDs instead?

If you happen to use LEDs, chance s are (like 99%) that you would get un-even distribution of light over the logo giving you bright and dark spots, spoiling the fun. Secondly, it would need extra power source that will eat apart of your battery. When its fed from LCD screen, there’s almsot no effect on luminance of screen and you end up consuming the same battery that you did earlier. And the thirdly, the best part: It will turn OFF and ON whenever your screen is ON or OFF — just like an Apple MacBook would do. And lastly, no wiring mess. I feel it’s worth the extra mile.

What’s next? Try DIY Keyboard Backlit Illumination

P.S. Similar hack can be applied for iPhone glowing apple logo. but its much harder to implement.

We write about Latest in tech, Google, Do-it-yourself (DIY), iPhone, Gadgets, Open Source, Programming. Grab them all @taranfx on Twitter or below:

AMD has announced a new chip is called the “Llano” processor which is not just a  CPU or GPU, instead, it’s a hybrid design that the chip company calls as an “Application Processor Unit,” or APU.

Intel’s current offering for the laptops is pretty limited in power they offer for graphics. They offer very-basic level of HD video playback, with DirectX 9 graphics to notebooks. AMD’s Llano will be combining a full DX11-compatible GPU with four CPU cores on a single 32nm processor die. This can literally swipe away all the Intel Laptop market.

At this time not much is known about the GPU, what we know is that the GPU offered by this APU combo is highly parallel vector. For the CPU, AMD has taken the “STARS” core that’s used in their current 45nm processor, shrunk them into a new 32nm SOI high-K process. AMD further added new power gating and dynamic power optimization capabilities to it. The result: 4Cores, each core has approx. 35 million transistors, and a 1MB L2 cache. It is planned to be clocked under 3Ghz and the power consumption would range between 2.5 to 25 watts(peek).

AMD will introduce another offering for the mobile called “Bobcat” which is more portable across a range of processes and configurations, and features less custom work that in Llano.

Llano will see some appearances in the later half of this year, and OEMs will be shipped around early 2011.

Power optimization
The most amazing part of this chip is it’s unique approach to dynamic power optimization. It is a step ahead from the traditional analog power management, towards digital, which makes it more accurate, efficient.

How Power optimization worked in current-gen. Processors: Normally, Power module takes analog input from a set of diodes placed throughout the die which act as thermal sensors, informing the module when the die heats up in an area due to increased compute activity.Temperature is the means for calculating power consumption.

Now, there is a problem with this approach: Ambient (surrounding) temperature changes (even minor ones) can change the values, make unwise decisions in setting the right clock speed and hence inefficient use of energy. And if the temperature changes are huge, like moving a laptop from A/C cabin to outdoors, the calculations go upto 40% incorrect.

However, Llano does it smartly. It uses a set of 95 bits of signals from different parts of the chip (pre-identified) are monitored, which have strong correlation to power consumption. This includes monitoring  integer traffic, cache misses, or branch mis-predicts via low-frequency sampling, which yields a very-high accuracy in determining the power usage.

AMD Fusion and future:

Clearly, AMD + ATI Fusion is now the way to go on notebooks. The combo/Fusion will reduce the Bus latency between CPU-GPU as they are now on the same Chip, making graphics faster and GPGPU apps more powerful.

Intel barely has any integrated GPU for 2011. Unless Intel buys NVIDIA, I don’t see them leading this segment.
On the other side,  NVIDIA’s upcoming x86 CPU + GPU combination would be interesting but we’ve to see how they perform in the CPU segment and not to forget they have some pending DMI licensing disputes.

Altogether, 2011 is going to be interesting for the notebook segment and It would make alot more sense even for general purpose apps to run on GPU with DxVA (DirectX Video Acceleration API) on Windows, VAAPI on Linux.

[via Inquirer]

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After Adamo, this is second trendy Notebook series from Dell, designed for business users. It is as slim as the Adamo (0.57-inch) but weighs (4.5 pounds), a bit more.

Z series is supposed to attract Pro Business users which like to have it as a status symbol. It’s beautiful, among the most beautiful Dell has ever designed.

Dell Latitude Z features a large 16-inch 1600 x 900  HD display that runs on Core 2 Duo. It has some distinct features from what other business laptops have seen.

It features a  multi-touch trackpad that supports iPhone-, MacBook Pro-type gestures: Pinch and zoom. Other attraction points are: new kind of touchscreen, wireless charging, SSD support (upto 250GB) and promising security features.

TouchScreen: This is a new kind, a new concept. Instead of having a  touchscreen display, the Latitude Z has touch functionality built along the frame of the notebook display.  Sliding your fingers vertically along the frame pops up a tool bar that lets you choose common applications like email, photos, and camera.

Wireless Inductive Charging:

The most anticipated feature is its optional ($200) inductive wireless recharging stand, which charges the laptop without a wired connection.

Image Credits: Wired

There are a few inductive charging stands out there, most of them third-party devices for phones, media players, and other small gadgets. But the Dell Latitude Z is the first mainstream notebook to come with the ability built in.

The  idea behind the stand is that you can drop the notebook on the stand, pull out a keyboard and work with the notebook while it charges. According to Dell, it should take 2 to 3 hours to fully charge a depleted machine, depending on the battery.

he lack of a power cord leading from the notebook to the stand might look good in a corporate office, but won’t make much difference in the long run. And of course, the Dell Latitude Z also comes with a more traditional power cord.

Business Features:

Z comes with lots of promising features that will force business users to crave for it.

More than a Camera: A 2 megapixel camera goes beyond the traditional webcam function. It can create contacts when you hold your business card in front of the camera and can then save in Microsoft Outlook contacts.  It can do some basic scanning too, hold a sheet of paper in front of the camera and  you can save it as a PDF.

The camera is also powered by software to do effective face-recognition. When turned ON,  it can detect when you step away from the computer and it will automatically lock the machine.

Other security features include a fingerprint reader and contact less smart card reader. It enables you to lock the notebook just by waving your office badge over it. Sounds cool.

Another interesting business addition to the laptop is new hardware that supports a ‘Latitude On’ mode. The mode promises instant start-up and offers ALWAYS ON connection to email, internet, contacts and calendar through a separate instant OS, which is Dell proprietary. Of course, you don’t have access to other apps. This scaled-down OS offers a benefit of extended battery life of up to 12 hours, says Dell.

Steve Belt, VP of business client engineering at Dell, said:

“We wanted to create something that would be the best of both worlds,” says Belt. “The Latitude On mode is fast and gives users gobs of battery life.”

For security reasons it doesn’t share data with the main OS, but it can hook up to Exchange and handle basic browsing tasks. In addition to its quick-booting properties, the light OS is driven by low-power ARM chipset.

Verdict:

Z series looks promising for Pro Business users by offering them unique security, Instant Email on the go features. It’s really a pretty tight design from Dell, and oozes quality.

What’s bit odd is the EdgeTouch sensor, specially for executives, who really don’t use such fancy stuff, right? The keyboard is one of the best laptop keyboards one would find, a smooth experience. The other thing that will keep some users is the hefty price tag of $2000. And if they opt for complete wireless charging package, it costs $200 additional.  I guess the crave will reside with status-aware Business professionals.

Latitude Z style

Two power buttons: One Regular other one for Latitude on Quick access.

]]> http://geeknizer.com/review-dell-latitude-z-features-beauty-craves-business-users-costs-2k/feed/ 4 http://geeknizer.com/worlds-fastest-desktop-replacement-laptop-is-here-maingear/ http://geeknizer.com/worlds-fastest-desktop-replacement-laptop-is-here-maingear/#comments Fri, 24 Jul 2009 15:48:11 +0000 Tarandeep Singh http://geeknizer.com/blog/?p=1457 Read more »]]>

For few, Netbooks is everything they need. And for people, like the one who are reading this blog, needs something extra from the world. A complete desktop replacement.

Maingear claims that their eX-L 18 laptop is the world’s fastest. I’m not sure if that claim is 100% true, but one thing is for sure, this lappy is powered packed, real desktop replacement.

This 18.4-inch laptop is powered by configurations including an Intel Core 2 Extreme quad processor, dual NVIDIA GeForce GTX 280M graphics cards, 8GB of RAM, three 2.5″ SATA or SSD drives (in RAID if you wish), and Blu-ray setups that cost from $3,000 to $6,500.

Let’s have a look at the attractive features which makes it pretty unique:

Basically, there are 3 CPU Platforms to choose from:

-Intel Core™ 2 Duo Processor P8700 (2.53GHz x 2)

-Intel Core™ 2 Duo Processor T9600 (2.8GHz x 2)

-Intel Core™ 2 Extreme Processor X9300 (2.53GHz x 4) 45w

Motherboard: Running on PM45/ICH9-M Intel Platform

GPU: Dual 1GB (2GB Total) NVIDIA&reg; GeForce&trade; GTX 280m in SLI

HDD: Single Hard Drive:

-7200 RPM, up to 500GB SATA

– Solid State Drive 80GB SATA

Dual Raid0 Hard Drives: 7,200 RPM  up to 1.5TB SATA (3 x 500GB)

Audio: Up to 7.1 Support through Digital Out

Ports: eSATA, HDMI, USB 2.0, and FireWire.

Battery: 12 Cell Lithium-ION Battery

Keyboard: Full size illuminated keyboard w/ separate numeric pad

Screen: LCD 18.4″, 1920×1080 (FullHd 1080p)

Dimensions: Height: 1.7 inches, Width: 15.65 inches, Depth: 11.80 inches, Weight: 9.5lbs

Specs are pretty impressive. But I’m not sure that you would spend around that much for it ]]> http://geeknizer.com/worlds-fastest-desktop-replacement-laptop-is-here-maingear/feed/ 4 http://geeknizer.com/are-sealed-batteries-like-mac-book-pro-any-better/ http://geeknizer.com/are-sealed-batteries-like-mac-book-pro-any-better/#comments Sat, 27 Jun 2009 17:44:20 +0000 Tarandeep Singh http://geeknizer.com/blog/?p=1257 Read more »]]> Today, the most of the laptops come with removable batteries. This gives you flexibility to put in a fresh one when your original battery runs out of juice. But few manufacturers, like Apple, like to ship sealed ones.

Every Lithium-ion battery (standard for mobiles, laptops) have life of few charge-discharge cycles. Ideally its 360 full charges. That means you battery can be full dsicharged 360 times before it dies, On average this results in average life span of 2 years. Earlier I posted “Secrets of Prolonging Life of Lithitum Ion battery“. In this one, Let’s discuss why are sealed batteries better.

However, The leader innovator of sealed batteries is Apple, which has often led the industry in introducing or removing components from computers. This time at WWDC, Apple unveiled two revised MacBook Pro laptops with higher-capacity, sealed-in batteries. In fact, Apple’s entire line of laptops now uses sealed batteries, except for one low-end MacBook model.

According to Apple, “This makes sense because sealing in the batteries lets the company make them larger, without adding heft to the laptops. Apple says the two models are the same size and weight as their predecessors, yet their battery capacity has grown by 33% and 46%, respectively. It has come up with some software technology that allows these sealed batteries to last up to five years in typical use. The company claims that is almost triple the industry average for removable batteries and is longer than the typical time consumers keep the computer, thus making it far less likely you’ll need to replace a dead battery. Apple says it is able to seal in bigger batteries without making the machines larger because the company can compensate by shedding the casings, internal housings and other components needed by replaceable power packs”.

Practical Tests

I’ve been testing the new Apple laptops, the 15-inch MacBook Pro, using my own harsh tests. The results? Excellent! The new Apple laptops scores among the highest battery lives between charges of any laptop I have ever tested with a battery that fits entirely inside the machine’s dimensions, without sticking out of the back or bottom and adding weight. Infact, one of my friends uses a 9Cell HP battery for extra juice. This inbuilt macbook Pro was able to beat it. He was left breathless.

Normal usage: MacBook 15″ lasted 5:14 hours which is close to Apple’s claim of around seven hours between charges, roughly a single charge in a normal full day use.

Apple claims that these sealed batteries lifecycle of  1,000 charges, and thus, last around five years. Second, if and when the sealed batteries do become unable to hold an adequate charge, the entire computer must be returned to Apple for a new battery. The company says that, if you do this at an Apple store, it’s a same-day process and, at least on the 13-inch model, the price of a new battery is the same as what Apple formerly charged for a new removable battery. But it’s still more of a hassle.

In the battery test, I turn off all power-saving features, Use the CPU to its 50% (1core full utilization) switch Wi-Fi network on, pump the screen to 100% brightness, and play music at 70% volume. That maximizes some of the biggest power hogs on a laptop. In normal use, a typical owner would likely use the power-saving features, turn the screen down a bit, have Wi-Fi off some of the time, and wouldn’t be running the hard disk constantly.

Note: These tests were on Nvidia graphics

The whole test proves that new MacBook Pros with sealed batteries can result in a very good experience for average users.

source: ATD, lesterelectrical

Laptops and handheld computers based on Nvidia’s Tegra computing platform will hit the market before the end of this year, the company said Tuesday.

Built around an Nvidia graphics processor and two Arm processor cores, Tegra packs nearly every component required for a computer on a motherboard that’s slightly bigger than a stick of chewing gum. It also encodes a hardware encoder and decoder for full high-definition video playback.

Tegra consumes less than half a watt of power, allowing devices that use it to run for many hours on a single battery charge, even while remaining constantly connected to a cellular data network, said Jen-Hsun Huang, president and CEO of Nvidia, speaking at the Computex exhibition in Taipei.

“With the proliferation of 3G mobile networks, it’s now perfectly clear that computing technology and communications will converge,” Huang said.

This is the second time that Nvidia has “launched” Tegra at Computex. Last year, the company showed a working prototype of a Tegra board. The prototype board was shown running inside an Asustek Computer Eee PC that had its original motherboard removed.

This time around, Nvidia had Tegra-based computers to show off instead of a mockup. In all there were seven prototypes on display, including models from contract hardware makers Compal Communications, Inventec and Wistron, among others.

These systems will cost around US$199 when they hit the market and could be as cheap as $99 if the price is subsidized by a mobile operator, Nvidia said. They will hit the market at roughly the same time as systems based on Qualcomm’s Snapdragon processor, a rival chip that also uses an Arm processor core.