Have Laptop Will Travel

Commuting with a Laptop

Originally posted on January 20, 2010 @ 9:38 am

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You know, travelling doesn’t just mean vacations and whatnot. If you take your laptop to work like I do, then you must be pretty familiar with the tedium of the daily commute carrying a huge and heavy laptop around. Granted, the laptops that we’re carrying now aren’t as huge and bulky as the ones that came out fifteen years ago, but they’re still heavy. You can argue that with the advent of netbooks, commuting has never been easier, but sometimes working full-time on an Atom-powered netbook isn’t enough. I need a full-powered computer for office work, and a huge, bulky laptop fills that particular need. [Read more…]

Charge your gadgets via wifi with RCA Airenergy

Originally posted on January 14, 2010 @ 8:30 am

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Ever wish you can bring your laptop around, and not worry about battery life at all even when you don’t have your charger with you? I’m talking about working at that laptop of yours for more than six hours without the need to charge it. Yeah, the laptop brick can be pretty unwieldy to bring around at times. I feel you.

Now it’s probably going to take a couple of years more before we see this technology becoming really useful, but RCA has developed a charger that charges your gadgets via wifi signals. You read it right folks, wifi. [Read more…]

PC makers working on borderless screens

Originally posted on February 11, 2010 @ 11:48 pm

It seems that several ODM Taiwanese notebook manufacturers are at work developing slim laptops with frameless screens. And amazingly, we can expect the first few models to come out the second half of 2010. These manufacturers are said to be Foxconn, Quanta, Compal, Acer, and HP.

This is something I’m seriously looking forward to, because bezels on screens have always been a huge turnoff for me. On some systems, such as the Asus Eee PC 701, the bezel makes sense, since the only way to provide a reasonably large keyboard with a 7 inch screen is to pad the space on the sides of the display. But on other models, there’s no good excuse for the black bars that border the display.

According to Digitimes,

The Foxconn Group is cooperating with Chimei Innolux Corporation (CIC), the new entity to be formed by Chi Mei Optoelectronics (CMO), Innolux Display and TPO Displays, to develop frameless models to strengthen its competitiveness in the ODM notebook segment, the sources indicated. Meanwhile, Compal Electronics is collaborating with Chunghwa Picture Tubes (CPT) to develop frameless screens, and is expected to start shipping frameless notebook models to its major clients, including Acer, in the second half of 2010, revealed the sources.

The new frameless screens will mainly be made using Corning’s reinforced Gorilla glass, the sources indicated.

We’re not exactly clear what “frameless” means, though. I’m hoping that we get a screen that has no bezels whatsoever, with the display bleeding over to the edge of the laptop’s lid or will we get a laptop with a really thin bezel that it’s barely noticeable? I’m seriously hoping it’s the former.

Are 3-D display laptops the future?

Originally posted on December 11, 2009 @ 12:24 pm

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Honestly, I don’t know what to make of it. It seems that Acer has come up with a laptop that has a 3-D display effect. The 3-D effect is achieved by a transparent polarizing filter overlaid on the screen, which splits images into separate streams for each eye. You would need a pair of special polarizing glasses to get the effect, and if you look at the screen straight-on, you’d get the 3-D effect. Looking at the screen at an angle may actually not show the 3-D. [Read more…]

Lenovo IdeaPad U1 Smartbook

Originally posted on January 6, 2010 @ 8:55 am

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I’ve always had a soft spot for Lenovo products. They’re well-designed, and they are what you can call sturdy. So when Lenovo unleashed a torrent of new products at CES 2010, I eagerly checked out their new offerings. This new smartbook, called the Lenovo IdeaPad U1, is still being developed, but I’d like to get my hands on one when it comes out. You see, the Lenovo IdeaPad U1 Smartbook is a clamshell laptop that can actually split in two. [Read more…]