ultraportables

Intel's Atom is proving to be a very popular chip. But is it too low-rent for Apple?

First the news. iSuppli reported Monday that Intel gained share, based on revenue, in the global microprocessor during every quarter of 2008 to finish up with 80.5 percent of the total processor market--a 1.6 percent gain over rivals--partly due to the success of its Atom chip in Netbooks.

"Intel's low-priced Atom has become increasingly popular as the Netbook market has gained steam," Matthew Wilkins, principal analyst, compute platforms research, for iSuppli, said in a statement.

Worldwide unit … Read more

Intel's newest Atom processor has slipped out of the starting gate sooner than expected.

Though the Atom N280 had been expected later this year, it is now shipping to Intel customers. "Asus is already taking preorders for the 1000HE with the N280," Intel spokesperson Bill Calder said Thursday.

Intel doesn't expect the rollout to be as big as the Atom N270, introduced back in June, but the N280 is expected to appear in a few systems, Calder said.

The N280 brings a minuscule clock frequency improvement to the N270, bumping up the speed to only 1.… Read more

Advanced Micro Devices' chief executive predicts that Netbooks will eventually disappear. This thinking, though obviously favorable to AMD's strategy, isn't completely at odds with Intel's.

"The distinction between what is a Netbook and what is a notebook is going to go away," AMD CEO Dirk Meyer said Thursday in the company's earnings conference call.

"There will be a continuum of price points and form factors," he said.

"Given the way Netbooks are configured today, consumers who want a notebook at those kind of (low) price points have to compromise and as … Read more

I've been following the goings on at the low end of the notebook market with considerable interest over the past year. Part of my reason is professional; the way that the most mobile client devices evolve says a lot about how we will access applications and what the infrastructure running those applications will look like.

I'm also interested on a personal level. On the one hand I travel quite a bit. On the other, when I'm not traveling, I generally work out of my home office where I have a hefty desktop rig with three monitors. As … Read more

That Eee PC Netbook too slow? Well, it probably won't get much faster in 2009, according to reports, proving that Intel is not keen on revving up Atom to compete with itself.

Both Digitimes and Engadget are reporting that the Atom N280--an update of the 1.6GHz N270--will appear by the third quarter of this year and run at 1.66GHz.

This is a whopping 0.06GHz jump in speed--very underwhelming and very different than the performance fast track that consumers are used to with higher-end Intel Core architecture chips. It highlights a theme that will be repeated often … Read more

Updated at 11:05 p.m. PST with additional information throughout.

Another Netbook? No, not exactly. Hewlett-Packard's new Pavilion dv2 is an ultraportable, thank you. And the new Athlon Neo silicon inside from Advanced Micro Devices will try to prove that point.

AMD is introducing new chips at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas that target the no-man's land between Netbooks and notebooks. Typically, these designs are referred to as ultraportables--the most salient examples being Apple's MacBook Air, the Toshiba Portege, and the Sony Vaio TT series.

So what makes AMD's platform different? In one … Read more

2009 may be the year of the Netbook. But there's a big if.

Here's the choice: Will consumers buy a thin, light, relatively fast $1,800 MacBook Air or a thin, light, ultrasmall, not-as-fast $450 Hewlett-Packard Mini 1000 Netbook? (Correction: the HP Mini 1000 configuration cited here was originally stated incorrectly as $700.)

If many people, fully aware of this choice, opt for a Netbook then we have the foundation of, at the very least, a rethinking of the pricey ultraportable.

At most, we have many more consumers buying into the Netbook concept--particularly if 3G broadband wireless comes … Read more

Last weekend I had a chance to speak at the annual meeting of the National Association of Science Writers in Palo Alto, Calif., on the subject of laptops. And what many of the attendees wanted to know was whether a low-cost Netbook would be a reasonable purchase for someone whose occupation requires not only frequent travel and note-taking at meetings but also countless hours composing at the keyboard.

The short answer: not unless you have a desktop waiting for you at your home office. You'll find the longer answer, along with my recommended writer-friendly laptops, after the page break.… Read more

Fujitsu continued its trend toward colorful laptops this week with the introduction of the tartan-lidded LifeBook A6220. Like the LifeBook A1110 announced earlier this month, the midsize LifeBook A6220 incorporates a swappable exterior panel so you can replace the default indigo lid with a red or gold one to suit your tastes.

All the standard features for a midsize system are here: a 15.4-inch, WXGA screen; integrated Webcam and microphone; fingerprint reader and spill-resistant keyboard; and DVD burner. Around the case, there are the expected four USB ports, expansion and memory card slots, and a mini-FireWire jack, plus such … Read more